C.B. Knights-Masculinities in Text and Teaching (2008)

Masculinities in Text and
Teaching
Edited by
Ben Knights
Masculinities in Text and Teaching
Also by Ben Knights
ACTIVE READING: Transformative Writing into Literary Studies (2006, with
Chris Thurgar-Dawson)
FROM READER TO READER: Theory, Text and Practice in the Study Group
(1992)
THE IDEA OF THE CLERISY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY (1978)
THE LISTENING READER: Fiction and Poetry for Counsellors and
Psychotherapists (1995)
WRITING MASCULINITIES: Male Narratives in Twentieth-Century Fiction
(1999)
Teaching
Edited by
Ben Knights
Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Ben Knights 2008
Individual chapters © contributors 2008
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Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgements viii
Notes on Contributors ix
1 Masculinities in Text and Teaching 1

Ben Knights
2 Training to be an English Teacher: Negotiating Gendered

Subjectivities and the Gendered Curriculum as Inter-linked
Cultural Processes 37
Wayne Martino
3 Queer Teaching/Teaching Queer: Renaissance Masculinities

and the Seminar 59
Mark Dooley
4 Charlotte Dacre’s Nymphomaniacs and Demon-Lovers:

Teaching Female Masculinities 75
Ranita Chatterjee
5 Masculinity and Modernism: Teaching D.H. Lawrence 90

Robert Burden
6 Gender and Narrative Form 109

Ruth Page
7 Bois will be Bois: Masculinity and Pedagogy in the Gay and

Lesbian Studies Classroom 126
Dennis W. Allen
8 Invisible Men: Reading African American Masculinity 141

Rachel Carroll
9 Lifelong Learning in the Lifelong Poem 155

Chris Thurgar-Dawson
v
vi Contents
10 Autobiographical Narratives in the Teaching of

Masculinities 170
John Beynon
11 Atrocity and Transitivity 187

Cris Yelland
12 Taking Possession of Knowledge: The Masculine Academic

in Don DeLillo’s White Noise 205
Ruth Helyer
13 High Visibility: Teaching Ladlit 220

Alice Ferrebe
Afterword 235
Index 237
Preface
The performance of masculinity in English does not concern men alone.

The dual subject of this book is the experience of men in English Studies,
and – simultaneously – the significance of masculinities for all those
who practice in this family of subjects. Masculinities in Text and Teaching,
as its title suggests, seeks to weave together the critical study of text
with reflection upon the experience of teaching. The textual disciplines,
we suggest, have always provided a scene for the more or less tacit
articulation of male subjectivity and roles. This book invites readers
to consider the implications for teaching and curriculum of rendering
masculinity visible. Skills developed for the interpretation of texts may,
the authors believe, also enable teachers – and students – to unpick
the meanings of the groups in which they participate. The informed
creation of pedagogic narratives allows teachers to become in a sense
ethnographers of their own experience. This means that in terms of
its evidential base – and to use a metaphor to which we shall have
to return – the book is rooted in ‘soft’ processes. We are aware that
to some other disciplinary traditions such ways of making knowledge
might appear merely impressionistic or anecdotal. The editor is therefore
particularly grateful to all those whose faith in the project sustained him
through a very long-drawn-out process. That gratitude extends to the
chapter authors themselves (including those who for one reason and
another had to withdraw along the way).
vii
Acknowledgements
Many people have sustained the intellectual and human environment

from which this book emerges. I would especially like to give warm
thanks to Paula Kennedy and the team at Palgrave Macmillan; to Michael
Kimmel for support and ideas, and the anonymous publisher’s reviewer
for their challenging but sympathetic response to the proposal and the
draft; to Pamela Knights for going on believing that the work was inter-
esting, and thus helping in no small measure to make it so; to the staff
of the Higher Education Academy English Subject Centre for being such
wonderful colleagues; the English Subject Group at the University of
Teesside who were so receptive to the original idea; Ina Schabert and
the organisers of the 2003 University of Munich ‘Gendered Academia’
Conference at Kloster Seeon; and to John Brannigan and his colleagues at
University College Dublin who invited me to give an early version of the
introductory chapter as a paper to their departmental research seminar.
Rebecca Price gave invaluable help in the final stages of formatting and
organising the text. The voices of many scholars of masculinities in
relation to English will be heard throughout the book, and are – I hope –
duly acknowledged in the introductory chapter.
viii
Notes on Contributors
Dennis W. Allen is Professor of English at West Virginia University.

He is the author of Sexuality in Victorian Fiction and has published
articles on topics ranging from queer pedagogy to aesthetic activism
in journals such as Narrative, Genders and Modern Fiction Studies. He is
currently working on a book on the impact of post-industrial capitalism
on contemporary gay male culture.
John Beynon is Head of Communication, Cultural and Media Studies

in the Cardiff School of Creative Industries, University of Glamorgan.
An ethnographer, he has been teaching and writing about masculinities
in one form or another for over 20 years – from Initial Encounters in a
Secondary School (1985), through to Masculinities and Culture (2002). He
is now completing a study of ‘prison masculinities’, based on inmate
mitigation narratives.
Robert Burden is Reader in English Studies in the School of Arts and

Media at the University of Teesside where he teaches modern literature
and culture. He is the author of Radicalising Lawrence (2000), and co-
editor of Landscape and Englishness (2006). He is currently writing a book
on travel writing and modernism.
Rachel Carroll is Principal Lecturer and Subject Group Leader in English

Studies at the University of Teesside. Her research interests are in
feminist theory, queer theory, critical heterosexuality studies and twen-
tieth century and contemporary literature and culture.
Ranita Chatterjee is Assistant Professor of English at California State

University, Northridge where she teaches British Romanticism and crit-
ical theory. She has published articles on Mary Shelley, Gothic fiction
and Irigaray. She is working on a book on the libidinal politics of the
Godwin–Shelley circle.
Mark Dooley is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Teesside

and previously taught at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has
published work on gender, sexuality, food, medicine and the body in
ix
x Notes on Contributors
Renaissance culture. The main focus of his research is on the dramatic

works of the Elizabethan playwright John Lyly. He has previously been
Programme Leader for Cultural Studies and retains an interest in gender
and contemporary popular culture.
Alice Ferrebe is Lecturer in English at Liverpool John Moores University.

Her book Masculinity in Male-Authored Fiction, 1950–2000 was published
by Palgrave Macmillan in 2005.
Ruth Helyer is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Teesside; her

research interests are contemporary fiction and film (particularly Amer-
ican), visual culture and gender studies (particularly masculinity). Her
publications include a chapter in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion
to Don DeLillo.
Ben Knights is Director of the English Subject Centre of the UK Higher

Education Academy. He has a long standing interest in the interplay
of subject and pedagogic research, and in the study of masculinities in
fiction and in education.
Wayne Martino has recently moved to the University of Western

Ontario. His research focuses on gender and education with a specific
focus on boys, masculinities and schooling. He has also conducted
research into the sex- and gender-based dimensions of bullying in
schools which has explored the implications for educational policy
and practice. His books include: So What’s a Boy? Addressing Issues of
Masculinity and Schooling published in 2003 and Being Normal is the Only
Way to be: Adolescent Perspectives on Gender and School published in 2005.
His latest book is entitled Gendered Outcasts Sexual Outlaws.
Ruth Page is interested in the many different ways in which gender

might influence narrative strategies. Her published work includes both
sociolinguistic and literary studies in this area, including her recent
Literary and Linguistic Approaches to Feminist Narratology (Palgrave, 2006).
Her current research also explores developments in new media from a
feminist perspective. She is a senior lecturer at the University of Central
England in Birmingham.
Having lectured in the Czech Republic, Chris Thurgar-Dawson is

currently Programme Leader for English Studies at the University of
Teesside. He has research interests in the long poem, cultural geography
Notes on Contributors xi
and critical-creative writing. With Ben Knights he is co-author of Active

Reading: Transformative Writing in Literary Studies (2006), and from 2008
he will be leading the Teesside MA in Creative Writing.
Cris Yelland is Principal Lecture in English Studies at the University of

Teesside, UK. His research interests include Thomas Hardy, the use of
critical linguistics with student groups, and the oral/written interface in
nineteenth-century radical journalism. He has just completed a book on
Jane Austen’s languages.
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1
Teaching
Ben Knights
As a woman, I am a consumer of masculinities, but I am not

more so than men are; and, like men, I as a woman am also a
producer of masculinities and a performer of them.
– Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Gosh, Boy George, You Must be
Awfully Secure in Your Masculinity’ in Berger et al. (1995)
Reading and the associated behaviours of sitting quietly with a

book can be understood as gender marked behaviours.
– Millard 1997: 20–21
Masculinity, it is now widely accepted, can no longer be treated as

an unmarked or tacit norm. As the reflexive or estranged study of
masculinities takes root, one side effect in the English disciplines is that
we are likely to become increasingly aware of the ubiquity of literary
discussions of manliness and masculinity. Examples start to leap off
the page. Take a moment in a superficially unremarkable nineteenth-
century realist novel. ‘Why is it that we hate a suicide?’, rhetorically asks
the eponymous vicar of Trollope’s The Vicar of Bullingham (1870) of his
despairing friend. Then answers himself:
‘Because he is a coward and runs away from the burden that he ought
to bear gallantly. He throws his load down on the roadside, and does
not care who may bear it, or who may suffer because he us too poor
a creature to struggle on! Have you no feeling that, though it may be
hard with you here,’ – and the Vicar, as he spoke, struck his breast, –
‘you should so carry your outer self, that the eyes of those around
you should see nothing of the sorrow within? That is my idea of
manliness ’ (Chapter 68)
1
2 Masculinities in Text and Teaching
There is a paradox here. This recipe for ‘manliness’ as defined by a

necessary, ethical disjunction between subjectivity and outward conduct
occurs in a male-authored text ostensibly dedicated to bringing to light
the inner – even unconscious – springs of behaviour. This paradox
focuses the problem of masculinity in textual studies. The association
between affect, disclosure and subjectivity has over the years created a
predicament for those men who engage in literary studies, one which
becomes most acute as we contemplate what sort of conversations can
be sustained through and around texts.
This book attempts a case study in the politics at once of inter-
pretation and of pedagogy: its focus is the simultaneous production
of masculinities within text and their performance upon the stage of
teaching. Through the interweaving of the chapters that follow, we
seek to articulate an ethical and political response to the discourses and
narratives of masculinity as they are lived out in textual studies. This, we
believe, is the minimum contribution that our topic can make to a much
greater and more urgent political – even in the largest sense environ-
mental – imperative. For across multiple cultures, religious and political
traditions, men’s pursuit of atavistic or resurgent patriarchal agendas,
and their fear of declining relative material and symbolic power, appears
to be among the most threatening forces at loose on earth today. This
may appear a dramatic, overblown claim. But consider the import-
ance of the nexus between patriarchy and textuality. Monotheistic neo-
fundamentalisms have in common an uncompromising effort to restore
society to the patriarchal law of the father. Where fidelity to the father’s
word is a matter of life or death, the immersion of masculinity in text is
hardly a sideshow: education has responsibilities that are far from trivial.
But textual education, we shall insist, must be understood as comprising
far more than exegesis.
While over the past 25 years there has been in Britain, Australia and
North America an explosion of critical interest in the study of masculin-
ities, it is on the face of things surprising that the growing study of
literary and textual masculinities has so far had little to say about the
pedagogic implications. Thus, for example, the special issue on ‘literary
masculinities’ of the journal Men and Masculinities (Vol. 4, No. 4, 2002)
only obliquely touched on pedagogic issues. It does not seem to be easy
for English and Cultural Studies (at least in Higher Education) to rise to
the challenge posed by Michael Kimmel of ‘Integrating Men into the
Curriculum’.1 As has so often been the case with the development of
‘theory’ in the cultural studies, it seems that ‘business as usual’ models
of teaching have largely been assumed. In contrast, the premise of this
Ben Knights 3
book is that it is increasingly necessary to take the debate beyond textual

analysis as such, and enquire into how the gender politics of textuality
are played out in the classroom. Not least because English as a university
subject is predominantly studied by women – indeed in Britain the most
recent figures suggest that after several years when relative male parti-
cipation in the subject was slowly increasing (partly because of the rise
of A-level English Language which attracts a higher proportion of male
students), full-time intake is not far off 75 per cent female.2 Young
males who choose to study English are generally assuming a position
in many ways counter-cultural, not the least of whose attractions may
be an extended struggle for superiority with female teachers of reading
(e.g. Millard 1997: 81–82). As a minority, men in English groups are
apt to form homosocial bonds against other students. And yet this is a
field one of whose pre-occupations over the past 30 years has been the
critique and subversion of traditional assumptions about gender. Funda-
mental to the present book is a belief that ‘English’, as a critical study
of discourses, can potentially provide a terrain on which gendered iden-
tities and narratives may be reflexively questioned and even rewritten.3
The book comprises a number of short case studies at once textual and
pedagogic with the intention of creating a mosaic of insights into the
mutual influence of processes at once cultural and pedagogic.
There are three related and confluent sources for this book. It derives
from an ongoing enquiry into the representation, performance and
reproduction of masculinities, through narrative and pedagogy (Beynon
2002; Connell 1995, 2000; Knights 1999). This, in turn, finds its context
in an enquiry into the overlaps and synergies between subject scholar-
ship and the intellectual practices of the discipline as they are embodied
in teaching occasions. The embodied nature of learning is in fact an
implicit if elusive theme throughout. And a key feature of this orienta-
tion towards pedagogy must be attention to the discursive formation of
student identities within disciplines, specifically here within a broadly
defined ‘English and Cultural Studies’. Those identities, we suggest, are
formed in the daily process of educational socialisation and derive as
much from student constructions of what is expected of them as from
the stated intentions of academics.
Throughout, this book will build upon the vigorous debates on gender
within the subject domain, the formative influence of both gender
and queer studies, the profound transformation feminism has wrought
in both subject matter and (to a lesser extent) in how the subject is
practised. Yet we see it as imperative that the weight of debates over
gender should not simply fall (as in the curriculum it so often does)
upon women’s or gay studies. The formation of male subjectivity needs

itself to be made visible.4 At the moment, debates on gender in tertiary
education are (mostly) carried on at the level of textual – or linguistic,
or cultural historical – analysis. Here we intend to take a leaf from
the study of secondary education and explore them as well at the
level of the classroom, actual or virtual. As will be evident, this book
invites and practices the critical discussion of text. Thus, for example,
in their respective chapters, Robert Burden discusses D.H. Lawrence,
Ranita Chatterjee Charlotte Dacre, Ruth Helyer Don De Lillo and Chris
Thurgar-Dawson the long twentieth-century poem. But the book further
seeks to fold the study of text back into a speculative, though exper-
ientially informed, account of the gendering of oral critical practice,
and the making of symbolic power in and around the classroom. In
different but complementary ways, the authors are concerned with
how masculinities may be reproduced, affirmed, policed or subverted
in educational practice, and, quite specifically, in a subject domain
where biological males – at least at A-level and undergraduate level –
are and have been for many years in a minority. Between us, we are
thus concerned with the (largely tacit and unacknowledged) processes
through which footing, influence, symbolic power and access to priv-
ileged meanings are acquired and maintained through the discussion of
text. The invitation to readers is to join in a reflexive enquiry into the
co-production of gendered meanings within that simultaneously social,
intellectual and affective space where text and the group meet. We need
to ask questions such as by what rhetorical moves is the authoritative
‘voice’ achieved? Where is the disposing, adjudicating gaze located?
Does the tactical disruption of the flow of reading itself propagate intel-
lectual superiority? Who achieves access to ‘high’ meanings? (Those
adjudicating propositions that ‘place’ in a hierarchy of significance the
other observations made within a seminar or within a critical text.) Do
transactions surrounding text legitimate or question gendered forms of
power?
Located in a particular group of disciplines, this whole book is simul-
taneously offered as a contribution to the scholarship of learning and
teaching. This itself requires a caveat. Our approach is embedded in
what Martha Nussbaum refers to as ‘narrative imagination’ (Nussbaum
1997). In appealing to teachers to become reflexively aware of the
processes and rituals in which they are likely to find themselves unwit-
tingly caught up, we are closer to literary ideals of defamiliarisation
or estrangement than to ‘evidence-based’ educational research. We
nevertheless suggest that future qualitative research of an empirical or
Ben Knights 5
phenomenographic kind could productively complement the kind of

discussion around the text carried on here.5
As will be explained at greater length below, this whole book builds
on the working hypothesis that there is a symbiosis between intellectual
and pedagogic habits. Subjects are themselves produced in the arguments
and dialogues of the corridor and classroom, in the encounters between
initiates and experts, on feedback forms and in the margins of student
essays, as much as in the monograph or learned journal (Knights 1992).
In the case of this particular group of subjects we make and shall revisit
later in this chapter, the historical assumption that the covert gender
struggle within English Studies in its formative years still in certain ways
influences the reproduction of the subject today. Or to put it another
way, that to uncover some of the predicaments faced by the pioneers of
the discipline can throw light not only on our own contemporary efforts
to induct our students into our modes of discourse and study, but also
on the roles – compliant or adversarial – that students find themselves
playing. This is a discipline which – and despite the rhetorical, outward
turn we associate with the era of ‘theory’ – has treasured affect, interiority
and the ‘soft’ discourses of interpersonal relations.6 In doing so, it found
the need to manage the very forces it had itself let loose, a compulsion
to legislate for what ought to matter within the interior of the self.
And constructionists and essentialists alike might agree that interiority
and the private domain have historically had to some extent different
meanings for – typical – females and males and at different points along
the gay/straight spectrum.
In this introductory chapter, then, we shall next offer a working theory
of masculinities as a rationale for the book, before going on to locate its
argument in pedagogy and specifically the pedagogy of higher educa-
tion. That will then lead in a final section to a speculative account of
masculinity in relation to the history of English Studies.
Thinking about masculinities
Since the 1970s, cultural studies have campaigned vigorously against all
forms of essentialism, not least those attached to sexual dimorphism.
Contemporary literary and cultural studies almost invariably assume a
cultural or social constructionist view of gender. Such an orientation was
fundamental to the rise through the 1980s of masculinity studies in soci-
ology and social psychology.7 The primacy of social learning in the form-
ation of identity as a sexed being and in the construction of experience
has become a category of thought for professionals in social, language
and cultural studies. From this perspective, masculinities (the term is

rhetorically contrasted with the connotations attached to simply being
male) are seen (in Michael Kimmel’s summary) as a
constantly changing collection of meanings that are constructed

through relationships with themselves, with other men, and
with the world. A social constructionist perspective understands
gender definitions as neither static nor timeless, but historically
articulated within and through people’s interactions with their
worlds.
http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/djglp/articles/gen4p181.htm
As articulated above, the meanings of masculinity vary across cultures,

through history, among men within any one culture, and over the
course of a man’s life. Thus, one cannot speak of masculinity as though
it were a constant, singular, universal essence, but rather one must
approach masculinity as an ever-changing fluid assemblage of meanings
and behaviours. Vulnerable as such propositions would seem from the
standpoint of evolutionary biology or cognitive neuroscience, they have
come to seem well-nigh unassailable from the point of view of literary
and cultural theory. While this chapter is not the place to review the
current research literature on masculinities, a book devoted to masculin-
ities in textual study owes it to its subject and its readers to articu-
late its key term.8 The best thing under the circumstances seems to be
to state a series of working hypotheses as an allusion to longer and
more complex arguments. Our first hypothesis is both the most diffi-
cult and – in our field – the most controversial. But since we aim not
simply to appropriate arguments about masculinity from other discip-
lines, but rather to argue for textual studies as themselves an arena for
the development of masculinity studies, we have to get it over with
first.
‘Theory’ as it is embedded in English Studies has usually been char-
acterised by cultural relativism in pursuit of a vigorous politics of anti-
essentialism. In short a preference on the part of this particular academic
tribe for thinking in terms of gender rather than sexual dimorphism.
Yet it is possible that the case for the social and linguistic construction
of gender espoused by literary theory (one which reached its acme in
the reception accorded to the performative arguments of Judith Butler,
in Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter) has actually passed its high-
water mark. Even if we disagree with them, those of us in English and
Cultural Studies cannot simply dismiss arguments about maleness and
Ben Knights 7
femaleness emerging from a variety of sources: from the new cognitive

sciences and from Simon Baron-Cohen’s work on autism as an extreme
version of ‘the male brain’ (see below), as much as from evolutionary
biology. In any case, a purely performative account of gender risks pulling
the rug from underneath a necessary critique of real inequalities and
injustice. Recent theory has sometimes made it seem as though iden-
tification with victims of historical oppression was simply a matter of
consumer choice. A similar argument concerns the effect on any concept
of human rights of the trick taught in any first year theory module of
disposing of ‘human nature’. All this said, we can and in our view should
continue to acknowledge that gender power (while resting on biolo-
gical foundations) is articulated and reinforced through the medium of
language and culture. To borrow the term Benedict Anderson put into
currency about nationality, we might say that to be a man is to belong to
a highly culturally variable ‘imagined community’ – a community with
its paradigmatic narratives for ‘self-fashioning’, its folklore and dramatis
personae.
This book seeks to avoid being trapped in the extremes either of
essentialism or of a constructivist/performative account of gender and
masculinity. We see both as dead ends, and as derived from the sort of
primitive dualism and disembodiment of mind taken to task by Antonio
Damasio (Descartes’ Error 1994 and The Feeling of What Happens 1999). In
general, the new neuroscience provides a constant reminder of the inter-
penetration of the biological and the cultural.9 Dualisms tend to favour
one of their binary terms, and the dualist tradition in western thought
has tended to privilege the bearers of intellect (cf. Lloyd 1993). (We
might, in passing, hazard the suggestion that reverence for ‘monuments
of unageing intellect’ is itself derived from a long patriarchal tradition
of associating the male with spirit and the female with the somatic.10 )
Doreen Kimura (who has invited and taken her share of criticism for
insisting on the biological origin of cognitive difference between the
sexes) is quite clear:
It is by now a truism that behaviour is determined by both physiolo-

gical and environmental factors, acting interdependently.
(Kimura 2004 and see Kimura 1999)
Biological and evolutionary pre-dispositions of personality and beha-

viour (themselves layered and various) are lived out and mutually influ-
enced through culture and language. And there seems little doubt that
many of the effects of genetic and evolutionary endowment can be
muted or enhanced by environmental factors. In what follows, then, we

are talking about the production of the masculine subject on the basis
of an already diverse (though indisputably real) biological infrastruc-
ture. ‘Masculinity’, we propose, is an aspirational identity rather than
descriptive fact. Forms for exhibiting it in the classroom (or anywhere
else) do not simply exist: they are perpetually in formation, and hence
at least potentially changeable. As Dennis Allen documents (below), the
meanings of masculinity, of manliness, of the behaviours and disposi-
tions proper to being a man are perpetually under negotiation – a fact
which has immediate relevance to those places where languages, codes
and genres come under reflective scrutiny. That said, the performance of
identities is not simply a matter of unconstrained individual choice. We
suggest that narratives of male identity hold an attraction endowed by
the memory (albeit often a false memory) of an entitlement to power.
Men of all sorts and orientations have been attracted to an epic
narrative of male supremacy not because they were hard-wired to do
so (the jury is out), nor because historically they all shared equally in
the benefits of hegemony (they didn’t). To take an analogy: many years
ago, in her classic study of the US South, Killers of the Dream (1949),
Lillian Smith demonstrated how many of those who in any objective
terms were themselves victims of an economic and social regime could
be persuaded to identify with the wealthy and powerful and act as
though they ‘really’ belonged to a master race. Material differences could
be brushed aside in bonding together to defend a supremacy which
was in many ways imaginary. It might help to think of the ‘imagined
community’ of hegemonic masculinity working in rather the same way.
As a working generalisation, men have characteristically sought to assert
an identity based upon an acquired memory of the historical exper-
ience of dominion – an experience that was only ever attainable by
some and only locally attainable by others. On that proposition rest the
propositions that follow. We are not here attempting a general theory
of masculinity: simply to articulate some hypotheses which we believe
to be of particular relevance to the immersion of self-identified males in
textual experience.
1. Hegemonic masculinity seeks to impose unity upon plurality. A vast

deal of historical and cultural evidence exists that – at all events
in western cultures – typically (we will have to insist on the qual-
ifier throughout), being male has been associated with a drive to
exorcise anxiety by rituals of bonding, by contempt directed against
those perceived to undermine manliness and by demonstrative acts
Ben Knights 9
of heroism. These tend to involve taking risks (with one’s own body
and the bodies of others), in courting danger beyond what would
in any practical sense be required by actual circumstances. Exagger-
ated performance seems to derive from the male subject’s obsessive
need for reassurance about his own continuity, physical integrity
and even existence. Narratives of heroism provide the medium of
symbolic bonding into what can be understood as an ‘imagined
community’. For it is a mistake to assume that the dominant mascu-
line modality is simply one of physical assertion. Even violence oper-
ates in the symbolic domain as much as in the realm of deeds. As the
present editor became conscious many years ago when teaching in
a men’s high-security prison, violent narratives (whether of triumph
or of failure) are not simply a celebration of individual or group
experience. Addressed to an audience, they constitute a distinct
kind of speech act: menace. Such speech acts present interlocutors
with an acute situational choice: follower or victim? On a more
highly wrought level, epic endeavour has always been about giving
enduring form to social memory. The originals of Achilles, Aeneas
or Beowulf would have faded from the world pretty fast were it not
for the cultural forms which celebrated and perpetuated deeds. So
the Carlylean longing to award ontological superiority to the (male)
act is a non-starter. And in any case if violent self assertion were
simply instinctual, what function would be served by celebrating
it in word or image?11 The standpoint of this book is that atav-
istic, competitive heroism is no longer sustainable. Humankind, says
the military historian John Keegan (hardly a soft touch himself),
‘needs not new hardware but a change of heart. It needs an end
to the ethic of heroism in its leadership for good and all’.12 This
may be akin to what Headlam Wells – who speaks of the ‘will to
myth’– is driving at when he says of Coriolanus that in the assumed
nobility of his tragedy, Martius’ ‘greatest conquest is not of Corioli,
but the hearts of theatre audiences and critics alike’ (Wells 2000: 83
and 146).
2. A number of simultaneously textual and social phenomena follow.
One concerns the strengthening and purifying of boundaries.13
Baron-Cohen’s key characteristic of what he calls ‘the male brain’ is
the propensity to ‘systemise’ (as opposed to the empathising ‘female
brain’).14 The pragmatics of system building, we might add, involve a
compulsion to police a dominant definition of manliness or male
attributes. One of the boundaries that appears to have given most
trouble is that marking off the subjective or inner domain. Typically
(again), men have tended to treat their own interiority or inner world
as a strange (and even threatening) land.15
3. Historically the suspicion attaching to interiority has also applied
to its correlative, empathy (dangerous proximity to the innerness of
others). Recalling Ian Suttie’s formulation ‘the taboo on tenderness’
(Suttie 1963), we suggest that one (typical) phenomenon of male-
affiliation is unease about affect, about the demands of intimacy and
the resulting compulsion to manage the boundaries of the securely
contained self.16 Once again, this suggestion impinges upon the
domain of literary culture and its reproduction through criticism and
educational institutions. In particular, the forms of subjectivity and
interiority associated with the rise of the novel and with Romantic
and post-Romantic poetry17 – and anticipated in the development
of the soliloquy in the early modern period – required male authors
and those who identified with them to negotiate a danger zone of
affect and blurred edges conventionally associated with the feminine.
Over the ensuing vertigo loomed a Carlylean spectre that introspec-
tion would sap the ability to act. In Kristevan terms, this fear of
abjection, of disintegrating under your own gaze and under the gaze
of significant others follows on the dissolution of strong bound-
aries. Conversely, many literary representations of masculinity have
been drawn precisely to the narrative dynamics of failure. Thus one
consequence (going back at least as far as Dostoyevsky) has been
a thread of enquiry into the male abject as anti-hero: ‘I really was
a coward and slave’, asserts the protagonist of Dostoyevsky’s Notes
from Underground.18 Reciprocally, literary fictions from Defoe’s Moll
Flanders to Allan Warner’s Sopranos have provided a pretext and
instrument for male authors and commentators to divert attention
from their own vulnerability by probing the interior of female exper-
ience. But this itself is not a risk-free procedure: the problem of
identification with the object of the gaze has been felt acutely in
relation to male creativity, as also in relation to the male gaze implic-
ated in critical reading (‘Portrait of the Artist as a Man’ in Knights
1999). In male-authored fictions, one way of managing the risk of
engulfment by feminised subject matter has been to project the
sense of threat upon female protagonists who subsequently – like
Desdemona, Cordelia, Anna Karenin, Emma Bovary, Effie Briest or
Tess Darbeyfield – come to grisly ends as sacrificial victims. Later in
the chapter we shall extend this argument about narrative predica-
ments: English Studies being organised to ward off or engage in ritual
expulsion of the feminine and the domestic.19
Ben Knights 11
Let us conclude these propositions by saying that in this book we are

going to take a pragmatic – even phenomenological – approach to the
question of masculinities. While believing that it is meaningful to talk
about a spectrum of publicly produced manhood, we see no reason to
collapse the discussion back into essentialism or any unmediated form
of quasi-biological determinism. At the same time, we can see no way
of theorising masculinities within a cultural – constructivist perspective
that is not itself susceptible to deconstruction (MacInnes 1998). Prag-
matically, though, there is a job for educationists to do: it would be
intellectually and politically retrograde to revert either to ‘blank slate’
(in any of its many variables), or, on the other hand to deny that gender
modalities – however sustained – exist and have ‘real world’ effects. Let
us grant that the masculine identities and performances towards which
men are tempted almost certainly have roots in evolutionary biology,
and in foetal responses to intra-uterine androgens. Outside the womb,
these dispositions are in due course overdetermined by the fraught
relationship to embodiment that arises from the drive to dissociate
from the mother. But the identities which result from these overlap-
ping bio-cultural processes are themselves experienced and performed
in symbolic, cultural (and to some degree therefore mutable) forms: the
experience of embodiment is itself mediated through interaction with
other embodied subjectivities.
Among those forms are the very narratives which literature, film and
drama make available to enquiry as public and sharable dramas of self-
fashioning. Almost needless to say, such texts are not simply available
to the always already gendered reader as items for solitary consumption.
Among the places where they take on meaning and perlocutionary force
is the scene of teaching within institutions dedicated to study. This book
adopts the working hypothesis that printed cultural forms – analogous
in a sense to the world wide web – constitute a form of virtual, collective
intelligence. This is what we might refer to as ‘peri-text’: the buzz of
conversation which surrounds the text as an enactment of social mean-
ings. In this view, poetry, drama or the novel constitute a form of
software for social intelligence. To take our immediate topic: narratives
of manliness do not have to be explained as simply epiphenomenal
upon a somatic or psychic base. Ruth Page’s empirical research (see
chapter below) constitutes a salutary warning against stereotypical ideas
of masculine or feminine narrative procedures. Nevertheless, social parti-
cipation in fictive narrative constitutes a theatre where the meanings
of masculinity may (among infinite other topics) be explored. Fictive
texts – as the chapters by Ruth Helyer, Ranita Chatterjee and Robert
Burden demonstrate – can themselves be read as commentary upon the

pedagogic formation of masculinities. (Even, as in Helyer’s discussion of
De Lillo’s White Noise, the parodic formation of academic man himself.)
In turn, John Beynon shows us how self-conscious understanding of
narrative can help make sense of the crafting of memory outside fiction.
Without going down an essentialist road, we shall therefore frame the
chapters that follow in terms of a history of the management of gendered
subjectivity. But in doing so we must at the same time insist upon
heteroglossia: the idea that discourses are almost inevitably fraught, self-
divided and internally inconsistent. As textual critics we are in many
ways trying to read texts and textual occasions ‘against themselves’, with
the prompts they themselves provide.
This book, we have said, is intended to be more than a collection of
critical studies as such. In a proceeding akin to David Bleich’s ‘double
perspective’ (Bleich 1988), the chapters which follow work through
an underlying supposition that while scholarly and critical knowledge
inform the processes of teaching and learning, the latter simultaneously
inform the creation and re-making of knowledge. We need next to turn
to the context within institutional pedagogic regimes.
Pedagogic orientation
While this book concentrates on the production of masculinities within

textual studies in Higher Education, we must make clear that there is a
substantial research literature on masculinity in initial education, (and
even to some degree specifically on masculinity in English).20 Higher
Education is in fact coming late to an already developed debate. One way
of explaining the ambition of the present book would be to say that it
represents a tentative application to higher education of research which
has been carried on for many years on schooling and with young persons
of school age. As long ago as 1994 student cultures of masculinity
and the idea of schools as a masculinising agency were the subject of
Mairtin Mac An Ghaill’s The Making of Men: Masculinities, Sexualities and
Schooling (1994). Mac An Ghaill’s work (see also Mac An Ghaill 1996)
draws upon and returns to a tradition of research and critique strongly
represented in the pages of the journal Gender and Education (e.g. the
1997 ‘Masculinities in Education’ special issue 9.1). If we turn specific-
ally to the domain of English and reading, we must note that such
research studies have taken place in a context of widespread and volatile
public debates concerning boys and reading.21 There is and has been
for 10 years or more a lively public and media debate in the United
Ben Knights 13
Kingdom, in North America and in Australia around ideas about why

boys are failing (or why the education system is failing boys – a media
trope repeatedly and cogently critiqued by Lynne Segal22 ), above all in
the skills of literacy. Many of the implications were drawn out by Elaine
Millard in her Differently Literate: Boys, Girls and the Schooling of Literacy
(Millard 1997), a study from which – although its research effectively
antedates the impact of the Internet – those who teach in Higher Educa-
tion could learn much. For comparatively little has been written on
masculinity in Higher Education (Michael Kimmel’s ‘Integrating Men
into the Curriculum’ is a significant exception) and of what there is,
little of it directly concerns men in English subjects. (An important, if
now rather dated, exception is Kim Thomas 1990; see also a handful of
articles in Studies in HE, and in Gender and Education, a few pages in Evans
1993 and Knights 1999.) This book proposes itself as a contribution to
filling that gap.
The implications of much of what follows are explored further in
Wayne Martino’s chapter (below). Where he will concentrate on the
experience of men who have elected to become English teachers, it seems
important here to suggest some further cross-sector threads. Especially
now that universities are no longer an experience of an elite only, there
is, we shall assume, an even greater need to explore and understand the
‘gender regime’ (Connell 2000) of English in universities. What Mac An
Ghaill says of school as a masculinising agency has relevance across the
sectors, as will be apparent in the chapters by Allen and Dooley (below).
A main argument of this book is that we need to consider not only

gender differences but also relations between young men and women
and within young men’s peer groups. It is important to see masculinity
not simply as complementary to femininity. Masculinities are also
developed in specific institutional contexts in relation to and against
each other.
(Mac An Ghaill 1994: 61)
While historically men have dominated university teaching (a situ-

ation however which in the Humanities has changed dramatically over
the past 15 years), teaching has paradoxically been by tradition been a
lower status and a women’s profession. At the same time, children (as
much as students) have to be seen as active agents in producing gendered
positions and resisting or creolising the educational languages with
which their teachers attempt to endow them. While they are unlikely to
use the term, students whether at school, college or university are quite
as sensitive to the implicit messages of ‘the hidden curriculum’ as are its

left wing critics. That English as a subject had colluded in producing the
subjectivities required by the state became in the 1980s a commonplace
of one strand of critique (e.g. Hunter, Culture and Government 1988).
From observation and the research literature, we might derive the related
suggestion that dominant boys have tended to identify English and
English teachers as having designs upon them. For as Mark Dooley has
pointed out:
English is a subject more profoundly engaged with the processes of

identity formation than any other. Every engagement with every
text involves, at some level, the negotiation of our sense of self with
the external world. When that engagement takes place in a public
space, with a group of people, there is no telling how many personal
stories could be circulating, how many narratives are being written
and rewritten, challenged and affirmed.
(p. 73)
Inasmuch as teacherly ideologies are perceived as threatening

cherished masculinities, resistance takes shape against teachers as well as
their subject matter and ‘soft’ empathetic approaches. Martino’s article
‘The Tyranny of Surveillance: Male Teachers and the Policing of Masculin-
ities. ’ (Gender and Education 2006) vividly portrays the attempts of male
teachers to operate under the ‘normalizing [and frequently homophobic]
gaze’ of male pupils. One frequent result is the display of forms of humour
and toughness by which to curry favour with dominant boys. Simultan-
eously, Millard’s summary of research will come as no surprise.
Boys learn at an early age to control both the girls in their class and
the women who teach them by adopting a ‘male’ discourse which
emphasizes negative aspects of female sexuality, and embodies ‘direct
sexual insult’ Boys act as if the very fact of working with girls will
demean them.
(Millard 1997: 9)
In higher education too, fear of feminisation can be countered by

taking control of the symbolic space. A quotation from Kim Thomas’s
interviews is likely to ring bells:
With my current tutor, I tend to be rather argumentative because

she’s a talker, she would talk if you let her – so I cut across her
Ben Knights 15
sometimes, which might mean she thinks I’m aggressive, but she
probably respects me in that respect.
(Male student interviewee quoted in Thomas 1990: 150)
The ambiguities of a situation in which a woman tutor is identified

with masculine subject matter are highlighted in Alice Ferrebe’s chapter
(below). But while those influenced by Pierre Bourdieu would reach for
the term ‘symbolic violence’ to characterise the power relation between
teacher and taught, we would prefer here to draw attention to the prob-
lematics of nurture.23 How, in the pedagogic environment, do nutrients
circulate, and who controls their flow? In particular, we are dealing
with a discipline that foregrounds the role of nurture and attentive
sympathy, yet at the same time is embarrassed by what to do with it.
In any case, how does an educational subject do nurturing? How does it
practise in that fuzzy, ordinary, in all senses virus-ridden domain where
subjectivities meet and may be exposed to shame or humiliation? How
does it call out and then in turn protect the vulnerability of teachers?
(The question will emerge again in the context of Mark Dooley’s and
Dennis Allen’s chapters below.) Disciplines that pride themselves on
their rigorous intellectual challenge may by the same token give scant
attention to the emotional or social needs of either their practitioners
and students. Self-evidently, this is a problem that extends far beyond
the family of English subjects or even the Humanities. But we suggest
that it has taken on a peculiar force in a discipline whose very subject
matter foregrounds the giving and receiving of nourishment (metaphor-
ical and literal) and relationships of care and attentiveness to others.
The intellectual and affective vulnerability of the teacher in this discip-
line constitutes a model for the student. How teachers manage and
students internalise or reject their vulnerability constitutes a central
element of the classroom production of the subject. As Higher Educa-
tion (in the United Kingdom at all events) moves steadily towards a
nurturing paradigm – though admittedly in a highly routinised, even
managerial, sense – such issues (with their implications for managing
the boundaries of embodiment) become even more acute. They have, we
suggest, implications for all levels of practice in our subject group, from
the lone reader, to the classroom and the dialogue within virtual learning
environment (VLE) and chat room, from the social and institutional
organisation of academic departments, to the practice of scholarship in
the subject. We shall explore below the protocols of male teachers in a
subject widely perceived as feminising. Here, let us note that one resol-
ution of this gender conundrum is the projection of the male English
teacher as charismatic hero, a role crystallised in Peter Weir’s 1989 film

Dead Poets’ Society (starring Robin Williams). Yet, charisma, too, with
its resonances of heroism and masculine leadership has to be under-
stood as operating within regimes that are simultaneously textual and
social. Fictional studies of the English – and more recently the Creative
Writing – lecturer also enlarge on the possibility that the elaborate,
erotic discourse of the subject may itself become a medium of seduc-
tion (e.g. J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace [1999]). In a contrasting mode, we can
often observe the perpetration of symbolic violence as a bonding force
in male reading. The male Cultural Studies students I remember testing
their squeamish male tutor (and female peers) by insisting on talking
and writing assignments about American Psycho, Fight Club or Omen were
anticipated in the late 1970s ‘sub-cultures’ period of the Birmingham
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.24
The present book builds on ideas developed over many years by
the Development of University English Teaching Project about the
isomorphic relations between text and pedagogic practice (Evans 1995;
Knights 1992). These ideas are grounded in a psychodynamic tradi-
tion. Applied to educational groups, they concern how groups negotiate
authority, police relevance, deal with material felt to be dangerous; how
they manage internal relations, and strive for coherence. With its vocab-
ulary of splitting, projection and of inter-group fantasy, the discipline
of group relations provides lucid insight into the fantasies and patterns
of expectation which govern gendered behaviours. Yet the Tavistock
tradition in group relations is itself vulnerable to critique on grounds of
its tacit gendering. The present study is simultaneously influenced by
the constructivist tradition in educational thought. And while Foucault
and ‘technologies of the self’ are another strong influence, the book is
committed simultaneously to ideas about heteroglossia and dialogism,
to a belief that educational institutions can provide sites in which to
explore difference, change, possibility. Contrary to the critique launched
in the 1980s by the anti-humanist left, we take a liberatory view of the
potential of textual study for cultural learning and renewal. Reading
and the collaborative discussion of books can be, as Rachel Carroll
suggests below, one road to alternative realities. Cris Yelland’s chapter
proposes a line between the study of transitivity and a revived sense
of human agency. But for such – admittedly utopian – routes to be
unobstructed, teachers and students have to become consciously aware
of Kimmel’s ‘hidden gender meanings’ within the dialogue between
students, teachers and texts. The underlying argument is that (while
aiming to avoid reductive treatment of texts and discourses) gender
Ben Knights 17
power and performance can be raised to the level of awareness through

dialogue over and through texts.
Earlier on, we suggested that literature (in a broad sense) might plaus-
ibly be seen as analogous to a form of software for social intelligence.
Underlying this point was the idea that text understood in this way
exists not solely in its one-to-one relation with individual readers, but
as mediated, argued-over, interpreted in social groupings which include
those which are our subject here: those at work in the socio-intellectual
space of academic institutions. Thus, in terms of the topic in hand,
interaction with narratives (literary and otherwise) is one of the ways in
which masculinity is produced. But the arena of higher education study
could simultaneously be one where that very process could be held up
to the light.
In what follows, then, we shall be talking not about text as such, but
about the study of text as a social practice: the protocols of argumenta-
tion, the disciplinary rhetorics, the conventions of evidence and styles
of thinking that from a scholarly point of view constitute the subject
but which, simultaneously, from a pedagogic point of view, are enacted
within the classroom or other encounters between professional initiates
and learners. I will argue as I have elsewhere that it is necessary for
those of us who study disciplinary ‘tribes’ to consider what I have – on
the analogy of the ‘implied reader’ – called the ‘implied student’ of the
discipline (Becher and Trowler 2001; Knights 2005). Disciplines – like
novels – can be studied in terms of their addressivity. The practice of the
subject invites the formation of a paradigmatic identity. This is of course
an invitation which students do not have to accept – like readers, they
too may comprehend their subject ‘against the grain’, or be selective
about which attributes they internalise. But even where their students
will not follow them into their profession, we have to see academics as
in some sense gatekeepers. This gatekeeping function operates within
the border rituals of the classroom (e.g. how it establishes relevance
or irrelevance in discussion) as well as its policing of its own scholarly
discourse. To examine a discipline is thus also to ask about its addressees,
those whom its discourse attempts to enlist in its intellectual style.
In the identification of the ‘implied student’, questions of gender are
unavoidable. Above all, in English and Literary studies, pedagogy and the
construction of masculine roles have to be understood as taking place
within a subject widely experienced as implicitly feminising. T.S. Eliot’s
much-quoted dictum about poetry being an escape from personality
continued to be lived out in the conflicted homage paid by English
Studies to impersonality (Ellmann 1987). We are talking about a subject
constellation which over the past century has formed defences against its
own tendency to blur cognitive borderlines. The practice of the subject
at once renders the subjective impersonal and disciplined and then re-
immerses apparently unambiguous knowledge in interpretation. This
dialectic, its proponents are likely to agree, is a fundamental element in
its pedagogic and developmental strength. Yet the affective snags of this
dialectical process are little understood. In the history of the subject itself
what started out as hard, objective knowledge (about literary history,
or philology or linguistic structures, about contexts or about authorial
biography) has tended to dissolve under scrutiny into the reflexive,
the ambivalent, the tentative, the inexorable slither of signified into
signifier.25 In this context, Ranita Chatterjee’s chapter (below) might
well suggest to us that what the pedagogic situation and the Gothic have
in common is a susceptibility to the uncanny. From Freud’s reading of
Jensen’s Gradiva (1904) to Derek Attridge’s The Singularity of Literature,
hospitality towards the haunting unspoken requires of both critic and
student a receptive mindset far removed from that traditionally associ-
ated with hegemonic masculinity.
Masculinity and English Studies
This brief contribution to a speculative history of the subject is different

(and in intention less dismissive) to that developed during the New Left
challenge of the 1980s.26 A critique of the dynamics by which gender
superiority is pursued provides no grounds for a reprise of the 1980s
assault on the discipline, if only because such an assault would unerr-
ingly reproduce earlier male attempts to take back ownership of the
subject. Literature as an institutionalised study has many and various
virtues, and we have no intention of denying these in suggesting that
it has also frequently formed a terrain for a covert struggle over the
gendering of symbolic power. Let us return to a fundamental (and,
we would argue, gendered) metaphor.27 Drawing on the earlier work
of Anthony Biglan, Becher and Trowler have demonstrated that the
soft/hard metaphorical set is endemic in the constitution of educational
disciplines (2001: 34–36). The English group have from the beginning
felt compelled to explain that what appeared to be a ‘soft’ subject
matter was actually hard if you looked rigorously enough. Between
1919 and 1921 the authors of the Newbolt Report, The Teaching of
English in England were exercised by a charge that has been repeatedly
heard since. Having reviewed the sources of difficulty, the Report
concluded that
Ben Knights 19
It is suggested that [English] is a ‘soft option’. This is an accusation

which affects the whole of our inquiry. If it were made good, it
would go a long way towards providing a justification for denying
English the place in our education system which we demand for it.
Above all it would be fatal to the claims of English at the University
stage. Our answer to it is that the charge is untrue and the danger
imaginary. [It] is a pure delusion to suppose that the fact that a
boy or man knows enough English to talk to his brother, or take a
railway ticket, or even conduct a business, leaves him nothing hard
or difficult to learn when he comes to study English Literature.
In short, the
man who enters an English ‘School’ hoping for an idle or easy time
should at once find he has deceived himself.
(§ 194)
But the celebration of Englishness and English culture into which

Newbolt and his colleagues hoped to engage the nation turned out not
to be the dominant gene within the new subject.
Literary studies soon turned out to represent a form of liminal
activity. Not only were they perched uneasily on the boundaries of
everyday and esoteric discourse, but, like psychoanalysis, alongside
which they grew up, they proposed to bring to the surface and articulate
disturbing unconscious material.28 Rapid and frequently disconcerting
code-switching has been and remains central to their performance. To
the extent these subjects’ boundaries leak, they are, in Mary Douglas’s
terms, dangerous.29 Critical activity – whether working with everyday or
with literary texts – is precarious, and in many senses counter-intuitive.
To re-immerse the written or spoken world in its moment of production,
to engage in elaborate interpretation, is to undermine everyday assump-
tions about making secure sense. Cris Yelland’s chapter (below), which
explores transitivity in war narratives, is simultaneously an object lesson
in the estrangement of apparently common-sense discourse, a necessary
but disturbing activity. The pedagogic value of unpacking transitivity
rests, indeed, upon its unsettlingness. Critical studies have character-
istically privileged hidden meaning, indeterminacy, unconscious shad-
owing – all the ambivalences, concealments and contradictions inherent
in language.
Yet, paradoxically, ‘English’ as a self-avowedly transgressive subject
has raised its own transgressions to a form of superior orthodoxy. The
site of teaching is therefore one which breeds anxieties all the more
urgent for the sense that only to the initiated can access the secret.
To borrow and adapt Basil Bernstein’s terms, the subject appears to
invite ‘horizontal’ (everyday) discourse, then reveals that the high status
language was ‘vertical’ (esoteric) all the time (Bernstein 1996). Crucially
for our purposes here, this propensity of the subject to re-immerse the
achieved word and well-wrought artefact back into indeterminacy has
particular resonances in terms of the history of gender. The emergence
of a community of professional textual interpreters may derive from
the same sources that have historically, in so many cultures, fuelled a
perceived need for a male caste of exegetes: those entrusted with the
sacred task of an engagement with the word seen as too dangerous for
the laity.
Quite specifically, the years when English Studies was being formed
were years of considerable gender turbulence and an agitated debate over
the nature of male subjectivity. I have written about this elsewhere, and
shall merely summarise here (Knights 2005). One way of getting hold of
this would be by allusion to the recent explosion of fictional interest in
Henry James.30 These doublings and re-doublings of James, with their
prurient attention to his sexuality and troubled subjectivity provide us
with a way of orienting a discussion of an educational subject that
emerged out of a moment when male aestheticism and the range of male
cultural expression had been so forcibly restrained. In distinctly Jame-
sian circumstances, Nick, the young protagonist of Alan Hollinghurst’s
The Line of Beauty (2004), tries to explain his PhD thesis to Lord Kessler.
‘And what is your chosen field?’

‘Mm. I want to have a look at style,’ Nick said. This flashing emphasis
on something surely ubiquitous had impressed the admissions
board, though Lord Kessler appeared uncertain. A man who owned
Mme de Pompadour’s escritoire could hardly be indifferent to style,
Nick felt; but his reply seemed to have in mind some old wisdom
about style and substance.
‘Style tout court?’
‘Well, style at the turn of the century – Conrad, and Meredith, and
Henry James of course.’ It all sounded perfectly pointless, or at least
a way of wasting two years, and Nick blushed because he really was
interested in it and didn’t yet know – not having done the research –
what he was going to prove.
‘Ah,’ said Lord Kessler intelligently: ‘style as an obstacle.’
Ben Knights 21
Nick smiled. ‘Exactly Or perhaps style that hides things and reveals
things at the same time.’ For some reason this seemed rather near
the knuckle, as though he were suggesting Lord Kessler had a secret.
‘James is a great interest of mine, I must say.’
‘Yes, you’re a James man, I see it now.’
(2004: 54–55)
In the 1890s and early 1900s, expressions of male melancholy became

endemic alongside wholesale propaganda for a new, toughened imperial
masculinity. Those poets of male doubling, Wilde, James, Stevenson or
George du Maurier, were surrounded by a frenzy of disambiguation:
notable instances include the discourses of nationalism; race, and –
here most pertinently – male bodies. From the mid-1890s on, social
attempts to regulate the male ran the gamut from military-style drill, to
imprisonment, and on to surgical mutilation (Budd 1997; Darby 2005;
Knights 2004). While Queer Studies have been inclined to read late
nineteenth-century heterosexual melancholy in the light of the repres-
sion of the homosexual other (e.g. Butler 1993; Sedgwick 1991), we make
a complementary suggestion.31 That is that the haunted masculinities
of the proto-modernist moment may also represent an act of mourning
for an earlier conception of male childhood. Much recent research has
explored the emergence of the new, toughened masculinities of the late
nineteenth century out of the more heterogeneous, even androgynous
version of manliness current in the mid-nineteenth century (Robson
2001; Steedman 1995; Tosh 1999). Thus Catherine Robson concludes
that in the 1890s ‘the boy returned from his long obscurity to be child-
hood’s supreme representative for the twentieth century’ (2001: 193). In
a complementary argument, Claudia Nelson argues that it was a mix of
Darwinism and homophobia that generated the strengthening distinc-
tions which destroyed the old androgynous ideal (Nelson 1991).
Obviously there are differences of emphasis and approach here. But
between them they nevertheless lend substance to the suggestion that
by the early years of the twentieth century a re-alignment of the relation-
ship between adult and child male self was for many generating a sense
of disorientation and loss. A gothic pathos associated with the death of
the small boy famously attracted Henry James as much as, later, it did
Benjamin Britten (cf. Bradley 2000; Ohi 2005). In an era when childhood
was increasingly the subject of educational and social regulation, we
might speculate that James’s Kindertotenlieder ‘The Pupil’ or The Turn of
the Screw prefigure an anxiety that pedagogy might smother its objects.
The trope of the ‘lost domain’ or Temps Perdu of boyhood came to be

extensively mined in Modernism – by Proust as by Alain-Fournier.32 As
James put it in his late memoir A Small Boy and Others (1913):
To look back at all is to meet the apparitional and to find on its

ghastly face the silent stare of an appeal. When I fix it, the hovering
shade, whether of person or place, it fixes me back and seems the
less lost.
At the same moment in the history of masculine subjectivity, J.M. Barrie

re-wrote his hugely successful play Peter Pan as a novel. In the narrator’s
identification with the figure of Peter, Barrie, like James, located the
male onlooker in a lost and excluded subjectivity. As he did so, he
established for the new century the paradigm of the little boy as exile
(cf. Rose 1984).33
However, as we are here we may as well stay and look on. That is all
we are really, lookers-on. Nobody really wants us.
(Peter and Wendy 5th edition 1911: 236)
Cultural repetition (acts of writing, reading or performance) could be

both the nostalgic performance of the moment of loss and a symbolic
rescue of the boy self. One might suggest that the pervasive literature
of male doubles – to which one hundred years later David Lodge, Colm
Tóibín and Alan Hollinghurst have now, as though under the sway of
some overpowering transference, returned – derives from the power of
the written word to hold in suspension multiple latent identities. But
also – and more to the point here – that the uncanniness and leaky
borders of so much turn of the century male writing rang warning
bells for those who sought to develop an educational practice based on
literature.
In short, we seem to have in the turbulence of masculine identities a
common genesis both for the gothic hauntings of fin de siècle fiction, and
a matrix for the new English Studies. This was perhaps another aspect of
that ‘paranoid articulation of charisma among middle-class professional
men at the turn of the century’ of which David Trotter speaks (Trotter
2001: 152). Here was a domain which had roots in activities and orienta-
tions widely perceived as feminine – or at least opposed to those coercive
versions of masculinity fashioned in the controversy over aestheticism
which surrounded the trials of Oscar Wilde. Simultaneously, as the
study of vernacular literature spread through the university extension
Ben Knights 23
movement, it became apparent that most of the students were actually

women. As the authors of the Newbolt Report commented,
literature courses found their audiences chiefly among women of the

middle class. But this fact by no means prevented them from being
valuable. It was an invaluable opportunity to thousands of women
in London and still more in large provincial towns or country districts
to have lectures of high quality brought within their reach. Many
of the women who now have the right to vote at elections have
learned in University Extension classes to understand and appreciate
more fully those national traditions which find in our literature their
highest expression.
(1921 §245)
In these circumstances, there was a social as well as an intellectual sense

of the threat to a male monopoly over the ‘monuments of unageing
intellect’. This, I suggest, is one context for what Robert Scholes was
to say of the men of 1914: ‘by their disparagement of the sentimental,
as opposed to the ironic or the paradoxical, they had made the typical
modernist move of assigning feeling to the female and thought to the
male .’ Scholes (Crafty Reader 2001: 34). ‘Men’s modernist culture’,
argues Peter Middleton, ‘is one means of sustaining modern masculin-
ities’ (1992: 44).
The fear of a potential feminising influence within the new subject
reflected also an orientation derived from a longer history of anxiety
about the rise of a mass reading public. In the nineteenth century and
on into the twentieth, mass literacy was associated with novel reading
and a feminised readership (Brantlinger 1998; Leavis 1932; Pykett 1995).
The masculine style and manliness in writing were a recurrent trope of
the period.
Manliness in art, what can it be, as distinct from that which in

opposition to it must be called feminine quality there, – what but
a full consciousness of what one does, of art itself in the work of
art, tenacity of intuition and of consequent purpose, the spirit of
construction as opposed to what is literally incoherent or ready to fall
to pieces, and in opposition to what is hysteric or works at random,
the maintenance of a standard.
(Walter Pater, Plato and Platonism: A Series of Lectures [1893]
New York, 1969: 280)
Intellectually as well as socially, the new English Studies represented

a gender border zone, and many practitioners went to considerable
lengths to regulate the perils of their new domain. As Colin Evans has
shown, in taking poetry and fictions as its objects of study the subject
had to guard against both the accusation of ‘softness’ and of ‘play’,
thus warding off the potential childfulness and femininity of the subject
(Evans 1993). In the work of the pioneers of the subject, there was
a covert gender struggle over the mastery of creative language. Those
early struggles have left their traces in continuing practice. The (mostly)
male pioneers of ‘ambiguity’ had to make sure there was no room for
error over the attribution of their key concept. Inasmuch as the subject
embraced polysemy as a literary and ethical value it had simultaneously
to disambiguate its own practices. The subject both invited and as a
consequence felt compelled to regulate interiority and intimacy. There
were, potentially, several ways of re-assuring oneself and other stake-
holders that the new subject possessed ‘hard’ subject attributes.
This dynamic may be seen as a kind of disciplinary deep structure or
sequence of transferences of which – even through subsequent fission
and metamorphoses – the subject still exhibits the archaeological traces.
Over the years, bulwarks against its own dangerous, boundary nature
have included, variously:
1. asserting the scholarly credentials of the subject by doing difficult

textual or historical work, or working on texts that required the
mastery of Old English or Old Norse (an approach rejected by the
Cambridge and US New Critical schools);
2. demonstrating that the new subject had ‘edge’ and bite: that while
it might take poetry and novels as its subject matter, its approach
was rigorous, and uncompromising in making discriminations. Real
critics might discuss emotions, but they would do so with detach-
ment and a dry lack of sentimentality; they would be very strict about
‘self-indulgence’, aiming to promote forms of maturity where affect
was subordinated to intellect and judgment;
3. forming some version of a ‘high’ language: a language which,
precisely because it shared its syntax and a good deal of its lexis
with the vernacular, required study and prolonged immersion in
order to be initiated. (Thus parallel in many ways with Classics
or academic Latin). English Studies analogues included the diffi-
cult and deeply ambiguous discourses of modernist poetry (and to
some degree the modernist novel); more recently, the proliferating
languages of various kinds of ‘theory’.
Ben Knights 25
Founded as it was on the domain of verbal play (and thus open to

accusations of infantilism as well as effeminacy), the new subject felt
obliged to mark out clear boundaries in arguing its case for its own
essential seriousness. In the classroom as much as in its published writ-
ings it had to simultaneously invite and then in turn manage ‘play’.
How otherwise were its students to cope with the lack of set rules and
clear-cut answers? The theatre of the subject generated forms of compet-
ition and hierarchy that relied on the internalisation of tacit rather
than explicit rules of discourse. Hegemony within class as within the
profession was generated through verbal facility, irony, the art of the
put-down, ritualised aggression: drawing on those adversarial, agonistic
traditions which Walter Ong has identified as characterising the insti-
tutions of male knowledge (Ong 1981). This polemical assertion of the
validity of the subject converged with argumentative or cognitive styles
which advantage those who have invested most in those attributes tradi-
tionally understood as ‘masculine’. Some (male) colleagues can still be
heard to distinguish between the kind of ‘brilliance’ tacitly associated
with the ‘male mind’ and an idea of ‘good’ but plodding compliance
associated with the ‘female’.
As I have tried to show in an earlier article, the educational practice
of literary modernism was characterised by contempt for the feminine
lowbrow – the assumption being that reading, and the reading of
fiction in particular had become feminised, aligned with consump-
tion, passivity, ‘substitute living’; all the phenomena of standardisa-
tion that in 1930, in a polemical pamphlet that was in many ways
a programme for Scrutiny, F.R. Leavis (building on Queenie Leavis’
work) identified with ‘mass’ civilisation (‘Mass Civilisation and Minority
Culture’ 1932).34
A central task of the new subject ‘English’, then, was to save heroic
readers from the fate of Emma Bovary: to ward off that regression into a
life of wish-fulfilment and social mimesis understood to be fostered by
the addictive habit of reading commercial best-sellers (Huyssen ‘Mass
Culture as Woman’ in Modleski 1991; Trotter 2001 especially Chapter 9).
Practical criticism was in effect a homeopathic ritual designed to defend
mind and strenuous reading from feminisation. In a subject which
constructed maps of interiority through evoking the unconscious and
the emotions, there was a perceived need to draw clear boundaries and
impose rigorous structures. A ‘habit of fantasying’ as Queenie Leavis
sternly remarked ‘will lead to maladjustment in actual life’ (Fiction
and the Reading Public 1932: 54). Such fears carried a particular force
for the reconstruction of masculinity in the wake of the spectacular

trauma of the First World War.
As David Gilmore has argued, rituals of masculinity are designed to
ward off regressive wishes and fantasies: ‘a defense against the eternal
child within’ (1990: 29). The reverse of the coin for a discipline that took
as its subject matter linguistic and emotional play was an implicit equa-
tion between the female and the infantile.35 In the 1920s and 1930s,
the Peter Pan-like implications of deriving sustenance from poetry were
peculiarly threatening. The new subject’s prickly fear of feminisation fed
into a practice designed to demonstrate the mature, masculine rigour of
its cultural enterprise. ‘Sentimentality’ became an implicitly gendered
code word for all that the student should eschew. With their cult of
impersonality and the ‘objective correlative’, those who aspired to form
a new professional caste sought to demonstrate the ‘hard’ nature of
their subject, leaving behind them a legacy in a discipline which offered
normative models for subjectivity. Writing about Hemingway, Peter
Schwenger once referred to an attempt to become an object in order to
evade your nature as a subject (Phallic Critiques 1984: 54). In its horror
of the domestic, the interior, the local – the conventionally feminine –
modernist literature (and the discipline erected upon it) tended to treat
attention to the inner, intimate world as warranted only if projected –
like the comings and goings of Leopold Bloom upon The Odyssey –
onto a larger, even mythic canvas. We might here appropriate Trotter’s
insight that ‘masculinity was for some Modernist writers not so much
a posture or a doctrine as a form of symbolic capital’ (2001: 252). The
corresponding institutionalised procedure was built on the foundation
of a modernist canon (a particular reading of Metaphysical Poetry and
of Hopkins; early Eliot, Pound, and in due course Yeats, Lawrence and
Joyce) in which crises in masculine subjectivity were raised to the level
of ‘universal human’ dramas – dramas on which literature with its
own ‘anxiety of influence’ could be read as a privileged commentary.
This propensity to universalise the masculine subject of literature has
occluded both male bodies and male sexuality, and – in relation to
our argument here – obscured the power relationships set up in the
pedagogic field that surrounds the text. Despite the anti-essentialism of
Theory, such pedagogic heroics were in many ways re-affirmed in both
English and Cultural Studies during the early years of the ‘theory wars’,36
the heroic avatar now the fearless controversialist who could tear apart
the veils of mystification. Arguably, indeed, ‘theory’ (not least in its
Freudian variants) gave a whole new lease of life to the father-fixated
Oedipus narrative.
Ben Knights 27
Time and again what has been offered by ‘canonical’ literature (and
the pedagogic style it entailed) has been the opportunity of occupying
the gaze of the male viewer. For pedagogy is a kind of deixis – nudging,
shaping, directing attention. Consciousness, readers of Vygotsky or
Bakhtin will not be surprised to hear, is being increasingly regarded as
social. The evolutionary anthropologist Michael Tomasello speaks of the
profound significance within the speculative origins of culture of ‘joint
attentional activities’ (1999: 6). Or again, Nicholas Humphrey, writing
from the standpoint of evolutionary psychology seems to return to a
Vygotskian insight that ‘empathy is mediated by imitating bodily action’
(Seeing Red 2006: 104). The affinities between the jointly attentional
gesture of pedagogy and the nurturing role discussed above militate
against any obtuse lumping into separate boxes of the cognitive, the
affective and the bodily. The gestural and physically grounded practice
of pedagogy constructs the objects of attention in the same way as the
text creates its imaginary scenes, characters and incidents.
Literature (text and peri-text) may be seen as a performative anthro-
pology: one of the sites where humans can practise what it means
and might mean to be human. While this book has no intention of
suggesting that other interpretative ventures are invalid, it does propose
to estrange the study of masculinity and manliness as a cultural aspir-
ation. The subject of culture, we have suggested, has frequently been
implicitly asked to develop a theory not so much of mind as of their own
or others’ male mind. Between them, the chapters that follow concern
ways of authoring and authorising masculinity within the domain of social
consciousness, but in ways that do not take masculinity as a default or
normative property. We propose to question or disrupt the situation
described by Bronwyn Davies.
While those inhabiting an ascendant category have difficulty recog-

nising their dependence upon the subordinate term for their own
meaning, the imagination of the person who is not in the ascendant
category is trained in an education system which takes those in
the ascendant to be the major source of meaning making. In
a fundamental sense, those who inhabit subordinate categories
are bi-cognitive, or bi-modal. ‘Constructing and Deconstructing
Masculinities through Critical Literacy’.
Gender and Education 9.1 (1997: 27)
Like her, we have no intention of replacing one dominant discourse

with another. But we would argue that the cultural performance
of masculinity should acknowledge and celebrate its own bi- or

multi-modality. While few English lecturers in the United Kingdom
would be likely to be comfortable with the degree of disclosure recom-
mended by David Bleich,37 they might reflect that in the history of the
discipline both sensibility and Althusserian approaches to ‘the subject’
(in the other sense) have provided a field for the regulation and subor-
dination of suspect elements.
This book invites engagement in a reflexive poetics of pedagogy. We
make the hypothesis that the predicaments embedded in the history of
the subject go on being lived out in the transferential relations between
mentors and learners and between learners themselves. Pedagogic
androgyny may yet be a long way off, and living in the unequal sort
of society we do, might in any case be for the moment a disingenuous
aim. Nevertheless, as part of our professional reflection, we who
teach should become self-aware about our own propensity – however
inadvertent – to reproduce or to collude in the gender dynamics of
the subject. We do not in this book seek to make a simplistic case
about the roles of actual women and men in the classroom or in the
staff group. But we should all acknowledge that a discipline that calls
forth the intricacies and indeterminacy of meaning also generates
its own forms of analytical heroism and professional quest – forms
which all too readily dignify the more sordid everyday dramas through
which gender and gender identity is established and symbolic power
assigned. In her chapter, Rachel Carroll urges us to recognise that ‘a
refusal of empowered forms of masculinity is not necessarily reducible
to a state of powerlessness’ (pp. 151–2). The historically grounded
dynamics, which we have sketched in this chapter, hold out to male
participants the lure of asserting symbolic mastery over proceedings. It
is an invitation which men must find the courage to refuse.
Notes
1. The same criticism can also broadly be made of the otherwise excellent essays
collected in (eds) Still and Worton (1993).
2. In 2004–2005, of the UK students listed by the Higher Education Statistics
Agency in English Studies, 36,810 (73.1 per cent) were women and 13,515
(26.9 per cent) men. (These figures include postgraduates, but not students on
combined or joint honours programmes.) The comparable figures for 2003–
2004 were 36,885 (73.6 per cent) women and 13,230 (26.4 per cent) men, and
for 2002–2003, 33,470 (71.3 per cent) women and 12,405 (28.7 per cent) men.
For comparison, in 2004–2005, 54.6 per cent of UK History students were
women and 53.25 per cent of Media Studies students. In the same year 85.5
Ben Knights 29
per cent of Engineering students were men. (My percentages, based on HESA
tables: http://www.hesa.ac.uk/holisdocs/pubinfo/student/subject0405.htm.)
English Language attracts a slightly higher proportion of males at A-level. See
Adrian Barlow’s appendix to the English Subject Centre Report Four Perspect-
ives on Transition, 2005.
3. The academic study of masculinities as it emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s
has been predominantly associated with the social sciences and psychology,
yet it has also in various ways entered into and influenced the study of text.
While this book does not seek to provide a history of the impact of research
on masculinity upon literary and critical studies, it must acknowledge the
productiveness of such approaches to texts across a wide historical span.
Such work goes back of course to Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1971) and
takes in pioneering studies by Peter Schwenger (1984), and Robert Scholes’
‘Reading Like a Man’. Its sweep includes distinguished work on the Early
Modern (Mark Breitenberg, Juliana Schiesari, Coppelia Kahn, Janet Adelman,
Bruce Smith, Gary Taylor, Robin Headlam Wells), to the eighteenth century
(Raymond Stephanson), through Romanticism (Tim Fulford), the Gothic and
Fin de Siècle ( Joe Bristow, Scott McCracken, Andrew Michael Roberts) to work
on contemporary and near-contemporary novelists (e.g. Berthold Schoene,
Susan Brooks, Alice Ferrebe) and poetry (Peter Middleton, Steve Clark).
4. This is in essence a ‘men in feminism’ perspective: we also note the need
for male students and teachers to ‘do their own work’ on their relations
to subject matter, authority, colleagues/fellow students and each other (cf.
Jardine and Smith 1987). We further need to acknowledge, however briefly
or inadequately, that this field of masculinity studies is deeply fraught and
not a little contradictory. It is not the least of its problems that a field of
research and practice that arose in dialogue with and as a complement to
feminism can have the paradoxical effect both of surreptitiously re-asserting
the centrality of the male and of colluding with (or appearing to collude
with) a highly suspect narrative of the male as victim (e.g. Faludi, MacInnes).
5. An initial report on a fascinating example is to be found in Ken Jones, Monica
McLean, David Amigoni and Margaret Kinsman. ‘Investigating the Produc-
tion of University English in Mass Higher Education: Towards an Alternative
Methodology’. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education. 4. 2005: 247–264.
6. ‘To be “literate” ’, says David Bleich, ‘means to be a social being. One is
committed to “read” the inner life of other, and to “write” one’s own life
on the blank space of one’s pre-given relatedness to others. In these terms,
any literate act is a development of one’s implication in the lives of others’.
And, he continues, to ‘cultivate literacy is to refine and enhance our mutual
implication in one another’s lives and to discover and exercise our mutual
responsibilities’ (1988: 67).
7. There is a helpful discussion of the idea of social construction by the clas-
sicist and philosopher Martha Nussbaum in her Cultivating Humanity. 1997:
226–232. This is not the place to illustrate the variety of masculinity studies.
But in relation to this book, we should mention Lynne Segal’s formative
Slow Motion (1990), R.W. Connell’s Masculinities (1995) and The Men and the
Boys (2000).
8. A number of relevant anthologies have been published during the last 10–15
years. Examples include (eds) Stephen M. Whitehead and Frank J. Barrett,
The Masculinities Reader (Polity 2001); (eds) Rachel Adams and David Savran,
The Masculinity Studies Reader (Blackwell 2002); (ed.) Judith Kegan Gardiner,
Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory (Columbia 2002); Máirtín Mac An
Ghaill, Understanding Masculinities (Open University 1996); (eds) Harry Brod
and Michael Kaufman, Theorizing Masculinities (Sage 1994).
9. There is a rich source on the website Literature, Cognition and the Brain –
http://www2.bc.edu/∼richarad/lcb/.
10. And see Peter Middleton’s commentary on Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’
1992: 63–65.
11. Barbara Ehrenreich’s point seems capable of analogous extension: ‘War is
too complex and collective an activity to be accounted for by a single warlike
instinct working within the individual psyche. Instinct may or may not
inspire a man to bayonet the first enemy he encounters in battle. But instinct
does not mobilise supply lines, manufacture rifles, issue uniforms, or move
an army of thousands from point A on the map to B’. (Blood Rites: Origins
and History of the Passions of War. London: Virago. 1997: 9).
12. Mask of Command 350. Robin Headlam Wells (2000) draws attention to this
passage.
13. Carole Gilligan teasingly suggests that a male identity is forged in relation to
the world rather than in relation to another person (Gilligan 1993). Gilligan’s
book (especially Chapter 7) has been an influence on this section.
14. Simon Baron-Cohen is himself careful to stress that he sees these as tend-
encies on a spectrum and sees the distribution of ‘male’ and ‘female’ brains
as statistical averages only. See his popularising work The Essential Differ-
ence (2004), and a number of articles on the website of the Cambridge
Autism Research Centre <http://www. autismresearchcentre.com/research/
cogneurogen.asp>.
15. Though our subject here is only indirectly creativity, there are suggestive
implications for the Orpheus syndrome, that recurrent question of through
what faculty men create. Is it the case, as versions of the Eurydice story
from the 6th century BCE through Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus to Coup-
land’s Girlfriend in a Coma suggest, that male creativity may often derive its
energy from its position ‘over her dead body’ (Bronfen 1992)? As Raymond
Stephanson has demonstrated, a debate about the internal space in which
men created was already being vigorously carried on in the early eighteenth
century (Stephanson 2004) The ‘traffic in male creativity caused a disjunc-
tion between the inner site and public status of creativity’ (p. 95). This led
to ‘self-alienating consequences for male authors as their sexually embodied
creativity became a rhetorical commodity. ’ (p. 157).
16. Simon Baron-Cohen’s definition of empathising is suggestive: ‘Empathising
is defined as the drive to identify emotion and thoughts in others and
to respond to these appropriately It is not simply about inferring what
someone else is thinking or feeling, though this is an important part of
empathising. Rather, it includes an appropriate spontaneous emotional reac-
tion’. John Lawson, Simon Baron-Cohen and Sally Wheelwright. ‘Empath-
ising and Systemising in Adults with and without Asperger Syndrome’. Journal
of Autism and Developmental Disorders. 34.3. 2004: 302.
Ben Knights 31
17. See for example Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction; Juliana
Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholy, Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private
Body.
18. Trans. Jessie Coulson, Penguin Classics. p. 48. The story is discussed in
relation to narratives of abject masculinity in Knights 1999: 121–125. We
speculate that the fascination held by Samuel Becket for so many males in
the critical profession may have to do with the way he raises male abjection
to the level of intellectual heroism.
19. See Valerie Walkerdine’s The Mastery of Reason (1988) on the power of
decontextualised knowledge, depersonalisation and the illusion of mastery.
20. See Millard, Martino, Connell, Mac An Ghaill and Paechter. An early and still
important study of gender in education is (ed.) Henriques, Walkerdine, 1984.
21. In the United Kingdom, what has now become a media commonplace – that
boys are failing in the education system (or alternatively that the education
system is failing boys) – might be seen to have received its first official
acknowledgment in the 1993 OFSTED report Boys and English. See Millard
pp. 2–3. Compare Janet White, ‘On Literacy and Gender’ in (ed.) Carter 1990.
22. For example in http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4117316,
00.html.
23. Nurturing, like the giving of gifts, can of course itself be an ambivalent,
even dominating behaviour.
24. The gendering of such work is explored by Susan Brook in her Literary and
Cultural Criticism: The Feeling Male Body. 2007: 136ff.
25. Witness the disorientation and puzzlement of first year students over their
teachers’ aggressive insistence on ‘the death of the author’ or the arbitrary
nature of the signifier.
26. Cf. the critique of the now conventional history in Atherton, Defining
Literary Criticism. 2006.
27. Many relevant connotations hover around the systemic hard/soft meta-
phorical set. While there are clearly pitfalls for the layperson, it appears
that recent research in the cognitive sciences enables a more grounded
account of the systematicity of metaphor as developed earlier by Lakoff and
Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (1980), Turner, The Origins of Thought and
Language (1996), Lakoff, Embodied Mind (1999), Women, Fire and Dangerous
Things (1987). A number of studies lend weight to the intuitive recognition
that the ‘soft’/‘hard’ binary is gendered, and gendered in ways that are of
direct importance for the history of disciplines and educational processes.
See the summary by Melnick who demonstrates the alignment of this binary
metaphorical set with (largely) unconscious beliefs about the nature of
fe/maleness. http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal/1999_melnick01.shtml.
28. Among the influences on this section are Peter Middleton’s The Inward Gaze
(1992, especially Chapter 3), Gilbert and Gubar (1988) and David Trotter’s
Paranoid Modernism (2001).
29. ‘ all margins are dangerous. If they are pulled this way or that the shape
of fundamental experience is altered. Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at
its margins’. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger. 121.
30. In particular, David Lodge’s Author, Author, and Colm Tóibín’s The Master
(both 2004).
31. Christopher Lane has cautioned us both against the assumption when
dealing with texts like these that all opacities stem from a closeted sub-text,
and against the reductivism present in resolving textual ambiguity by
providing the missing ‘answer’ (1999: 235–236).
32. It is also, though with yet another valency, the dominant trope of Thomas
Mann’s Death in Venice (1912). I have explored masculinities in Le Grand
Meaulnes (1913) in Knights 1999: 28–34.
33. Cf. Kenneth Kidd’s account of Pan as liminal, even feral figure ‘Men Who
Run with Wolves’ http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/lion_and_the_unicorn/
v020/20.1kidd.html.
34. See Kauko, Mieszkowski et al. (eds) Gendered Academia, especially chapters
by Elfie Bettinger, Ina Schabert and Ben Knights.
35. Or even explicit. ‘Mrs. Woolf as we all know, is a Poet in Prose; or rather
she has a range of sensuous impressions which would have stood a poet
in good stead. But sensuous impressions are not an end in themselves; if
they were, most normally sensitive children would be great poets. Of course
Mrs. Woolf is an “intelligent woman” but, as a reviewer in the Calendar
pointed out her intellectual capacity is oddly disproportionate to, and
immature compared with, her sensitiveness, and, if she ventures outside the
narrow range imposed on her by her sensuousness, she becomes a child ’.
Wilfred Mellers (Scrutiny VI 1937: 71–75).
36. Evans has explored the ‘contribution Theory has made to the masculiniza-
tion of English ’ (1993: 129), and see Chapter 6.
37. See for example his nuanced argument in ‘Collaboration and the Pedagogy
of Disclosure.’ College English. 57.1. (1995).
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2
Training to be an English Teacher:
Negotiating Gendered
Subjectivities and the Gendered
Curriculum as Inter-linked Cultural
Processes
Wayne Martino
Introduction
This chapter draws on research into the influence of masculinities on

male students who are training to be English teachers. I am interested in
examining how issues of masculinity impact on their developing iden-
tities and pedagogical practices as English teachers, given the perception
of English as a specific gendered curriculum domain and, hence, femin-
ized learning area (see Martino 1994; Millard 1997; Thomas 1990). This
forms the basis for exploring the extent to which English functions as
a specific gendered site for amplifying male teachers’ tensions or anxi-
eties about masculinities and what the implications of this might be
for their pedagogical practices and relations with students in the high
school classroom (Martino and Frank 2006; Roulsten and Mills 2000).
Thus, by raising important questions about the perception of English
as a feminized domain, a space is created for investigating the extent
to which such signifying practices mediate relations of masculinity
for prospective male English teachers. For example, being associated
with the feminine can often activate defensive practices of masculinity
which lead male teachers feeling compelled to reassert or rather project
hegemonic heterosexual masculinity as a protective strategy in order
to deflect any suspicion or attribution of imputed homosexuality (see
Francis and Skelton 2001; Skelton 2001). This may result in anxiety-
ridden practices of intensified self-surveillance and regulation motivated
by homophobia and regimes of compulsory heterosexuality (see Martino
37
38 Training to be an English Teacher
and Frank 2006). It may also translate into practices of masculinizing

or defeminizing the curriculum in schools in terms of text selection
to ensure that male interests and values are taken into consideration
(see Greig 2003; Martino and Meynn 2002; Martino et al. 2004;
Rowan et al. 2002 for a critique of such boy-friendly approaches). Such
pedagogic strategies are tied directly to the negotiation and reproduc-
tion of gendered subjectivity in male teachers’ lives. These inter-linked
processes involving the performative dimensions of masculinity and
pedagogical practices serve as a basis for understanding the negotiation
of gendered subjectivities in male educators’ lives and how these are
enacted within the pedagogic space of the gendered curriculum.
While research has been conducted into the lives of male
student/primary teachers and their perceptions of doing women’s work
(Carrington 2002; Johnston et al. 1999; King 1998; Skelton 2002, 2003;
Smedley 2006; Smedley and Pepperell 2000; Thornton 1999), scant
attention has been directed to investigating how masculinities impact
on secondary male teachers’ professional identities and pedagogical
practices, particularly within the context of the gendered curriculum
(see Martino and Frank 2006; Roulsten and Mills 2000 as exceptions).
Foster and Newman (2005), for example, focus on the stories of male
primary teachers in the United Kingdom to highlight the complex-
ities of men’s experiences within the context of how they ‘made sense
of other people’s gendered perceptions of their professional identity’
(p. 346). In fact, they claim that the ‘range of competing masculin-
ities that is representative of the complexities of men’s experiences in
the world outside remains scarcely acknowledged inside the primary
school, either by men themselves or by their female colleagues’ (p. 342).
This is particularly significant in relation to investigating male high
school teachers’ experiences and practices of masculinities in schools.
As Francis and Skelton (2001) argue, what is needed is a focus on the
various ways in which discourses of gender and sexuality are employed
by men in their professional lives as teachers and how these are mani-
fested in terms of both their pedagogical practices and relations with
students.
This chapter is thus motivated by such concerns in its focus on
male students studying to be English teachers. In following Smedley
(2006), it aims to look closely at individual men’s negotiation of their
professional identity and pedagogical practices within the context of a
domain often perceived to be associated with the feminine: ‘Looking
closely at individual men’s ideas and perspectives has shed light on
assumptions about masculinity and men as teachers, highlighting a
sense of not fitting in, disjunctions, and feelings of unease and conflict’
Wayne Martino 39
(p. 128). It is at this nexus of negotiating gendered subjectivities and the

gendering of the curriculum as interlinked cultural processes that this
chapter makes a particular contribution to the field in addressing the
following question: How do gender regimes impact on male pre-service
English teachers, both in terms of their own professional identities and
also their pedagogical practices in the classroom? This is important
given the moral concern motivating recruitment drives for more male
teachers in the United Kingdom, North America and Australia, where
the call for more male role models and, hence, a more gender-balanced
workforce eschews any discussion of the gender politics implicated
in doing women’s work and its status vis-à-vis regimes of hegemonic
masculinity (see Carrington 2002; Elementary Teachers’ Federation of
Ontario 2003; Foster and Newman 2005; House of Representatives
Standing Committee On Education and Training 2002; Martino and
Kehler 2006; Williams 1993).
About the study
This chapter is based on research undertaken in 2000–2001. Sixteen pre-

service male students completing their Bachelor of Education program
at an Australian university (three of whom were studying to become
high school English teachers) and five students enrolled in a similar
program in a Canadian university (two of whom were studying to
become high school English teachers) were interviewed.1 The focus
of this research was to investigate how these men’s experiences of
masculinity impacted on their self-perceptions and identities as student
teachers.2 In drawing on both Foucault (1977, 1982) and Butler (1993)
I was interested to investigate how these men come to understand
themselves as gendered subjects within the context of a dominant
culture in which normalization and gender hierarchies are endorsed.
In short, to what extent did these men demonstrate an awareness
of their embodied practices of masculinity? To what extent did their
own insights into ‘doing masculinity’ (Coleman 1990) inform their
understanding about their developing skills and pedagogical capacities
as prospective English teachers? To what extent did the signifying
potential of English as a feminized learning area impact on the self-
fashioning and performative practices of masculinity in terms of how
these men talked about their own experiences of schooling and initial
teaching? In short, to what extent did these men’s self-perceptions as
gendered subjects and, hence, their experiences of doing or embodying
masculinity mediate their pedagogical relations and practices in the
English classroom? In addressing these sort of questions, I draw on
interviews with two men studying to be English teachers – Matthew,

aged 23 (Australian) and Jackson, aged 22 (Canadian) – who raise
important issues about the performative dimensions of masculinity
and the pedagogical significance of this in terms of their developing
understanding about the limits imposed by the ‘regulatory apparatus of
heterosexuality’ and, hence, a gender system built on the repudiation
of the ‘feminine’3 (Butler 1993: 12).
The gendered dimensions of English as a pedagogical and

learning domain
In the interview with Mathew the gendered dimensions of English, as

both a pedagogical and learning domain, are examined. Reflections on
his experiences of being an adolescent boy studying English play an
important part in his developing understanding about the gendered
significance of pedagogical practices and relations in a domain that is
often associated with the feminine. For instance, Matthew had a passion
for English teaching which he attributed to his own experiences of
English in high school and to one particular male English teacher. He
grew up in a small rural community and talked about the significance
of the relationship/friendship he developed with this teacher. Within
this small community sport and farming were central and, as Mathew
suggests, almost antithetical to what English, as a subject and his English
teacher, more specifically, offered – an appreciation of life and the
space for deep reflection and meaningful learning connected to personal
experience. For example, Mathew claims:
My English teacher was the one who really got me to want to do

something with academics rather than sport and other sort of work
that I was used to, farm work I really enjoyed English and writing
and reading and stuff, and I thought maybe I could transfer that in
a way of my experience into a teaching situation. I just felt that was
the closest I had come to feeling good about, confident about some
sort of work other than being on a farm chasing horses and stuff.
In the interview he talks at length about the influence of his English

teacher:
He just got me interested in the stuff that I was studying at school. It

became like a transferral from the sport and we’d go on bush walks
and long bike rides and lots of chats about sorting out the universe
Wayne Martino 41
and sorting out where you’re at when you’re a 14 year old boy. He
was able to say, ‘Well look at this poetry by John Keats and see how
he was going through similar emotional stages and he’s dealing with
loves, losses’, all these sort of things that I actually could see in the
text. And then we started studying Malouf and the questions about
dying, all these things just became interesting to me. From that point
on I also started to write poetry about the bike rides, the beauty of
a morning bike ride, stuff like that which in my way was my sort of
outlet. Sort of I suppose making a bit of sense of it really, just creative
sense and I thought it was good.
So for Mathew, it is something about the quality of the relationship

fostered by this teacher which mediated his engagement with literature
in the classroom. He seems to be highlighting the significance of this
relationship as a powerful influence in being able to connect literary
texts to his everyday experiences in the world. Thus for Mathew, the
quality of the pedagogical relationship that he valued with this teacher
was supported by approaches to teaching English which endorsed both
the personal growth of the student and the philosophical significance
or relevance of reading literary texts. This highlights the experience of
English for Mathew as facilitating a distinctive set of learning experi-
ences and pedagogical relations which did not appear to be as readily
available in other subject areas. As Ian Hunter (1988) points out, the
reading practices fostered by this teacher and endorsed within English
are governed by norms for undertaking a particular work on the self
through engaging in certain acts of moral self-problematization and
reflection. However, for Mathew the reading practices fostered by such
pedagogical relations are consistent with those fostered by the English
teacher with his students outside of the classroom.
The gendered significance of this learning experience and pedago-
gical relationship as curriculum specific is highlighted by Max in his
interview. He differentiates learning English or being an English student
from studying maths and science. For instance, he mentions that he
introduced his ‘best mate’ to this teacher, who tended to be more of
‘a Mathematics/Science based academic learner’ and indicates how they
developed a great friendship which ‘really improved his attitude towards
learning and especially English’. Thus for Mathew English as a learning
domain is governed by norms that require different modes of relating
and responding and he frames such practices in antithetical and opposi-
tional terms to those fostered by teachers of other subjects such as maths
and science. The gendered significance of such a curriculum divide or
split, as dictated by the regulatory ‘apparatus of heterosexuality’, are

made much more explicit later in his interview, where he talks about
the compulsion he felt as a male school student to be enjoying those
subjects considered to be more sex-appropriate:
I think one of the main gender issues for me, as far as going to be a
teacher, would be to encourage the sort of diversity of mix between
subject areas. That comes again from me enjoying English, whereas
I should have been enjoying maths, science, blah, blah, which I was
hopeless at of course. But because I enjoyed English I was put into
a category, I was labelled gay, homosexual, for enjoying English.
I mean this is in a country school, mind you, where people are much
more blinkered But that sort of attitude how girls are encouraged
with the humanities and English and things like this and boys are
steamrolled into the maths and sciences you’ve got an amazing,
like a skewedness about where the girls go and where the boys go.
It’s all boys in the maths and science, just about all boys. So I think
that gender issue really needs to be addressed in our schools and we
need to get rid of the stigma.
However, while Mathew’s aim is to engage boys in the humanities,

and more specifically in English, he does not appear to be committed
to masculinizing the curriculum to accommodate boys’ expressions
of hegemonic heterosexual masculinity. He wants to foster particular
pedagogical relationships and responses to texts that do not resort to
supporting the perpetuation of sexism, misogyny and homophobia as
means by which to establish his ‘masculine credentials’ (see Francis
and Skelton 2001: 15). In short, his experiences of marginalization do
not lead him to assert hegemonic masculinity – the attribution of the
feminine is not experienced as a threat, but rather as something to be
embraced. Mathew is only too aware of the limits imposed by a gender
system that enforces polarization grounded in the differentiated sexed
body (Harding 1998). This is most clearly manifested when he talks
about the stigma that is attached to English due to its perceived focus
on expressing emotion and studying poetry:
Everyone seems to have this stupid notion that poetry is effeminate,

where it comes from who ever knows. Secondly to talk about things
such as love, relationships, even death that kids are scared of. When
you’re 15, 16 year olds dealing with issues and the mere fact that
Wayne Martino 43
they’re coming out in the open just embarrasses so many people and
also the showing of emotions.
This leads him to talk about a particular incident involving a unit on

studying poetry in English class which involved a task where students
were required to choose a poem and to read it out to the class. He was
16 years old and the incident stands out as very significant for him in
that it brought with it a particular knowledge about being placed under
the homophobic surveillance of other school boys as a consequence
of choosing to engage in what was considered to be a transgression of
normative masculinity. For example, he chose to stage a performance of
part of Coleridge’s, The Ancient Mariner, which he had learnt by heart,
as opposed to just reading it out to the class. He talks about having long
hair at the time down to his shoulders, which he had wet and ruffled
in order to personify the mariner. His performance involved a dramatic
reconstruction of the mariner, ‘almost dead’ and with this ‘very raspy
look’. When he finished his presentation he indicates that ‘a couple of
the guys just pissed themselves laughing’ and he explains their reaction
in these terms:
I could hear them at the start sort of going phphph, and it was because
I’d shown some sort of putting your whole person into something and
not caring what other people thought. And just guys seem to have a
real problem with that. Even though the girls didn’t, no one else in
the class actually did that and the teacher said to me afterwards – he
didn’t know I was going to do it – but he said that’s great that people
can express themselves, he said we need to get more of that.
The attribution of the feminine within the pedagogical space of

the English classroom appears to be related to being open and
expressing emotion, behaviour which is subjected to the normalizing
and homophobic gaze of other boys who police the limits of accept-
able heterosexual masculinity (see Alloway et al. 2003). Such regimes
of normalization, Mathew intimates, impose gender straightjackets for
boys, particularly in terms of governing the ways in which they learn
to relate as boys and respond in the English classroom (see Martino and
Pallotta-Chiarolli 2003). This appears to be intensified in a small rural
community dominated by farming and sport as culturally sanctioned
‘masculinity confirming practices’ (Renold 2003). Thus for Mathew,
the teaching of English must necessarily involve a moral imperative to
engage boys and to facilitate the development of quite specific capacities
for engaging with literary texts, which appear to be at odds with norm-
ative constructions of masculinity: ‘But the gender issues for me are to
try and get rid of [this stigma] and maybe encourage some of the guys
to not be afraid to want to do English if they do want to, and then I’ll
obviously encourage them then as a class, try to get people more open
about their feelings’.
The limits of such a culture, in which the feminine is repudiated,
are further highlighted by Mathew who, as an adolescent boy, worked
actively to challenge the ‘regulatory apparatus of heterosexuality’ and
the normative embodied practices of masculinity that it supported. His
commitment to challenging such a regime is attributed to his own
experiences of being targeted for engaging in what were considered to
be non-normative practices for an adolescent boy, such as expressing
himself in English and cultivating a close student–teacher relationship.
This stigmatization is further situated within a broader homophobic and
sexist community from which he actively worked to dissociate himself:
When I went through school I was labelled homosexual and attrib-

uted all the language that’s carried with homosexuality, and all these
things for three or four years at high school. And me and a couple
of mates who just happened to enjoy English and my relationship
with my English teacher was said to be homosexual by lots of people
in the community, even adults and other teachers. My Year leader,
she was homosexual and she married another female staff member
and they had to leave the town. So these sort of issues in schools
they’re just so potent and I don’t know what we can do about it but
it’s so prevalent. Homophobia is just everywhere The word ‘poof’
is almost an accepted form of slang. So it’s a huge problem.
And he relates such homophobia to the stigmatization that is attached

to gender non-conformity, both in terms of performing masculinity and
in terms of attributions of the feminine regarding perceptions of the
curriculum:
It all comes back to people being put into roles, stigmas being
attached to gender, the fact that boys do maths. All that sort of thing,
the fear of expression, the fear of being creative, all these things, I
think, lead into this, not that homophobia is by any means the only
sort of outlet and horrible thing that comes out of all these stupid
stigmas and things that are attached to gender and people. But it’s
definitely probably the most harmful and I think one of the most
Wayne Martino 45
negatively geared one that happens in schools. It stops people, espe-

cially boys, it really stops boys from following a course that they may
otherwise have followed for fear of having this stigma attached to
them. I mean it’s a real thing that kids are afraid of and every 14 year
old boy, whether he is homosexual or not, is dead scared of being
labelled as a homosexual I think it shapes the whole way people
go in their school lives and their careers.
Mathew’s own attempt to challenge the normative gender expecta-

tions and homophobia of his school community highlights the signi-
fying potential of the body as performative text. For example, as an
adolescent boy, he and his friend were both conscious of projecting
a different masculine image – they grew their hair long, wore an ear
ring and had a pony tail. In fact, he claims that they were both
‘very non-conformist’, despite the fact that they embraced learning and
were very successful academically. He recounts an experience which
involved how they had decided to go to school dressed in a sarong
(‘Fijian style’) and leather striped sandals. This performance appeared
to be incited by the already existing homophobia that they had exper-
ienced, as a consequence of their refusal to conform to the dominant
norms governing hegemonic masculinity in school and the broader
community. Mathew did not relate to the dominant boys or their sexist
attitudes and his passion for English appeared to be symptomatic of
a deeper sense of rejecting such masculinist values. For instance, he
remembers the homophobic comments that were directed at them as a
result of wearing a sarong, but stresses that ‘it was worth doing it’:
There wasn’t one person in the whole school who didn’t look at us
and go, ‘Oh my god. There was a whole, I’d say 90 per cent, looked
at us and said, oh my god these guys are gay as it comes The
feeling that day, so many comments, so many people saying, ‘What
are you wearing a dress for? Are you a fairy?’ All the bullshit, it
was unbelievable. It was worth doing it just to, I wish I had a tape
recorder that day because if I had brought that tape recorder today
you could write three books on it. The comments that were said
just because we were wearing a sarong, it wasn’t a dress, if we came
cross-dressed the attitude would have been the same. The fact was
we were making a concession to something feminine, I mean even
the sandals went down, ‘What are these sandals you’re wearing?’,
because ‘blokes’ aren’t supposed to do this.
Being a ‘bloke’ – a colloquial and class-inflected term for being a man

in the Australian context – highlights the cultural significance of a partic-
ular version of masculinity involving mateship, which Mathew clearly
rejects. This involves men relating in ways that do not compromise their
masculinity through any display of soft, feminine or expressive beha-
viour. He also mentions in the interview how they walked into town
after school, still wearing their sarongs, only to have ‘blokes shouting
abuse from cars and tooting their horns’. Weeks later, they were still
dealing with the towns’ people trying to ‘pick fights’ and threatening
them with violence:
It was like we were threatening the very existence of this whole town.
It was like, basically, they were scared of us because we were doing
this and I’m sure it just all came back to this fact that we’d made
a concession, well I wasn’t even making concession on my feminine
side but people said, you’re trying to get in touch with it.
Through recounting such an experience, he demonstrates a knowledge

about the ‘regulatory apparatus of heterosexuality’ and how this is main-
tained through homophobic policing and surveillance of the gendered
body. He claims that gender transgression for girls also results in similar
questions being raised about the status of their femininity. For example,
he mentions that while girls who excelled at sport were ‘sort of given
raps formally’, the blokes ‘behind their backs’ would make derogatory
comments about them such as, ‘Oh jeez look how big her shoulders are!’,
rather than commending them for their sporting or athletic prowess: ‘All
that people could do would be say, she’s a bit masculine for my liking’.
In this sense, he highlights the constraints imposed on both boys and
girls for choosing not to conform to traditional gender stereotypes or
normative constructions of femininity and masculinity. However, while
he asserts that it is ‘equally harmful both ways it’s worse for boys who
show the effeminate side’: ‘Like a boy with a high pitched voice, or a
boy with gestures that aren’t particularly masculine, it’s harder for them
than for girls because girls seem not to pick on them as much’. This sense
of the amplification and intensification of homophobia amongst boys
is significant in terms of Mathew’s own lived experiences of gender and
sexuality in school and in the broader community in which he grew up.
The significance of this is that Mathew’s own experiences of homo-
phobia as a heterosexual boy led him to develop crucial insights into
the policing of masculinity and its consequences for imposing limits in
the form of a gender straight-jacket. In fact, he is able to distinguish
Wayne Martino 47
between sex and gender in his articulation of a disavowal of hegemonic

masculinity and attributes this understanding to his own family experi-
ences of growing up with four sisters and a mother who was the primary
breadwinner. For example, he reiterates that, while he sees himself as
male, he doesn’t ‘really have a notion of masculinity’ or what he terms
‘a masculinity ethos’. What he does have an understanding of is how
others choose to define masculinity:
but I do have a notion of what other people have of masculinity

which is big, strong, sport playing, perhaps mathematics, sort of
money earning, bread winning, all the relevant stigma. That’s what I
see masculinity as meaning because that’s how society places it basic-
ally. But I don’t really have a concept of masculinity. I think maybe
because I have four sisters and I’ve never really had masculinity in a
home situation. My father was never the bread winner, my mother
was the bread winner and my dad was the house husband sort of
thing. Although he taught, he retired when I think I was 12 and just
part time taught, and then worked on the farm, and there was never
any sort of he’d make the decisions sort of thing.
Mathew has a particular knowledge about the social construction

of masculinity and its embodied significance, which he has lived in
terms of being a boy at school who felt marginalized by the values of
hegemonic masculinity in a small rural community. The consequence
of these values were manifested for him poignantly in terms of his
experiences of studying and participating passionately in the English
classroom as an adolescent boy, which he frames in gender-specific
terms. Such knowledge and understanding informs his commitment to
teaching English and to encouraging boys to engage in non-normative
practices of masculinity in the English classroom. The link between his
lived experiences of masculinity and how this connects to his pedago-
gical commitment to address the limits imposed on boys by gender
regimes in the English classroom are significant. Furthermore, his desire
to embrace certain pedagogical practices in the English classroom, which
promote particular modes of relating to the self and engaging with
texts, is informed by a broader political project of supporting alternative
versions of masculinity. Through his own self-fashioning experiences of
embodied masculinity, he has experimented with the signifying poten-
tial of the body as a site of resistance and transgression. This has trans-
lated into a knowledge base that informs his desire to foster certain
pedagogical relations and practices within what he understands to be
a gendered curriculum domain. I elaborate further on the link between

the gendered body and pedagogical relations in the next section, where
the focus is on investigating Jackson’s commitment to interrupting
hegemonic practices of masculinity in the English classroom. Jackson’s
interview further highlights the significance of the signifying potential
of embodied practices of masculinity and their pedagogical potential in
the English classroom.
The significance of embodied practices of masculinity and

their pedagogical potential or limits
The interview with Jackson also raised important questions about the
signifying potential of the male body in terms of the implications of self-
fashioning practices of masculinity for engaging in pedagogical relations
in the English classroom. He mentions his desire to engage students in
the way that his own English teacher in high school did. She is identified
as ‘a really modern woman’ and as a feminist with a ‘kind of left wing
modern type of influence’ who encouraged her students ‘to question a
lot of things’ (see Coulter 2003). This was achieved by relating literature
to real-life issues and concerns. She also addressed sexuality and used
literature to raise philosophical questions about the meaning of life that
he could relate to:
She got us to think about sexuality and the meaning of it and I guess
it’s a good time to begin at that age, you’re really interested in it then.
Sexuality is still pretty new so it’s really cool to be able to talk about
it in an intelligent and objective way in the high school situation.
Because you apply your own life. We talked a lot about death too
and existentialism with the book, Albert Camus ‘The Outsider’ and
books like that. I think that’s where you know like the big ideas of
the world started becoming really interesting to me.
Thus, once again, like Mathew, Jackson presents English as a pedago-

gical space or site for fostering certain sorts of relationships that are
conducive to a particular kind of learning which can be readily applied
to ‘real life’. Fostering such modes of relating to the self through
using literary texts constitutes a particular moral technology that still
lies at the heart of producing certain kinds of literate subjects in the
English classroom. Jackson, in following in the footsteps of his inspiring
English teacher, too wants to embrace such a technology for ethical–
moral cultivation and engagement in the English classroom. At the
Wayne Martino 49
centre of such a pedagogy lies the liberatory potential invested in the

teacher’s capacity to open up the classroom to an examination of the
human condition through the vehicle of using literary texts. This lends
itself to creating conditions for learning and relating to the self that
become associated quintessentially with the domain of English teaching.
However, embracing such pedagogical relations incites certain tensions
for Jackson as a male – an attractive male – who is aware of the risks
involved:
So involving them and getting them to talk about their perspect-

ives on their lives, I mean it’s a dangerous topic because you don’t
want to talk too much about their personal experiences for your own
protection.
The spectre of being considered sexually suspect hangs over Jackson,

particularly, given his desire to raise questions about sexuality in the
English classroom by connecting literary texts to the everyday lives of
students within the context of cultivating certain personalized relation-
ships. There is a heightened sense of vulnerability as he assesses the risk
posed by his embodied heterosexual masculinity and what this might
signify for his female students. In this sense, Jackson raises important
questions about risky and dangerous pedagogies within the English
classroom, given the sort of topics that he wants to address and the rela-
tionships with students that he wants to foster (see Martino and Berrill
2004; McWilliam and Jones 2005):
The things that are the most interesting I think can sometimes be
dangerous when you’re getting involved with ideas that some of
the students aren’t going to be comfortable with, or their parents
wouldn’t be comfortable with. So I mean the things I’m interested
in talking about are somewhat precarious in that way Like talking
about the meaning of the value of sex, or of having sex as a young
teenager and what it means and things like that. It’s almost like a
health class but with the theory and philosophy into it. You get a lot
of that when you read books that have that kind of content in it. So
it’s a dangerous thing but it’s something to think about anyway.
Here, Jackson is explicit about deploying literary texts as sites for cultiv-
ating pedagogical relations and practices of self-problematization in
the English classroom, particularly as they relate to sexual desire and
bodies. This becomes accentuated for him while on practicum. He
talks about a girl in a Grade 8 class becoming ‘really obsessed’ with

him to the point she would write his name on her pencil case and
focus undue attention on him. There was a sense, he claims, that ‘she
was projecting this identity onto me which as a teacher and as a man
and all these things, it just really made me, it really created a distance
between us when I was teaching her’. Such experiences provoke a certain
degree of anxiety for Jackson and accentuate a particular polemic about
heterosexual masculinity and the pedagogical limits imposed by his own
embodied self-fashioning practices of masculinity. In short, in order to
ward off the signifying potential of his body as inciting sexualized desire,
he resorts to dressing differently – wearing more formal clothes such as a
suite and tie – as a means by which to downplay his sexuality. This func-
tions as a protective strategy to minimize the risk that such sexualized
attention carries in terms of the need to avoid any perception of sexual
misconduct within the context of teaching adolescents in schools:
As a teacher and as a man, it just really created a distance between us

when I was teaching her. Because I was protecting myself and trying
to reduce the situation and then I started dressing more like an adult.
I started wearing a tie and a jacket to school so that I would just kind
of reduce my young look That’s one thing about teaching which
scares me in a way because you hear a lot about stories of teachers
who are accused of things and that’s the worst thing being accused
of something that’s inappropriate I guess.
In this sense, he believes there are certain limits imposed on male

teachers. However, he does talk about negotiating what appears to be
a relational pedagogy organized around deploying literary texts as a
means by which to raise philosophical, social and challenging issues
that are relevant to students’ lives, while still protecting himself from
being implicated as sexually suspect: ‘I mean I’m interested in finding
strategies which are positive and helpful but also protecting and I have
to think about that’.
Jackson also demonstrates a broader awareness of the sexual and
gender politics governing the differential perceptions and expectations
that students have of teachers. For example, he talks about how male
teachers are treated or perceived differently by students on the basis
of their gender. While he claims that male teachers are treated with
more respect than their female counterparts, he raises questions about
embodied masculinities and about male teachers ‘doing women’s work’,
Wayne Martino 51
which may also result in questions being raised about their status and
legitimacy as men.
with male students there’s almost a higher respect for male teachers
than female teachers, and this is a problem because it’s shifting
the identity, removing the identity from what the actual teacher is
doing and placing it onto their body and their image. I think male
teachers are, often there’s the stereotype of male teachers being gay
in primary school, or things like that. And those things I am going
to confront them and deal with it. I don’t know how they’re going
to manifest themselves to me but I mean I certainly think it’s quite a
different thing to be a male teacher than a female teacher.
Here he seems to be suggesting that there may well be parallels between

the sort of homophobia and stereotypes that male primary teachers are
forced to confront and those that he will have to deal with as a male
high school teacher. However, as a result of what he sees as being the
limits imposed by hegemonic heterosexual masculinity (Frank 1987), he
is committed to developing strategies that are designed to ‘break down
gender distinctions in the classroom’. A part of this project involves
not only deploying literary texts and cultivating particular pedagogical
relations, but, more significantly, a conscious attempt to engage in self-
fashioning practices of performative and embodied masculinity that,
in his eyes, have the signifying potential to interrupt ‘gender stereo-
types’. He does this by actively fashioning a different kind of masculinity
through wearing nail polish – the idea of a man wearing nail polish leads
people to raise questions about both the normative status of masculinity
and also to a questioning of his sexuality:
As a man wearing nail polish, it’s like people see me and the question
of my sexual orientation is immediately prevalent, and that has been
really helpful for me. It’s been a really good move for me to attach
myself to the finger nail polish because that way I found people are
less affronted by me as a man. I mean being a man is something
that is attached to this higher order of power and your dynamic in
culture is somewhat heightened by masculinity. The expectations of
being a man is being red blooded and aggressive and all these things
which I don’t identify with as a man. So wearing nail polish is a
way to physically say, ‘Hey this is a way that I feel differently from
other men’, and it’s a form of gender bending, it’s about erasing the
distinctions to create equality and wearing nail polish is kind of a fun
way to get people to question their ideas about me and then in turn
their ideas about masculinity.
He sees such self-fashioning practices as potentially destabilizing

people’s expectations regarding what is considered to be acceptable,
normative and embodied masculinity. This is an active intervention, on
his part, which appears to be integrated into his own lived experience
of gender relations as a concrete commitment to the realization of a
transformative gender politics. For example, when I ask him whether
he saw himself wearing nail polish as a teacher in the classroom, he
responds:
I can see myself doing that with a class that I’d be able to get to know
and get to explain to them what it’s about and encourage them to
question gender. I think that as a man who has kind of a masculine
body I feel like I’m in a privileged position to destabilise gender roles –
it’s is easier for me. In the classroom I think it’s kind of a dangerous
thing and this is where I’d be putting myself somewhat at risk of
being I guess lumped with homophobic threats and things like that.
He indicates, however, that he has not attempted to wear nail polish

during his practicum because he doesn’t believe that there is enough
time to allow the students to ‘get comfortable’ with him. Since Jackson
already embodies a normative masculinity and, thus, has cultural and
social capital in terms of being physically attractive, he acknowledges the
privilege that this accrues. For example, he is careful to avoid claiming
that he is not effeminate through stating that he has ‘a kind of mascu-
line body’. His pedagogical strategy is to get students on side and to
create a threshold of acceptance, before launching into any sort of
gender-bending practice as a teacher in terms of ‘doing masculinity’
in the English classroom. This raises crucial questions of the power of
homophobic regimes which position effeminate male teachers as the
deviant other and, hence, in Jackson’s eyes, as significantly de-powered
in terms of being able to effectively intervene in a dominant culture that
is dominated by the values of the jocks or what he terms ‘prom kings’.
Part of his rationalization for delaying the application of nail polish
relates to the necessity of avoiding the limits imposed pedagogically
through any overt invitation for his students to classify him as a ‘freak’:
I would like them to get to know me and the nail polish being a part
of me but if I’m only there for a short period of time, then it’s like
Wayne Martino 53
that guy who wears nail polish, he’s this freak. And what I don’t want
is to be cast or exiled as a freak or to be labelled as someone that’s
different, because I’m very much inside of the culture and I want to
show that I’m a part of it and different from the normatives. As soon
as you say someone is a freak or an outsider, then it’s like, okay then
we can just incorporate them into our mind as a freak, or someone
that’s different. But if you can say oh well that person is normal and
they’re doing this thing which is different, then it’s a much better
and more positive way to understand.
This raises important questions about the male body and its signi-
fying potential. Given Jackson’s own awareness of such potential, he
is conscious of deploying his body strategically and pedagogically to
achieve a particular object of interrogating gender regimes and their
impact on students’ lives and relationships. However, he still fails to
realize the significance of the limits imposed by a logic that requires
him to establish his normative masculine status as a basis for securing
a form of pedagogical legitimacy or authority in his students’ eyes. In
short, his political agenda of disrupting hegemonic masculinity relies
on proving his normality as a man in the students’ eyes, which leaves
unquestioned the very regimes of homophobia and compulsory hetero-
sexuality upon which the ‘regulatory apparatus of heterosexuality’ is
built. This leaves unquestioned assumptions about status of the effem-
inate male teacher or more broadly the homophobic system of denig-
rating the feminine. Inscribing the feminine on the male body as a
potentially disruptive strategy for challenging gender binaries can only
gain legitimacy, once the male teacher has established the status of his
masculinity in the students’ eyes (see Martino and Frank 2006). This
draws attention to the limits of the signifying potential of the male body
that is still caught within a regime of normalization which both dictates
the requirement to embody normative heterosexual masculinity and
governs the logic driving pedagogical regimes in schools. While Jackson
is not committed to consolidating or asserting hegemonic hetero-
sexual masculinity through his pedagogical practices in the English
classroom, he is still caught within the limits of a logic which unin-
tentionally authorizes hegemonic male power as a means by which to
ward off any attribution of deviancy and, hence, as a basis for realizing
a political agenda of gender deconstruction. The polemical significance
of such a logic and its implications for those male teachers and students
who do not embody normative masculinity are not considered. Does
a male teacher’s failure to meet students’ normative expectations of
embodied masculinity detract from his pedagogical potential and status

as a transformative intellectual? To what extent does such a strategy
leave intact certain regimes of normalization that are sustained by a
desire to pander to the homophobia of those hegemonic male students
who function as gatekeepers of masculinity for both teachers and their
peers (see Martino and Frank 2006)?
This strategic attempt to interrupt hegemonic masculinity though
mobilizing the signifying potential of the male body needs to be
applauded and is indeed built on a deep knowledge about the cultural
politics of gender relations and performativity. For example, Jackson
states:
I don’t think masculinity exists. I think masculinity is this facade put

on by men who absorb this idea of what it means to be a man and
how to culturally behave as a response to what’s in between your legs.
Masculinity is a creation of body techniques, of walking a certain
way, of talking a certain way and thinking a certain way which is
completely fabricated by the world. Well I don’t know who is to blame
but it’s all a part of our culture which falsely interpellates all male
sex people into this kind of behaviour technique which is disturbing.
I mean I’ve really been frustrated with our culture’s insistence on a
battle between the sexes and kind of like there’s the men’s magazines
which give you advice about women and then there’s the women’s
advice about how to get your guy to do this. I mean it’s all, our culture
has dichotomised ideas about men and women. Femininity I think
is just as much of a creation as masculinity I think masculinity
is also a masquerade, a kind of performative facade in order to feel
comfortable with yourself Men and women have this set of traits
which they choose between but I don’t think it’s related to your body
as much as it’s related to the way you’ve been socialised.
In this sense, Jackson’s attempt to pedagogically work at interrogating

the limits of gender regimes in the English classroom through mobilizing
the signifying potential of the male body as a cultural resource, needs to
be situated at the nexus of theory and practice which is always fraught
with slippages and indeterminacy in the realization of a transformative
gender politics:
Well I think my objective in school is in terms of deconstructing

gender roles and kind of challenging the masculinity is going to be
met with resistance by the typical male, people who are insisting
Wayne Martino 55
that football is for boys and things like this. I mean I think being
a modern man or someone who is trying to figure out a way to be
egalitarian and degendering is a real problem. It can be a real problem
in the classroom when it comes to people who are going to be imme-
diately dislocated from their previous ideologies. I want to function
in the classroom and I want to change the masculine identities or
depower them, but working within the system and working within
the classroom and culture as a normal person. As a part of it not as
an outsider, not as someone who is different but as someone who is
the same and who has the same kind of ideas about life that other
people who will identify with. I want to be a teacher who, I’m kind
of fumbling right now, so it’s getting incoherent. The challenges
that I’m going to face are going to be in recreating an idea about
masculinity which the students will feel comfortable with, and which
gets them away from a forced presentation of themselves.
Thus, Jackson is committed to using his privilege and, hence, to

working within the limits imposed by the current gender system, while
simultaneously creating a pedagogical threshold for using his body to
disrupt the notion of a fixed, essentialized masculinity that is grounded
in biological sex differences. It is in this sense that Jackson’s interview
draws attention to the crucial significance of the gendered dimensions of
pedagogical relations and textuality in terms of the signifying potential
of the male body within the context of the English classroom. Jackson’s
attempt to disrupt gender binaries and, hence, to interrogate masculinity
needs to be understood in relation to understanding the historical signi-
ficance of the emergence of literature teaching as an apparatus of moral
supervision in which a particular teacher–student relation was organ-
ized around moral emulation and correction (Hunter 1988). Jackson
embraces such a literary pedagogy married with a knowledge about
the limits imposed by a gender regime, which leads him to embrace
a cultural practice in the service of placing students’ own values and
experiences of gender under his moral authority and gaze. The analysis
undertaken here, however, has been committed to foregrounding the
significance of embodied practices of masculinity in mediating such
pedagogical relations.
Conclusion
In this chapter I have attempted to highlight the pedagogical implic-

ations of masculinities for male university students who are training
to be English teachers. The focus has been on an examination of the

gendered dimensions of their embodied pedagogical relations in the
English classroom. In drawing attention to the significance of authorized
pedagogies within the context of English education, which are commit-
ting to cultivating a particular student–teacher relation and moral
aesthetic involving the imperative to connect the text to real life, my aim
has been to raise some critical questions about the significance of hege-
monic heterosexual masculinities for male student teachers’ developing
understanding of their pedagogical practices. It is at this nexus that the
interconnected dimensions of negotiating gendered subjectivities and
teaching English are foregrounded in an analysis that is committed to
exploring the signifying potential and limits of embodied masculinities
in terms of their impact on pedagogical relations for male teachers in
the English classroom. Such an analysis of masculinities offers a much
more nuanced perspective than that represented by recruitment drives
to attract more male teachers to the teaching profession and which
are grounded in simplistic notions of role models and calls for a more
gender balanced workforce (Bernard et al. 2004; Elementary Teachers’
Federation of Ontario 2003). Such perspectives eschew an analysis of
the significance of hegemonic heterosexual masculinities for imposing
limits on male teachers ‘doing women’s work’ (Williams 1993) or for
those high school teachers responsible for teaching subjects such as
English, which are considered to be aligned with developing feminized
or soft learning capacities and dispositions. In drawing attention to the
textuality of the male body, with its signifying capacities for both rein-
forcing and disrupting representations of hegemonic masculinity, this
chapter highlights the need to further investigate the gendered dimen-
sions of pedagogical practices for male teachers and the extent to which
their threshold knowledges about gender relations and performativity
impact on their teaching of English.
Notes
1. I would like to acknowledge Deborah Berrill, Trent University, for her support
in setting up the interviews I conducted with Canadian research subjects. The
overall study was funded by Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia.
2. Male student teachers were asked in the interviews to talk about why they
had chosen to become a teacher, whether they thought there were any issues
that impacted on them as males training to be teachers and about what they
had learnt about being a teacher form their practicum experiences. Towards
the end of the interview, they were also asked specifically to reflect on specific
issues of masculinity, how they defined it and what they saw its significance
to be in their lives as prospective teachers.
Wayne Martino 57
3. Only two men are selected for focus in this chapter due to limits imposed by
word length and to allow for more in-depth analysis of the individual men’s
subjective experiences of teaching English.
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tion Review 55 (2): 195–210.
Smedley, S. (2006) Listening to men student primary school teachers: Some
thoughts on pedagogy, Changing English 13 (1): 125–135.
Smedley, S. and Pepperell, S. (2000) No man’s land: Caring and male student
primary teachers, Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice 6 (3): 259–277.
Thomas, K. (1990) Gender and Subject in Higher Education. Buckingham: The Society
for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press.
Thornton, M. (1999) Reducing wastage among men student teachers in primary
courses: A male club approach, Journal of Education for Teaching 25 (1): 41–53.
Williams, C. (1993) Doing ‘Women’s Work’: Men in Nontraditional Occupations.
Newbury Park, London and New Delhi: Sage.
3
Queer Teaching/Teaching Queer:
Renaissance Masculinities and the
Seminar
Mark Dooley
This chapter takes as its starting point a moment of crisis in my own

teaching career that took place several years ago. It was a moment that
has stayed with me, scarred me to some extent, and upon which I
have reflected many times. Being invited to contribute a chapter on
masculinity and pedagogy to this book, then, has given me the oppor-
tunity finally to explore that experience more systematically and to
unpick some of its more illuminating aspects. In writing about it, I hope
not only to lay to rest some of its after effects for myself, but also to turn
it into a meaningful experience that may stimulate further thoughts
about the complex relationships between gender and sexuality in our
teaching spaces and practices.
The highly personal tone of the introductory paragraph will be
continued throughout this chapter – I make no apology for it. Indeed,
one of the central themes of my contribution here will be to stress the
need for teachers of English to reflect more on themselves; to think
about the route by which they have entered their profession (or voca-
tion), how their own subjectivity and the ways in which it has been
shaped subsequently influence their own pedagogical practice. We are,
as a profession, very good at thinking about our students and their
experiences and, increasingly, through Personal Development Planning
and the like, enabling them to become more and more self-reflexive
at a personal, as well as an intellectual, level. But we are not, I would
suggest, so accomplished in our own self-reflexive practices and, if we
are, we tend to keep the results of our explorations pretty well closeted.
I am, of course, generalising here, but my research for this chapter has
confirmed in my own mind that even the most sensitive and recent
material in this area of study has tended to take as its object the student
and pays little real attention to the role of the teacher.
59
60 Queer Teaching / Teaching Queer
This chapter, then, will be divided into several sections. Firstly, I want
to reflect on myself, to examine where I have come from and how
this has shaped my own identity, research interests and practices as
a teacher. It will then describe and explore the crisis to which I have
(albeit obscurely, and perhaps teasingly) referred. It will then proceed
to examine the complex relations between gender, sexuality, authority
and pedagogy as they are revealed in this episode before moving finally
to look outwards and suggest some wider implications for the subject
and the profession of such experiences.
English, as an academic discipline, has always provided a particularly
important space for the negotiation of identities. As a rather ‘bookish’
child, growing up on a council estate and attending the local, London
Borough comprehensive school, I was made acutely aware of my ‘differ-
ence’ from my male peers. Marked out by my friendships with girls and
lack of footballing skills, I was labelled very early on with the usual range
of insulting epithets (poof, queer, gayboy, etc.). As the insults began to
bite, I retreated further into my books and, it is now interesting to reflect,
was also increasingly labelled ‘posh’; a term that was intended as an
insult, but which also seemed synonymous with ‘boffin’, another term
regularly used to describe me by other pupils. My dubious masculinity
and perceived intellectualism, then, were directly related in the minds
of my tormentors to sexuality and to class, well before we had a clear
sense of what constituted either of these categories. Of course, what
made me unpopular with my peers made me popular with my English
teachers who clearly saw someone who had a genuine enthusiasm for
the subject. As they encouraged me, so I became ever more ‘bookish’ and
so it went on. The standard response of my family as I moved through
my teens and they were asked if Mark had a girlfriend yet was to jump
in with, ‘he’s too caught up in his books to have time for girlfriends’. It
seems the books gave everyone an excuse!
The English classroom became, for me, a haven into which I could
escape from the oppressive models of masculinity operating at home
where my father’s highly traditional view of masculinity (no doubt
reinforced by his job as an heavy goods vehicle driver and shop
steward at Ford Motor Company, and his football refereeing at week-
ends and evenings) and my brother’s sporting prowess, became yard-
sticks against which I was found profoundly lacking. It is impossible to
overstate the significance and positive influence of Angela Dale, Jenny
Des Fountain and Margaret Berry, my A-level English teachers who,
although they never explicitly acknowledged my sexuality (how could
they?) made me feel valued and created a space in which it was safe to
Mark Dooley 61
explore, through texts, issues that were so very pertinent in the lives
of all their pupils. They also encouraged me to go to university to read
English, and so I became the very first member of my family to go on
to higher education.
The move to university was, initially at least, not a happy one. My
lecturers in the first year of my undergraduate career in the mid- to
late- 1980s were, for the most part, diehard Leavisites and I shall never
forget my first essay assignment title: ‘Tentative: Is Lawrence that in The
Rainbow?’ The English class went from being a safe and encouraging,
imaginative and creative space, enabled by women teachers, to one
where father figures seemed once again to dominate and whose expecta-
tions I seemed unable to fulfil. These were men in their fifties who were
highly authoritative on their subject (the Modernists, of course) and
very explicitly heterosexual. I felt alienated from the subject I had loved
and threatened by the men who stood at the front effectively telling us
it was unlikely that many of us would ever be able to understand the
literature we were studying. I saw little in these men that I could, or
wanted to, emulate.
Everything changed in the second year. A new lecturer joined the
department and threw everything into turmoil. He was, certainly by the
standards of the time, a ‘theorist’, but his use of theory was enabling
and, although challenging in many ways, his teaching was exciting and
engaging. He was a Renaissance literature specialist and, as he made sure
we were aware, gay. He was also, by no means, a father figure. To me, this
was a hugely significant moment, both in my intellectual and personal
development. To experience a man teaching the literature I had very
nearly fallen out of love with and to recognise in that man something
of my own emerging identity gave me, at last, a model of masculinity
to which I could aspire. There was, after all, a way to be a man, be gay
and love literature. From then on, the way forward was, for me, the
literature of the Renaissance: that was what he taught and that is what
I would study. All this seems very obvious in retrospect, but the effect
at the time (and I recognised it as such at the time) was phenomenal. I
would not hesitate to say that the influence of that particular man was
to shape the rest of my professional life. As George Steiner asserts:
Every ‘break-in’ into the other, via persuasion or menace (fear is a

great teacher) borders on, releases the erotic. Trust, offer and accept-
ance, have roots which are also sexual. Teaching and learning are
informed by an otherwise inexpressible sexuality of the human soul.
This sexuality eroticises understanding and imitatio. Add to this
the key point that in the arts and humanities the material being
taught, the music being analysed and practised, are per se charged
with emotions. These emotions will, in considerable part, have affin-
ities, immediate or indirect, with the domain of love.1
I have offered this extended and, no doubt, apparently egocentric

description of my own journey in order to shed light on the nature of
the events to which I alluded at the beginning of this chapter. Those
events culminated in my being verbally abused in a threatening manner
in my office by two male students late one evening, several hours after
a seminar which had not gone at all well from their perspective.
In Early Modern Sex and Sexualities: Lyly to Milton (a final year,
double credit module in the BA Hons English Studies programme),
students had an opportunity to focus their study of Renaissance liter-
ature around the issues of gender and sexuality, while broadening the
range of texts with which they engaged. The module also engaged, at a
sophisticated level, with feminisms and queer theory and their implic-
ations for reading Renaissance texts. It had as a prerequisite a level two
module, Renaissance Drama, which introduced students to a range of
fairly canonical dramatic texts. In Early Modern Sex and Sexualities,
however, they were encouraged to look beyond the canon and actively
to seek out texts that would allow them to explore their own areas of
interest as they develop. There were no lectures for this module, just
a weekly 2-hour seminar. So, the first five sessions of the module were
directed, and introduced students to erotic poetry such as Shakespeare’s
‘Venus and Adonis’ and Marlowe’s ‘Hero and Leander’. Another session
explored the importance of Ovid to Renaissance culture. In another
session on homoerotics, students studied Marlowe’s Edward II alongside
John Lyly’s Campaspe; a play from the 1580s about Alexander the Great
and his relationships. In another session we studied Lyly’s Gallathea
(a crucially important, though often overlooked, play for those inter-
ested in representations of female same-sex desire in the period) and in
the final directed session we explored three Jacobean witchcraft plays.
After the first five sessions, students on this module submitted a short
essay (chosen from a list of titles set by the tutor) based on the texts
they had studied so far. This essay counted for 30 per cent of the overall
mark for the module.
During the weeks of directed study, students were encouraged simul-
taneously to begin seeking out new texts, which they could use for their
negotiated essay; a longer piece based on their own research interests
and which counted for 70 per cent of the overall module mark. The title
Mark Dooley 63
of the essay had to be negotiated with the tutor and signed off and the
students gave a seminar presentation as part of the preparation for this
essay. The idea behind the module, then, was that students move from
a closely directed mode of study to a much more self-directed approach
which allowed them to negotiate their own curriculum and shape their
own assessment.
It is particularly significant to me that the challenge from the young
men in question came so near the end of their programme but I think
their reaction to this particular module can be accounted for if we
examine the links between their own sense of their masculine identity
and their chosen path through the course up until this point. Both
these men were returning to education after some years working locally.
As has long been recognised, ‘English [as an academic discipline] has
battled from the beginning against being classified as a “soft” option’.2
These students marked themselves off as distinct from the predomin-
antly female student body of their year cohort from the outset and had
as little to do with their peers as possible; whether in the seminar room
or out of it. They chose their modules carefully, seeking out wherever
possible those focused on modern literature and taught by older, estab-
lished male lecturers that they felt they could look up to. This strategy,
I would suggest, enabled them to enact a model of masculinity, which
defended their own sense of self and promoted a feeling of community;
not with their female classmates, but with their male lecturers. Indeed,
they were often referred to by some staff as the brightest and most
promising students in their year while some equally bright women were
somewhat overlooked. The master/disciple model of pedagogy was one
to which these particular students were well suited.
So, having chosen to study English in the first instance, these students
found a way to defend their traditional masculine identity through a
careful choice of modules and lecturers. As Ben Knights has recently
noted:
The male student of English is going against the social grain As

members of a minority within the student body, males have to nego-
tiate their standing, and fend off the effeminacy that may be attrib-
uted to them by other students.3
Some male students, it must be noted, would embrace the opportunity

to go against the social grain and discover a host of new opportun-
ities for their masculine identity in so doing. The students in question
here, though, succeeded in fending off any potential effeminacy by
enacting a barely disguised contempt for their female peers and their
contributions to seminar discussions. They established their identity
almost entirely on gendered lines: they were ‘proper’ men, working
closely with ‘real’ (male) academics on ‘hard’ authors and texts whereas
the women students, as they later made clear in their own terms, were
‘silly housewives’ who were playing at being students.
The crisis moment in Early Modern Sex and Sexualities occurred
during the session on Homoerotics and Masculinity in Christopher
Marlowe’s Edward II and John Lyly’s Campaspe. Interestingly, the
students under discussion here had little problem with the Marlowe’s
play. Despite their own reading around our topic, and my reminders
that categories of sexuality in the period were far from stable, or even
recognisable from a twentieth-century viewpoint, they were reluctant to
see Edward II as anything other than ‘gay’ or ‘homosexual’. There is, of
course, a real difficulty for students in discussing early modern sexual-
ities in ways that recognise their difference from our own, highly defined
notions of sexual identity. For these particular students, however, the
easiest way to deal with this when discussing Edward II was to attempt to
erase from their minds all notions of historical distance and difference
which, for their reading of this text, made Edward’s ‘homosexuality’
recognisable and, I would suggest, ‘safe’. In exactly the ways that even
the most cursory reading of Foucault’s History of Sexuality Vol 1 would
have revealed to them as problematic (and it is one of the texts on the
reading list for the module) they read Edward’s ‘gayness’ as the funda-
mental feature of his identity: everything that he did and everything
that happened to him was as a result of his identity as a homosexual,
rather than as a man. In other words, he was not like them. Their mascu-
line identity was defined against the representation they were exploring
in Marlowe’s play. They vociferously argued that Edward was gay so that
they could set themselves against him; seeing his lack of political astute-
ness and military prowess as a clear sign of his homosexuality and the
inevitable effeminacy that they attached to it. Disturbingly, then, the
ending of the play (which, again, they read as entirely unambiguous,
almost despite the text itself) was seen by them to be an entirely logical
conclusion. The ‘red hot poker’ was no more than a symbol for the
way Edward had lived his life and ruined his country. Other, women
students, were equally vociferous in pointing out that the text does
not support such unambiguous categorisation and that their research
had suggested to them that homoeroticism and masculinity were not
opposite in Renaissance culture but, as they argued, so the male students
became even more entrenched in their views. The more the women
Mark Dooley 65
attempted to deconstruct the notion of homosexuality, so the men clung

more firmly to it. Edward was gay, he had a sexual relationship with
Gaveston, that’s why he was a bad ruler, that’s why he was killed in
the fashion he was. The notoriety of Edward II in the popular imagin-
ation made the play an ideal ground upon which these students could
enact their masculine identity. Masculinity, for them, was straightfor-
wardly synonymous with heterosexuality. If they had to drag the histor-
ical Edward hundreds of years out of his context and subject him to a
categorisation that would not have been available at the time Marlowe’s
play was written, let alone when the historical figure of Edward II lived,
they were prepared to do so. What powerful forces were at work on
these men that drove them, so forcefully, to assert their own model of
contemporary masculinity through their reading of the play and on the
other members of the seminar? This is a question to which I shall return.
The discussion of Marlowe’s play was tense and difficult at times; it is
very difficult, as we all know, to encourage debate and discussion and
at the same time attempt to keep the discussion from wandering into
unpleasant and, in this case, potentially offensive territory. What I had
not fully appreciated at the time, however, was how much the path
these students had adopted in their approach to the first text was to
compromise and threaten their sense of self as we moved into discussion
of Lyly’s play, Campaspe.
Edward II is a fairly canonical text in Renaissance studies these days; it
has a well-established place in the performance repertoire and the plot
is often thought by many students to be familiar to them (until they
read or see the play!). As such, the play poses a real challenge in the
teaching of issues such as gender, sexuality and history – students have
many preconceptions about it which are difficult to break through –
and this seminar proved to me that the distance and difference of
early modern models of gender and sexuality (here masculinity and
homoerotic desire) are made more threatening to traditional models of
contemporary masculinity in the process of recognising that distance.
The potential continuity between, and fluidity of, masculine identities
in the Renaissance is replaced in our own time by a severing of different
models and a policing of the new, apparently fixed boundaries of licit
and illicit masculinities. This is what Eve Sedgwick has characterised as
‘the potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and
homosexual – a continuum whose visibility, for men, in our society,
is radically disrupted’.4 The strategy adopted by the male students in
this seminar, then, was to make the difference between the homosocial
and the homosexual as distinct as possible, and to erase for themselves
and, I suspect, in the minds of their peers, any notion that they might
potentially sit on the same continuum. Their keenness to pin down
Edward’s sexuality (and, therefore, identity), to make it familiar and
recognisable in their own terms (gay, homosexual) in this well-known
Renaissance tragedy was matched only by their reluctance to even
contemplate doing the same for the protagonist of Lyly’s relatively little
known court comedy.
John Lyly’s play, Campaspe, is about Alexander the Great and tells
the story of how he falls in love with Campaspe, a woman captured
during one of his military campaigns. During the course of the play,
Alexander’s love for Campaspe is criticised openly by his confidante,
Hephestion, and covertly by his soldiers, who find there is no longer
a role for them as all masculine activity (here, war!) has stopped for
the duration of their general’s dalliance. Indeed, the play describes how
his love for Campaspe has an effeminising effect on Alexander and his
world. In an exchange between two of his soldiers, Parmenio tells Clitus:
I mislike this new delicacy and pleasing

peace; for what else do we see now than a kind of softness
in every man’s mind
O Philip [Alexander’s father], were thou alive to see this
alteration – thy men turned to women, thy soldiers to
lovers, gloves worn in velvet caps instead of plumes in
helmets – thou would either die among them
for sorrow or confound them for anger.5
The misogynist aspects of this play which clearly sees the love of
men for women as a second rate, irrational kind of love with damaging
social effects is shaped very much by the context of the 1580s and the
attitudes of many of the influential men at the Elizabethan court who
felt that a woman’s rule had effeminised England and made her prone
to invasion. The most pressing political debate at the time the play
was written concerned the desire of men like Leicester and Burghley
to go to war against Spain in support of the Protestant Low Coun-
tries and I argue that Lyly’s play was designed as an intervention in
this debate to support the views of the religious radicals. So, much
of the play is concerned with promoting highly traditional views of
masculinity which are characterised by activity – military strength,
aggressive imperial expansion and invasion as opposed to Elizabeth’s
long sustained policy of peace (or passivity). None of this seemed to
cause any particular difficulty for the students in the seminar except
Mark Dooley 67
some of the women students became rather uncomfortable at some of

the more explicitly misogynistic attitudes displayed. One moment in
particular stands out in my memory as the students responded so differ-
ently. Hephestion, Alexander’s ‘confidante’ berates his friend:
And shall it not seem

monstrous to wise men that the heart of the greatest
conqueror of the world should be found in the hands
of the weakest creature of nature – of a woman, of a
captive?6
The shock of the women students at such an explicitly sexist atti-

tude (and it never fails to surprise me that many women students are
genuinely shocked by the extent to which Renaissance texts are often
so deeply sexist) was countered by the laughter of the male students,
whose enactment of their masculine identity at this point in the discus-
sion appeared to assert their sympathy with the views of Hephestion.
Alexander, unlike Edward II, was a ‘proper’ man and, although his love
for Campaspe was foolish, it did not undermine his masculine status as
such – for them. It seemed that for as long as the discussion focused
strictly on issues of gender the male students were comfortable and
engaged, able to defend Alexander as ‘a bit of a lad’. They clearly saw
in him something which they could recognise; a masculine ‘type’ with
which they shared common ground.
The generally good-tempered, if at times polarised discussion of
Campaspe took a turn when I introduced the points raised by Alan Bray’s
excellent article on male friendship in Elizabethan England which I had
asked the students to read for the seminar.7 Interestingly, it was now
time for some of the women students to laugh. They looked at me
knowingly, almost mockingly, and playfully teased me about wanting
to uncover a ‘gay’ relationship between Alexander and Hephestion in
the play. Despite the gentle teasing, several of the same women students
needed no help from me and had produced some excellent readings
of the play through their own research that recognised the operation
of homoerotic desire in the play. In his discussion of the ‘masculine
friend’, Bray notes that Elizabethan men were likely to share a bed and
kiss each other publicly and that ‘[e]motional bonds had their place
alongside the physical links of friendship’.8 However, the masculine
friend had somehow to be clearly differentiated from its horrific ‘other’,
the sodomite. What Bray’s work shows us, though, is that while in
theory the ‘distinction between the two kinds of intimacy [friendship
and sodomy] was then apparently sharp and clearly marked: the one
was expressed in orderly “civil” relations, the other in subversive’, in
practice, [t]he signs of the one were indeed sometimes the sign of the
other’.9
The distinction, then, between the masculine friend and the sodomite
was not so very clear in the period or, as the women students attempted
to show, in its cultural remains. What we have to do in our readings of
Renaissance texts concerned with masculine identity, they concluded,
is to be open to the potential that homoerotic desire may at all times be
operating, even directly alongside heteroerotic desire and that neither
of these expressions of sexuality were directly related to gender (here,
masculinity). Alexander, then, loved both Campaspe and Hephestion,
was tied by eroticised bonds of patronage to the painter, Apelles, to
whom he finally ‘gives’ Campaspe as a wife, and through the eroti-
cised bonds of warfare with his soldiers. Careful readings of the topo-
graphy of the play were produced, where the off stage ‘camp’ of the
soldiers and its symbolic significance as an all-male space during war
time was explored. Extracts from Plutarch, Castiglione and Montaigne
concerned with friendship were produced to support their argument.
This discussion led us into a wider debate about hyper masculinity and
the potential to read for homoeroticism in the contemporary sporting
world. Rugby, I remember, came under particular scrutiny. The women
students were altogether more assertive in their reading of Campaspe
than they had been in their reading of Edward II. They had not been
able to resist the traditional view of Marlowe’s play and found it diffi-
cult to counter the views put forward by the male students although
they very clearly did not comply with the view that Edward died as
he’d lived. With Campaspe, however, they were encountering a text
previously unknown to the whole group. They had done their research
and, interestingly, played out their reading quite forcefully to the
seminar and, perhaps more specifically, to the male students who had
become increasingly quiet during this discussion. Their discomfort was
palpable.
My own contribution to the discussion focused around the ways in
which homoerotic desire could be seen to function as a socially orderly
force and a means by which masculine identity could achieve some level
of stability within the play, especially when we take into account the
historical context of Elizabethan masculinity. The play could, I argued,
be seen to call for a vigorous re-establishment of homosocial relations
at the Elizabethan court and that this could include erotic relations
between men who had for too long been bound up in a Petrarchan
Mark Dooley 69
fantasy world where they had been divided endlessly among themselves
in the shifting relations of factionalism. This, it seemed was too much
for the male students to tolerate. To try and ‘insinuate’ that Alexander
was ‘gay’ was one thing, but to then argue that this could be a ‘good
thing’ for masculinity was just beyond what was reasonable. Nothing
that had been said in the discussion so far could be directly evidenced
by the text, it was suggested, and all the research was ‘just’ theoretical
anyway. It was all, by implication, worthless.
The discussion was becoming rather heated between the students so
I decided to intervene. The male students were, as I explained, very
keen to recognise Edward II as ‘homosexual’ so, I thought, I would use
their own approach to establish the possibility that even if they didn’t
think that Alexander could be discussed in terms of homoerotic desire,
Marlowe certainly did. In what I thought was a neat (if rather well-
rehearsed) moment of intertextual analysis, I asked them to look back
at Edward II and find the reference to Alexander and Hephestion. In that
play, Mortimer Junior is complaining to his uncle about the relationship
between the King and Gaveston. Edward reveals his own view of their
relationship when he asks Gaveston:
Knowest thou not who I am?

Thy friend, thy self, another Gaveston.10
For Marlowe’s Edward, their relationship is entirely commensurate

with the key, defining feature of masculine friendship in the period:
equality between the partners. This view of the relationship was not
the one taken by the male students, neither, as it happens, is it the
view taken by the Mortimers in the play. However, where the students
clearly viewed the homoerotic nature of the relationship as in some way
threatening, Mortimer Senior reassures his nephew that there is nothing
in it to cause concern:
The mightiest kings have had their minions:

Great Alexander loved Hephaestion,
The conquering Hercules for Hylas wept,
And for Patroclus stern Achilles drooped.11
Here, Mortimer Senior uses the pejorative term ‘minion’ to describe

Hephestion which automatically suggests a sodomitical element to
the relationship between him and Alexander because their rank, in
Mortimer’s account, is so incompatible that they cannot be counted
as friends. In the play which the male students were convinced dealt
explicitly with issues of ‘homosexuality’ then, the relationship between
Alexander and Hephestion comes top in a list of classical homoerotic
relationships, but is seen by Mortimer Senior as harmless in the overall
scheme. I suppose the implication of what I was trying to point out was
that they couldn’t have it both ways – if they accepted the view that
Edward was ‘gay’ and that the play’s conclusion as they saw it somehow
‘proved’ this (despite Edward’s own assertions that he loved Gaveston
as a friend or ‘another self’) then why was it impossible to recognise the
potential for homoerotic desire in the relationship between Alexander
and Hephestion? The male students simply responded that ‘it wasn’t the
same’ and that ‘we’ (by which I think they meant the women students
and myself) were ‘reading too much into it’. This retreat into the equi-
valent of undergraduate infancy came as a surprise to me, as did the
surly manner in which these male students left the room at the end of
the session. It was to be the last time I saw them in a seminar on that
module.
In the hurly burly of the seminar we perhaps don’t have time to
stop and think enough about why a particular student, or group of
students, wants (or perhaps needs?) to resist a particular view or position.
It is very easy to become seduced oneself by the fantasy that all this
is ‘just’ theory and that it doesn’t really matter above and beyond the
intellectual exercise. What became clear after this seminar was that there
was much more at stake than I’d ever realised.
Several hours after the seminar, and at the end of a long-working day,
there was a knock on my office door. I was the last person left in the
department on that particular day. The two male students I have been
discussing came in and, despite my repeated requests that they should
take a seat, they insisted on standing. It was also very obvious that they
had both been drinking and they admitted to having been in the pub in
order to ‘pluck up the courage’ (as they put it) to come and see me. They
began telling me that they were not enjoying Early Modern Sex and
Sexualities and that they didn’t really want to take it in the first place;
it was, apparently, the best of a bad bunch of modules on offer that
semester. Their primary complaint was with the women students who,
they felt free to say, ‘talked rubbish’. They had not come to University,
I was informed, to listen to a lot of housewives talking amongst them-
selves. I immediately told them that I found this attitude towards their
fellow students disrespectful and unacceptable. This seemed to ignite
their fury. As each of them spoke, the other made remarks under
his breath and they made explicit reference to my wanting to ‘find’
Mark Dooley 71
homosexuality in texts where there was none (ironically, this was exactly
what I was warning against in the seminar). Campaspe, it seemed, was a
text about soldiers, war and the love between men and women, nothing
more. Yes, Edward II was about homosexuality but, as they saw it, I
had disregarded their contributions on this text because I didn’t like
the way it ended. The aggression in their demeanour and the attitudes
they displayed made me feel threatened and I asked them to leave my
office. They didn’t, and kept repeating that I needed to recognise that I
was being unreasonable in reading too much into these texts because of
what I was. I asked them what they meant by this but they would not
be any more specific. Eventually I insisted that they leave my office, as
it was clear we could not have a sensible conversation while emotions
were running so high on their part. At this point they left, muttering
insults over their shoulders.
The ways in which these particular students had managed to defend
their own views of traditional masculinity had required them to separate
themselves off from the rest of the predominantly female student body
against which they defined themselves, and to ally themselves with
particular members of staff with whom they felt they could operate in
a master/disciple relationship (even if the staff member did not share
their views). In addition, they formed a very powerful bond with each
other; always turning up to lectures and seminars together, always sitting
next to each other and exchanging contemptuous looks as their peers
made contributions to the discussion. This approach seemed to have
worked for them, until they arrived in Early Modern Sex and Sexualities,
when they were faced with an openly gay lecturer whose sexuality and,
I suspect, relative youth, made it impossible for them to view me as a
master of any kind. As it was also clearly too difficult for them to relate
to me on friendly terms, they were at a bit of a loss. The curriculum
of the module itself seemed to alienate them from the start, while at
the same time empowering the women students who, in some cases,
seemed to have a score to settle with these men.
The extent to which the male students felt driven to label Edward
II as ‘homosexual’ in order to contain any threat posed by the nature
of the topic we were studying is surprising, at least to me. They were
deeply uncomfortable with the idea that as categories such as homo-
sexual and gay did not exist in the Renaissance, people simply didn’t
define themselves in the way many do today, in terms of the gender of
their object of desire. The implied fluidity of this model, which allows for
the potential of homoerotic relations as a constituent part of homoso-
cial relations, was clearly too much for them to accept. However, having
firmly established in their own minds that homosexuality did exist in

the Renaissance (as evidenced by Edward II) they set themselves up as
the guards whose role it was to police the boundaries of who ‘was’
and who ‘wasn’t’. The greatest challenge to the integrity of the bound-
aries that they established came in our discussion of friendship and,
looking back, I can begin to see why they found this as threatening as
they clearly did. These men had formed a very powerful friendship that
had seen them through their university careers so far; they remained
‘untarnished’ by the charge of effeminacy that could so easily have been
their fate as male English undergraduates. However, in a discussion of
Elizabethan models of masculine friendship that ranged over Aristotle,
Plato, Plutarch, Castiglione and Montaigne, the very concept of mascu-
line friendship itself was brought into relief and was placed under the
microscope of that seminar discussion. The conclusion that ‘male friend-
ship in early modern England may have been openly and normatively
homoerotic’12 resonated too strongly as the male students themselves
had worked so hard to eradicate historical difference in their reading.
The model of masculinity that they so clearly feared and against which
they had guarded themselves throughout their studies thus far, the
effeminised man, the ‘homosexual’, was embodied in the figure sitting
at the front of the room, in a position of authority, and was inviting
them, challenging them even, at some deep level, to explore the very
nature of the relationship that underpinned their identity as men in
that room at that time: friendship. The irony is that, given the nature of
psychosexual dynamics, none of us fully realised that that was what was
happening!
I started this chapter with a long explanation of my own path into the
teaching of English, and the enormous significance of the subject for
my own personal history and identity formation. I can only guess at the
extent to which that history has shaped my current investment in the
subject that has since given me a living. How far has that history shaped
not only my choice of research specialism, but also the curriculum that
I teach each year? How far did my personal investment in this material
further provoke the events that occurred in and after that Early Modern
Sex and Sexualities seminar? How could I have handled it better? How
far am I still engaged in a struggle to define myself against the traditional
model of masculine identity defended and promoted by those male
students? What part does my teaching and my professional identity play
in this struggle?
The title of this chapter is intended to recognise the complex relations
between the practice of teaching, the material we teach, who we teach
Mark Dooley 73
and who we are. English is a subject more profoundly engaged with the
processes of identity formation than any other. Every engagement with
every text involves, at some level, the negotiation of our sense of self
with the external world. When that engagement takes place in a public
space, with a group of people, there is no telling how many personal
stories could be circulating, how many narratives are being written and
rewritten, challenged and affirmed. As George Steiner observes:
The pulse of teaching is persuasion. The teacher solicits attention,

agreement, and, optimally, collaborative dissent. He or she invites
trust Persuasion is both positive – ‘share this skill with me, follow
me into this art and practise, read this text’ – and negative – ‘do not
believe this, do not expend time and effort on that.’ The dynamics are
the same: to build a community out of communication, a coherence
of shared feelings, passions, refusals. In persuasion, in solicitation,
be it of the most abstract, theoretical kind a process of seduction,
willed or accidental, is inescapable.13
The process of seduction outlined by Steiner recognises an erotics of

pedagogy. It should come as no surprise, then, that encounters in the
seminar will be more or less comfortable, depending on the individuals
involved. What is important for us, as teachers, is to recognise the value,
and indeed the necessity, of the refusals, to the maintenance of always
precarious individual identities.
Notes
1. George Steiner. Lessons of the Masters. Cambridge, MA. and London: Harvard
University Press, 2003. p. 27.
2. Ben Knights. Writing Masculinities: Male Narratives in Twentieth-Century
Fiction. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999. p. 38.
3. Ibid. pp. 39–40.
4. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial
Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. pp. 1–2.
5. John Lyly. Campaspe and Sappho and Phao. G.K. Hunter and David Bevington.
(Eds) Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991. IV, iii, pp. 6–27.
6. Ibid. II, ii, pp. 61–65.
7. Alan Bray. ‘Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan
England’ in Jonathan Goldberg. (Ed.) Queering the Renaissance. Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 1994.
8. Ibid. p. 45.
9. Ibid. p. 47.
10. Christopher Marlowe. Edward II in Mark Thornton Burnett. (Ed.) Christopher

Marlowe: The Complete Plays. I, i, pp. 141–142.
11. Ibid. I, iv, pp. 390–393.
12. Mario DiGangi. ‘Marlowe, Queer Studies, and Renaissance Homoeroticism’
in Paul Whitfield White. (Ed.) Marlowe, History and Sexuality: New Critical
Essays on Christopher Marlowe. New York: AMS Press, 1998. p. 198.
13. Steiner. p. 26.
Works cited
Bray, Alan. ‘Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan
England’ in Jonathan Goldberg. (Ed.) Queering the Renaissance. Durham and
DiGangi, Mario. ‘Marlowe, Queer Studies and Renaissance Homoeroticism’ in
Paul Whitfield White. (Ed.) Marlowe, History and Sexuality: New Essays on
Christopher Marlowe. New York: AMS Press, 1998.
Knights, Ben. Writing Masculinities: Male Narratives in Twentieth-Century Fiction.
Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999.
Lyly, John. Campaspe and Sapho and Phao. G.K. Hunter and David Bevington.
(Eds) Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991.
Marlowe, Christopher. Edward II in Mark Thornton Burnett. (Ed.) Christopher
Marlowe: The Complete Plays. London: Everyman, 1999.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial
Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
Steiner, George. Lessons of the Masters. Cambridge and London: Harvard
University Press, 2003.
4
Charlotte Dacre’s Nymphomaniacs
and Demon-Lovers: Teaching
Female Masculinities
Ranita Chatterjee
‘ “Why, there is certainly a pleasure,” with a fierce malignant smile,

observed Victoria, “in the infliction of prolonged torment” ’ (Dacre 1997:
205). With this shocking confession, Charlotte Dacre’s 1806 gothic
novel Zofloya: Or, The Moor portrays its heroine’s unbridled erotic tastes
and miscegenation with a black lower-class Lucifer, named Zofloya, as
threats to the emerging British Empire. Despite its didacticism, especially
its attribution of all flaws in the daughter Victoria to her weak-willed
mother Laurina, Dacre’s novel relishes in Sadean scenes of seduction,
torture, and violence. The novel begins with Laurina di Loredani’s seduc-
tion by her husband’s house guest, the German Count Ardolph. Ardolph
is a libertine whose ‘savage delight [was] to intercept the happiness of
wedded love – to wean from an adoring husband regards of a pure
and faithful wife’ (1997: 43). The wicked Ardolph is so taken with
Laurina’s fidelity that he does not rest until he successfully seduces her
and convinces her to leave her husband. As a result of her actions,
her family disintegrates: her son Leonardo runs away from home, her
husband dies in a duel with the Count, and her daughter Victoria is
imprisoned by the Count in the home of a distant and strict Cath-
olic aunt with a ‘mercenary soul’ (1997: 67). Victoria both escapes
from her female oppressor, and marries her lover Berenza. Neverthe-
less, she continues to blame her mother for all the subsequent evil that
befalls her. Although the novel is subtitled A Romance of the Fifteenth
Century and is set in the morally corrupt aristocratic world of Venice,
the novel’s characters are recognizably late eighteenth-century Britons
who wrestle with issues of female propriety and mothering akin to what
Mary Wollstonecraft discussed in her 1792 A Vindication of the Rights
of Woman. Given Wollstonecraft’s equation of strong nationhood with
virtuous mothering, Diane Hoeveler claims that in placing the blame for
75
76 Charlotte Dacre’s Nymphomaniacs and Demon-Lovers
Victoria’s hellish nature on a promiscuous mother, Zofloya is a ‘virtual

parody of Wollstonecraft’s works’ (1997: 185).
Dacre’s novel suggests that Victoria’s own horrific imagination attracts
Satan. Zofloya, a former slave and present servant of Victoria’s husband,
first appears to her in an intensely passionate dream as a humble, yet
majestic figure willing to do her bidding. In Victoria’s dream, Zofloya is
adorned in angelic white and gold clothes, and an emerald bejeweled
turban with a green feather. His bare arms and legs are also ‘encircled
with the finest oriental pearl’, and his neck and ears are decorated with
‘gold rings of an enormous size’ (1997: 145). Not only is Zofloya a
painstakingly orientalized (and thus feminized) Moor with knowledge
of a variety of nefarious drugs, he also only appears to Victoria after she
calls for him in her ‘dark mind’ (1997: 165). Moreover, he is associated
with the most sensual feelings Victoria experiences: his voice is ‘like the
sweet murmuring sound of an Æolian harp, swept by the breath of a
zephyr’ (1997: 165). Victoria’s female imagination, then, is associated
with otherness, darkness, and danger because, as Adriana Craciun notes,
it originates in ‘physical sensation’ (1997: 165–166, n. 1). Like his literary
precursor Vathek (from William Beckford’s 1786 oriental tale of the
same name) and his infamous successor the Malay (from Thomas De
Quincey’s 1821 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater), Zofloya is clearly
depicted as enjoying a non-normative ‘oriental’ sexuality. That he turns
out to be the devil is no surprise. What is surprising is the scope of
the upper-class Victoria’s desires. With Zofloya’s aid, Victoria slowly
poisons her husband Berenza to death; imprisons, tortures, and brutally
murders her rival and ward, the innocent orphan Lilla; and for one night,
undergoes a metamorphosis to look like the deceased Lilla in order to
sleep with her betrothed Henriquez, who is Berenza’s loving younger
brother and the object of Victoria’s lust. After Zofloya helps Victoria
to escape the authorities and extracts her unquestioned allegiance, she
passionately gives her body and soul to him.
In her introduction to the novel, Adriana Craciun observes that
‘Unlike the conventional woman in a demon lover ballad who is
horrified to see her lover revealed as infernal, Victoria, like several
of Dacre’s poetic narrators, finds his supernatural and infernal origins
arousing’ (1997: 17). I argue that Dacre’s gothic novel is unique in
its depiction of the heroine’s transformation from a ‘beautiful and
accomplished angel’ (1997: 40); to an ‘untameable hyaena [sic]’ (1997:
75), glossed by Craciun as ‘hermaphroditic’ (1997: 75, n. 1); a woman
‘wild with the furor’ (1997: 144), glossed by Craciun as nymphoma-
niac (1997: 144, n. 1); and finally to a woman with ‘bold masculine
Ranita Chatterjee 77
features’ (1997: 211). Victoria’s physical appearance grows more mascu-

line and her skin becomes problematically darker as she progressively
embarks on further evil deeds to satisfy her bloodlust. While one
may interpret these bodily changes as corporeal manifestations of the
soul’s increasingly corrupt nature, I think we need to consider what
these changes might suggest about the period’s own notions about
masculinity and femininity. Is Victoria a girl gone wild? Is she a woman
behaving badly? Can we blame her mother for Victoria’s unruly ways? Is
Victoria so thoroughly poisoned by patriarchy’s negative view of women
as either angels or whores that she expresses her desires (which she
should not even have) in terms of demonic activity? Or, as students
often suggest, is she simply a woman behaving like a man? The portrayal
of the sexually deviant and socially defiant Victoria befriending an
exotic Moorish devil, though racist and orientalist, may signify the
extent to which her libidinal power can neither be confined by the
early nineteenth-century’s nascent and limited conception of femin-
inity, nor codified as anything other than nymphomania. Indeed,
Dacre’s novel is a remarkable exploration of the social production of
racial and gender classifications. The classroom is precisely where these
questions concerning how to read Victoria’s gender get worked out
and, significantly, with this novel, where alternative conceptions about
masculinity emerge. After all, what does it mean to say that Victoria
behaves like a man?
Despite the institutionalization of certain strands of post-1960s crit-
ical theory, what educators believe to be a dialogic space of learning
may still be to our current English literary and cultural studies students
a place of overwhelming terror. Fear and trembling aptly describe many
of our students’ experiences in the hegemonic arena of the college and
university classroom. The age and experience of the teacher, as well as of
the students, may also produce a similar, though muted, gothic feeling
in the English literature professor. This may partly explain the uncon-
scious adherence to well-rehearsed scripts of gender and pedagogic
performance. Even in a playful Derridean challenge to the canon, be
this in choice of texts, interpretative strategies, or alternative pedago-
gical practices, new lines of power are inevitably drawn and defended.
For example, in queer studies, a field that strikes many as automatically
subversive, a pernicious form of racial and gender hegemony may still
dominate the discourse. As Susan Stryker and Judith Halberstam note,
queer theories and queer activism with their focus on non-conformist
and non-normative gender and sexual identities have the potential to
explode the myth of binary gendered and sexual manifestations. Yet, in
the academy, and especially in our pedagogical practices, though we

acknowledge that gender is socially constructed, we tend to resurrect a
two-gendered, two-sexuality model and ignore, or worse, forget about
the existence of transgendered and transsexual individuals. For Stryker,
what she calls ‘transgender phenomena’ ‘bear witness to the epistemolo-
gical rift between gender signifiers and their signifieds. In doing so, they
disrupt and denaturalize Western modernity’s “normal” reality, specific-
ally the fiction of a unitary psychosocial gender that is rooted biologic-
ally in corporeal substance’ (Stryker 1988: 147). The failure to explore
the formation of transgender subjectivities also keeps masculinity firmly
wedded to male bodies, especially white male bodies, in a sacrosanct
union. Thus, in the West, ethnic masculinities are tenuously male,
whereas gay masculinity is hyper-male as long as it is in a white body.
In her critique of the new hegemony of white gay masculinity, Judith
Halberstam argues that the ‘future of queer studies depends absolutely
on moving away from white gay male identity politics and learning
from the radical critiques offered by a younger generation of queer
scholars who draw their intellectual inspiration from feminism and
ethnic studies rather than white queer studies’ (Halberstam 2005: 220).
There is a similar phenomenon in theory classrooms. Speaking
about ‘ “theory” as a practice, an educational genre, rather than a
curriculum’, Ben Knights claims that with its ‘compulsive, almost
theological allusion to a new canon of patriarchs (Nietzsche, Saussure,
Heidegger, Gramsci, Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, Foucault, Lacan, Barthes,
Lyotard, Derrida, Baudrillard and so on)’, English studies has become ‘a
diglossic culture, where the ‘high’ language gestures towards mastery
even while simultaneously denying its possibility’ (Knights 1999:
45–46). Our students’ anxieties often stem from having to learn an
overwhelming new theory vocabulary that only the professor appar-
ently knows how to use. Even if the theories are meant to empower the
learner and reveal the ideological workings of power in the classroom,
only those students who understand the theories can recognize their
own agency. Critical theory classes and gender-aware spaces may poten-
tially breed even more hostile subjects than the supposedly traditional
non-theory classrooms. Both Halberstam and Knights conclude that
these new ‘theory’ hegemonies produce pedagogical and scholarly
models, whether in terms of race or gender or both, that reinstate earlier
patriarchal forms of masculinity and gender hierarchies. ‘What’s a girl
to do?’ may be the most crucial formulation of the question of how to
create a responsible and responsive pedagogy that encourages a hetero-
glossic exploration of texts within their historically specific gendered
and sexualized contexts. In this essay, I will use my experiences in

teaching the nineteenth-century gothic novel Zofloya: Or, The Moor by
Charlotte Dacre to argue that we need to attend more to the historically
changing performances of gender and sexuality, especially of altern-
ative sexualities. In disassociating our contemporary socially constructed
notions of masculinity and femininity from their rigidly maintained
embodiment in biological male and female bodies, we may be able to
challenge some of the ways patriarchy rears its ugly head over and over
again in a variety of apparently subversive pedagogical contexts.
It has been almost two decades since Judith Butler first discussed
gender as a performance that is, nevertheless, not voluntary and
is strictly enforced ‘within a highly rigid regulatory frame’ (Butler
1993: 33). Butler concluded Gender Trouble with her now infamously
misunderstood discussion of drag queens and how their perform-
ances expose the lack of an original femininity: misunderstood because
Butler’s critics incorrectly assumed that identifying a social construc-
tion, in this case femininity, as a performance liberated individuals to
perform whatever gender however they chose. As Butler clarified later
in Bodies That Matter, gender performance is not a ‘willful appropri-
ation and it is certainly not a question of taking on a mask’ (1993: 7). If
gender is a performance under social surveillance and the punishment
is severe for not embodying one’s gender as others see fit, then we must
wonder why the parody of femininity in certain controlled settings can
be so entertaining, whereas there are no such possibilities or venues
for the corresponding parodic performance of masculinity. Why do
discussions of masculinity, both within and without academia, fail to
consider female masculinity? Despite our theory savvyness when it comes
to the relationship between sex and gender in our various analyses
of femininity, why do we insist on, or at least act like we believe in,
an inherently natural bond between masculinity and biological male
bodies? These are the troubling questions raised by Judith Halberstam’s
groundbreaking 1998 book Female Masculinity, where she describes the
‘general disbelief in female masculinity’ as a ‘failure in a collective
imagination: in other words, female-born people have been making
convincing and powerful assaults on the coherence of male masculinity
for well over a hundred years; what prevents these assaults from
taking hold and accomplishing the diminution of the bonds between
masculinity and men?’ (Halberstam 1998: 15). Moreover, Halberstam
argues that as long as we associate female masculinity with lesbianism or
keep ‘reading it as proto-lesbianism awaiting a coming community, we
continue to hold female masculinity apart from the making of modern
masculinity itself’ (1998: 46). In addition to women making ‘their own

unique contributions to what we call modern masculinity’, we should
recognize female masculinity as a ‘proliferation of masculinities’ that
multiplies in Foucauldian fashion the more we identify the ‘various
forms’ (1998: 46). This very disbelief in the existence and contribu-
tions of diverse female masculinities enables the replication of patri-
archal structures in our classrooms, no matter how subversive our
curricula.
In our now predominantly female English literature classes, teaching
gothic texts by women writers raises particular problems. Since gothic
discourse is not only about power and its transgressions, but also expli-
citly about gender and sexual relations, our students, whether they have
formally studied feminist theory or not, become gender-aware subjects
in the classroom. Indeed, most students’ initial responses to the gothic
are predetermined by feminism which, as Laura Fitzgerald indicates,
‘was instrumental in institutionalizing Gothic studies’ (2004: 9). Gener-
ally, students have liberal feminist tendencies, that is, they believe in
a superficial gender equality that does not address the systemic and
institutional structures that produce inequities in the first place. Thus,
students are eager to interpret female writers of the Romantic period
as always challenging the gender status quo of the time, either in
their texts or lives, precisely because these authors were women who
chose to publish gothic works without a male pseudonym. In this case,
students celebrate the text’s content as radical, whether historically it
is or is not, and miss the truly radical challenges to the very institu-
tion of gender at specific historic moments in some gothic texts, such
as Dacre’s Zofloya. Moreover, because of their belief in a transhistorical
inherent connection between female bodies and femininity, and like-
wise, between male bodies and masculinity, these students can ignore,
diminish, or exceptionalize examples to the contrary in their quest to
interpret the works of women writers as somehow associated, however
obliquely, with their own ‘commonsensical’ ideas of femininity. In large
part, students’ liberal feminist essentialist reading strategies for British
Romantic works are not a disservice to the novels by Ann Radcliffe, Mary
Wollstonecraft, and other women writers of the 1790s. These female
writers used the gothic for sociopolitical commentary, specifically to
expose the horrors of imprisonment in the patriarchal institution of
marriage. That Mary Wollstonecraft’s writings are an early example of
liberal feminism also bolster’s students’ interpretations of many women
writers in the Romantic period. Gothic scholars have even identified
the key traits of ‘female gothic’ versus ‘male gothic’ texts, a binary
guilty of ahistorical essentialism, if not also liberal feminism. For Diane

Hoeveler, ‘the typical female Gothic novel presents a blameless female
victim triumphing through a variety of passive-aggressive strategies over
a male-created system of oppression and corruption (alternately known
as the patriarchy’ (Hoeveler 1997: 107). In her Art of Darkness: A Poetics
of the Gothic, Anne Williams explains that:
Male Gothic derives its most powerful effects from the dramatic irony
created by multiple points of view, posits the supernatural as a
‘reality’, has a tragic plot, specializes in horror, [and] focus[es]
on female suffering, positioning the audience as voyeurs who, though
sympathetic, may take pleasure in female victimization. Such situ-
ations are intimately related to its delight in sexual frankness and
perversity, its proximity to the ‘pornographic’.
(1995: 102–105)
If Charlotte Dacre’s gothic novel was presented through the victimized

Lilla’s point of view and, despite being tortured (albeit by a woman),
Lilla escaped and married her fiancé Henriquez, we may be able to
include her text in a female gothic tradition. However, Zofloya with its
supernatural Moor and omniscient third-person narration of adulterous
mothers and mother-figures, impotent husbands, feminized men, and
masculinized women does not comfortably fit into the female gothic
tradition. In fact, Dacre’s novel is as violently misogynistic as the work
of the infamous ‘Monk Lewis’.
It is a scholarly commonplace to note that Dacre’s text rewrites
Matthew Lewis’ 1796 The Monk. As Robert Miles notes, ‘Charlotte
Dacre’s Zofloya: Or, The Moor (1806), is in two respects a female version
of Lewis’s The Monk: a woman, Victoria di Loredani, now occupies
Ambrosia’s role, while the sexual politics of the Gothic are viewed from
a feminist perspective’ (Miles 2002: 167). In a note, Miles explains
his use of the term feminist: ‘Dacre’s novels make their bows towards
conventional morality, but her complexly furnished heroines do not fit
into these conventional boxes; issues of “gender politics,” rather, are
left open and it is in this qualified sense that I term her “feminist” ’
(2002: 219, n. 4). Although a productive description of ‘feminist’ since
Miles implicitly acknowledges feminism’s commitment to exploring
the production of gendered subjects, his need to label Dacre’s novel,
even with qualifying caveats, as ‘feminist’ prevents us from considering
the role of sexuality. In other words, binary gendered models fail to
account for the diversity of gender and sexual expressions in the era, as
Foucault and others have shown, when gender and sexuality were being
realigned along a binary essentialist model, namely the conflation of
female bodies with femininity, male bodies with masculinity, and non-
heteronormative bodies with perversity. Queer, then, might be a more
precise term to describe Dacre’s texts. Indeed, as Paulina Palmer notes,
both ‘Gothic and “queer” share a common emphasis on transgressive
acts and subjectivities’ (Palmer 1999: 8).
In the rest of this paper, I shall consider one pedagogical context
in which these discourses of masculinity emerged: a small under-
graduate senior honors seminar on experimental narratives of the British
Romantic period. Like the early reviews of Zofloya that were generally
ad hominem attacks, some accusing Dacre of being worse than the
depiction of her devil, students initially had negative responses covering
the spectrum from dismay to disgust. When asked to elaborate, all the
students stated that they could not explain what they perceived to be a
discrepancy between the author’s female gender and her violent, porno-
graphic text. I had expected this type of psychobiographic interpreta-
tion, whereby the author functions as the signified for the text’s various
signifiers, to be dismissed or, at least, challenged by our reading of a
wide range of gothic texts written both by men and women, radicals
and conservatives. I should note that I also taught Dacre’s text in a
mandatory graduate theory course that used Zofloya as a casebook for
the application of several theoretical approaches (from deconstruction
and Lacanian psychoanalysis to feminisms, queer theories, theories of
race and ethnicity, and cultural studies). Although I do not have space
in this paper to explore the pedagogical production of masculinity in
this graduate seminar, let me briefly say that I had hoped that theory,
especially our readings from Butler’s Gender Trouble and Halberstam’s
Female Masculinity, would enable students to see the limitations of a
psychobiographic analysis of Dacre’s unconventional gothic novel. In
both pedagogical spaces, the students’ resistance to the idea of female
masculinity amazed me. And this despite the novel’s careful portrayal
of Victoria as a defiant agent of a malleable conception of gender and
race. Clearly, various extra-textual matters are at stake when we raise
issues of gender and sexuality in the classroom.
The gender dynamics of any class affects how discussions of
masculinity might play out. In my undergraduate honors class of 12
exceptionally articulate and bright students in their twenties, only
four were self-identified men. Regardless of what we discussed, I could
see that the young men wanted to appear sensitive to the concerns
of their female colleagues, probably to ward off any suggestions that
they might be as misogynistic as Dacre’s Count Ardolph or her male

critics. Consequently, my male students did not pursue some of their
more intriguing interpretations. On the other hand, young women
in the class struggled with appearing to be feminist for fear of being
accused by the few self-identified feminists of patriarchal indoctrina-
tion. Additionally, I had one brilliant Moslem student who reminded
us of the historical stereotyping of non-Anglo-Saxon men, such as Jews
and Moors, as always already embodying a perverse masculinity. In
this complex pedagogical atmosphere, I used close readings, some post-
structuralist and queer theories, and historical documents on gender
and sexuality to encourage my students to broaden their conceptions
of masculinity. What emerged were numerous lively discussions of
race, slavery, and Empire in relation to Zofloya’s satanic non-normative
masculinity. Because we had already discussed Beckford’s oriental tale
Vathek (1786), De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821),
and Lord Byron’s The Giaour (1813), the students had enough diverse
models of male masculinity to recognize the orientalist and racist aspects
of Zofloya’s portrayal of its Moorish devil. From the megalomaniacal
desires of the Caliph Vathek, the criticism of patriarchal Moslem and
Christian men in The Giaour (which is an Arabic word for infidels), and
the opium-induced paranoid haze through which De Quincey imagines
an encounter with a textbook pernicious non-Western other (the Malay),
both my male and female students productively explored the influ-
ence of racial and imperialistic anxieties in the formation of male
masculinity. The students were particularly adept at noticing the ways
in which the masculinity of non-Western male characters is comprom-
ised by perceived feminine traits, such as the jewels that cover Zofloya,
or the passivity of De Quincey’s imaginary Malay. Furthermore, the
students engaged in a nuanced discussion of the homoerotic dimensions
of the male interactions in these gothic novels without automatically
assuming its textual presence based on their knowledge of the histor-
ical authors. This class approached the topic of masculinity through
Zofloya and the depiction of his ‘oriental’ sexuality, which they all
agreed produced a non-normative compromised masculinity. That non-
normative masculinity might also include the portrayal of Victoria did
not initially occur to these students, especially the women who desper-
ately sought to reconcile Dacre’s historical feminine gender with her
apparently ‘male gothic’ narrative.
One of the male students tried to suggest that because Victoria is aban-
doned by her mother after her ineffective father is killed, she models
herself after the only powerful person she has known: at first, this is
her mother’s lover Count Ardolph. Later, Victoria’s role model becomes
the Satanic Zofloya. Donna Heiland also observes that ‘within the world
of the novel, the person she [Victoria] most resembles is not Lilla or
any other woman, but Zofloya’ (Heiland 2004: 46). My male student
also argued that the three other significant male characters – Victoria’s
brother Leonardo, her husband Berenza, and his brother Henriquez – all
exhibit a passive, perhaps effeminate, masculinity. In the class discus-
sions that followed, we noted that curiously, all three men are the
objects of a female gaze. This is explicitly the case with Leonardo. After
Leonardo runs away from home, he has several adventures that involve
eluding amorous adulterous mother figures, the most significant one
with Berenza’s former mistress Megalena Strozzi. Megalena’s description
of first seeing the young Leonardo sleeping rivals that of any male gaze:
on his cheek, where the hand of health had planted her brown-red
rose, the pearly gems of his tears still hung – his auburn hair sported in
graceful curls about his forehead and temples, agitated by the passing
breeze – his vermeil lips were half open, and disclosed his polished
teeth – his bosom, which he had uncovered to admit the refreshing
air, remained disclosed, and contrasted by its snowy whiteness the
animated hue of his complexion.
(Dacre 1997: 120)
As Robert Miles states, ‘the iconography of the modest female is

present’ both in Megalena’s depiction and in Leonardo’s response to
her questions (Miles 2002: 171): ‘His cheeks became suffused with deep-
ening blushes, and his eyes, with which he longed to gaze upon her,
were yet cast bashfully towards the earth’ (Dacre 1997: 121). Thoroughly
eroticized, the 18-year-old Leonardo is easily seduced by the older, more
experienced ‘syren [sic] Megalena’ (1997: 123) to do whatever she desires,
particularly to exact revenge against Berenza who has moved on to a new
lover. Megalena fabricates a false tale to justify why Leonardo should
murder Berenza who, unknown to both, has made Victoria his new
mistress. He hides in Berenza’s bedroom until they have fallen asleep.
As he raises his dagger, ‘[t]o a hand rendered unsteady by a confused
consciousness of the meditated crime, was added the intense and over-
powering horror of at once recognizing a sister, and burying in the same
moment (as he believed) his dagger in her heart’ (1997: 133). This is a
more powerful scene when we discover that Leonardo forgets to retrieve
the dagger whose hilt is engraved with the name ‘Megalena Strozzi’
(1997: 135).
Students had no problems reading this scene psychoanalytically, that

is, they viewed Megalena quite literally as the phallic mother in her rela-
tionship with Leonardo, and were disturbed by the incestuous overtones
of him stabbing his sister. However, they were less capable of artic-
ulating the possible relationship between Victoria and Megalena that
Leonardo facilitates. Many of the students read the murder scene as two
women fighting over one man. I asked the class to compare this portrayal
with the homosocial one in Byron’s The Giaour between Hassan and
the infidel Giaour whose love for Hassan’s courtesan Leila prompts the
Ottoman overlord to kill her for her infidelity. Byron’s poetic oriental
tale emphasizes the intimacy of the two men bonded by hatred. In
reconsidering Megalena’s anger against Victoria once Leonardo explains
the situation, many students began to read the novel’s attempted murder
scene as foregrounding the homosocial bonding and rivalry not between
two men, but remarkably between two women (also noted by Heiland
2004: 44). However, at this point in our discussions, only the male
student who suggested that Victoria models herself after Ardolph and
Zofloya wrestled with my argument that female masculinity, instead of
the limited concept of phallic femininity, might be a more productive
way to read the character of Victoria who, unlike Megalena, is less
invested in empowering her femininity than in adopting masculinity.
While most students did acknowledge the passive masculinity of
Victoria’s brother Leonardo and her husband Berenza, the women in
the class did not want to interpret Victoria’s adoption of masculine role
models as anything more than the expression of a radical feminism.
Furthermore, some students of both genders explained that because
Zofloya first appears in Victoria’s dream, we should read him as her
evil doppelganger: that he is a satanic, orientalized Moor indicates
the extent to which Victoria’s desires for power are unconventional.
Whether Zofloya is a figure for Victoria’s desires or not, Dacre’s text
implies that the origins of Victoria’s demonic imagination are specific-
ally gendered social injustices against which writers like Mary Wollstone-
craft and her literary circle fought. For Victoria survives the knife wound
and is so highly regarded by Berenza for saving his life that he rewards
her the only way he knows: by marrying her. That Berenza deemed her
unworthy for a wife and kept her as a mistress until this life-saving event
is never forgotten by Victoria. When she secretly vows revenge because
Berenza did not initially want to marry but ravish her, Victoria’s rage
appears to be less against Berenza than against her society’s gendered
double standard for social conduct: men can have lovers and wives, but
women may only be wives or whores. ‘With what pleasure, with what
delight, with an air how unembarrassed, did he now introduce, as his

wife, to an elegant and respectable society, her whom he could have felt
but a vain and inconsiderable triumph in introducing as his mistress to
the gay and dissolute!’ (Dacre 1997: 139). Only in this feminist reading
may Victoria’s later murder of the considerably younger daughter-figure
Lilla be read as another revenge killing against the kind of woman society
considers acceptable. But as we turned our attention to the two women,
my students, especially the self-identified feminists, had more difficulty
with a feminist interpretation.
To begin with, all the students recognized the novel’s subversion of
conservative Romanticist conceptions of femininity, such as passivity,
affectionate mothering, female bonding, obedience to men, emotional
weakness as in crying or fainting, and irrational childish behavior.
Although Victoria’s mother Laurina is a failure and is rightly blamed
for not instilling higher moral principles in her daughter, she is also
stereotypically feminine in her lusty desires and in her inability to resist
temptation. As my students noted, Laurina simply moves from angelic
mother to whorish adulteress. The descriptions of Lilla and Victoria
replicate the angel/whore dichotomy less than a female–male opposi-
tion. Henriquez, whom Victoria tries to conquer with her feminine wiles
and seductive arts, describes her in masculine not promiscuous terms.
Compared with Lilla’s
trembling delicacy, her gentle sweetness, her sylph-like fragile

form, [and] softloveliness, Victoria he viewed with almost abso-
lute dislike; her strong though noble features, her dignified
carriage, her authoritative tone – her boldness, her insensibility, her
violence, all struck him with instinctive horror; so utterly opposite to
the gentle Lilla, that when, with an assumed softness she [Victoria]
deigned to caress her [Lilla], he almost trembled for her tender life,
and compared the picture in his mind, to the snowy dove fondled
by the ravenous vulture.
(Dacre 1997: 196)
In class, the students were surprised that Henriquez’s disgust did not
arise from Victoria’s promiscuity or marital infidelity (after all, she is
married to his older brother). Rather, as my students noticed, Henriquez
is horrified by Victoria’s masculine traits: if she were a man, Henriquez’s
portrayal would hardly be considered negative.
Earlier in this honors class, we had discussed the potential lesbian
undertones of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem ‘Christabel’ (1816) in
which the evil Geraldine is described by Bard Bracy in a dream as

a ‘bright green snake’ (Coleridge 2006: 537) wrapped around a dove,
representing the innocent Christabel. While Coleridge’s poem encour-
ages us to read Geraldine as a phallic woman and, thereby, raises the
spectre of homoeroticism (albeit problematically as lethal lesbianism),
Henriquez’s description of Victoria left these students with what they
considered to be a jarring fusion of honorable masculine characteristics
and a female body. In fact, as the novel progresses towards the climactic
scene of Victoria repeatedly stabbing a scantily clad, starved and tortured
Lilla, it became almost impossible for my class to see Victoria as a
radical feminist fighting patriarchy. Perhaps ‘the most bizarre scene’, as
Hoeveler rightly states, ‘in the history of the female gothic’ (Hoeveler
1997: 193), Lilla’s death is both bloody and pornographic:
Victoria, no longer mistress of her actions, nor desiring to be so, seized

by her streaming tresses the fragile Lilla, and held her back. – With
her poignard she stabbed her in the bosom, in the shoulder, and other
parts: – the expiring Lilla sank upon her knees. – Victoria pursued
her blows – she covered her fair body with innumerable wounds,
then dashed her headlong over the edge of the steep. – Her fairy
form bounded as it fell against the projecting crags of the mountain,
diminishing to the sight of her cruel enemy, who followed it far as
the eye could reach – those fair tresses dyed in crimson gore, that
bleeding bosom.
(Dacre 1997: 220–221)
Though the class assumed that Victoria is heterosexual, as with

Megalena, they were able to discern the violent undertones of slasher
lesbianism in the prolonged murder of Lilla. Even those male and female
students toying with the notion of female masculinity were distressed
by the novel’s negative portrayal of non-normative masculinity (both
in Zofloya and Victoria).
I suggest that Victoria’s excessive rage over other more domesticated
women combined with her confident pleasure in her own sexual prowess
(portrayed as nymphomaniac) may be read as female masculinity
that cannot express itself as anything but a pathologized masculinity.
However, all students were dissatisfied with our analyses of Victoria.
This was the case precisely because students could not relinquish their
belief in an essentialist two-gender model. In other words, they had
trouble with Victoria because they were unwilling, in Butler’s terms, to
‘trouble’ gender, and, subsequently, to sever the bond between male
bodies and masculinity, as Halberstam advocates. Following the lead of

the few self-identified feminists who strove to interpret Dacre as a radical
feminist of her times, none of the students articulated a queer reading
of Victoria despite their collective close reading to suggest as much. At
the end of the day, I believe these undergraduate students were more
disturbed with what the novel’s association of passivity with femininity
and aggressive violence with masculinity implies about masculinity,
whether it is embodied in so-called normative white male bodies, non-
normative minority bodies, or non-normative female bodies.
Through our mutual professor–student heteroglossic exploration of
discourses of masculinities in Charlotte Dacre’s problematic gothic
novel, what emerges are embittered and embattled masculinities that
are no longer the sole preserve of male-born individuals. Moreover, our
discussions of Zofloya expose the limitations of two-gendered essentialist
models that cannot account for any kind of transgendered position.
Masculinity, then, effectively gets relegated to a liminal position to
which both females and males have access. Ultimately, this is Judith
Halberstam’s goal: to pry apart masculinity and male bodies and allow
masculinity to occupy a fluid space. It is in the limited or contained
dialogic space of fictional narratives as they are explored in the inevit-
ably hegemonic classroom that masculinity remains an open issue and
that female masculinity may emerge from the closet. In this queer space,
reading for female masculinity empowers those students who wish to
interpret Charlotte Dacre herself as feminist for transgressing the generic
boundaries of what women writers could publish. In other words, by
teaching Dacre’s gothic novel in terms of the spectrum of masculinities,
including foremost female masculinity, students can recover the radical
feminist elements of an otherwise problematically misogynist female-
authored text. In the hands of Dacre, the post-Sadean gothic may then
function as an instrument for female liberation both for its author and
its heroine. However, this liberation comes with a price. Dacre’s gothic
tale, if not read as queer gothic, requires renewed loyalty to the period’s
own xenophobic anxieties and discourses of racial and class hegemony.
Works cited
Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex.’ New York and
London: Routledge, 1993.
——. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. ‘Christabel.’ Romanticism: An Anthology. In (Ed.)
Duncan Wu. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006. 639–655.
Dacre, Charlotte. Zofloya, or The Moor: A Romance of the Fifteenth Century. (Ed.)
Adriana Craciun. Peterborough: Broadview P, 1997.
Fitzgerald, Lauren. ‘Female Gothic and the Institutionalization of Gothic Studies.’
Gothic Studies 6. 1 (May 2004): 8–18. 2004.
Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 1998.
——. ‘Shame and White Gay Masculinity.’ Social Text 84–85 (Fall/Winter 2005):
219–233. 2005.
Heiland, Donna. Gothic and Gender: An Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004.
Hoeveler, Diane Long. ‘Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya: A Case Study in Miscegena-
tion as Sexual and Racial Nausea.’ European Romantic Review 8.2 (Spring 1997):
185–199.
——. ‘Teaching the Early Female Canon: Gothic Feminism in Wollstonecraft,
Radcliffe, Austen, Dacre, and Shelley.’ Approaches to Teaching Gothic Fiction: The
British and American Traditions. (Eds) Diane Long Hoeveler and Tamar Heller.
New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2003. 105–114.
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
Miles, Robert. Gothic Writing. 1750–1820. A Genealogy. Manchester: Manchester
Palmer, Paulina. Lesbian Gothic: Transgressive Fictions. London: Cassell, 1999.
Stryker, Susan. ‘The Transgender Issue: An Introduction.’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian
and Gay Studies 4.2 (1988): 145–158.
Williams, Anne. The Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1995.
5
Masculinity and Modernism:
Teaching D.H. Lawrence1
Robert Burden
Introduction: The problem with teaching Lawrence
Teaching Lawrence and gender requires careful historical understanding.

Female students who react to his anti-feminism, or male students who
identify with his promotion of male leadership have to think beyond
themselves – the situation of their own lives – and get back to the first
contexts of Lawrence’s writing. Like many writers of his generation,
Lawrence registered shifts in gender coding. Indeed, he was particularly
sensitive to them because his main concern was with the changing rela-
tionship between men and women. Before 1915 he supported whole-
heartedly the ‘feminization’ of the culture. After 1915 he began to
propose a ‘new masculinity’, a reassertion of degrees of patriarchy which
by the end of the war took on more strident tones. Lawrence is an
interesting case for gender studies because, as Hilary Simpson (1982)
pointed out, his writing career ‘spanned one of the most crucial periods
in women’s history’, with its intense period of radical feminism up to
1914, and the anti-feminist reaction after 1918.2 His ‘post-war paranoia
was not merely personal, but shared with many men of his generation’.3
Furthermore, the sea change in sexual ideology was the more total in
inverse proportion to the utter belief in the New Woman before the
war, when Lawrence made categorical statements like: ‘(Men should)
draw nearer to women, expose themselves to them, and be altered by
them’.4 The early Lawrence spent a lot of time in the company of radical
women; and, the extent to which his modern women friends and lovers
were also his literary collaborators is now much clearer.5 After the war,
Lawrence registers that general reaction to feminism which took the
form of a belief that the changes had gone too far, that women had
become too idealistic, too wilful, that they had succumbed to the general
90
Robert Burden 91
malaise of modernity in losing their ‘natural feminine instinct’ through

mechanical adherence to the latest chic behaviour.6 In terms of sexual
politics, as recent feminist theory has so often argued, Lawrence is repres-
entative of the masculinist reaction of his day, striving to reassert itself
at a time of post-war disillusion and dislocation.
In this chapter, I argue that Lawrence’s masculinist doctrine undergoes
degrees of deconstruction in fiction characterized by Lawrence himself
as ‘thought-adventure’.7 Lawrence appears to test out the ideas expressed
categorically in his essays and letters in his fiction. There is a consensus
view that Lawrence promoted masculine supremacy in phallocentric
and phallocratic fictions, especially in the so-called ‘leadership novels’
after the First World War where he appears to turn more explicitly
against women. His writing from about 1918 expresses an ‘hysterical
masculinity’, and one which is part of a general post-war reaction
against the extent of female emancipation – appearing to express ‘a
male modernist fear of women’s new power’.8 Now, this consensus view
has been variously challenged in recent criticism by claiming that it
is precisely here, in these novels of the 1920s – Aaron’s Rod, Kangaroo
and The Plumed Serpent – that Lawrence was at his most experimental,
his most modernist. The adventure of thought is read as an adventure
of writing, in which the theories of masculinity are promoted in texts
which in their play of linguistic and representational codes implicitly
question fixed meaning and grand narratives, and traditional certainties
of gender. In this chapter, I look at how to teach the characterolo-
gical and textual instabilities in Lawrence’s fiction that undermine the
doctrinal assertions of male leadership, as he represents the post-war
crisis of gender as a crisis of writing.
Hysterical masculinity and male leadership: Lawrence’s

masculinist doctrine
The new masculine anxiety is recalled by Lawrence in his late essay, ‘The
Real Thing’ (1929):9 ‘Perhaps the greatest revolution of modern times
is the emancipation of women The fight was deeply bitter, and, it
seems to me, it is won. It is even going beyond, and becoming a tyranny
of women’ (P 196). For Lawrence the sexual revolution has gone too
far. Men have lost faith in themselves and have become submissive to
the demands of women; demands that are not instinctive but willed,
and therefore false. What began with men worshipping and glorifying
women in literature, and then by the new cinema (so despised by
Lawrence), has now ended up in a period (the 1920s) ‘of the collapse
92 Masculinity and Modernism
of instinctive life-assurance in men’, so that sex has become ‘a great

weapon and divider’. The new freedom for women has led to a greater
unfreedom. So man’s old self needs to die and be reborn into a renewed
instinctive masculinity – a forgotten instinct. The ‘real thing’ is to ‘feel
right’ by being ‘in touch with the vivid life of the cosmos’ (P 202).
This essay can, then, be taken as an example of Lawrence’s most
consistent principle, namely, the instinctive is the natural, and any
attempt to change instinct by thought is an aberration. Lawrence writes
of that modern woman, ‘always tense and strung-up’ who has ‘less peace,
less of that lovely womanly peace that flows like a river, less of the
lovely, flower-like repose of a happy woman’ (P 197).
Lawrence was not always so poetically sentimental. In 1918 he wrote
in more categorical, programmatic terms to Katherine Mansfield:
I do think a woman must yield some sort of precedence to a man,

and he must take this precedence. I do think that men must go ahead
absolutely in front of their women, without turning round to ask for
permission or approval from their women. Consequently the women
must follow as it were unquestioning.10
It is here that Lawrence’s belief in the return to male superiority is first

expressed. In the same year, 1918, he is writing the essays, ‘Education
of the People’, soon to be followed by ‘Democracy’ (1919);11 and, in
1921 Fantasia of the Unconscious, where he formulates in stark terms
his critique of the ideals of liberal democracy, like equality – seeing
it as unnatural, and an attempt at the kind of mechanical process of
standardization in modern industry and mass society – and the tradi-
tional role of motherhood in the upbringing of children which he
accuses of destroying the child by ‘emotional and psychic provocation’
(P 621). Maternal love is now a specific target for Lawrence, driven no
doubt by a revision of his own case as represented in Sons and Lovers
(1913). However, the denunciation of the idealization of the Mother
as Magna Mater is also evident in Women in Love. The ‘deadly idealism’
of idolizing the mother – child relationship has lead to ‘the grovelling
degeneracy of Mariolatory!’ (P ibid.). Lawrence insists that women are
‘devouring mothers’ dominating men, treating them as boys. Lawrence
warns women to beware ‘the mother’s boy!’12 In Mr Noon Johanna
complains about those mothers’ darlings, ‘all Hamlets, obsessed by their
mothers, and we’re supposed to be all Ophelias, and go and drown
ourselves’.13
Robert Burden 93
Lawrence’s post-war essays are, in Hilary Simpson’s words, ‘a violent

and often sadistic attack on democracy and liberal idealism, in the
ranting style that now begins to characterize Lawrence’s writing’.14 It is
in this tone and style that Lawrence insists on a new masculinity which
will abolish the kinds of gender relatedness sought in The Rainbow and
Women in Love. Henceforth there will be a return to the hierarchical
order of Patriarchy, but not simply in the senses analysed by Kate Millett
(1969) in Sexual Politics. Lawrence’s Patriarchy will be based on more
ancient models close to the Old Testament Church Fathers, or a pre-
Columbian ‘natural’ aristocracy (in The Plumed Serpent). It would not
be the last time in the twentieth century that, in the general chaos of
post-war dislocation, masculinist mythic solutions will be found for the
problems of political realities.
The Great War has also played its part in ruining ‘manhood’: ‘These
are the heroes of the Great War. They went and fought like heroes,
truly, to prove their manhood’.15 But they did this from a wrong
idea of manhood. Like ‘heroic automata’, they understood themselves
within the given masculine codes of heroism, unquestioningly believing
they were making the world safe for democracy. They ‘never faced the
strange war-passions that came up in themselves’. They believed the
world would be the same again. For Lawrence, the opportunity for a
new world has been missed:
Out of the strange passion that arose in men during the war, there
should have risen the germ of a new idea, and the nucleus of a new
way of feeling. Out of the strange revulsions of the days of horror,
there should have resulted a fierce revision of existing values and
the fierce repudiation of false values should have ripened the seed of
a whole new way of experience, the clue to a whole new era.16
Post-war man is disillusioned, disoriented and deracinated. T.S. Eliot’s

‘hollow man’ wanders in the wasteland of post-war England. Lawrence
will take himself and his fictional protagonists abroad in search of altern-
ative models of man – as political and spiritual leaders.
In 1925 Lawrence declared that: ‘The reign of love is passing, and the
reign of power is coming again’.17 But we should be clear about what
Lawrence means by ‘power’. He differentiates between ‘will’ and ‘power’.
The Nietzschean ‘will-to-power’, as Lawrence understands it, is just
‘bullying’ – like the force imposed by the fascist dictator on the masses
which Lawrence had witnessed in Italy, and which is emergent in Aaron’s
Rod. Lawrence works through the problems of power and leadership in

this and the two subsequent novels, Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent.
Power is beyond the egotistical will, it ‘comes to us from beyond’.18
It cannot be grasped through ‘willing and intellectualizing’, it is ‘self-
generated’.19 It comes from ‘living’ which consists in ‘doing what you
really, vitally want to do: what the life in you wants to do, not what
your ego imagines you want to do’.20 Lawrence’s theory of power derives
from the idea of the charismatic leader common in political theories
of the time21 combined with the notion of a ‘natural’ aristocracy of
prophetic artists or writers, like himself, who would lead the people by
example into an era of cultural regeneration. The political version of this
is played out in Kangaroo, an Australian staging of the political theatre
of 1920s Europe. The process of a cultural regeneration through spiritual
revivalism is dramatized in The Plumed Serpent.
Power can be destructive and creative. But in Lawrence’s sense, argued
for in his essays, true power is always instinctive; and, by implication,
when responsibly used is creative: it always ‘puts something new into the
world’.22 It is up to the new man to regenerate the culture in the ‘reign
of power’. In Fantasia of the Unconscious he blames the whole post-war
cultural crisis on living ‘from the head’ instead of ‘from the spontaneous
centres’ of the self.23 His solution to the crisis is quite explicit:
We can’t go on as we are. Poor, nerve-worn creatures, fretting our

lives away and hating to die because we have never lived. The secret is
to commit into the hands of the sacred few the responsibility which
now lies like torture on the mass. Let the few leaders be increasingly
responsible for the whole.24
However, in order to make it absolutely clear that these few are men,
Lawrence resorts to a reductionist conservative theory of sexual differ-
ence: women are naturally passive, men active; women belong in the
domestic sphere, men in the public sphere;25 women live by feeling, men
by a sense of purpose;26 man is the great adventurer with the passion of
collective purpose.27 Thus, Lawrence’s new masculinity is based on old
gender stereotypes.
Fortunately, Lawrence’s women characters are not as one-dimensional
as the doctrine seems to demand. It is in the fiction of the 1920s,
contemporary with these discussions, that Lawrence takes the woman’s
question and the reaction to it in the form of the new masculinity on
a series of ‘thought-adventures’. What makes these works still inter-
esting is the way they both assert and deconstruct the new masculinist
Robert Burden 95
doctrine. Knights (1999) sees in Lawrence’s writing a paradox: ‘that one

of the most avowedly phallocentric writers is in fact engaged in a crit-
ical account of masculinity which inevitably raises questions about the
nature of male being and male power’.28
Masculinity and literary modernism
There is of course a cultural history of masculinity in the early twentieth

century, which provides a context for reading and teaching Lawrence.
Middleton (1992) explains how men began to reflect on themselves
as a gender, asking themselves and each other what it meant to be
a man, after feminism had been raising consciousness about gender
difference. Men turned their gaze inward and began questioning cultur-
ally constructed images of masculinity, the process from boyhood to
manhood, manliness, and their position of power, social expectations
and conventional responsibilities. The danger in such self-reflexivity
is that men might succumb to fantasies of ‘self-aggrandizement’.29
Literary Modernism was very preoccupied with the issues of mascu-
line subjectivity, and in a more self-conscious way than popular culture
at the time. Lawrence belongs to this moment in the early history of
twentieth-century masculinity. For him, as for others of his genera-
tion, the ‘relation between subjectivity and power’ was – as it still is –
‘difficult to articulate’.30 Man only became consciously gendered once
patriarchy was questioned as the dominant mode of socio-cultural form-
ation. Rethinking ‘existing concepts of gender and identity in terms of
the relations between society, reason and emotion’31 enables a theor-
izing of masculinity as a preliminary to cultural change.
The First World War was a focus for the crisis in masculinity. Tradi-
tional codes of heroism and cowardice, patriotism and sacrifice, violence
and pacifism could no longer be taken for granted. On the Western Front
the new war machine was a transpersonal instrument of mass destruc-
tion. At home the force of changing social and cultural values were
partly the result of the women’s movement. State propaganda was
no longer going unquestioned, especially in Modernist writing, which
represented a subjectivity at odds with itself. Lawrence’s The Rainbow
has often been analysed in these philosophical terms.32 As Middleton
argues, in The Rainbow the history of consciousness is a gendered history,
as the men characters struggle to form ‘an inward gaze’, while the
women characters from the outset cope better with the pressures of
modern subjectivity. For Middleton, the portrait of Will Brangwen ‘is
one of the first important analyses of modern masculine sexuality in
English writing’.33 Traditional codes of manliness, virility and patri-

archy are increasingly under threat in the novel from, in Lawrence’s
words, ‘woman becoming individual, self-responsible, taking her own
initiative’.34 Anna’s fight with and victory over Will, and Ursula’s
destruction of Skrebensky, just as Gudrun’s battle for supremacy with
Gerald in Women in Love, are all key instances of modern masculinities
succumbing to the new, independent-minded woman. And this type of
female character persists in Lawrence’s ‘leadership’ fiction of the 1920s
as a radical voice, albeit in the margins of the text. I’m thinking here of
characters like Harriett Somers in Kangaroo, and Josephine Ford or the
Marchesa in Aaron’s Rod. In The Rainbow, the men are supposed to learn
about their emotions and their sexuality from the women. Yet it seems
that the men will not change that easily because the old masculine
codes are deeply ingrained, and the pressures to be a man are some-
times overwhelming. Will Brangwen, the craftsman, devotes himself to
Gothic church art; Anton Skrebensky, the soldier, marries the colonel’s
daughter and is posted to India; Gerald Crich, the captain of industry,
commits suicide. The more successfully ‘feminized’ man, Rupert Birkin,
already shows signs of the emergent new masculinity: first, as he feels the
need for a close relationship with a man – although the precise form
that should take is left teasingly ambiguous – and he thus foreshadows
the relationships between Rawdon Lilly and Aaron Sissons in Aaron’s
Rod, Cooley and Somers in Kangaroo, and Ramon and Cipriano in The
Plumed Serpent; and, second, as he reacts violently to the power of a
woman’s love, which he wants to destroy for ever because it is so wilful
and insistent. Birkin wants to get beyond the ‘messiness’ of sex, into a
more impersonal relationship; and in this he prefigures Aaron Sissons
walking out of his marriage and trying to live without sex altogether.
The problem of male intimacy first emerges in Lawrence’s fiction in
the Gerald–Birkin relationship in Women in Love: they only get close
to intimate physical contact by staging a naked wrestling contest. In
Aaron’s Rod, Lilly massages Aaron’s sick body, in a bolder moment of
homoeroticism on Lawrence’s part. Yet the role model is that of moth-
ering the sick boy. Indeed, here where the men try to go it alone
without women, domesticity has only female models, and it is described
as such in text as the men take it in turns to be mother. Homosocial
bonding is a crucial focus in Lawrence’s writing (even as early as Sons and
Lovers where Paul Morel bonds with his erstwhile rival Baxter Dawes).
However, Lawrence remains ambivalent towards homosexuality. There
is a tacit heterosexual imperative that runs through the fiction, and a
Robert Burden 97
repressed homoerotic desire that sometimes threatens to express itself.

As Jonathan Dollimore argues:
running through it all is the problem, or the promise, of the homo-

erotic. It is made to carry the burden of Women in Love’s deepest
tension or contradiction: it is both the agent of death, reduction and
degeneration, and the source of the deepest possibility of redemp-
tion. The extent of Lawrence’s ambivalence towards homosexuality
is striking.35
Lawrence’s writing in the period of Modernism coincides with key

discussions on sexuality and gender difference in Freudian psychoana-
lysis, the sexual theories of Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis,36 Marie
Stopes’ Married Love (1916), as well as the assault on Victorian taboos
and prudery in literature.37 Carpenter promoted a more open recogni-
tion of homosexuality, which in itself enabled the sexuality of women
to emerge as a phenomenon and a discourse in its own right. Gender
difference drew attention to the sexuality of men, but the discussion
took long to emerge. Indeed, men developed a consciousness of their
gender and sexuality because of the First World War, as the general
transvaluation of values affected traditional masculinity too, making it
visible and questionable.
Lawrence’s work clearly belongs to the crisis in masculinity which
really began in earnest in the early twentieth century and is still with us
today. What is important, however, is to get the students to notice that
Lawrence’s search for a new language to express feelings and sexuality
contrasted markedly with mainstream Modernism. T.S. Eliot founded a
whole theory of literature on ways of containing emotions in an accept-
able aesthetic form. If, like female sexuality, emotional outburst was
dangerous then the ‘objective correlative’ would textualize it in such
a way that the reader or spectator could experience it impersonally –
at a safe, aesthetic distance. Lawrence rejected Eliot’s neo-classicism for
expressive theories first developed by the Romantics. His representations
of moments of emotional crisis are closer to the Symbolists, and some-
times to the Expressionists, both inheritors of the Romantic tradition
of individual inner expressivity. Lawrence’s writing is a locus for the
expression of emotion, masculine or feminine, against the grain of the
conventional gender designation of the emotional sphere as exclus-
ively female. In The Rainbow, the principal male characters struggle to
express their feelings, and need the female characters to help them do
this. How would a mixed age seminar group – with different levels of
maturity and abilities to express their sexuality openly (indeed in groups

where usually the female outnumber the male students) – respond to
Lawrence’s demands?
Lawrence’s ‘male leadership’ writing engages fully in the crisis of
masculinity in the post-war world, telling stories of men questioning
their lives with women, their sexuality, sexual difference, in fiction
which tried to imagine masculinist alternatives to the cultural crisis.
After they fail to go it alone, male characters tend to be involved in
collective alternatives for men only – a political group planning to reas-
sert itself on the public stage, as in Kangaroo; or a religious movement
planning a return to a more authoritarian ritual order, as in The Plumed
Serpent – public arenas where men’s feelings can traditionally express
themselves.
Lawrence draws attention to the gendered constructions of narrat-
ives. These fictions are themselves stories men invent and tell each
other. They are stories of quest, travel, adventure, leadership. They allow
men to imagine a superior place for themselves at a time of crisis in
masculinity. Moreover, they are ancient, traditional masculine narrat-
ives. As Knights (1999) has argued, masculinity is more than gender
difference, or male encoding; it is at the same time a way of telling
stories.38 And as we can see from a cursory glance at the critical recep-
tion of Lawrence, male and female critics have told different stories
about Lawrence, just as older teachers appear to be more committed to
the continuing relevance of his work. What they all should acknow-
ledge, though, is that Lawrence’s masculine stories are often framed in
the ironies that destabilize their truth. And these ironies should enable
us to question the force of the masculinist argument. He does this by
giving women a debunking role in a world of idealist men, or by posi-
tioning women as focalizers with mixed feelings about male supremacy.
For example, in Kangaroo (Lawrence’s most explicitly political novel)
Harriett Somers casts a shadow over men’s idealism, and her husband’s
involvement:
What is all their revolution bosh to me! There have been revolutions
enough, in my opinion, and each one more foolish than the last.
And this will be the most foolish of the lot. And what have you
got to do with revolutions, you petty and conceited creature? You
and revolutions! You’re not big enough, not grateful enough to do
anything real. I give you my energy and my life, and you want to put
me aside as if I was a charwoman.39
Robert Burden 99
In The Plumed Serpent, a western woman, Kate Leslie tries to understand

the contradictions of Mexico, and is both repelled and later attracted
to its macho culture. The one novel where the woman’s viewpoint is
marginalized is Aaron’s Rod. Aaron Sissons’ attempt to live without
women is represented at the narrative level by his exclusive masculinist
reading of the situation, often objectively and without moral scruples
as he abandons his wife and children on Christmas Eve for an itinerant
existence as a flute-player. It is a masculine story certainly appealing to
male more than female readers, a solidarity already represented in the
degrees of male bonding in the text. Yet, because Lawrence allows the
women’s voices in the text to undermine any doctrinal masculinist
certainty, we can read the text against itself, and against Lawrence’s less
ambiguous essays, by repositioning what is marginal. The spirit of this
critical female – even feminist – voice is already evident in Mr Noon,
where Johanna’s sister complains that ‘all Englishmen are Hamlets,
they are so self-conscious over their feelings, and they are therefore so
false these men with their tragical man-hysterics!’40
Aaron’s Rod has been traditionally read as doctrinally anti-feminist.
But the text is not so consistently transparent. It offers us degrees of
deconstruction at different levels. We should look to the margins of
the text to decentre the masculinist ideology. A teacher might get the
students to find answers to the following questions:
• How exclusive is the male perspective?

• How absolute are the dominant anti-feminist ideas?
• How certain is the Lawrence of the essays of the ground on which
his new masculinity is built?
• Can we trust the tale?
There are two points of entry into this deconstructive reading of Aaron.
First, the marginalized role and speech of the women characters which
casts a shadow of doubt over all the masculinist assertions; second,
the meta-narrative intrusions of the narrator which undermine the
authority and reliability of the male stories. A different truth emerges,
therefore, in the voices of those marginalized women characters, and the
narrator who breaks through the otherwise exclusive perspective of the
main protagonist.
In order for a novel to maintain the coherence of the ideology it
represents it has to maintain a determinate silence on what might
threaten to tell a different story.41 Aaron’s Rod is a locus classicus for
the representation of an ideology – the new masculinity. However, it

is questioned from outside that ideology by the critical voice of the
feminine speaking from the margins of the text. Rereading the text
through feminist theory which is already in the text demonstrates that
the authority of the masculinist ideology is based on its exclusivity and
its marginalization of the feminine – which might create an interesting
dilemma for articulate women in the classroom. What is interesting
about Aaron is that it already prepares the ground for the woman student
or feminist critic through the women characters in the novel. Whilst
the masculine ideology of Lawrence’s post-war essays remains internally
coherent and can only be accepted or rejected by the reader as a matter
of belief, the novel with its play of narrative perspective already offers
the reader the possibility of rejecting the dominant ideas it is trying to
promote. In this respect the fiction demonstrates the limits of the ideas
in the essays. And this gives students the licence to reread the essay and
letters back through the fiction.
Aaron’s wife is only seen from his view, in both senses as focalized and
as ideology, except once when on his last visit home she has it out with
him, accusing him of not being a man (with all its traditional connota-
tions). Most significant, though, is when she says: ‘You ran away from
me, without telling me what you’ve got against me’ (AR 125). He can
only reply that he went because he had had enough. Her conventional
way of seeing things wins our sympathy as it breaks the monopoly the
man has on the truth – the new masculinity seems rather shaky as an
ideology.
Josephine Ford, the representative modern, metropolitan woman-
artist, is given the privileged role of focalizer at the opera through which
we get biting satire of the sham representation of Verdi’s Egypt. Lawrence
marks her exceptionality by giving her ‘some aboriginal American in
her blood’ despite her self-conscious arrogance (AR 46). She takes the
initiative, inviting Aaron to dinner, gets him to talk about himself, and
finds him inwardly indifferent to her, if not to everything (AR 65). She
takes the lead sexually, seducing him in spite of his avowed refusal of
women and love. Her view of him, and her behaviour establish a level of
plausibility which undermines his version later that sex with her was the
direct cause of his illness (we do not get the sex described). She repres-
ents the greatest threat to the new, vulnerable male. She is the second
female character whose voice has refused to remain marginalized.
Lady Franks is the strongest figure of traditional feminine idealism.
She is satirized for her belief in her work of reform, and the ‘restoring
of woman to her natural throne’ (AR 147). She disapproves of Aaron’s
Robert Burden 101
attitude to life, even though he can impress her with his music. Again
we get a critical perspective, albeit from a representative type mostly at
the receiving end of the masculinist attack. She reads him from her own
firm ideological position.
The Marchesa is also a critical voice incensed by the general miso-
gynistic attitude of the young men (AR 236ff.). Although she is seduced
by Aaron’s music, as he revives her singing and her sexuality with his
phallic flute, it is she who scripts his role in her opera buffa, despite the
sex-scenes being told from his privileged focalization. His earnest and
deliberate dominance of her is undermined by her easy acceptance of
his explanation that he cannot continue the affair because he is still
attached to his wife. His lie is clear to us; but it matters less to her because
the rules of the affair are what count. Her casualness is a symptom of
her experience in the game of adultery with a younger man. This genre
(with its implications of comic opera) offers the reader a completely
different perspective in its value as light entertainment to that of Aaron’s
masculine seriousness. Indeed, we are shown by an older, wiser woman
that he takes himself far too seriously. We are again made suspicious of
his motives for giving up the affair. Furthermore, just as he turns her
into the object of his desire, fetishizing her body in part-objects, so she
for her part uses him as her ‘fetish’, a magic, phallic implement for her
pleasure (AR 272–273). Although it is Aaron who becomes aware of this,
and thus it could be read as yet another male fantasy, it seems plausible
that it is the woman’s view because of the way she sets up the affair and
uses the younger man, with the utmost discretion.
These women’s voices speak, each in their own way, from the margins,
and give us a vantage point from which to read the masculinist ideology
against itself. Students could look for the details in text and discuss the
effectiveness of these voices: are they all effective enough to counter the
masculine ideology? And are we now being told that it is not so easy
to accept masculinity as a return to natural instinct, given its construc-
tedness as a force to counter the perceived dominance of the New
Woman? Don’t motives for the male attitudes towards women appear
in their contexts suspicious? Personal fears or war-affected weariness
are often talked up into a frenzy of misogyny and idealist solutions,
as they are in Lawrence’s essays. Yet in the novel they seem to lead
nowhere, except further away. Travel is the only remedy offered for the
crisis of masculinity. The assumptions on which the masculinist ideo-
logy relies for its authority are questioned by what the women say and
do in the text. These assumptions are also in doubt because of Aaron’s
inability or unwillingness to commit himself to Lilly as the new leader.
However, the decisive point is that the reversal of an opposition is no

guarantee of a fundamental change. As Derrida insisted, all oppositions
are violent hierarchies, the first term being in the position of power.42 If
for Lawrence the wilful woman was dominant in the post-war culture,
then does not reversing the hierarchy give power back to the men? And
does not the situation still remain one of power and subjugation? We
need to go one step further and, by understanding the assumptions on
which the binary of male–female relies, displace the power struggle by
changing the terms of the social formation. How you do this is another
matter. This does not invalidate the method of deconstruction – and
importantly a method that should enable the students to challenge the
masterful pedagogy of the Lawrencian teacher.
The role of the narrator (and the teacher), as distinct from the focal-
izing agents, is also a destabilizing one. Like the narrating persona of
Mr Noon, only less anarchic, the narrator of Aaron breaks the flow of
the story with meta-narrative comments: ‘Our story will not yet see the
daylight’ (AR 39); ‘Our story continues by night’ (AR 45); ‘Behold our
hero’ (AR 131). And in doing this, a different relationship is established
with the reader (and the teacher with the students): a pact at a meta-
narrative level demanding a satirical attitude to the fiction from the
reader. We are thus at several removes from the dominant masculinist
views of Aaron (as spokesman for the Lawrence of the essays and letters):
first, through his distancing and estranging perspective; second, through
the further distance created by the marginalized women’s voices; third,
through the doubts Aaron has about Lilly and the idea of being able to
go it alone; and, last, through the self-conscious narrator. None of this
will mitigate the force of the misogyny for those readers who, seeking
to prove a case against Lawrence, will be offended. The question to ask,
though, is why Lawrence writes a novel characterized by degrees of play
and instability which undermines the authority of ideas he appears to
believe in at the time? Did he want to pre-empt the attack from his
women readers? Should we really trust the tale?
There are two other intrusions from the narrator which have more
significance. The first is when he discusses how he has to represent
Aaron’s self-understanding in a way that Aaron could not. What is ‘risen
to half consciousness’ in the character, is made explicit by the narrator
in the form of commentary; but one that is also meta-commentary
(AR 163). Aaron thinks deeper thoughts in music, while the narrator
has to translate them into words. And here the narrator with the comic
persona of the English tradition (dominant in Mr Noon) turns modernist
too: ‘If I, as word-user, must translate his deep conscious vibrations
Robert Burden 103
into finite words, that is my own business. I do but make a translation

of the man. He would speak in music. I speak with words’ (AR 164).
Aaron is not as articulate with words as the narrator; and the ‘gentle
reader’ should not ‘grumble’ at this fact, but merely decide whether the
thoughts attributed to Aaron are plausible (AR ibid.). The second is just
an aside, but a telling one. Aaron has written a letter to Sir William which
contains the gist of Lawrence’s current philosophy and the narrator
comments: ‘When a man writes a letter to himself, it is a pity to post
it to somebody else. Perhaps the same is true of a book’ (AR 264). If
Lawrence felt in the early 1920s that writing was like sending a letter to
yourself, then we are reminded that it must have been difficult for him
to imagine a reader because of the continual difficulties he had getting
his books published after the banning of The Rainbow in 1915. Moreover,
this might account for the presence of characters as readers in his fiction
since Women in Love, and the extreme frustration shown by his now
infamous assault on the female reader in Mr Noon. And this is all a much
more serious matter than just playful meta-narrative markers about the
story’s progress. It goes to the heart of the representationalist crisis of
Modernism.
I suggest, then, that if Lawrence’s novels of the 1920s are examples
of this process of self-questioning, then we need to assess the extent
of his critical stance towards the new masculinity which he promotes
aggressively at the same time in his essays. A serious methodological
point that arises from this approach is that we should be wary of reading
the fiction exclusively through the essays. It might be more useful to
read the essays and letters from the critical perspectives of the fiction –
which might be simply done by handing out extracts for comments. This
process should find the grounds for an effective challenge to monolithic
readings of Lawrence’s truth like those of the early feminist attack, which
begins with John Middleton Murry’s (1931) character assassination of
Lawrence and reaches its high point with Kate Millett (1969).43 To quote
Knights once again:
To set about re-writing male narratives was to risk rendering the whole
subject unstable, so Lawrence’s later programme was not simply a
performance of a script supplied by his own neuroses, but a response
to problems he had himself courageously opened up.44
Students should become aware of the extent to which, in Lawrence’s

fiction, gender becomes mobile as the characters move out of the tradi-
tional feminine and masculine spheres of self-definition, and travel in
search of new identity. The rooted Brangwen existence of the opening

of The Rainbow will give way to deracination for which the restless
women are initially responsible. Aaron Sissons, Rawdon Lilly, Lovatt
Somers and Kate Leslie – all as part-selves of a travelling author – are
representations of the new mobile self in the writing of the 1920s. The
first three characters are in flight from the feminized world of post-war
England in search of a new masculinity. Kate Leslie is in flight from
herself in a story which attempts to reverse the historical process of
modernity and the feminization of culture. However, by imagining in
The Plumed Serpent the consequences of a return to pre-Columbian patri-
archy, and filtering the story through the critical views of a modern
woman, Lawrence draws attention to the cultural constructedness of
what is otherwise passed off as an ancient instinct. The female protag-
onist creates enough doubt through a modern, disarming irony to make
the ground un-firm on which the new patriarchal grand narrative is
founded. In Lawrence’s fiction, gender difference was being destabilized
in a narrative Modernism. The representation of masculinity and femin-
inity in these novels undermines the reductionism of any ideologically
narrow criticism, and should enable a critical perspective on the gender
stereotypes on display in contemporary culture.
Summary
I have argued in this paper that Lawrence belongs to the ongoing

discussion within Modernism of the politics of gender; but also that
his fictional narratives are not monolithic expressions of doctrine, but
instead the masculinist ideas in them are partly questioned by the
texts which try to promote them. The critical women’s voices create
ironies. Lawrence is at his most sceptical in parts of Aaron’s Rod and
practically all of Kangaroo, his most adventurous writing. The doubts
are played down in The Plumed Serpent, yet the deconstructive posi-
tion of the principal female character teases out the contradictions in
the text to an extent that the earlier feminist readings, for instance,
could not achieve by exclusively concentrating on the sexual politics.
What emerges is the recognition of a writing which, while seeking to
express a doctrine of masculine supremacy in reaction to the perceived
wilfulness of modern women and the general post-war cultural disin-
tegration, represents degrees of modernist experiment. Thus it is that
textual instabilities undermine the assertions of ideology. In this, the
‘leadership’ novels belong to the whole play of writing that began with
Women in Love, and includes The Lost Girl and Mr Noon.
Robert Burden 105
The textual instabilities, and the shifting relationship between the

essays, letters and fiction, should impact on teaching the text: a
less authoritarian approach to Modernism, gender and Lawrence. The
students should not be allowed to wait for the truth from the one who
is supposed to know;45 nor should they hope that the canonical text has
a single truth. But also shifting truths and textual instabilities should
not be allowed to lead to interpretive anarchy but encourage the open-
minded investigation of writing in open-endedness and its different
genres.
Methodologically speaking, I would first point out that reading the
essential oppositions against their assumptions is a strategy of re-
appropriating the text in an understanding that goes beyond its own
self-understanding, and, at the same time challenging those readings
which are parasitic on that self-understanding. Second, I’ve read the text
of Aaron’s Rod as self-deconstructing, as a self-conscious play of writing
that always already rehearses the critical disputes of its reception.46 In
doing this, I’m working with the assumption that monologic, narrowly
ideological reading is deconstructed by the play of meaning in the text,
by the destabilizing strategies of writing. As Derrida asserted:
some works which are highly ‘phallocentric’ in their semantics [he

has Joyce in mind], their intended meaning, even their theses, can
produce paradoxical effects, paradoxically antiphallocentric through
the audacity of a writing which in fact disturbs the order or the logic
of phallocentrism or touches on limits where things are reversed: in
that case the fragility, the precariousness, even the ruin of order is
more apparent.47
Notes
1. An earlier version of this paper without the pedagogic discussion was
published in Simonetta de Filippis and Nick Ceramella (eds), D.H. Lawrence
and Literary Genres (Napoli: Loffredo Editore, 2004).
2. Hilary Simpson, D.H. Lawrence and Feminism (London: Croom Helm,
1982), 15.
3. Ibid.
4. Letter to Arthur McLeod 2 June 1914, respectively. Cited in Simpson,
op. cit., 16.
5. Cf. Simpson’s last chapter. The collaboration was not changed by the war.
The Boy in the Bush (1924) was a reworking of Mollie Skinner’s text; and
Lawrence had plans to write a novel with Mabel Dodge Luhan called ‘The
Wilful Woman’, a fragment of which is extant (1922).
6. The term ‘feminism’ had a largely pejorative sense in the 1920s, as it entered
more common usage. As Buhle explains, ‘its meaning [was] encapsulated in
the pejorative “careerism.” Feminism came to signify masculinism, and little
else’. Mari Jo Buhle, Feminism and its Discontents (Cambridge, Massachusetts
and London: Harvard University Press, 1998), 13.
7. Kangaroo (London: The Penguin edition of the Cambridge D.H. Lawrence,
1997), 279.
8. Marianne Dekoven, ‘Modernism and Gender’ in Michael Levenson (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999), 174.
9. Reprinted in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D.H. Lawrence (London:
Heinemann, 1936). All page references for this and other essays, which appear
in Phoenix are to this edition, and will be indicated by (P) in text.
10. 5 December 1918 inThe Selected Letters of D.H. Lawrence compiled and edited
by James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 163.
11. Both not published until 1936.
12. ‘On Being a Man’ (1923) reprinted in Reflections On the Death of a Porcupine
and Other Essays (1925), edited by Michael Herbert (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988), 216.
13. Mr Noon (London: The Penguin edition of the Cambridge D.H. Lawrence,
1996), 124.
14. Simpson (1982), op. cit., 93.
15. ‘On Being a Man’, loc. cit., 219.
16. Ibid., 221.
17. ‘Blessed are the Powerful’ in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine, op. cit.,
321.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., 322.
20. Ibid., 323.
21. For the sources of Lawrence’s political ideas, see Rick Rylance, ‘Lawrence’s
Politics’ in Keith Brown (ed.), Rethinking Lawrence (Buckingham: Open
University Press, 1990); Peter Fjagesund, The Apocalyptic World of
D.H. Lawrence (London and Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1991); Anne
Fernihough, D.H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1993).
22. ‘Blessed are the Powerful’, loc. cit., 323
23. Fantasia of the Unconscious and Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (London:
Penguin, 1971), 83.
24. Ibid., 88.
25. Ibid., 97.
26. Ibid., 102–103.
27. Ibid., 109–110.
28. Ben Knights, Writing Masculinities: Male Narratives in Twentieth-Century Fiction
(London: Macmillan, 1999), 89.
29. Peter Middleton, The Inward Gaze: Masculinity and Subjectivity in Modern
Culture (London: Routledge, 1992), 9.
30. Ibid., 10.
31. Ibid., 12–13.
Robert Burden 107
32. Cf. Michael Bell, D.H. Lawrence: Language and Being (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991); Anne Fernihough (1993), op. cit.; Fiona Becket,
D.H. Lawrence: The Thinker as Poet (London: Macmillan, 1997).
33. Ibid., 75.
34. Letter to Edward Garnett 22 April 1914.
35. Jonathan Dollimore, Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture (London: Allen
Lane/Penguin, 1998), 270–271.
36. Edward Carpenter, Civilization, its Cause and Cure (London: Swan
Sonnenschein 1889); Henry Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 7
volumes (1897–1928, revised edition, 1936).
37. For a well-informed study see Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and
Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997).
38. Ben Knights (1999), op. cit.
39. Kangaroo op. cit., 162.
40. Mr Noon op. cit., 196.
41. This is the classic Althusserian argument best exemplified by Pierre Macherey
in A Theory of Literary Production (London: Routledge, 1979. First published
1965). Edward Said also redeploys it in Culture and Imperialism (London:
Chatto and Windus, 1993).
42. Cf. Jacques Derrida, Positions (3 interviews) (London: Athlone Press, 1981.
First published 1972).
43. John Middleton Murry, Son of Woman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1931); Kate
Millett, Sexual Politics (New York and London: Virago, 1969).
44. Ben Knights op. cit., 84.
45. ‘le supposé à savoir’ – Lacan’s critique of the analytic situation where the
analysand’s expectation of the analyst’s authority is denied. The question of
knowledge and authority in teaching might be further investigated through
the Lacanian model. But this would require another paper.
46. For more detailed discussion of masculinity in Lawrence’s leadership
writing, see Robert Burden, Radicalizing Lawrence (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000)
Chapters 4 and 5.
47. Jacques Derrida, ‘That Strange Institution Called Literature: An Interview
with Jacques Derrida’, in Acts of Literature, edited and introduced by Derek
Attridge (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 50.
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Norwegian University Press, 1991.
London: Macmillan, 1999.
Ledger, Sally. The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997.
Middleton, Peter. The Inward Gaze: Masculinity and Subjectivity in Modern Culture.
Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics. New York and London: Virago, 1969.
Murry, John Middleton. Son of Woman. London: Jonathan Cape, 1931.
Rylance, Rick. ‘Lawrence’s Politics’ in Keith Brown (ed.), Rethinking Lawrence.
Buckingham: Open University Press, 1990.
Simpson, Hilary. D.H. Lawrence and Feminism. London: Croom Helm, 1982.
6
Gender and Narrative Form1
Ruth Page
Texts, technology and gender
The practice of responding to texts stands at the heart of the student’s

learning experience on an undergraduate degree in English studies.
Despite its critical status, analysing reader response is less than easy and
might involve any number of influential factors. Early studies in feminist
literary criticism considered the role that a reader’s gender might play in
textual response, and how practices of reading might entail a political
(specifically feminist) dimension.2 Now, some 20 years on, there is still
some way to go in addressing questions of gender and reader response. As
Johnson points out, changes in language and gender research have chal-
lenged the focus on the study of women alone to incorporate analysing
the construction of masculinities.3 The kind of texts that readers might
encounter both within and outside their academic study is also shifting,
with the evolution of digital culture.
The development of digital texts is highly significant. It brings into
sharp focus the potential influence of medium in the reading experience.
In particular, it provides an alternative to print culture, which Douglas
describes as so dominated by familiar conventions that ‘we can never
hope to clarify precisely what happens during the transaction between
reader and text’.4 Instead, both the technology and the alien conven-
tions of an electronic reading environment present the opportunity to
scrutinise reader response from a fresh perspective. The discussion of
reader response that follows in this chapter is thus embedded in wider
debates about technology, textuality and gender.
Studies that explore the relationships between gender and technology
present a complex and contradictory picture. On one level, techno-
logy (in general terms) has been characterised by masculine dominance
109
110 Gender and Narrative Form
and sexism. On another, amongst the manifold forms and uses of

technology, hypertext in particular has been attributed with feminist
potential. Indeed, the multiplicity of hypertext is a form of textu-
ality which can be used to open up co-existing contradictions and
provide spaces from which marginalised perspectives on gender can be
expressed. Landow returns to Cixous’s description of écriture feminine,
in which textual boundaries are ascribed with ideological signific-
ance, and univalence and closure understood as patriarchal restriction
which women’s writing must overcome. Given hypertext’s multiplicity,
Landow goes as far to debate ‘whether hypertext fiction and, indeed,
all hypertext is in some way a feminist sort of writing’.5 As such, the
political application of hypertext has been exploited by researchers like
Sullivan, who, working in pedagogical contexts use hypertexts as part
of an educational programme to create the possibility for reader-viewers
‘to interrogate their positions within dominant ideological regimes of
representation’ especially where these ideologies are understood as
patriarchal.6
For the most part, it is feminist researchers and practitioners who
have made use of hypertext to examine the construction of specific-
ally women’s identities and writing, as does Love, for example.7 While
this may be for good reason, such emphasis is not unproblematic, for
it leaves the issue of masculinity largely uncontested. The outcome is
that it is too easy to assume ‘masculinity’ to be a single, monolithic
construct that does not need to be questioned in relation to textual
medium or form. However, formulating questions about masculinity
and texts needs to be handled with precision and sensitivity. Within
the existing research literature, the equation of hypertext, écriture
feminine and feminism seems to be based upon a theoretical correlation
which in turn conflates issues of form, content and medium. It is
also necessary to disentangle the terms used to discuss ‘gender’ in
this context. Thus biological sex can be distinguished from gender as
a social construct, both of which are separable from political posi-
tions such as feminism or patriarchy.8 Given the metaphorical nature
of Cixous’ work which has influenced so much of the theoretical
discussions of technology, textuality and gender, there is an increasing
need for empirical data which examines what actually is, both in
terms of use of technology and reader response more generally. The
data and analysis discussed in the rest of this chapter are a first
step towards this end, exploring the potential connections between
form, medium, biological sex (of the reader) and representations of
gender.
Ruth Page 111
Data sample and methodology
The analysis discussed here examines the responses of 96 readers to a

collection of stories called Fishnet.9 The readers were all undergraduate
students at higher education institutions in the United Kingdom. Forty-
seven of the readers were male and forty-nine were female. The study
was carried out in three stages, with these readers divided into groups
according to subject of academic study and whether they read the hyper-
text or the print version of the stories. This is summarised in Table 6.1.
The main focus in this chapter will be on the readers taking part
in an English studies programme, with only brief comparisons made
with those who were part of a Faculty of Computing, Technology and
Engineering.
Fishnet is an amateur piece of writing by Charles Sundt. It might best
be described as transitional rather than native hypertext in that Fishnet
was originally written as eight separate, conventional stories about the
same set of characters that the author later integrated together into
one overarching web. As such, Fishnet does not contain many of the
characteristics of more sophisticated experimental hypertexts such as
multimedia effects (sound, image or animation) and readers can only
comment on rather than contribute to the story text. However, readers
are free to navigate their way through the hypertext in various ways.
The underlying principle is that the reader treats Fishnet as if it were
a series of stories being screened simultaneously that they can switch
between at will.
The rationale for choosing Fishnet was twofold. First, in its simplicity,
it facilitated a fairly crude analysis of the mechanics of hypertextual
reading by the analyst tracing which kinds of links the readers followed.
Second, in its transitional nature, it offered a transmedial comparison
of print and hypertext versions of the ‘same’ story, as the original print
versions of the stories were also available from the same website. In
this way, the potential influence of medium on reading response in
Table 6.1 Details of readers
Academic subject Hypertext/print Male Female Total
English Hypertext 14 28 42
English Print 11 15 26
Computing Hypertext 22 6 28
Total 47 49 96
this study could be explored, at least in part. As I have discussed in my

earlier work, numerous other factors may be important too, not least of
which is the reader’s evaluation of the narrative content. In this case,
they deemed Fishnet to be ‘poorly written’, which in some cases led to
their disengagement from the text.10
The English studies readers were asked to respond to Fishnet during
their class time as part of a module ‘Narrative Analysis’. Although the use
of technology within the class was unusual, the students were familiar
with the practices of close reading that the task set demanded. They
read through the hypertext, recording their responses in a reading log
which charted the pathway that they navigated and their qualitative
comments about the experience. They then wrote a short creative piece
which extended the original storyweb in some way. The students from
Faculty of Computing undertook exactly the same task. Finally, a third
group of English studies readers were given a print version of the short
stories. They were not asked to complete a reading log, but carried out
the creative writing task only.11
The mechanics of reading
The first area of reader response I examined was the pathways that the
readers took as they navigated through the hypertext. The structure of
Fishnet offered two polarised alternatives for navigating the storyweb.
Readers could click on numerical hyperlinks, which enabled them to
follow one storystrand consistently, or use the lexical hyperlinks, which
switched them into a different storystrand. The pathways generated by
following the different types of links contrasted sharply. The numer-
ical links could create a strongly linear sequence like a conventional
print narrative, often with a defined beginning, middle and end. In
comparison, the lexical links produced an associative pathway, with
little narrative coherence at all.
On the surface, these options share similarities with gendered descrip-
tions of reader response. For example, the linear sequence is not unlike
Carolyn Dinshaw’s metaphorical description of ‘reading like a man’ which
provides ‘a single, univalent textual meaning fixed in a hierarchical
structure’,12 or Peter Brook’s analysis of the ‘male plot of ambition’
which mirrors the reader’s sequential progression through conventional
narrative dynamics.13 In contrast, the fragmentary and open-ended
characteristics of the associative pattern of reading are suggestive of
the Cixous description of écriture feminine which ‘bursts partitions,
classes and rhetorics, orders and codes, must inundate, run through’.14
Ruth Page 113
However, gendering reading response in this way is limited, for these

analogies rest upon an abstract equation of sexual and textual response
which threatens to universalise both femininity and masculinity and
fails to explain how these metaphors might be related to actual reading
practices.
The data gathered in this study challenges these metaphorical asso-
ciations of gender and textual response. Critically, neither the binary
distinction between linearity and association nor its unequivocal
mapping onto gender values could be sustained. Both the male and
female readers used both types of links as they navigated through the
text, although with differing emphases. Furthermore, no two readers
took exactly the same pathway, reflecting the individualised nature
of the reading experience. At its most rudimentary, this suggests that
the explanatory power of biological sex as a sociological variable is
limited, and throws the gendering of reader response itself into further
doubt. However, comparing the readers’ pathways was a useful first
step in uncovering other differential patterns of response. With that
in mind, the readers’ pathways were analysed and then compared
according to the number of numerical hyperlinks taken. This indicates
the extent to which they recreated conventional narrative structures,
where the greater the proportion of numerical links, the higher the
degree of perceived linearity. The results of this analysis are presented in
Table 6.2.
At first glance, the figures seem to suggest that there is some differ-
ence in the pathways that the male and female readers took through the
hypertext. Male readers used the numerical links and created conven-
tional narrative sequences more frequently than did the female readers,
who instead made greater use of the lexical hyperlinks. However, the
qualitative comments that the students made about the experience
suggest that biological sex is not in itself a determining factor in this
aspect of reader response, nor did they describe their reading experi-
ence in explicitly gendered terms at all. Instead, the choice of reading
pathway seems to be associated with the reader’s expectation of hyper-
text as a medium. Several of the male readers explained their navigation
Table 6.2 Proportion of linear steps taken by readers (%)
Female readers (%) Male readers (%)
Average 26 42
as a result of their frustration with Fishnet as a hypertextual structure.

One student wrote:
But after I discovered that the lexias had no connection I read the
story I liked best in a traditional linear way. The format while at first
seems clever, becomes redundant.
Another commented,
The interactivity of the experience is rather pointless. I can imagine

a button labelled ‘Take me to another random page please!’ doing
pretty much the same job and producing an experience of similar
quality.
The decision to reconstruct a conventional narrative thus seems to

result from the reader’s search for relevance in the reading experience,
rather than an essentialist impulse to read in a ‘masculine’ way.
The extent to which these navigational choices might be interpreted
as a gendered process remains open to debate. Indeed, it is striking that it
was only the male students in this group who expressed their frustration
with the hypertext. This could be explained by their greater famili-
arity with digital texts, which they described as including e-journals,
weblogs and more sophisticated hypertextual narratives. By way of
contrast, none of the female students claimed to have any experience
of using technology in such forms. Thus it is the readers’ differential
experiences of technology and their subsequent expectations of hyper-
text as a medium that resulted in their choices to navigate the text in
a particular way. In the case of this sample of readers, the degree of
technological familiarity varied according to sex, where the male readers
showed greater technological expertise than the female readers. This
correlation seems to support early stereotypes of digital technology as a
masculine domain, and thus might function indirectly as a resource for
enacting ‘masculine’ behaviour. However, more recent research indic-
ates that patterns of technological usage do not support this stereotype,
and I do not wish to claim that the difference found here is in any
way fixed or universal. Despite the stereotypical gendering of techno-
logy as ‘masculine’, in this sample, there is little explicit evidence that
the technological expertise was understood by these students as a way
of performing their masculinity. However, it does seem to bear further
influence on the ways in which the readers conceptualised gender iden-
tity as expressed in their rewritings of the hypertext version of Fishnet.
Ruth Page 115
Gender in the storyworlds
The readers’ responses to the hypertext were also analysed in the light
of the creative writing they undertook which extended the original
storyweb in some way. These narrative fragments are understood as
what David Herman terms ‘storyworlds’.15 Storyworlds are special kinds
of mental models created when readers interpret narratives. Critically,
storyworlds do not treat narratives as textual products alone. Rather
as mental models, the reader’s interaction with them is inextricably
linked with their experience of real world contexts (albeit in a complic-
ated fashion which is less than easy to pin down). In this sense, the
analysis of representation is not limited to textual concerns alone but
may have wider implications for understanding these readers’ concep-
tions of gender identity.
I am most interested in characterisation as a storyworld element.
Following Herman’s work, I use Halliday’s system of transitivity choices
to examine who does what to whom.16 I am particularly interested in
the most frequently occurring participant role: that of ‘Actor’. This is the
‘do-er’ role associated with Material processes of external action. In the
following example, the Actor is underlined.
He clenched his fists, squeezing the small grains of tobacco deeper

beneath his nails.
(Male reader, hypertext version)
The Actors were analysed according to the ways in which they were
marked for gender. The characters’ gender could be lexically signalled,
so that the reader interpreted them as masculine, feminine, human but
without clear marking of gendered status, gendered in a shifting or
plural sense (for example as transgendered individuals) or non-human
characters (either abstract or concrete). The results of this analysis are
given in Table 6.3.
The results show that there is no clear pattern of difference in the char-
acterisation based on the biological sex of the reader. Instead, there are
many points of similarity. For example, the proportion of characters that
were given a non-human identity was almost identical for the students
rewriting the print version of the stories (16.9 per cent for the male readers,
17 per cent for the female readers). Where differences did occur, these
were not systematically distributed. Just as with the reading pathways,
there is no evidence here from which we might gender reader response
in some essentialist manner, be that derived from the biological sex of
the empirical reader or from the abstract figure implied by metaphorical
Table 6.3 Gendered characteristics of Actors and Sensers (as %)
Actor Actor Actor Actor Actor Actor

(masculine) (feminine) (unspecified) (trans- (non- (non-
gendered) human, human,
abstract) concrete)
Hypertext 253 61 152 20 86 66

male
reader
Hypertext 280 109 106 0 77 26
female
reader
Print 151 226 66 0 75 94
male
reader
Print 228 154 66 0 74 96
female
reader
allusions to ‘reading like a man’. That said, the representational choices

in these storyworlds remain significant as suggesting a range of ways in
which gender identity was conceptualised by these students.
The characterisation in these storyworlds indicates that the readers
of both the hypertext and print versions primarily constructed fictional
gender identities that were either clearly masculine or feminine. Indic-
ations of gender include naming choices, linguistic details such as
pronouns (which in English inflect for gender in the third person
singular), or use of culturally recognised patterns of behaviour, such as
clothing choices. The pattern of binary difference remains a powerful
norm which regulates the characterisation choices for both male and
female readers, and for both text types. A typical example of this char-
acterisation is given below.
Carly picked up the snowdome and it cracked. She began to cry

because it was the only thing she had left that her father had bought
her. ‘It’s cheap tat.’ Said her evil cousin, ‘he probably paid 10 pence
for it.’ With that, Carly attacked her cousin and slashed his throat
with a piece of the glass snowdome. As her cousin lay dying on the
carpet, Carly shook with fear. ‘He should never have said anything
about my father,’ she cried and threw herself on Paul’s dead body.
(Female student, hypertext version)
In itself, this choice is not unremarkable, especially given that the

normative pattern of representation was also found in the source texts
Ruth Page 117
(both print and hypertext). What is more interesting is that the textual
medium seemed to play an influential role on gender representation,
particularly as seen in the human characters who did not fit into a
binary classification of masculinity or femininity.
One representational choice was to create characters that were not
distinctly marked for gender at all. It is striking that the male students
who rewrote the hypertext version of Fishnet used this type of charac-
terisation more than anyone else. Usually, these storyworld participants
were represented as a generalised group, or as individuals who were
not described with enough detail to infer a gendered identity, as in the
examples given next.
The rich and poor were meant to live as equals. But as time went on,
some became more equal than others. The ones who were once poor
always remembered how the rich had treated them before. So when
the time came, the poor before moved into the great houses while
the rich before were left out in the cold.
(Male student, hypertext version)
The meaning of life is something that has been thought about by

many people, but each person only thinks about it once. It takes this
one chain of thoughts for an intelligent person to realise there is no
meaning to life, except to create more life.
One effect of this type of characterisation is to make the storyworlds

appear less personalised. The characters of the storyworld seem less vivid,
and in some cases are backgrounded further still through the use of
passive constructions or nominalisation, as underlined in the example
below.
When one wants a child, one donates sperm or eggs at the enfant-
clinique and within a year your child, DNA altered according to your
taste, is ready for collection. Single-parent families, 400 years ago
seen as the scourge of society are now the norm.
Overall, in comparison with both the print-derived storyworlds and the

hypertext worlds written by the female readers, the creative responses
of the male readers to the hypertext seemed to de-emphasise the precise
detail and agency of the characters.
Although inevitably more speculative, it is also important to explore

the reasons that might lie behind representational choices. On the
surface, it is tempting to suggest that there are some similarities here with
the storytelling styles of men in other contexts. Argamon et al. found
salient differences in the written style of women and men, particu-
larly as realised through the linguistic choices used to present people
and objects. Specifically, women writers tended to use grammatical
and lexical choices which created greater personalisation than did the
men who used less specific forms of reference as a ‘depersonaliza-
tion mechanism’.17 Similarly, Barbara Johnstone analysed a sample of
Midwestern American storytellers, observing that in men’s storyworlds:
People fill roles in the story, but rarely have individual identities.
The male protagonists in men’s stories act alone, they do not rely on
other people, though they do often rely on things – which are often
described with the level of detail women use for people.18
Against this wider background, the less-detailed characterisation

created by the male readers is symptomatic of a stereotypical view
of masculinity as impersonal and less socially oriented, ultimately
opposed to a model of femininity which emphasises community. Brady
Aschauer explains that these ‘masculine’ characteristics have been seen
as resulting from gender-specific patterns of socialisation and the male
child’s psychoanalytic detachment.19 However, as Johnson points out,
to perpetrate this stereotype may be in some cases both misleading and
politically suspect.20 Indeed, it is dubious at the least to abstract the
findings from one set of data and then superimpose them onto another.
Despite the echoes in this stylistic difference across mode and context,
I do not want to suggest that superficial parallels in findings necessarily
correspond to parallels in causation.
On the basis of the data in this study, I would want to strongly resist
a simplistic correlation between biological sex and storytelling style and
to argue instead that other factors may be highly significant. Indeed, it is
not exclusively male readers who created non-gender-specific characters,
and in the case of the readers responding to the print version, the
women and men used this type of characterisation equally (6.6 per cent
each). Given that the difference occurred most prominently in relation
to the hypertext version, this hints that one possible influence that
might explain the variation in characterisation is the medium in which
the students read the original story.
Ruth Page 119
The group of male students who responded to the hypertext narrative

were distinctive in that they had the greatest experience of texts using
new technology. Their subsequent expectations of hypertext’s potential
lead to them navigating through the text in a particular way. I suggest
that these medium-specific expectations also coloured the representa-
tional choices in their creative writing. One dimension of this is the
gendered schemata that are particularly associated with the electronic
environments in which fictional hypertexts are situated.
Virtual reality and online communication available through the
Internet, computer games, the World Wide Web and other digital devel-
opments provide environments where the norms of gender identity can
be challenged. As Roberts and Parks put it:
The virtual worlds of the Internet give people unparalleled control

over the construction and presentation of their identities. Gender-
switching is perhaps the most dramatic example of how people exer-
cise this control.21
From this perspective, digital technology, be it through virtual reality,

online communication or fictional hypertext, carries the potential to
deconstruct fixed gender identity. I suggest that the greater the exper-
ience of these electronic environments, the more likely it might be
that the reader draw upon these gendered associations and carry this
into the characterisation of their storyworlds. Indeed, it is striking that
it was the male readers of the hypertext version (that is, those who
had the greatest technological expertise from those in the School of
English) who uniquely created fictional participants that deconstructed
binary gender categories. Examples of these characters included indi-
viduals who switched gender, or otherwise merged human and machine
in cyborg-like imagery, as in the following examples.
Lobe by lobe the brains of the experimenters were extracted and

transferred to the mainframe of the global network server. From vile
to phile. Gender was now genuinely an attitude and penises were
‘add ons’ at the ‘online’ peripheral outlet.
It seemed natural since he did not remember any of his previous lives.
That was probably for the best since when ‘Joseph’ hit puberty things
started to go very wrong. You see poor Joseph has been christened
Georgina and now had to cope with the advances of boys at school.
Although it was only the male readers from the school of English
who created characters like this, it is clearly not the reader’s biological
sex that motivates such a choice. None of the male readers responding
to a print version of the stories created gender-switching characters.
Furthermore, female readers who did have more experience of digital
texts from the separate group of students from the faculty of computing
produced storyworlds with similar characterisation.
‘We’d then have to spend hours in front of the mirror every morning.’
‘And period pains, childbirth, hormones,’ Rob went on. ‘In fact, that’s
a heavy price to pay. Guess we’re going to have to be more sympath-
etic towards Erika and Karen?’
(Female Computing student)
Characterising fictional gender identity in more fluid, multiple forms is

thus open to readers of differing sex and who construct their gender in
various ways. Crucially, the results of this analysis point to the influence
of hypertext as generating particular gendered schemas, and suggests
that this form of technology might open up alternative possibilities for
exploring gender, both masculinity and femininity in broader and more
plural terms.
Even while the rewritings of the hypertext seem to offer a platform
from which a binary categorisation of gender can be deconstructed, it
is important not to promote this as unqualified emancipation. First,
the examples of gender switching were by far in the minority of the
characterisation (only 2 per cent of the Actors in the hypertext-derived
writing). Second, even when transgendered possibilities were presented,
the policing effects of heteronormative gender identification are still in
force. To cross defined gender boundaries beyond normative masculinity
is presented by the students in their writing in negative terms as some-
thing ‘embarrassing’ or a ‘heavy price to pay’. It is clear that within these
storyworlds, the gender representation created by these students legit-
imates identities which keep within the cultural norms of masculinity
and do not move beyond this in any far-reaching or sustained
manner.
Summary
The point we have reached is that the results of the analysis indicate
that it is not the biological sex of the reader that is the primary influ-
ence in their response to the text, either in the case of the pathway
Ruth Page 121
they navigated through the hypertext or in their creative writing carried

out subsequently. Instead, the data also showed important points of
similarity between the male and female readers’ responses, along with
intracategory variation. A simplistic model of gender difference in reader
response is untenable in the face of this empirical evidence. In turn,
there appears to be little (if any) evidence to suggest that reading patterns
themselves can be gendered in some essentialist manner. To ‘read like a
man’ is a metaphor, and in the light of this study, cannot be substanti-
ated as a distinctively ‘masculine’ practice in any clear way.
Instead, I have suggested that there are other influential factors at work
here. The role of the textual medium is particularly important, where
the readers’ expectations of hypertext as an interactive form seemed to
play a part in their navigational choices and also contributed to the
way they characterised gender in their storyworlds. For this group of
students, their expectations of the medium were related to their previous
technological experience, which differed between the male and female
students. This gender difference must be understood as context-specific
and certainly not immutable. In my earlier work, I carried out a fuller
comparison with the students from a Faculty of Computing, Engineering
and Technology, showing that academic discipline also shaped the ways
in which readers responded to digital texts.22 The young women from
the Faculty of Computing also had high expectations of digital texts’
potential, indicated here through the way they chose to conceptualise
fictional gender identity.
What then might this mean for the use of technology and texts in
the context of English studies in the United Kingdom at this point
in time? First, it is important to recognise the potential influence of
medium on reading experiences. On one level, the limited technolo-
gical experiences articulated by the young women in the group from
the School of English indicates that there is much more that can be
done to familiarise students with the wealth of narrative texts and
genres being exploited in digital media. On a deeper level, there is also
more that can be done to explore the opportunities that narratives
in new media present for asking questions about gender, identity and
power. Earlier research has already indicated the possibilities that the
multiplicity of hypertext holds for deconstructing monolithic gender
perspectives, especially when employed by women for feminist ends.
This multiplicity need not be applied to questions of femininity alone,
but also used to challenge a unified concept of ‘masculinity’. Given
that it was the young men in this sample who were most familiar
with technology, they might be particularly well placed to open up this

possibility.
One application of this study then, is to recognise and reiterate
Takayoshi’s point that ‘teachers would be wise to use the Web
as more than a glorified research database and realize its revolu-
tionary potential for dismantling stereotypes about technology and
girls’,23 to which we might also add, stereotypes about boys, men
and masculinity. As Mullany points out, this is particularly important
as elements of cyberspace can be used to reproduce exaggerated
conceptions of masculinity that strengthen dichotomies, rather than
deconstruct them.24
That said, the use of hypertext to challenge gendered stereotypes
is not without its constraints. First, the use of multiplicity, especially
in hypertextual forms, does not simply equate to a gendered revolu-
tion. The medium in which a narrative is constructed must also be
seen in relation to its subject matter and purpose, neither of which
need to entail explicitly gendered meanings. Moreover, textual multi-
plicity and non-linear reading patterns need not result in a meaningful
reading experience. When multiplicity results in disorientation and frus-
tration (as it did for at least some of the readers in this study) then this
might lead to readers disengaging with the text altogether, in which
case we might question its political potential at all. Indeed, textual
changes which deconstruct gender identity need not lead to real world
changes in understanding gender – either masculinity or femininity.
Roberts and Parks point out that what happens to gender identity in
virtual environments does not necessarily influence real world beha-
viour. They argue that gender switching ‘should be viewed as exper-
imental behaviour rather than an enduring expression of sexuality,
personality or gender politics’.25 Similarly, the gender deconstruction
in the storyworlds created by the male readers need not break a binary
view of gender in a lasting manner, nor bear any influence on their
own ‘real world’ gender identity.
This study has indicated the ways in which a group of students
responded to a hypertext narrative. There may be limited evidence to
suggest that ‘masculinity’ as one half of a gendered binary is a salient
variable in the reading experience, but this does not mean that gender
need be dismissed from our discussions of reader response and techno-
logy. Even within the limits I have laid out, narratives using new media
may also offer new ways of exploring masculine identities. How those
identities are then performed outside the text within the classroom and
beyond will remain to be seen.
Ruth Page 123
Notes
1. An earlier version of this chapter was presented at Narrative, An International
Conference (Ottawa, April 2006), supported by the British Academy grant
OCG-42352. I am grateful for the ensuing critiques that helped reshape
some of the concepts discussed here. Parts of the initial stages of the study
reported here are also discussed from an alternative perspective in Ruth
Page, Literary and Linguistic Approaches to Feminist Narratology (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2006).
2. J. Rivkin, ‘Resisting Readers and Reading Effects: Some Speculations on
Reading and Gender’, in Narrative Poetics: Innovations, Limits, Challenges,
ed. James Phelan (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1987), 11–22.
3. Sally Johnson, ‘Theorising language and masculinity’, in Language and
Masculinity, ed. Sally Johnson and Ulrike H. Meinhof (Oxford: Blackwell,
1997), 8–26.
4. Jane Yellowlees Douglas, Print Pathways and Interactive Labyrinths: How Hyper-
text Narratives Affect the Act of Reading (Unpublished PhD thesis, New York
University), 3.
5. George P. Landow, Hypertext 2.0, Revised and Amplified Edition (London and
Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997), 206.
6. L. L. Sullivan, ‘Wired Women Writing: Towards a Feminist Theorization of
Hypertext’, Computers and Composition, 16 (1999), 46.
7. J. Love, ‘Elecriture: A Course in Women’s Writing on the Web’,
Kairos, 7 (2002), Available: http://english.ttu.edu/Kairos/1.3/archival/3.html.
(Accessed July 2004).
8. I will use the terms ‘male’ and ‘female’ to refer to the biological sex of
the readers and ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ when talking about the cultural
markers of gender identity. As postmodern feminists have pointed out, the
distinction between sex and gender is itself false and neither should be
understood as binary oppositions. However, given that the readers in this
study identified themselves as ‘male’ and ‘female’, I will retain the distinction
in this discussion.
9. Charles Sundt, Fishnet (2004). Available: http://www.angelfire.com/ny5/
Fishnet/index.html. (Accessed July 2004).
10. Page, Literary and Linguistic Approaches, 103–106.
11. The students reading a print version of Fishnet handwrote their creative
retellings on paper. The students reading a hypertext version used a mixture
of word processing and handwriting to create their versions. The mode of
production for the creative writing did not correlate with any differences
found in the textual response.
12. Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Wisconsin: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1989), 28–29.
13. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge,
London: Harvard University Press, 1984), 39.
14. Hélène Cixous, ‘Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays’, in The
Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism, ed. C.
Belsey and J. Moore (London: Macmillan, 1989), 113.
15. David Herman, Story Logic. Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (Lincoln and
London: University of Nebraska Press, 2002).
16. M. A. K. Halliday, An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 2nd edition

(London: Edward Arnold, 1994).
17. S. Argamon et al., ‘Gender, genre, and writing style in formal written texts’,
Text, 23 (2003), 331.
18. Barbara Johnstone, Stories, Community and Place (Bloomington and Indiana-
polis: Indiana University Press, 1990), 75.
19. A. Brady Aschauer, ‘Tinkering with Technological Skill: An Examination
of the Gendered uses of Technologies’, Computers and Composition 16
(1999): 13.
20. Johnson, Language and Masculinity, 18.
21. L.D. Roberts and M.R. Parks, ‘The Social Geography of Gender-Switching in
Virtual Reality Environments on the Internet’, in Virtual Gender: Technology,
Consumption and Identity, ed. E. Green and A. Adam (London: Routledge,
2001), 265.
22. Page, Literary and Linguistic Approaches, 94–115.
23. P. Takayoshi, E. Huot and M. Huot, ‘No Boys Allowed: The World Wide Web
as a Clubhouse for Girls’, Computers and Composition 16 (1999): 105.
24. L. Mullany, ‘ “Become the Man that Women Desire”: Gender Identities and
Dominant Discourses in Email Advertising Language’, Language and Literature
13 (2004): 303.
25. Roberts and Parks, Virtual Gender, 266.
Bibliography
Argamon, S., Koppel, M., Fine, J. and Shimoni, A. R. ‘Gender, Genre, and Writing
Style in Formal Written Texts’. Text 23 (2003): 321–346.
Brady Aschauer, A. ‘Tinkering with Technological Skill: An Examination of the
Gendered uses of Technologies’. Computers and Composition 16 (1999): 17–23.
Brooks, P. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge,
London: Harvard University Press, 1984.
Cixous, H. ‘Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays’. In The Feminist
Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism, edited by C. Belsey
and J. Moore, 101–116. London: Macmillan, 1989.
Clark, C. L. ‘Hypertext Theory and the Rhetoric of Empowerment: A Feminist
Alternative’. Kairos, 7 no. 3 (2002). Available: http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/7.
3/binder2.html?coverweb/clark/page1.html. (19 July 2004).
Dinshaw, C. Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1989.
Douglas, Jane Yellowlees. Print Pathways and Interactive Labyrinths: How Hyper-
text Narratives Affect the Act of Reading. Unpublished PhD thesis, New York
University.
Halliday, M. A. K. An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 2nd edition. London:
Edward Arnold, 1994.
Herman, D. Story Logic. Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln and London:
University of Nebraska Press, 2002.
Johnson, S. ‘Theorising Language and Masculinity’. In Language and Masculinity,
edited by S. Johnson and U. H. Meinhof, 8–26. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.
Johnstone, B. Stories, Community and Place. Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 1990.
Ruth Page 125
Landow, G. P. Hypertext 2.0, Revised and Amplified Edition. London and Baltimore:
John Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Love, J. ‘Elecriture: A Course in Women’s Writing on the Web’. Kairos, 7
no. 3 (2002). Available: http://english.ttu.edu/Kairos/1.3/archival/3.html. (19
July 2004).
Mullany, L. ‘ “Become the Man that Women Desire”: Gender Identities and
Dominant Discourses in Email Advertising Language’. Language and Literature
13 (2004): 291–305.
Page, R. E. Literary and Linguistic Approaches to Feminist Narratology. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Rivkin, J. ‘Resisting Readers and Reading Effects: Some Speculations on Reading
and Gender’. In Narrative Poetics: Innovations, Limits, Challenges, edited by
J. Phelan, 11–22. Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1987.
Roberts, L. D. and Parks, M. R. ‘The Social Geography of Gender-switching in
Virtual Reality Environments on the Internet’. In Virtual Gender: Technology,
Consumption and Identity, edited by E. Green and A. Adam, 265–285. London:
Routledge, 2001.
Sundt, C. Fishnet. Available: http://www.angelfire.com/ny5/Fishnet/index.html.
(19 July 2004).
Sullivan, L. L. ‘Wired Women Writing: Towards a Feminist Theorization of Hyper-
text’. Computers and Composition 16 (1999): 25–54.
Takayoshi, P., Huot, E. and Huot, M. ‘No Boys Allowed: The World Wide Web as
a Clubhouse for Girls’. Computers and Composition 16 (1999): 89–106.
7
Bois will be Bois: Masculinity and
Pedagogy in the Gay and Lesbian
Studies Classroom
Dennis W. Allen
During the spring semester of 2006, at the large land-grant American

university where I work, I taught a regularly offered course for senior
English majors entitled ‘Special Topics in Lesbian and Gay Studies’. The
topic this time was Assimilation, and the class investigated the ongoing
process of incorporating gays and lesbians into mainstream society,
reviewing the history of the lesbian and gay civil rights movement and
then addressing such issues as gay marriage and the commercialization
of gay culture. Readings for the course consisted of books and articles
by popular authors (Mark Simpson, Sidney Abbott, and Barbara Love)
and academic queer theorists (Shane Phelan, Michael Warner) ranging
from the 1950s to the present, as well as four films intended to show-
case changing perspectives on lesbian and gay identity, including The
Children’s Hour and Latter Days. As is usually the case in such classes,
about half of the 29 students were straight, the other half gay, lesbian,
or bisexual, and the gender breakdown was roughly the same as that of
other senior-level courses in the English Department (60 per cent female
and 40 per cent male).
Now, when I began thinking about my essay for this collection, my
initial reaction was that this class, like most Gay and Lesbian Studies
courses, was not an ideal example to use in analyzing the gendering of
the classroom and reflecting on the relations between masculinity and
pedagogy, if only because such courses complicate those issues. Despite
nearly 20 years of Queer Theory, which has insisted on the need to make
a conceptual distinction between gender and sexual orientation, there is
still a nearly universal tendency not only in the general population but
also in the scholarly community to assume a correlation between the
two. Although we didn’t talk about masculinity or femininity very often
in this particular class, much of the class discussion implicitly rested on
126
Dennis W. Allen 127
unarticulated assumptions about the nature of the genders themselves

and on the notion that there is a direct link between an individual’s
sexual orientation and the extent of his or her compliance with gender
norms. They rarely said it out loud, but most of the people in the class,
gay and straight, assumed that gay men are ‘naturally’ more feminine
and gay women more masculine than their straight counterparts, even
though there were people sitting in the classroom who disproved this
notion. If the relations between masculinity and pedagogy are complex
and difficult to unravel, adding sexual orientation to the equation makes
matters even harder to sort out.
And yet, I think this additional complexity can be very helpful
in refining our understanding of how masculinity functions in the
classroom, if only because it forces us to reconsider our notions of
masculinity itself. One of the recent developments in Gender Theory is
to recognize that it is really not possible to speak of a single ‘masculinity’
or ‘femininity’, even in a specific culture at a specific time. In addition
to a society’s dominant or hegemonic gender definitions at any partic-
ular cultural moment, there are always variants, gender presentations
that are differently inflected: influenced by race, age, class, cultural
beliefs, and, yes, even sexual orientation (Gardiner 2002: 11). These vari-
ations are present, if often unnoticed, in every classroom, but, because
of our cultural expectations of a link between ‘sexual deviance’ and
gender non-conformity, they emerge into visibility in the Lesbian and
Gay Studies course in a very clear way. In other words, it’s in such classes
that we are not only more likely to notice the queeny gay man or the
butch lesbian but also to contemplate what their existence implies for
our understanding of masculinity in general.
In addition to calling our attention to the multiplicity of gender,
the Lesbian and Gay Studies classroom can also provide an additional
insight into the nature of masculinity. Once we notice that there are
multiple forms of masculinity evident at any given moment, some of
which do not even correspond to biological sex, then it becomes easier
to realize that gender is not particularly coherent or static, that what
constitutes the masculine can not only vary among the individuals in
a given space but can also change over time, both for the culture and
the individual. Because masculinity does not exist transcendentally but
only in its enactment by individuals, then masculinity – any version of
masculinity – is not so much a thing or a quality as a process, which
means that it can mutate or drift or even fail. Sometimes the butch
lesbian isn’t so butch; sometimes the jock-y fraternity boy isn’t either.
128 Bois will be Bois
What I’d like to do in this essay, then, is to explore both of

these insights a little further to see what they can tell us about the
gendered identities of the individuals in the classroom and then examine
their implications for our understanding of the gendering of the pedago-
gical situation itself. As I hope to show, although the pedagogical
model underlying English Studies derives from a particular set of mascu-
line ideals used to construct the discipline as a whole, the multipli-
city of identities and genders in any given classroom and the fact
that pedagogy is a process that sometimes fails to reflect those ideals
suggest that both masculinity and pedagogy may be more complex
and less stable than current sociological studies of gender and the
classroom sometimes indicate. As a result, I will argue, if we’re concerned
with guaranteeing gender equity in the classroom, then we have to
realize that masculinity is not simply a pre-existing fact that enters
the college classroom. Instead, it is a diverse set of identities and
behaviors that are continually being enacted, revised, and negotiated
there.
Boys will be bois
As it happened, the Assimilation class was like a Noah’s Ark of contem-

porary American college students: there seemed to be at least two of
every conceivable type. There were sorority girls and fag hags who
looked exactly like sorority girls but whose worldview was diametric-
ally opposed to theirs. There were drag queens and ‘straight-acting’ gay
men and ‘straight-acting’ straight men and some lesbians who acted
like the ‘straight-acting’ men and some straight men who didn’t. There
were straight women who ‘read’ as butch lesbians and ‘alternative kids’
of both sexes, always already just queer, whose gender was subcultural
(‘emo girl’, ‘slacker dude’) and whose sexuality was often ambiguous.
These variations in the class members’ self-presentations were a matter
of interest to the students because, as is always the case in such classes,
everyone was very curious about everyone else’s sexual orientation. Their
usual strategy, following the cultural expectations about the relation of
gender and sexual orientation that I’ve already mentioned, was to try to
‘read’ sexual orientation from an individual’s gender presentation. What
the students discovered, as the semester progressed and various indi-
viduals publicly announced their sexual orientation, is that it is almost
impossible to determine, just by looking at someone, who they might
want to sleep with. The latter point was very nicely illustrated by one of
the sorority girls near the end of the semester, who related, in detail and
Dennis W. Allen 129
much to the other students’ amusement, which of her classmates she

had initially misclassified in her personal assessment of who was what.
I was curious about who was what too, of course, but the gender
variation evident in the classroom was also interesting to me because
it confirmed Judith Halberstam’s assertion that the categories in our
binary gender system are so broad and general that, in order to make
sense out of the multiple versions of masculinity that operate in any
given culture at any given time, we all use what Halberstam has called
‘nonce taxonomies’, those informal categories that give us more concep-
tual specificity in assessing other people’s gender presentations (Halber-
stam 1998: 27). Thus, there were, of course, people in the class who
were perfect illustrations of hegemonic masculinity, which is defined
in the academic literature as characterized by strong ego boundaries
and an aggrandizing sense of self (Knights 1999: 5) and by behavior
that is active, aggressive, quarrelsome, and attention-seeking (Kimmel
2000: 154). I’ll simply add, drawing from the marketing niches used by
advertising, that it is also supposed to be characterized by a relative lack
of concern with grooming and fashion.
Yet the class also provided examples of two of the alternative
masculinities recognized by the advertising community: metrosexuals
(a form of ‘consumption masculinity’ in which male identity is defined
by what one owns, specifically through the construction of the self as
a model of taste and grooming) and slacker/Generation X guys (char-
acterized by an ironic distance from mainstream culture, including
the ideal of hegemonic masculinity) (Clarkson 2005: 238–243; O’Barr
and William 2004). And, because the class was half lesbian, gay, and
bisexual, there were some additional variations less widely recognized
in academia or at Saatchi and Saatchi. There were ‘straight-acting’ gay
men, who were indistinguishable except in their sexual orientation from
whichever variant of masculinity they were enacting, and soft butches
(lesbians who, while recognizably female, were otherwise straightfor-
ward incarnations of hegemonic masculinity and who thus provided
a nice commentary on the assumption that gender must be linked to
biological sex), not to mention a couple of types unique to gay male
culture: bois (slightly feminine younger gay men), and queens (recogniz-
ably male, but with a camp re-presentation of stereotypical ‘feminine’
qualities).1
I will return to the implications that this proliferation of masculin-
ities has for our understanding of the relations of masculinity and
pedagogy and for the gendering of the pedagogical situation itself. For
the moment, I’d simply like to note that it reveals the crudeness of the
analytic lens evident in some of the sociological literature on gender and

the educational system. Even as astute an observer as Michael Kimmel,
who has published extensively on historical variations in conceptions
of masculinity, loses some of his normal subtlety when discussing
pedagogy. For example, summarizing previous research on gender bias
in the classroom, Kimmel notes: ‘Teachers call on boys more often and
spend more time with them. They ask boys more challenging questions
than they do girls, and wait longer for boys to answer’ (2000: 154).
While I’m sure these findings are true, the difficulty here is that the
unconscious tendency in such studies to revert to biological sex (boys,
girls) rather than gender as the taxonomic fulcrum oversimplifies the
picture. What we also need is more refined analyses that take into
account the co-existence of multiple versions of masculinity and femin-
inity and that also assess the impact of variations in the relation between
an individual’s sex and his or her gender. Teachers may indeed call
on boys more often than girls, but it also seems important to discover
whether elementary school teachers call on tomboys more often than
the girls whose role model is Hillary Duff or whether college professors
pay less attention to the male art majors than to the sports manage-
ment majors. Is sex the primary determinant of ‘teacher attention’ or
do teachers respond (also or instead) to gender, to masculine behavior
regardless of sex? Does the correlation (or lack of it) between a student’s
sex and his or her gender affect the teacher’s treatment of the student?
One of our initial conclusions, then, can be that more empirical research
needs to be done on such issues if we want a more complete picture of
the gendered classroom.
Lonesome cowboy
There are additional limitations to how some of the sociological liter-

ature analyzes gender in the classroom beyond this lack of attention
to variations in gender presentation. Often, such research implicitly
assumes that gender is relatively coherent and consistent although, to
understand what is wrong with this assumption, we will first have to
take a look at the student in the Assimilation class that I will call Bob.
Bob was a straight man who was almost a textbook example of a partic-
ularly extreme form of hegemonic masculinity. In part because he was
extremely bright and well-informed, personable, and often very funny,
and in part because he was very self-assertive (his part time job outside
of school was as a bouncer), Bob consistently took a lead role in class
discussion, often setting the terms for the day’s debate and orienting
Dennis W. Allen 131
the other students’ responses so that they spent a good deal of a number
of class periods reacting to his statements. Just to round out the picture,
I’ll add that, in the course of the semester Bob managed to hit on every
straight woman in the class. If Bob was thus a clear example of one
valued form of masculinity in our culture, in the classroom he became,
in a sense, the Beta, perhaps even the Alpha, male in the room.
Attention-seeking and self-aggrandizing, Bob would thus seem to
be the consummate proof that classrooms revolve around and reward
traditional masculine behavior, and yet Bob’s self-presentation ulti-
mately suggests some limitations in sociological analyses of gender in
the classroom. Even while such analyses insist that gender character-
istics are culturally constructed (so that men are not, then, ‘naturally’
self-assertive), these studies often unconsciously present the gender of
individuals and gender itself as essentially fixed. To take only one
example, Sadker et al., looking at gender inequity in instruction, note
that: ‘Not only do male students interact more with the teacher but
at all levels of schooling they receive a higher quality of interaction’,
defined as clearer and more precise comments from teachers than
the female students receive (2000: 213). Perhaps because, once again,
gender is rendered synonymous with sex here, this reads both the
genders themselves and an individual’s gender as completely formed
and self-evident, as ‘facts’ or causes which then produce certain effects
in the classroom. While gender is thus involved in a dynamic situ-
ation (since boys then get an educational advantage both in terms of
learning and ‘self-esteem’), gender itself is understood as a relatively
stable binary of cultural roles, and an individual’s gender, inculcated at
an early age, is implicitly presented as more or less coherent, unitary, and
static.
We can, however, look to Judith Butler for a slightly different take
on what the social construction of gender might mean, specifically her
assertion that, if masculinity is culturally constructed, then there is no
ground upon which it is based except its construction, the continual
performance of it that creates it. As such, masculinity (both in general
and for the individual) has no internal coherence since it is founded
on enactments of the ideal rather than on a transcendental essence.
Even more apposite for our purposes is Butler’s insistence that gender
performances MUST be repeated in order for gender to exist and that
there is always the possibility that the gender in question will be repeated
differently or that it might not be repeated at all (Butler 1991: 21). In
short, Butler suggests that, rather than being coherent or consistent,
sometimes masculinity can fail.
And that brings us back to Bob. Bob’s classroom persona was

predicated on a highly defined sense of self, which provided the basis,
actually the authoritative ground, for most of his assertions. Thus, Bob
was invaluable in the classroom because many of the things he said were
both controversial enough and presented in a sufficiently authoritative
manner that they forced the other members of the class to challenge
him, producing an in-depth discussion of the issues involved. When,
for example, he insisted that the best course of action for gays and
lesbians was to assimilate to the dominant culture since this was inev-
itable in any situation when minorities have to deal with a majority,
he provoked a variety of strongly argued responses: that the majority
sometimes had to adapt to minority cultures, that gays and lesbians
had a rich subculture that it would be a shame to lose, and so on.
Significantly, even some of the students who agreed with his opinions
reacted negatively to how forcefully he presented them. In short, Bob’s
statements came, or appeared to come, out of sense of self that was
strongly defined, confident, and that was to be understood, at least in
a discursive context, as the site of knowledge or truth. In other words,
Bob was demonstrating the independence, the individualism, and the
ability to defend his own beliefs that we expect from a hegemonic male
(Kimmel 1997).
And yet what was finally striking on this as on other occasions
was that, however adept Bob was at defending his position, the intense
reaction that he provoked always seemed to surprise and bother him so
that he would say to me privately, after class or before the next class,
things like ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have said that’ or ‘Maybe I shouldn’t
have taken this class’. I would reassure him, of course – I liked him
and he really was invaluable – but the salient point is that he would
have these doubts in the first place, that he would worry about the
other students’ reactions not only to his opinions but to him. I take
these to be the moments when, in a certain way, his continual perform-
ance of hegemonic masculinity failed, precisely because the self on
which that performance was based could not, ultimately, stand apart,
independent and individualistic and self-validating, regardless of what
anyone else thought. He couldn’t live up to that impossible ideal (and,
if he could have, it probably would have made him a jerk); instead, his
sense of himself required external confirmation, some feedback from
the outside that validated his worth, if only (or perhaps especially)
from the professor. To put it another way, in the High Noon that the
class sometimes became, Bob couldn’t quite sustain the role of Gary
Cooper.
Dennis W. Allen 133
The head of the class
I could provide other examples of mutations or failures of expected

gender performances in the class: the straight woman who defied
conventional gender expectations for women by being almost as
self-assertive, aggressive, and verbal as Bob or the ‘boi’ who would
talk to me privately about his perceived lack of success at that role,
but I’d like to go on and address the implications of the notions that
masculinity is both plural and incoherent. How does this more complic-
ated picture of gender revise our understanding of the ways in which
the classroom is gendered, of the relations between masculinity and
pedagogy? Previous work on the gendering of the classroom sees it as an
overtly patriarchal space. Writing in 1997, Michael Kimmel argues that
the college classroom illustrates the inequality of gender both because
male professors can conform to gender expectations while successfully
pursuing their careers while female professors cannot and because of
the different, and essentially unequal, life experiences of the male and
female students in the room, including such factors as women’s substan-
tially more frequent experience of sexual harassment (Kimmel 1997).
Although Kimmel’s essay is useful in helping us to see how the classroom
functions as an extension of patriarchal society, the essay, unfortunately,
does not really analyze the pedagogical process itself.
Ben Knights, examining the gendering of the field of English Studies
as a whole, provides a more subtle and specific analysis of the ways in
which masculinity shapes what goes on in college classrooms. Knights
notes that both the formation of English as a discipline and the pedago-
gical models it employs were a reaction by male professors to the percep-
tion that language and literature were essentially ‘feminine’ interests. In
response to a fear of the affective, of subjectivity, and of the threat of
male feminization, English Studies was thus constructed throughout the
twentieth century as a complex assertion of male mastery. This insist-
ence on masculinity, Knights argues, is evident on a number of levels:
in the stress on the critic’s objective detachment, in the field’s emphasis
on intellectual difficulty (initially, in the selection of the canon under
New Criticism and in the emphasis on theory in more recent years), in
an agonistic style of intellectual interchange, and in a classroom practice
that has been predicated on the bonding of a small (male) elite with the
(male) professor. As a result, any analysis of the pedagogical conventions
of English classes cannot ignore the patriarchal underpinnings of the
discipline. As Knights succinctly puts it, in a formulation that is particu-
larly apt for courses in Gender Theory or Gay and Lesbian Studies: ‘New
knowledges transmitted through unexamined forms of pedagogy will

inevitably fossilize and fail to bring about any lasting change’ (Knights
1999: 36).
Now, if we take this admonition seriously, and I think we should,
then we need to do more than simply select texts or discuss topics in
class that provide a critique of patriarchal privilege. Instead, we need to
rework the implicit gendering of the pedagogy itself, and that involves
thinking a bit more about where and how masculine privilege inheres
in the classroom. Since Knights’ focus is on the discipline as a whole, he
does not address in detail the ways in which pedagogy enacts a certain
ideology of masculinity. We can, however, use his insights to begin to
understand what Frederic Jameson would call ‘the content of the form’
of pedagogy in English Studies, the underlying belief system that shapes
that pedagogy. If we look back at Knights’ list of the twentieth-century
masculinist ideals used to define the discipline, one way to view conven-
tional pedagogical practices is that they are implicitly intended to create
a classroom that is parallel to or isomorphic with the hegemonically
masculine male of the era. Just as that male is thought to be coherent
and unified, with strongly defined ego boundaries, and a aggrandizing
sense of self, the classroom ideal that emerges might best be understood
metaphorically as itself a corporate being that is constructed as ‘male’:
intellectually serious, internally organized, goal-directed (in its focus
on the acquisition of knowledge), structured hierarchically around the
instructor as ‘the head’ of the class. Think F. R. Leavis lecturing.
I’m certainly no F. R. Leavis for any number of reasons, but the
Assimilation class, because its infrastructure derived from the conven-
tional pedagogical assumptions of the discipline, implicitly invoked a
gendering of the classroom as ‘male’ in the sense outlined above. This
wasn’t so much because there was a man standing at the front of the
room but because of subtler factors: because it was a ‘serious’ course
for senior majors, a theory component was included in the readings to
give the course some ‘depth’; there were rules designed to insure that
the students’ attention was focused on intellectual matters and that the
class was free of distractions (e.g. no reading the newspaper or doing
the crossword during class); class discussions were moderated by the
professor, who called on people and sometimes provided commentary,
which insured that the teacher remained the focal point of the class;
and the classroom ideal, for both the teacher and the students, was a
detached, unemotional inquiry into the issues, no matter how contro-
versial some of them were. It could easily be argued, then, that despite
its sometimes radical content, the Assimilation class was as patriarchal
Dennis W. Allen 135
in its form as any other. Except that I’m not so sure that all of them
necessarily are. Knights, discussing the gendered subject position offered
to us by literary texts and conventions of reading, also argues for a
process of reflexive or estranged reading of the male identity retailed
in such texts, and I think we might also ‘read’ the college classroom
‘against the grain’, looking for the incoherencies and failures in what
appears to be, in theory at least, a fairly seamless masculine pedagogical
practice.
On a fairly obvious level, one of these incoherencies is that the
classroom itself is always a plural site on a number of levels. Although
the disciplinary model that we’ve been discussing stresses the teacher
as the focal point of activity in the room, another look at the college
classroom suggests that such models are only partially true, especially
in discussion-based classes in the Humanities where, given the current
stress on ‘critical thinking’, the students are supposed to develop, artic-
ulate and defend their own individual positions on the texts and issues
addressed in the class. In the Assimilation course, because there were no
clear answers to the basic question posed by the class (‘Should gay people
assimilate to mainstream culture?’), in the course of the semester, various
students became advocates for particular positions on the topic. One of
the butch lesbians always took an assimilationist stance that centered
on gay marriage; one of the straight women consistently argued a queer
perspective that rejected most social institutions, including marriage.
Thus, in terms of the course content itself, there were multiple sites
of ‘intellectual truth’ in the room, only one of which was centered on
the teacher. Even more importantly, because of this, much of the class
discussion involved the students responding to each other rather than
to anything the professor had said. As a result, the professor’s traditional
role as moderator made him the center of the discussion in only the
most nominal sense.
Moreover, precisely because the classroom is a complex social field,
it’s important to remember that there are always multiple levels of inter-
action and various agendas at play in the room. While the professor
may tend to assume that the primary goal in the classroom is instruc-
tion, the students’ motivations, both individual and collective, are
more complex. Some students simply want to fulfill the basic course
requirements and collect three more credits toward graduation; other
students are looking for intellectual interchange and become genu-
inely involved in a particular class; some students fluctuate between
these two poles. Moreover, while the students often react to each
other intellectually, the classroom for them is also a complex social,
emotional, and sometimes even romantic field. Bob wasn’t the only
one who was ‘mac-ing’ that classroom; one of the bisexual women
went through a series of crushes on several of the other women in
the class. Moreover, if identity is continually enacted, then on any
given day the students will be performing aspects of their identities,
including gender and sexual orientation, not merely as a simple continu-
ation of previous performances but also as a complex reaction to the
texts under discussion, the identity performances of the other students,
and others’ responses to their own performances. Rather than being
a unitary entity, then, any classroom is the site of multiple points
of view, academic and personal goals, and social interactions. To put
it another way, if the classroom itself can be compared metaphoric-
ally to a man, it would have to be a man with multiple personality
disorder.
Even more important than this obvious pluralism, however, is the fact
that pedagogy is not a thing but a process. And this means that, like
masculinity itself, conventional pedagogy (and its patriarchal underpin-
nings) must continually be enacted in order to exist. And that, as I’ve
already noted, means the continual possibility that it will fail. Now, I’m
not really thinking here about failures of the teacher’s authority – like
the long running and highly comic battle I had with two women who
insisted on working the Sudoku puzzle during class – if only because I’m
a bit reluctant to gender authority itself as male, which simply assumes
gender stereotypes in the process of attempting to critique them. Rather,
I’m thinking about the eruption of alternate identities and complex
forms of interaction in class discussion, something that is particularly
clear in a Lesbian and Gay Studies class. It’s at such moments that the
patriarchal underpinnings of the pedagogical model of English Studies
are challenged in a more serious way than when students won’t put
the Sudoku puzzle away. Two examples, both conveniently bearing on
questions about the nature of masculinity itself, should help to make
the point clear.
Example 1: During a discussion of Brokeback Mountain, one of the
bois in the class (we can call him ‘Chad’) concluded his analysis of the
film’s representation of gay men with an apparent digression intended
primarily for comic effect. He found Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance
unrealistic, he said, because Jake didn’t fully convey how painful anal
intercourse can sometimes be for the recipient. If Jake believed in
method acting, Chad argued, he should have practiced at home with a
dildo first so that he could have made the right noises during the sex
scenes.
Dennis W. Allen 137
Now, on one level, Chad was simply trying to get a laugh and to
shock some of the straight people in the room, and he succeeded admir-
ably in both of those goals. But it was clear, to me at least, that there
was more going on here: Chad was also implicitly articulating a gay
male perspective, specifically a boi perspective. If some of his classmates
were taken aback by the sexual explicitness of the comment, its true
shock value lay in the fact that it completely skewed their views of
male sexuality or how a man would think or what a man would want.
Although I know Chad hadn’t read Queer Theorists such as Lee Edelman
or D. A. Miller, and while I’m not sure he was entirely conscious of it, he
was thus making the same point about gay male identity that they’ve
made: in contrast to hegemonic masculinity’s emphasis on well-defined
boundaries, both for the ego and the body itself, its fear of penetration
on a number of levels, Chad was articulating a version of masculinity
that was more porous, more open, at least corporeally, to an osmotic
relationship with others, even if that sometimes hurts. Moreover, the
classes’ discussion of gay and lesbian and queer perspectives on various
issues was usually pursued, following academic conventions about intel-
lectual interchange, on a certain level of conceptual abstraction that
often worked, in effect, to erase the corporeality of gay identity. It was
precisely the sexual explicitness of Chad’s comment, which directly
insisted on the details of the gay male body and its sexuality, that
did more than any argument about gay marriage to provide some of
the straight students with a clear understanding of a gay man’s view
of the world. Finally, it seems salient that Chad’s reading of Brokeback
was that ‘homosexuality ruined everyone’s lives’, a message that he
lamented in ‘the most important gay film of our generation’. Although
I would call this a misreading of the film’s complex perspective on the
subject, it is a telling one, for Chad’s implicit sense that homosexuality
is socially disruptive not only shaped his understanding of the film but
also influenced his classroom behavior. A boi is supposed to be a little
bit outrageous, a little bit disruptive, so that Chad’s comment not only
articulated but enacted his sense of his sexual identity. In other words,
it was precisely at the moment when he was shocking people that Chad
was not only presenting things from a boi’s perspective but also actually
being a boi.
Example 2: One of the texts for the class was a 1994 essay by
Mark Simpson about metrosexuality (‘Metrosexuality: Male Vanity Steps
Out of the Closet’), identifying the phenomenon and discussing it
as the result of attempts by marketers to extend the consumption
of fashion and grooming products beyond the gay community to
straight men. During class discussion of the essay it was soon clear that
most of the class was comfortable with the larger implications of the
article: that masculinity has multiple forms and changes over time. For
example, the sorority girls in the class got Simpson’s point immediately
because, I learned from them, the metrosexual alternative to hegemonic
masculinity was rife among fraternity boys. Bob, on the other hand, was
having none of it. He insisted that such alternate masculinities repres-
ented inadequate variations on ‘real men’ and rigorously defended his
own hegemonic view that a man should be a bit scruffy. Besides, he
said, he did grooming too: ‘I get up in the morning and I look in the
mirror, and I want to vomit because I’m so ugly, and then I shower and
shave’. At this point, one of the straight girls (‘Toni’) turned to him and
said, from across the room: ‘That’s not grooming; that’s just hygiene’.
Once again, the entire class cracked up.
Now, leaving aside Bob’s rather bizarre remark about what we
might call his ‘auto-bulimia’ (which seemed calculated to insist on
his masculinity by asserting his ugliness but which was also another
moment where his normal self-confident masculinity seemed to falter a
bit, looking for reassurance), this struck me as a fairly complex moment
that actually enacted the classes’ more abstract debate about varieties
of masculinity. If, on one level, Toni was simply trying to clarify terms
and definitions and thus distinguish between two types of masculinity,
on another level her remark was also a critique of Bob’s version of
masculinity. While she presented it comically – she was also trying for a
laugh – her response overtly suggested that Bob’s view of proper mascu-
line behavior might be wrong, at least so far as grooming is concerned.
Even more importantly, in the context of the semester as a whole it was
possible to see the comment as a not so subtle putdown that reflected a
certain exasperation on her part with Bob’s tendency to speak ex cathedra
and dominate class discussion. If the content of the class discussion was
about varieties of masculinity, I’d argue that the remark was the point
when one form of masculinity was being rejected, contested as much
by the action of the remark itself as by its content. In short, this was
the moment when Toni finally said ‘no’ to Bob’s performance of the
hegemonically masculine.
Both of these examples are, of course, moments when the normal
proceedings of traditional pedagogy failed: one student was sexually
explicit, another one got a bit testy with one of her classmates. But I
consider these aberrations in classroom decorum as fortunate in a way,
as important symptoms of a deeper incoherence in the pedagogical ideal
of the discipline of English Studies, moments where, like masculinity
Dennis W. Allen 139
itself, the class revealed itself as plural and unstable. Classrooms are
not always centered on the teacher or on intellectual issues nor are
they always dispassionate or unemotional. They are also sites where, as
with Chad, individuals are not only articulating but enacting (often,
articulating by enacting) alternate forms of identity and where, as with
Toni and Bob, the relations between various definitions of masculinity,
of gender, are continually contested and negotiated, sometimes even
more through the form of the discussion than through its content.
Because the Assimilation class was explicitly presented as a site where
alternate forms of identity were clearly acceptable, such moments may
have been more obvious there, but I can say from experience that incid-
ents like these occur in every class. If we want to understand and rework
the gendering of the classroom then this involves more than simply
insuring that girls and boys are called on equally. We also need to pay
attention to and validate those ‘digressive’ moments in the classroom
when the multiplicity of both pedagogy and gender become evident.
At the end of the semester, ‘Keri’, one of the sorority girls, gave me her
informal assessment of the course. ‘It was a good class’, she said, ‘But
we got off the subject a lot’. I agreed with her completely about the first
part of her statement. As to getting off the subject, though, I don’t think
we ever did.
Note
1. While most people are familiar with the concept of the ‘queen’, ‘boi’ is
an identity category in lesbian and gay subculture that is substantially less
familiar to the general public. Originally coined to designate young mascu-
line lesbians (or ‘tranny bois’), the term quickly mutated, following a logic of
parallelism, to apply to slightly feminine younger gay men as well. The fact
that the difference between a boi and a queen is largely a matter of degree
rather than kind confirms that gender presentations are extremely varied and
that even subcultural nonce categories merely present artificial but culturally
recognizable segments of what is actually a continuum of behaviors.
Works cited
Butler, Judith. ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’. In Inside/Out: Lesbian
Theories, Gay Theories. Ed. Diana Fuss. New York: Routledge, 1991. 13–31.
Clarkson, Jay. ‘Contesting Masculinity’s Makeover: Queer Eye, Consumer
Masculinity, and “Straight-Acting” Gays’. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 29
(2005): 235–255.
Gardiner, Judith Kegan. ‘Introduction’. In Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory.
Ed. Judith Kegan Gardiner. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. 1–29.
Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998.

Kimmel, Michael. The Gendered Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
——. ‘Integrating Men into the Curriculum’. Duke Journal of Gender Law and Policy,
4 (1997). http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/djglp/articles/gen4p181.htm
Knights, Ben. Writing Masculinities. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
O’Barr and William M. ‘Roundtable on Advertising and the New Masculin-
ities’. Advertising & Society Review, 5 (2004). http://muse.jhu.edu/cgi-
bin/access.cgi?uri=/journals/asr/v005/5.4roundtable.html
Sadker, Myra, David Sadker, Lynn Fox, and Melinda Salata. ‘Gender Equity in
the Classroom: The Unfinished Agenda’. In The Gendered Society Reader. Ed.
Michael Kimmel with Amy Aronson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
210–216.
8
Invisible Men: Reading African
American Masculinity
Rachel Carroll
In her 1990 article ‘Fear of the Happy Ending: The Color Purple, Reading
and Racism’, Alison Light critically reflected on the experience of
teaching a text authored by an African American woman in the context
of a course on ‘women’s writing’ and in a pedagogic situation in which
students and tutors were all white. Light recorded that ‘as tutors we were
surprised that the discussion did not lead into the issue of racism, and
at the ways in which it did not’;1 the ‘fact’ of Walker’s and her protag-
onists ‘blackness’, did not in itself guarantee that ‘race’, as a contested
issue, would be addressed. This chapter will reflect on the racial and
gendered construction of African American masculinity in the context
of the teaching of African American writing as a literary tradition: that
is, it will explore the teaching of masculinity as a gendered identity in a
context where the contesting of racial constructions of identity is fore-
grounded. It will explore what might be termed the curricula construc-
tion of racial and gendered identity as represented in, and as produced
by, counter canons of literature. The premise of this discussion is that
it is not simply the racial or gendered identities of tutors or students
that produce the ways in which a text is understood; the curricula and
pedagogic contexts within which the text is placed have the potential
to make possible certain readings and to preclude others.
The identifications and appropriations which are at work in a
pedagogic situation – between tutor, student and subject matter –
are as complex, contingent and contradictory as the identities of its
subjects. The study of African American writing, and its contribution
to a historic struggle for liberty and equality, can inspire impassioned
student engagement. Such an identification can be both problematic
and productive. It may be problematic where it contains an evasion
of a more troubling sense of implication in the histories of racial and
141
142 Invisible Men: Reading African American Masculinity
colonial power; it may be productive, however, where it is expressive

of a student’s transformed sense of his/her own relationship to history
and identity. Indeed, the provisionial and imaginative occupation of
the space of a historical and cultural ‘other’ can effect a meaningful
estrangement from one’s own lived identity. The pedagogic situation is
in a sense a performative space and it is the ‘staging’ of the encounter
with the subject which may determine how, and with what effect, posi-
tions of power, knowledge and authority are occupied. What will be
staged below is a contextual reading of African American masculinity
designed to make possible an understanding both of the complex implic-
ation of race and gender and of the uneven allocation of patriarchal
masculinity. A reflection on the identification of Alice Walker’s The
Color Purple as ‘woman’s text’ within a canon of women’s writing will
act a starting point from which to revisit constructions of racialised
masculinity within the canon of African American male writing. I will
conclude with a more sustained consideration of a poet whose work
has received limited critical attention; a reading of Etheridge Knight’s
representations of masculinity, written within the historical context of
the Black Power movement, is offered as a productive contribution to
the ongoing curricula construction of counter-canons and histories.
Curricula constructions of African American masculinity
The complexity of the context of Alison Light’s 1990 article is worth

exploring in some detail. Alice Walker’s 1982 novel The Color Purple
is possibly the African American text with which non-African Amer-
ican readers are most familiar whether directly, or indirectly through
the Steven Spielberg’s popular if controversial 1985 film adaptation.
With the expansion of courses dedicated to the study of ‘women’s
writing’, a genre inaugurated by Anglo-American feminist literary criti-
cism, The Color Purple became canonised as a key text. Indeed, in
the British context and period in which Light was writing, where
courses dedicated to women’s writing were becoming commonplace
but where courses dedicated to African American writing (outside of
American Studies programmes) were less common, The Color Purple
may well have been the first, and in some cases only, African Amer-
ican text which students encountered. Studied within this curricula
context, as a ‘women’s text’ within the genre of ‘women’s writing’,
Walker’s novel offers a representation of the patriarchal oppression, both
economic and sexual, of women and of successful resistance to that
oppression through self-expression. What this context risks, however, is
Rachel Carroll 143
the occlusion of the specific experience of African American women

as subjects constructed through racialised as well as gendered histor-
ical contexts and cultural discourses. In its focus on the dynamics of
an African American community, The Color Purple belongs to an African
American literary tradition characterised by the foregrounding of African
American perspectives rather than a reactive response to the imperatives
of white racism. However, studied outside the context of this tradition,
this strategic displacing of the privileged white gaze may pass unseen
and the historical context of racism, which is one enabling condition
for the double oppression of black women, may remain invisible. The
curricula construction of The Color Purple as a woman’s text may inad-
vertently contribute to the invisibility of the racial construction of the
gendered identity of women (whether white or not-white); however, it
may also inadvertently perpetuate the racial construction of gendered
identity for African American men. While the female African American
protagonists of The Color Purple are universalised as ‘women’ in feminist
terms, the racial identity of the men who oppress and abuse them is
not: what may problematically remain, then, is a woman’s testimony to
her oppression and abuse by black men. The way in which the repres-
entation of these men is constructed through patriarchy as a racialised
history and discourse is not examined; on the contrary, racist stereotypes
of black men as sexually predatory and abusive may be inadvertently
animated.
Critical reflection on teaching The Color Purple emphasises the danger
of occluding the racial construction of African American women’s
gendered identity; it seeks to make white (female) feminists more
conscious of the relationship between femininity and race, but leaves
unexamined the implication of race in the construction of masculinity.
What is invisible here is the status of African American masculinity as
both a racialised and gendered construction of identity and the ways in
which it can, as such, be enlisted to perpetuate patriarchal constructions
of gender or mobilised to challenge them.
Much work in masculinities studies has sought to make visible the
‘invisibility’ of masculinity as a normative and universalised subject
position; the trope of ‘invisibility’ has also been deployed in crit-
ical white studies to denote the unexamined status of whiteness
which it seeks to contest. Writing in the introduction to their 1996
collection, Representing Black Men, Marcellus Blount and George P.
Cunningham observe that ‘African American men as gendered, rather
than racial, subject, rarely if ever provide a strategic site for interrogating
constructions of gender and sexuality within contemporary theory’;2 the
‘invisibility’ of masculinity as a gendered construction of identity is

here specifically obscured by the historical and racialised construction of
African American identity as constituting a problematic ‘visibility’. The
pedagogic context for a contextual understanding of the construction of
African American masculinity will need both to ‘make visible’ the invis-
ibility of masculinity and to contest the problematic visibility of race.
The historical formation of African American masculinity demonstrates
the way in which patriarchal prerogatives, while nominally universal,
have been unevenly and unequally distributed to male subjects. Hence,
an exploration of the impact of historical and cultural contexts, and
more specifically of the experience and legacy of American slavery, is
essential in enabling an understanding of the construction of African
American masculinity as a racial and gendered subject position. Kobena
Mercer and Isaac Julien’s comments, in their key text ‘Race, Sexual
Politics and Black Masculinity: A Dossier’, make explicit the relationship
between patriarchy, masculinity and race:
Whereas prevailing definitions of masculinity imply power, control

and authority, these attributes have been historically denied to black
men since slavery In racial terms, black men and women alike were
subordinated to the power of the white master in the hierarchical
social relations of slavery and for black men, as objects of oppression,
this also cancelled out their access to positions of power and prestige
which are regarded as the essence of masculinity in a patriarchal
culture. Shaped by this history, black masculinity is a highly contra-
dictory formation as it is a subordinated masculinity.3
This reflection makes possible an important insight into the contra-

dictions and inconsistencies of patriarchal masculinity. The asymmetry
at work in the relationship between racial and gendered identity for
African American men in a patriarchal context is captured by Robyn
Wiegman when she refers to the ‘contradiction that resides within all
patriarchal relations’: namely that ‘empowerment based on maleness is
not automatically conferred but can be, and frequently is, quite violently
deferred’.4 In a patriarchal culture where power is gendered masculine
and powerlessness feminine, empowerment and disempowerment are
experienced as gendered properties even where the distribution of power
is determined not only by gender but also by constructions of race.
Consequently, the historical struggle of African Americans to remedy
what can be described as the ‘violent deferral’ of their rights as American
citizens is implicated in gendered discourses of identity in complex ways.
Rachel Carroll 145
The teaching of the African American literary tradition currently takes

place in a contemporary context where African American expressive
culture is an integral feature of a globalised mass culture; however, the
latter has also been instrumental in the circulation of contentious repres-
entations of African American masculinity, including those identified
with gun, gang or drug cultures. In such a context, it is perhaps all the
more imperative to foster a more complex understanding of the politics
of appropriation of normative gendered discourses. bell hooks is one
critic who has written powerfully about the internalisation of patriarchal
ideology by African American men:
If black males are socialized from birth to embrace the notion that
their manhood will be determined by whether or not they can
dominate and control others and yet the political system they live
within (imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy) prevents
most of them from having access to socially acceptable positions
of power and dominance, then they will claim their patriarchal
manhood, through socially unacceptable channels.5
hooks’ polemic is compelling and persuasive, but its import is perhaps

contingent on its audience; that is, whether her readership is identical or
other to the ‘they’ to which she refers. If the pedagogic situation does not
endeavour to enable an understanding of the complex and conflictual
relationship between patriarchy and race, there is perhaps a danger that
such a critique might be too readily incorporated into an essentialising
presumption that ‘black males’ are somehow more prone to patriarchal
positioning: a presumption recursively confirmed by the availability of
cultural representations of African American men as violent, criminal
and sexually oppressive. I want now to turn to some key texts in the
African American canon (oral, autobiographical, fictional and poetic)
and to suggest how a focus on their relationship to normative gendered
discourses might enable an appreciation of the historical and contem-
porary complexity of the relationship between race and gender.
An appeal to normative, and hence patriarchal, gendered roles has
historically played a significant role in African American discourses of
emancipation: as Wiegman has written ‘ both feminist-abolitionist
and early African-American writings were overwhelmingly concerned
with the slave as a gendered being, finding in the possibilities of sexual
difference a rhetorical strategy for marking the African (-American)’s
equal humanity’.6 Wiegman questions the presumption that patriarchal
discourses can only have conservative or reactionary effects: when
appropriated by African American counter-discourses, a gendered role

which is otherwise normative can become subversive. In the context of
the teaching of gendered identity, an apprehension of sexual difference
as ‘rhetorical strategy’ effectively casts into relief the constructed nature
of all gendered positions. Hence, Sojourner Truth’s celebrated retort to a
white abolitionist audience at Akron, Ohio in 1851 – ‘ain’t I a woman?’ –
both mobilises and interrogates a gendered discourse in support of her
rights as a woman and as an African American.7 As a speaking subject
who is marginalised both by race and gender, Truth’s relationship to
the dominant racial and patriarchal discourses of femininity – the ‘cult
of true womanhood’ – is necessarily ironic. However, different kinds of
complexity are evident in the relationship of a male speaking or writing
subject to dominant gendered discourses in which ‘manhood’ promises
a citizenship equated with masculinity. Michael Kimmel has written
that the ‘quest for manhood – the effort to achieve, to demonstrate, to
prove masculinity – is one of the animating experiences in the lives of
American men, as well as the history of the United States’.8 The histor-
ical claim to ‘manhood’ on the part of African American male subjects
explicitly challenges the racial construction of citizenship but in doing
so potentially subscribes to its gendered formation as masculine. Key
texts in what Stephanie Brown and Keith Clark describe as ‘the great
patri-narrative of African American men’s literary genealogy’9 depict the
struggle by African American men to attain ‘manhood’ understood as
synonymous with citizenship. In The Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass: An American Slave (1845), Douglass is inadvertently empowered
as an African American by the actions of his white mistress Mrs Auld,
who teaches him to read and write; his realisation of the power of the
written word acts as a formative moment both in the context of his
narrative and in the formation of an African American literary tradi-
tion. However, pivotal in a different way is Douglass’s account of his
confrontation with his overseer, Mr Covey; in physically overpowering
a white man, Douglass is arguably contesting his ‘feminisation’ as a
man by slavery and asserting his prerogatives as a masculine subject.
‘Manhood’ is the prize at stake in this battle and Douglass’s overturning
of Mr Covey’s racially sanctioned masculine authority authorises his
right to freedom in a way that his entry into written language, as enabled
by his white mistress, cannot. The implications of the internalisation, as
opposed to appropriation, of the patriarchal ideology inherent in Amer-
ican political philosophies of citizenship and freedom are exemplified in
Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son. The novel’s protagonist, Bigger
Thomas, can be thought of as a literary manifestation of an African
Rachel Carroll 147
American masculinity which has become a recurring trope in contem-

porary culture; the black man as hostage to patriarchal definitions of
masculinity who seeks to remedy his disempowerment by transgressive
appropriations of anti-social power (see hooks above). It is in the context
of the historical demonisation of African American male heterosexuality
as predatory and violent that Bigger Thomas accidentally smothers the
daughter of his white employer. Wrongly suspected of the rape of a
white woman but subsequently actually guilty of the rape and murder
of a black woman, Bigger finds himself empowered by assuming the
pathologised identity which a racist discourse has prepared for him.
The problematic potential contained within this ‘rhetorical’ appropri-
ation of normative discourses of gendered identity is articulated by
Abdul R. JanMohamad:
The fundamental premise of Native Son, which Wright entirely fails

to examine critically, is that the protagonist can become a ‘man’
through rape and murder and overcome the racialization of his
subjectivity the phallocratic order can foreclose effective forms of
resistance and can position some black males in such a way that they
are incapable of asserting their ‘manhood’ against racism except by
replicating phallocratic violence against women.10
Sojourner Truth’s oratory, Frederick Douglass’s autobiography and

Richard Wright’s fiction have been the focus of extensive critical atten-
tion by scholars working in African American studies; I want to conclude
with a more sustained reading of an author whose work has not received
the same kind of critical attention. The poetry of Etheridge Knight was
written within the context of the Black Power movement and its rhet-
orical appropriations of militant masculinity but is interesting for the
ways in which it critically explores the disempowered state of African
American masculinity as a gendered as well as a racial condition without
making recourse to recuperative or compensatory modes of patriarchal
masculinity as its remedy.
Violent spaces: Modes of masculinity in the poetry of

Etheridge Knight
The Black Power movement’s appropriation of modes of militant

masculinity to express its political agenda continues to have iconic
power and currency, as seen in the popularity of Spike Lee’s 1992
biopic Malcolm X and the commodification of the imagery and discourse
of Black Power which accompanied it. The potent and provocative

public image of the movement was one of the black male body as
autonomous, disciplined and armed. The performative power of this
mode of masculinity can be attributed not only to its reiterative enact-
ment on public stages but also to its citational relation to previous histor-
ical constructions of African American masculinity: more specifically, in
its refutation of the African American male subject as ‘feminised’ or
‘emasculated’. As Wiegman has suggested ‘ it was precisely the elision
between material and symbolic feminization that underwrote a great
deal of Black Power rhetoric in the 1960s and 1970s, begetting the turn in
popular culture towards images of a powerfully masculine black male’.11
While this performative masculinity has the potential to subvert the
dominant racial modes of masculinity which it cites, it equally has the
potential to perpetuate patriarchal modes of masculinity. This tension
is identified by Erika Doss who recognises an attempt to ‘recuperate
the socially constructed masculine attributes of power, militarism, inde-
pendence, and control that had been denied subordinated black men
since slavery’ but also questions the way in which such strategies ‘rein-
scribed the most egregious forms of patriarchal privilege and domina-
tion, from machismo and misogyny to violence and aggression’.12 Most
problematic, perhaps, is the employment of a rhetoric of sexualised
power and violence, in which women (both black and white) are expli-
citly reduced to objects over which white and black men compete; the
rhetorical force of Eldridge Cleaver’s infamous invocation of rape as a
weapon of racial insurrection in his 1968 autobiography Soul on Ice can
be historicised, but cannot justify any rationalisation of the material
and historical reality of women’s experience of sexual violence. It is
important to note that the phallic sexualisation of libertarian politics
is a phenomenon common to counter-cultural movements of the late
1960s; however, in a context in which radical racial politics were being
given an explicitly gendered, and arguably patriarchal, mode of expres-
sion, Etheridge Knight’s poetry is especially interesting for its reflective
and affective representation of modes of masculinity other then the
empowered or the militant.
Knight’s poem ‘Hard Rock returns to Prison from the Hospital for the
Criminal Insane’13 explores the appropriation of patriarchal modes of
masculinity, revealing it to be not perhaps not so much recuperative as
compensatory. ‘Hard Rock’ centres on the acting out on a masculinity
which is racialised and embodied in specific ways. As Arthur Flannigan
Saint-Aubin writes:
Rachel Carroll 149
There was a time when the black male was a non-person, when his
body was not his own possession, a time when his subjectivity, his
self-representation, and his representation by others emerged from
this non-possession. At the same time, however, he was his body;
that is, he was recognised and valorized for his physicality.14
Hard Rock manifests a form of African American masculinity closely

identified with a male body attributed with hypermasculine proper-
ties; namely, the productive powers of the labouring body (which have
historically been exploited) and the phallic powers of the sexualised
body (which have historically been demonised). Hard Rock simultan-
eously evokes, perpetuates and avenges a certain stereotype of the
African American masculinity as reducible to sheer materiality. The
masculinity which is staged through this performance is characterised
by an ability to inflict significant harm on other men and by the capa-
city to endure considerable pain; it is staged in scenes of Hard Rock’s
power over other men and the reiteration of his impenetrability by
power. The ‘scars’ [2] on his body ‘prove’ [2] his masculinity; the ‘lumbed
ears’ [3], ‘welts’ [3] and scar that ‘plow[s]’ [5] though his temple and
hair testify to the impact of this testing of his manliness. Hard Rock’s
monumental masculinity can be considered compensatory in the way in
which it symbolically, if not actually, avenges the disempowerment of
African American men: ‘our Destroyer, the doer of things/We dreamed
of doing but could not bring ourselves to do’ [34–5]. Moreover, this
compensatory action is a collective currency, distributed through prison
legend by ‘the WORD’ [7], and providing the shelter of the ‘cloak/of
his exploits’ [15–16]. Hard Rock avenges the history of injustice carried
in his appellation as a ‘black son of a bitch’ by a ‘hillbilly’ [24] by
becoming the ‘crazy nigger’ [20] mythologised by his peers; he mobil-
ises a dehumanising stereotype in order to exorcise the power which it
carries. However, the ‘emasculation’ of African American men by racism
in patriarchal culture is forcibly reasserted in the narrative of the poem.
Both prison and the ‘hospital for the criminal insane’ are disciplinary
institutions; in this context, medical technology is not a curative but
punitive in its effects. Hard Rock’s ‘geld[ing]’ [12] by surgical lobotomy
and the forcible administration of electro-convulsive therapy returns
his body to the status of an animal whose value is determined by its
managed productivity. The performance of hypermasculinity becomes a
cautionary spectacle when Hard Rock is ‘turned loose to try his new
status’ [11–12] and his ‘tam[ing]’ is publicly ‘tested’ [23]. The possibility
that his ‘new status’ may signal the adoption of a new more subtly coded
performance, that of ‘being cool’ [32] can be understood as an attempt

to recuperate a measure of individual and collective dignity from his
highly gendered humiliation; that is, one of the ‘variety of attitudes and
actions that serve the black man as mechanisms for survival, defense and
social competence’ and which act as ‘facades and shields As black men
fight to preserve their dignity, respect and masculinity’.15 The failure
of the attempt to read Hard Rock’s mutilated body as a testament to
heroic resistance is suggested in the final lines of the poem in which
the captive bodies of African American men are depicted as historically
inscribed: ‘The fears of years, like a biting whip,/Had cut deep bloody
grooves/Across our backs’ [36–38].
If in ‘Hard Rock’ the speaker assumes a vicarious relationship to a
performative and compensatory masculinity, then in ‘The Violent Space
(or when your sister sleeps around for money)’ the speaker’s relationship
to dominant modes of masculinity can be characterised as deferred and
displaced. In this poem competing modes of masculinity – the pater-
nalist and the predatory – are evoked over the objectified body of an
African American woman but the male speaker allies himself with the
feminised body of the woman both as a child and as her sibling. Two
bodies are captive in the ‘The Violent Space’: the addicted male body
of the speaker and the sexually possessed body of his sister. The fore-
grounding of the male speaker’s embodiment as giving rise to forms
of vulnerability, powerlessness and dependency makes possible a sense
of continuity between his marginalised masculinity and her exploited
femininity. The sub-title of the poem implies a reputed identity by which
the sister who ‘sleeps around for money’ is implicitly constituted by
others as promiscuous and as herself economically exploitative: that is,
as the agent of a transgressive feminine sexuality not as the object of
an exploitative male heterosexuality. Her loss of name to the ‘nameless
void’ [27] is the effect of its circulation and the compromises to which
it subjects her identity: from ‘the Virgin Mary’ [24], to the eponymous
subject who is offered consolation in the gospel standard ‘Oh, Mary
don’t you weep’ [28], to the juke joint Mary enjoined to ‘shake your butt’
[29]. The ‘exchange [of] notes’ [1–2] – whether commercial, musical or
written – throughout the poem positions the African American female
body as the object of exchange. The desire of the speaker to protect
his sister from sexual exploitation, and his powerlessness to realise this
desire, raises issues to do with the racialised distribution of patriarchal
prerogatives: ‘ one of the salient historical features of racism has been
the assumption that white men – primarily those who are economically
powerful – possess an incontestable right of access to black women’s
Rachel Carroll 151
bodies’.16 The desire of an African American man to reclaim the sexu-

alised and objectified body of an African American woman could be
interpreted as the assertion of patriarchal right. However, this would be
to deny the affective complexity of a desire which is not simply redu-
cible to its patriarchal construction. This affect occasions a reflection
on feelings of powerlessness expressed in questioning refrains – ‘What
should I do?’ [20], ‘what do I do’ [32] and ‘I am not bold’ [35] – culmin-
ating in an admission of an inability to ‘take hold’ [35] of the ‘weight’
[36] of the white male body which bears down on an African American
woman’s ‘black belly’ [36]. Moreover, rather than compete to take the
privileged place of the white male body the speaker expresses a sense
of sharing his sister’s place ‘alone now/In your pain’. The admission of
vulnerability is reinforced by the evocation of childhood subjectivities,
with the speaker still occupying the position of sibling to his diminutive
‘lil sis’ [18] and as incapable of casting out the and ‘demon[s]’ [22; 30;
35] of sexual exploitation as of ever outrunning the fear of ‘the Bugga
man’ [6; 13; 23].
The ‘violent space’ to which Knight’s eponymous poem alludes
might be understood as representing the contested and conflictual
space of racialised masculinity: that is, a space which witnesses the
complex relationship between subordinated and patriarchal masculin-
ities, and the ways in which empowered forms of masculinity are
internalised, appropriated or refused. If the ‘violent space’ indicates
the forcible exclusion of African American men from the privileges
of patriarchal heterosexuality then the motifs of emptiness, absence
and the void in Knight’s poetry suggests that it is not a space which
the poems seek to reclaim or colonise. Historically, racial construc-
tions of African American masculinity have taken contradictory but
mutually reinforcing forms; disempowered but accommodated in its
‘feminised’ and ‘emasculated’ form or pathologised and demonised in
its phallic and masculine form. African American counter-discourses,
from abolitionist through accommodationist to Civil Rights and Black
Power discourses, have had to negotiate with discourses of racial iden-
tity which are thoroughly implicated in discourses of gendered identity.
I have tried to demonstrate how a contextual and gendered reading of
African Americans texts might enable a pedagogic context in which the
subversive appropriation of dominant modes of patriarchal masculinity
can be appreciated: that is, a curricula context in which such negoti-
ations with gendered norms are not simply dismissed as only or inev-
itably reactionary or regressive. Equally, such a context is designed to
enable a recognition of the ways in which a refusal of empowered forms
of masculinity is not necessarily reducible to a state of powerlessness;

that is, to appreciate the significance of a refusal to make recourse to
recuperative or compensatory modes of patriarchal masculinity.
This chapter began with some reflection on the way in which a
pedagogic context may produce and stage the complex identifications
and appropriations which it contains; this was not to dismiss the signi-
ficance of the racial and gendered identities of the tutors and students
who populate this context but rather to suggest that racial and gendered
identifications do not simply or exclusively originate in their subjects.
I would like to conclude this chapter with a reflection on the location
of issues of race, masculinity and patriarchy in the curriculum. In the
curricula context of a course on masculinities – or indeed in the context
of a collection of critical essays on masculinity – the study of African
American masculinity might seem to offer an exemplary ‘case study’;
the cultural and historical construction of masculinity is impossible to
overlook in contexts where the prerogatives of masculinity are not auto-
matically conferred on all biological males but are explicitly denied to
some biological males on the basis of race. However, such a conscrip-
tion of the study of African American masculinity in the service of the
study of masculinity would be to mobilise a problematic power relation
whereby African American masculinity is required to ‘do the work of
race’, so to speak, in the name of gender. In the same way that the loca-
tion of ‘gender’ within the curricula space of ‘women’s writing’ might
serve to perpetuate the invisibility of masculinity as a gendered construc-
tion of identity so might the exclusive location of ‘race’ within the
space of non-white cultural formations serve to perpetuate the invisib-
ility of ‘whiteness’ as racial construction of identity. Pedagogic reflection
of the kind pioneered by Light has offered insights into the complex-
ities and paradoxes attendant on white students’ identifications with
African American subject positions. Rather than merely problematise
students’ affective investments, perhaps the most productive outcome
of such reflection might be to examine the ways in which the curricula
might enable students (and tutors) to reflect constructively on the racial
and gendered construction of their own subject positions.
Notes
1. Alison Light, ‘Fear of the Happy Ending: The Color Purple, Reading and
Racism’, Plotting Change: Contemporary Women’s Fiction, ed. Linda Anderson
(London: Edward Arnold, 1990) 87.
Rachel Carroll 153
2. Marcellus Blount and George P. Cunningham, ‘Introduction: The “Real

Black Man?” ’, Representing Black Men, ed. Marcellus Blount and George
P. Cunningham (London and New York: Routledge, 1996) x.
3. Kobena Mercer and Isaac Julien, ‘Race, Sexual Politics and Black Masculinity:
A Dossier’, Male Order: Unwrapping Masculinity, ed. Rowena Chapman and
Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988) 112.
4. Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham
and London: Duke University Press, 1995) 12.
5. bell hooks, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (London and New York:
Routledge, 2004) 57–58.
6. Wiegman, American Anatomies 44.
7. An account of this speech is anthologised in Call and Response: The Riverside
Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition, ed. Patricia Liggins Hill
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998).
8. Michael Kimmel, ‘Integrating Men into the Curriculum’, http://www.
law.duke.edu/journals/djglp/articles/gen4p181.htm (17 August 2005).
9. Stephanie Brown and Keith Clark, ‘Melodramas of Beset Black Manhood?
Meditations on African American Masculinity as Scholarly Topos and Social
Menace: An Introduction’, Callaloo 26:3 (2003) 733.
10. Abdul R. JanMohamad, ‘Sexuality on/of the Racial Border: Foucault, Wright,
and the Articulation of “Racialized Sexuality” ’, Discourses of Sexuality: From
Aristotle to AIDS, ed. Domna Stanton (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1992) 108.
11. Wiegman American Anatomies, 15.
12. Erika Doss, ‘Imaging the Panthers: Representing Black Power and
Masculinity, 1960s–1990s’, Prospects 23 (1998) 493.
13. As anthologised in Call and Response 1998. The poems discussed here were
first published in Knight’s 1968 collection Poems from Prison.
14. Arthur Flannigan Saint-Aubin, ‘Testeria: The Dis-ease of Black Men in White
Supremacist, Patriarchal Culture’, Callaloo 17:4 (1994) 1061.
15. Richard Majors quoted in Flannigan Saint-Aubin ‘Testeria’ 1059.
16. Angela Y. Davis, ‘Rape, Racism and the Capitalist Setting’, The Angela Y.
Davis Reader, ed. Joy James (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) 136.
Works cited
Blount, Marcellus and George P. Cunningham. ‘Introduction: The “Real”
Black Man?’ Representing Black Men. Eds Marcellus Blount and George
P. Cunningham. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.
Brown, Stephanie and Keith Clark. ‘Melodramas of Beset Black Manhood? Medit-
ations on African American Masculinity as Scholarly Topos and Social Menace:
An Introduction’. Callaloo 26:3 (2003) 732–737.
Davis, Angela Y. ‘Rape, Racism and the Capitalist Setting’. The Angela Y. Davis
Reader. Ed. Joy James. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.
Doss, Erika. ‘Imaging the Panthers: Representing Black Power and Masculinity,
1960s–1990s’. Prospects 23 (1998) 483–516.
Flannigan Saint-Aubin, Arthur. ‘Testeria: The Dis-ease of Black Men in White
Supremacist, Patriarchal Culture’. Callaloo 17:4 (1994) 1054–1073.
hooks, bell. We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity. London and New York:
Routledge, 2004.
JanMohamad, Abdul R. ‘Sexuality on/of the Racial Border: Foucault, Wright, and
the Articulation of “Racialized Sexuality” ’. Discourses of Sexuality: From Aristotle
to AIDS. Ed. Domna Stanton. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992.
Kimmel, Michael. ‘Integrating Men into the Curriculum’. http://www.
law.duke.edu/journals/djglp/articles/gen4p181.htm. (17 August 2005).
Liggins Hill, Patricia (Ed.). Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African
American Literary Tradition. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.
Light, Alison. ‘Fear of the Happy Ending: The Color Purple, Reading and Racism’.
Plotting Change: Contemporary Women’s Fiction. Ed. Linda Anderson. London:
Edward Arnold, 1990.
Mercer, Kobena and Isaac Julien. ‘Race, Sexual Politics and Black Masculinity:
A Dossier’. Male Order: Unwrapping Masculinity. Eds Rowena Chapman and
Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988.
Wiegman, Robyn. American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender. Durham and
9
Lifelong Learning in the Lifelong
Poem
Chris Thurgar-Dawson
And then went down to the ship, Set keel to breakers, forth on
the godly sea [ ]
– Ezra Pound, The Cantos 1, ll.1–21
AS IF BECAUSE OF FATHER I WENT DOWN TO the soft forced

notions of boats went as wax before repleteness in summer’s
heat [ ]
– Lisa Robertson 2001, 3652
Silly humans, always filling in the blanks.

– Susie, Cropcirclers Blog, 15 May 20063
Extensive written and oral discourses already exist about my two key
topics in this chapter: masculinity and the contemporary long poem.
There is even a growing body of work, certainly in the international
academy, which tentatively links and explores the two topics. What
is lacking, however, and what this chapter seeks in its own way to
address, is pedagogic reflection on how more meaningfully to learn
from, teach and deliver such material. I should state at the outset that
this chapter draws heavily on two specific teaching moments: the first
belongs to Professor Cairns Craig who delivered the Long Poem MA
module at the University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom in 1992, and
the second goes to Prof. PhDr. Jaroslav Macháček at Palačky Univer-
sity in the Czech Republic who enabled my own Modern Long Poem
module in 1995–1996. Part 1, below, focuses on masculinities in various
contemporary long poem texts themselves. Part 2, concerning experi-
ential pedagogy, is derived from the modules named above. Since I use
long poem examples in most of the modules I teach – including those
155
156 Lifelong Learning in the Lifelong Poem
which address transformative writing in the creative/critical mode – my

general argument stems from the strong belief that the contemporary
long poem is a valuable and underused student resource in the explor-
ation of male, not to say ‘epic’, identity.
Not to say ‘epic’ identity: Masculinity and the contemporary

long poem
The quotations from Pound and Robertson which act as epilogues to this
chapter tell of one mode of interrogation in which a (loosely speaking)
postmodern long poem replies to a modernist one. The modernist one
in this case is certainly not speaking in its own voice either – but is a
roundabout reply to Odyssey XI, with a nod to two Medieval Latin trans-
lators, Andreas Divus of Justinopolis and Georgius Dartona of Crete.4
We can suppose that the latter pair were themselves writing back to the
set of Greek authors known as Homer, via a string of Romance interme-
diaries and pseudo-secular soothsayers: ‘[s]illy humans, always filling in
the blanks’. Well yes, but us or them, and is there another option? But
actually the most enlivening quotation of the three is Susie’s, whom I
have taken out of context in order to model her point. It reads in full:
Silly humans, always filling in the blanks. I never thought about

instinctual narrative tendencies. I do remember someone once
pointing out that the whole gamut of education was to build and
bridge connections between things that we otherwise might not
notice. And I liked that notion at the time. But now, I’m thinking
that we make up a lot of the stuff that we teach, even what we learn
we make up. But I like stories
(Susie, Cropcirclers Blog, comment posted 15 May 2006)
This opens up a question familiar to neurologists and behavioural

psychologists: do we perceive first and then narrate, or do we instinct-
ively build our perception into an immediate narrative, because humans
are hard-wired to do so and simply have no choice? Are we primarily
‘seeing’ and ‘visualising’ creatures or ‘narrating’ and ‘story-making’
ones? But we need some more context and are still guessing at the real
topic of conversation, the trigger for Susie’s informal pedagogic message.
The physical object under discussion is the second edition of Sharon
Thesen’s The New Long Poem Anthology (Robertson 2001), which has
become something of a standard work in the field, replying as it did
to Michael Ondaatje’s original Long Poem Anthology (Ondaatje 1979)
Chris Thurgar-Dawson 157
and indeed to its own first edition which appeared to some acclaim in
1991. Susie, a student teaching practitioner, is making a message board
comment on an original posting by ‘Kaleidoscope’ entitled ‘Experien-
cing Reading/Writing the Long Poem’. Kaleidoscope is clearly a poet
herself and the relevant part of her original posting is here:
Thanks to Erin Mouré, who last year suggested that I write ‘friends’
for my poems, and who lead me toward reading long poems, I’m
presently reading Sharon Thesen’s 2001 The New Long Poem Anthology
which includes such wonders as Anne Carson’s ‘The Glass Essay’ and
Jeff Derksen’s ‘Interface.’ These two long poems are the beginning
of a change in my poetic sensibility. What were once skimpy little
lyrics (apologies, older poems ) are evolving into pages of startling
material. Writing in this form is teaching me about the end. Thesen
points out ‘ it is easy to see how both the resistance to end and the
desire to continue [ ] are the essential experiences of life itself.’ The
end can be anywhere, but if I keep pushing it off (in poetry we can
choose to push off the end) I’m constantly surprised.
(Kaleidoscope, Cropcirclers Blog, comment posted 15 May 2006)
In her stark admission that ‘writing in this form is teaching me about the
end’, Kaleidoscope voices, perhaps unwittingly, one of the commonest
concerns of the critical debate about the long poem, a debate stretching
back to Ted Weiss, Rosenthal and Gall, Robert Kroetsch and the now
infamous Long-liners Conference in 1985.5 If the long poem is by default
about delay, deferral and ‘the resistance to end’ (occupying the position
of both symbolic ritual and ritualised symbol), then this appears in some
sense to be a threat rather than a liberation to masculinity. Playing
with this threat – ultimately the threat of death from which no man
can save either his family or himself – becomes a generic prerequisite
of this procrastinating form, a form described by Hamlet’s players as
‘poem unlimited’, by Pound as ‘the tale of the tribe’ and by Poe as ‘a
flat contradiction in terms [ ] mere size’.6
Certainly the role of man as saviour–warrior, of male subjectivity itself
as at once embattled, questing, nation-forming and heroic is central
to the epic tradition in western poetry and western culture until the
end of the eighteenth century. In various ways it was the long poem
itself which was the cause of this situation. Nor was it Wordsworth’s
Prelude that heralded a key change in sensibility; throughout the seven-
teenth century extended poetic texts were produced which already
held masculinity in some disarray.7 Nevertheless is was not until
the twentieth century that publishing itself could allow the serious
marketing and dissemination of long poem sequences and extended
forms that challenged the bastions of epic masculinity with any force.
While texts by H.D., Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, Amy Lowell and
Laura Riding may have paved the way for overdue regenderings of
the genre, and undoubtedly led to transitional texts by writers such
as Barbara Guest, Lorine Niedecker, Kathleen Raine, Elizabeth Jennings
and Elizabeth Bishop, it was not until truly postmodern times that
the women’s long poem and extended sequence had significant impact
in replacing (more accurately, re-placing) male epic poetry. Indeed, if
the 1980s have been recognised for various Thatcherite cultural and
nuclear shifts in power relations, not to mention the concomitant rise
of the ‘New Man’, they have not been recognised as the time in which
female authorship of the epic qua took over from the male. Suddenly
Diane Wakoski, Leslie Scalapino, Susan Howe, Kathleen Fraser and Lynn
Hejinian in America found themselves matched by Daphne Marlatt,
Phyllis Webb, Betsy Warland and Lola Lemire Tostevin in Canada. Even
in the United Kingdom Anne Stevenson, Sally Purcell, Penelope Shuttle
and others were joining the epic rewrite. Clearly, epic masculinity in
English poetry was losing key ground, though as we shall see in the
following three extracts, the crisis in traditional constructions of what
it meant to be manly needed little help from across the gender divide.
The first example is the oldest: it is Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger, published
as a whole in 1975 and reissued with a new introduction by Marjorie
Perloff in 1989.8 Gunslinger, written in 4 books over 7 years remains
one of the great poetic achievements of the last century but is known
today to only a handful of academics and students of American liter-
ature. In it, Dorn simultaneously traces the decline of the myth of
the American West alongside the debilitating processes of emasculation
itself. He performs this through the thinly disguised figure of Howard
Hughes (known as ‘Robart’) who also travels West on his specially
adapted railroad carriage. It is a narrative of the utter failure of capital
economy, of the parody of those popular forms which bribe and cajole
consumer society, and finally of the triumph of language over substance
in what Dorn announces as his ‘ABSOLUTE LINGUATILT SURVEY SITE’
(G 141). It is also an extended piece of often supra-real writing which
charts like no other the highs and lows of the mescaline years of the
sixties, as the key characters travel in their marvelous ‘constellation’
towards their ultimate destination, the ‘hill-of-beans’ in California. If
the anti-hero of the piece is Gunslinger himself, referred to variously
as Slinger or Zlinger, the hero of the poem is the ‘bombed Horse’ who
takes on the voice of the philosopher Heidegger and becomes something

of an ontological creature. The rest of the posse include Taco Desoxin,
Tonto Pronto, Champagne Lil and the pseudo-medical man, Dr Jean
Flamboyant, all of whom employ a creative panoply of voices and iden-
tities as befits their current situation on their stage-coach headed West.
Parodying such historical landscape tropes as the American dust-bowl,
the Californian gold rush, the Texan oil fields and Hollywood itself,
the characters’ Waynesque trot towards the setting sun becomes an
important and vivid rewrite of American cultural politics in the second
half of the twentieth century. The sixth and final member of the team
is a character whose proper name is ‘I’, which leads among other things
to the syntactically playful lines, ‘I is dead, the poet said/poet that ain’t
grammatical’ and in many ways typifies the crisis of the modern male,
as argued here by Erik Cohen:
[ ] modern men are often alienated from the centre of their society
or culture. Some of them may not be seeking alternative centres:
their life, strictly speaking, is meaningless, but they are not looking
for meaning, whether in their own society or elsewhere. For such
people, travelling in the mode just described, loses its recreational
significance: it becomes purely diversionary – a mere escape from the
boredom and meaninglessness of routine
(Cohen 1979: 185)9
But Gunslinger deconstructs masculinity more effectively in the

narrative of Robart (Hughes) himself. At every turn, stereotypical social
constructions of masculinity are established, upended, reestablished,
faked, faded and lampooned. Hughes’ famous last years on the ninth
floor of the Desert Inn Hotel, Las Vegas provide the appropriate back-
drop to a story that has seen him scale the heights of Trans World
Airlines and plumb the depths of the Spruce Goose. He becomes, in
Dorn’s text, the ultimate symbol of self-crippling masculinity in a society
that has learned neither to care for, nor to notice its symptomatic
and metonymic victims. If Dorn’s long poem is what it claims to be,
that is, ‘SUBLIME/STARRING THE MAN’ (G 123), then the man it stars
has indeed been found, but he was not (yet again) the man we were
looking for.
Robert Kroetsch provides the second interrogation of masculinity
here. Kroetsch is the perfect example of the Canadian long poet. He
makes the right wrong moves, he uses the expected unexpected forms,
he has made resistance to narrative an art form in an art form that
resists all narration; blending biography with deconstruction, he abhors

genre yet writes paradoxically within it. All this he does from a uniquely
Canadian perspective and with no small amount of style. Indeed, he
claims that to write like this is, uniquely, the Canadian perspective:
the recuperation of an all-but-unnamable, settler identity. In addition
he provides, as the contemporary critic of the long poem has come to
expect, a marvelously complex assemblage of theories to cover all aspects
of his poetic practice. Completed Field Notes (1973–1989),10 in 3 books
and 20 sections, complete with contents page, prologue and author’s
note end-piece, is a comprehensive lesson in self-regarding Canadian
masculinity:
a series of related poems that would in devious ways seek out the
forms sufficient to the project (I leave it nameless) announced by
Wordsworth and Whitman and rendered impossible by the history
and thought and art of the twentieth century. Since the eloquence
of failure may be the only eloquence remaining in this our time, I
let these poems stand as the enunciation of how I came to a poet’s
silence. And I like to believe that the sequence of poems, announced
in medias res as continuing, is, in its acceptance of its own impossib-
ilities, completed. (author’s note, CFN 269)
This author’s endnote which claims, significantly, that ‘the eloquence of

failure may be the only eloquence left in this our time’ is both central to
the argument of this chapter and a useful point of entry stylistically. The
prose here is oppositional, corrective, balanced. It is the kind of writing
that constantly seems to be seeking its double, its doppel, its other. We move
from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, from the expectancy of
naming a ‘project’ to ‘nameless’, from ‘eloquence’ to ‘failure’, from ‘enun-
ciation’ to ‘silence’, from ‘continuing’ to ‘completed’. Such oppositional
progress is highly ratiocinative in its structure, displaying the same contra-
puntal strategies which form such an important part of the main body of
the poetic text itself. The words seem to lie in wait for their partners, to
anticipate their semiotic other, and it is this anticipation which drives the
text forward as much as the weighted metrics of traditional poetic texts.
As George Woodcock has observed, ‘[i]t is a two-steps-forward-one-step-
backward kind of poetry’.11 The writing desires simultaneously to affirm
and deny the male voice in the same instant of enunciation and this schizo-
phrenic challenge informs Field Notes at every turn. It lies deep at the
heart not only of the split absence and presence of the linguistic sign, but
also deep within what it means to set down the male identity of the
Canadian (anti-)hero:
Canadians seek the lost and everlasting moment when chaos and
order were synonymous. They seek that timeless split-second in time
when the one, in the process of becoming the other, was itself the
other. The city of such dreams is unrealizable; the poem of the occa-
sion becomes the unendable long poem.
(Kroetsch, The Lovely Treachery of Words, 68)12
For Kroetsch, this sense of ‘space all over the place’13 is written on
a gendered landscape. It is the Prairie space of his Alberta childhood,
and the ‘vast but contained environment [of] endless land and towering
skies’14 of the Northern Territories where he worked on inland riverboats
from 1948 to 1951. This is ‘the geography of middle space’, where ‘the
very act of speaking announces space’ (LTW 36, 164) and which Kroetsch
contrasts so openly with the capitalised West in these extracts from his
‘Upstate New York Journals’:
Sunday, October 31, 1971

The old/new struggle in the capitalistic West: land as
earth and land as commodity. The connection lost,
we find it. My deep longing of recent days for the
west of my blood and bones. My ancestral west, the
prairie west, the parklands. (LTW 141)
Sunday, January 14, 1973

In the west we are possessed of a curious rhetoric. A
rhetoric that goes back to religion and politics, to the
outcry, to the curse, to the blessing, to the plea, to
the song. Not to the educated man, imagining himself to
be reasonable. (LTW 146)
The writing of this opposition which compares the masculinity of the

urban, metropolised West with the masculinity required by the vast open
landscape of the ‘prairie west’ had no poetic tradition in Canada until
the 1960s. At that time a community of ‘Prairie Poets’ gradually appeared
from various western provinces, all with the common aim of in some
way recuperating the lost ‘curious rhetoric’ of which Kroetsch speaks.
Apart from Kroetsch himself, the work of Eli Mandel, John Newlove and
Dale Zieroth was instrumental in beginning to re-place the Canadian
west in a form that was neither fictive in its handling of quintessen-

tial maleness nor necessarily naturalistic. The Canadian realist novel
which had in many ways made its home on the prairies (‘This fiction
makes us real’ as Kroetsch has said), seemed in no position to deal with
the socio-economic changes which were remorselessly turning paternal-
istic prairie smallholdings into the horizonless voids of multinational
agribusiness. For that task the Prairie Poets had to ‘seek out the form
suitable to the project’, a project which has been strenuously continued
since then in the work of a new generation of western poets: Andy
Suknaski, Roy Kiyooka, Glen Sorestad and others. It was a task that
belonged, Kroetsch felt, ‘Not to the educated man, imagining himself to
be reasonable’ but to an authentic masculine voice that became mascu-
line only by disavowing any notion of successful masculinity in the first
place.
Since men, rather than women have been seen characteristically as the
namers, the sex which has the power over the linguistic signifier, some-
times referred to as a ‘pact of nomination’, my third example comes from
Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s second New World Trilogy, republished as
Ancestors.15 The naming process lies at the heart of this long poem and
to understand the trilogy fully in terms of linguistic annunciation, it
is necessary to understand the nation language concept of ‘Nommo’.
For this I refer to Brathwaite’s extended essay ‘The African Presence in
Caribbean Literature’ written between 1970 and 1973,16 since it provides
the clearest explanation of the cultural reference behind the technique.
Again I want to underline the fact that this is a specifically gendered
concern relating to the Barbadian sociolect and to Brathwaite’s insist-
ence in writing poetry that is appropriate to the failing man’s dialogue
with his local environment: ‘[w]hat I am saying is that the choice of
word (nommo) dealing with experience in and out of the hounfort, must
be appropriate to the place and the experience’ (R 227).
‘Nametracks’ as the title itself suggests, links the ideas of linguistics
and naming with those of tracking and leaving a ground-trail, a male
tribal role. This is evident in the way the text trails down the page
swerving from side to side but also in the difficulty faced by the ‘ogrady’
figure to name the slave poet. In fact, in the movement of the punning
and repetitious letter-swapping it is as much, perhaps, nametricks as
nametracks. Again we can read close parallels with male characters in
other long poems. Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger faces exactly the same fear
of being ‘described’ in Book One of his eponymous poem, ‘Are you
trying/to “describe” me, boy?’ (G 25) while the Canadian Trickster figure
in Completed Field Notes connects us to an acknowledged but hidden
and unnameable Arcadian mythology. However, whereas Kroetsch and
Dorn see their task as one of unnaming and whilst Walcott is on record
in many places for his project of initiating an ‘Adamic naming’, Brath-
waite deals almost exclusively with the powers and dangers involved in
the process itself of re-naming, a process which is ever subject to vari-
form strategies of veiling, disclosing, doubling and secreting to which
the contemporary long poem is both particularly suited and justly
renowned. Coming full circle, the whole concept of male fame is itself
linked to the idea of reiterating or re-sounding a name, thus for example
the French word for famous, renommé, the ‘re-named’.
Brathwaite, too, recognises the travelling masculine internationalism
of this power of language, a power which in the West is very much in
question today, having gradually replaced an oral tradition or ‘auriture’
with a scriptural one, ‘écriture’. Erring on the side of caution, it is fair
to say that the feminist challenge to the denotative inefficacy of the
word has been a largely twentieth-century phenomenon. Significantly,
in ‘The African presence in Caribbean literature’, Brathwaite asserts that
‘a certain kind of concern for an attitude to the word, the atomic core of
language is something that is very much present in all folk cultures, all
pre-literate, pre-industrial societies’ (R 236). In his desire to resubmit to
us the full pre-existing Benjaminian aura of the Word as Sign, Brathwaite
follows a long line of Modernist poets and proves himself to be the only
true Modernist (albeit a late Caribbean Modernism) of this chapter. We
think of Eliot’s ‘that is not what I meant at all’, of Pound’s ‘it coheres
all right/even if my notes do not cohere’, of Beckett’s ‘I can’t go on,
I’ll go on’, of H.D.’s ‘undecipherable script’, and above all, perhaps,
of David Jones’s life-long ‘utile’ project to lift up valid signs, ‘things
that somehow are redeemed’. Such recognition of the failure of a male
language to signify, of the poem, literally, to mean, is nevertheless part
and parcel of Brathwaite’s own poetic use of ‘nam’, ‘nyam’, ‘nomminit’
and of the whole Bantu concept of ‘nommo’. We learn that ‘[t]he word
(nommo or name) is held to contain secret, power ’:
People feel a name is so important that a change in his name could

transform a person’s life. In traditional society, in fact, people often
try to hide their names. That is why a Nigerian, for example, has so
many names. Not only is it difficult to remember them, it is difficult
to know which is the name that the man regards or identifies as his
nam. If you call the wrong name you can’t damage him. Rumpelstilt-
skin in the German fable and Shemo-limmo in the Jamaican tale are
other examples of this.
(Brathwaite, R 236–237)
The importance of the highly poetic ‘Nightwash’ episode of Mother

Poem can now be recognised. If the male coloniser of empire, person-
ified in the figure of ‘ogrady’, to whom the piece is addressed, can be
prevented from naming the poet by his own name, the ‘maim what
me/mudda me name’ (MP 64), then he can be linguistically and cultur-
ally outwitted by the Bajan nation-language adoption of ancient African
ritual. No matter how hard ogrady tries to beat the slave-poet into
submission (notice the play on maim/name), his identity is veiled,
hidden, secure. The note on the word ‘nomminit’, typical of Brathwaite’s
notes in its tone of bare understatement and partial decoding of the
secrets of his text, runs as follows:
p. 64, l, 9. nomminit: nation-language sound/word for ‘cultural

domination’, literally ‘the gobbling up of the (other’s) name’.
(Brathwaite, MP 121)
Similarly, the note for ‘nam’ itself is quoted below, since it demonstrates
the wordplay techniques which underlie and inform the whole trilogy
and, again, is symptomatic of the kind of annotation which we must
learn to read not just as explication and commentary, but as an integral
part of the poetic text itself:
p. 62, l. 8. nam: secret name, soul-source, connected with nyam (eat),

yam (root food), nyame (name of god). Nam is the heart of our
nation-language which comes into conflict with the cultural imperial
authority of Prospero (O’Grady), pp. 58–64.
(Brathwaite, MP 121)
Jumping forward, briefly, to the notes for X/Self, we should compare this
definition with another explanation of ‘nam’ which again stresses the
political implications of the word in relation to its colonial past, a whole
new frame of reference being carried along in the same three letters:
Nam (the title of the poem and word used throughout the work)
means not only soul/atom but indestructible self/sense of culture under
crisis. Its meaning involves root words from many cultures (meaning
‘soul’; but also (for me) man in disguise (man spelled backwards));
and the main or mane of name after the weak e or tail has been eaten
by the conquistador; leaving life (a/alpha) protected by the boulder
consonants n and m. In its future, nam is capable of atomic explosion:

nam dynamo dynamite and apotheosis: nam nyam onyame
(Brathwaite, XS 127)
The neologising tendency which gives rise to words such as

‘poopapadoo’ and ‘boobabaloo’ (MP 64) is again dependent on our
knowledge of the ‘onomatopoeia and sound-symbols’ of nommo in
which ‘a kind of conjuration the same magical/miracle tradition as
the conjurman’ means that ‘Vibrations awake at the centre of words’ (R
238). The conjurman figure or ‘word see-er’ of African descent becomes
the male poet of oral tradition and of performance poetry and in this
respect Brathwaite reemphasises his Modernist hand. The belief that the
poet could redeem or act as social prophet was a persistent theme of
the European literary avant-garde throughout the twenties and thirties
and in this way the second trilogy’s linguistic gendering is seen to
rewrite or reconfigure the history of empire not simply by replacing
it with nation-language, but by infusing certain experimental prin-
ciples of British Modernism with the environmental experience of the
Barbadian mindset towards the word. The textscape of this long poem
thus becomes a triage point for wounded British, Bajan and African
masculinities.
The three long poem examples I have used above, then, have intrinsic
merit when addressing questions about the representation of male iden-
tity – political, linguistic and ideological. But they also have extrinsic
value for those interested in using such extended texts within a teaching
context. Such value that links the life of the text to the lives of real
readers may take several forms, and it is to these broadly educational
concerns that I now turn in Part 2.
Pedagogy: Teaching the lifelong poem to male students
While the poems above only hint at the importance of masculinity in

the contemporary long poem, and do need to be lived with and more
carefully explored to appreciate the lifelong elements of their inscrip-
tion, nevertheless they appear to trigger some interesting reactions in
the seminar room. These range from classic ‘male inexpressiveness’
involving poor levels of self-disclosure (Balswick 1988), to masculinity
being performed as the ‘flight from the feminine’ (Kimmel 2001), and
link no doubt to wider historical interpretations beyond the institu-
tion regarding ‘hegemonic masculinity’ (Tosh 2004).17 However, in the
absence of firm data on the subject, let me begin by listing some
empirically observed behaviours by male students while delivering this

material:
1. An attempt to advise the tutor that the text was too difficult for
other students on the course.
2. The taking the tutor aside at the end of the seminar to demonstrate
that the student had superior cultural knowledge about the poem
which he needed to prove in the others’ absence.
3. A male student who gradually took on the role of ‘expert’ within
the group to impress female students at the expense of the group’s
formerly supportive dynamic.
4. A male student who would say nothing at all and hide in his shell
for weeks at a time, only to announce at the end of the module that
it was all far too basic for him.
5. A male learner who exhibited laddish body language and lethargic
poses in an attempt to impress other ‘mates’ in the class so as to
form a peer clique instead of a small learning group.
6. A participant who increasingly saw himself in the role of the tutor’s
apprentice, using great care and self-awareness in complex processes
of deference and counter-transference.
7. A mature student who used his life experience to way-lay and side-
track critical discussion and the group’s own objective development
of ideas.
8. A football fan whose interpretation of each text always seemed to
bear upon a heroic male in Tottenham Hotspur FC.
9. A student with specific learning needs who used aggressive and self-
aggrandising outbursts about the so-called poor interpretations of
his peers.
10. A male student of modest ability, who felt he had to rectify his intel-
lectual shortcomings by dominating group sessions with his voice
alongside the careful maintenance of a tiresome and emotionally
costly ‘cool’ aura.
11. The strategic men, always to be found ‘down the pub’ after each
class, dropping in and out of sessions in a piston arrangement to
minimise contact time.
12. Mutually supportive but detrimentally inseparable male students,
who worked so well together that they inevitably drew attention to
themselves as Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee and whom none of
us ever reached.
13. A male gay student who used his sexuality to elicit sympathy and
humour from the rest of the group while actually being both lazy
and indulgent.
It would be too much by far to claim that these examples were limited to
the delivery of a long poem module – indeed I can think of certain more
destructive examples from core survey modules – but I am suggesting
here that pseudo-epic, narrative poems in which the construction and
performance of fragmentary masculinities is highlighted, can and do
cause exaggerated male learning behaviours to be exhibited in the
seminar space. If resistant-defensive mechanisms are to be turned to
the advantage of the group as a whole, an aim which is achievable if
rarely accomplished, the tutor cannot afford to situate her/himself in
a position which overlooks, disregards or is silenced by such interven-
tions. Neither intentionally complicit nor unintentionally condoning
the actions of such difficult participants, the tutor may have to allow
certain short-term antagonisms to run their course if medium and
longer-term learning goals are to be achieved by the whole group.
Nor is the male tutor in some way magically immunised against errors
in behaviour and judgement. Experience only goes so far in gauging the
harmful effects of certain individuals’ ego displays. The male tutor can
react aggressively himself; can get drawn into an unsavoury battle of
wills; can weaken in the face of manipulation and misdirection; can, in
short, be little better or far worse than the male student himself. In such
cases where the power shifts uneasily between tutor and group and back
again, little of lasting pedagogic value is achieved.
Having said that it is speculative to account for the high incidence of
awkward male behaviour (which I take to be group transference indic-
ators of one sort or another) in regard to one particular genre or sub-
genre such as the long poem, it seems nevertheless likely that because
men and women construct their preferences differently when entering
the text, a generic cause may in the end be responsible for such effects
in the space of the seminar room. According to reader research under-
taken by David Bleich in the 1980s, male students consistently looked
for a strong narrative voice, whereas female students tended to perceive
a narrative ‘world’:
After collecting five response statements from each of the four men
and four women, we found a significant gender-related difference
in response only with regard to literary genre. We did not see that
response varied significantly with the gender of the author, and we
did not find any obvious differences in the respondents’ sheer use of
language. [ ] Men and women both perceived a strong lyric voice
in the poetry, usually seeing it as the author’s voice, while in the
narrative men perceived a strong narrative voice, but women exper-
ienced the narrative as a ‘world’, without a particularly strong sense
that this world was narrated into existence.
(Bleich 1986: 239)18
Long poems in the Lucanian, subversive mode, such as the three

discussed above, are in the deliberate business of disrupting any sense
of sustained narrative voice, yet they easily build a story-world, a world
that is accessed through an accumulation of associated but disparate
chunks of information. It would then be possible to suggest a correla-
tion between evidence of frustrated male behaviours and an absence of
‘strong narrative voice’. Put another way, when a certain group of texts
offer a weak narrative voice, there is little for the male reader to buy
into, less material with which to build either an empathetic or cognitive
link. When narrative voice begins to fragment, weaken or flex, it seems
the text-world is more easily made significant by female readers who
do not perceive such features as an obstacle to building a meaningful
whole.
Where does this leave us and what conclusions can we usefully draw?
In the English Studies seminar room we know that the male student
is almost certain to be in the minority. We also know, in my own
institution, that he is statistically twice as unlikely to make it through his
degree at all. This speaks of a pressing need to research and acknowledge
the obstacles to learning experienced by male participants in Higher
Education. Generic research by Bleich and others is a good start, but
if we are to move beyond general identification of the problem and
unverified suppositions on the cause, what we need next is some serious
consideration of male student perspectives, specifically those on UK
English courses. The trope of the defeated reader is not one any educator
wishes to encourage; the trope of the male defeated reader, a faltering
minority, still less so.
Notes
1. Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1991), 3.
2. Lisa Robertson, ‘Debbie: An Epic’, in The New Long Poem Anthology, ed.
Sharon Thesen (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2001), 365. Michael Ondaatje, The
Long Poem Anthology (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1979).
3. Susie, comment on ‘Experiencing Reading/Writing the Long Poem’, Crop-

circlers Blog, comment posted 15 May 2006, http://www.cropcirclers.
blogspot.com (accessed 4 March 2006).
4. Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California, 1993), 1. For a full discussion of the traditional Virgilian
versus the subversive Lucanian epic modes, see David Quint’s persuasive
argument in Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
5. See Frank Davey and Ann Munton, eds, ‘The Proceedings of the Long-liners
Conference on the Canadian Long Poem, York University, Toronto, 29 May –
1 June 1984’. Open Letter 6.2 (1985).
6. Poe makes this statement in his well-known 1850 essay, ‘The Poetic Prin-
ciple’. He goes on, ‘If, at any time, any very long poem were popular in
reality, which I doubt, it is at least clear that no very long poem will ever be
popular again’.
7. See, for example, Richard Payne Knight, The Landscape: A Didactic Poem
in Three Books (1795), reprinted as facsimile of 2nd edition (Farnborough:
Gregg, 1972).
8. Ed Dorn, Gunslinger (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989). Hereafter
G in the text.
9. Erik Cohen, ‘A Phenomenology of Tourist Experiences’ Sociology 13 (1979),
179–201.
10. Robert Kroetsch, Completed Field Notes: The Long Poems of Robert Kroetsch
(Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989). Hereafter CFN in the text.
11. George Woodcock, George Woodcock’s Introduction to Canadian Poetry
(Toronto: ECW Press, 1993), 168.
12. Robert Kroetsch, The Lovely Treachery of Words (Toronto: Oxford University
Press, 1989). Hereafter LTW in the text.
13. Woodcock, George Woodcock’s Introduction to Canadian Poetry 166.
14. Ibid., 157.
15. Kamau Brathwaite, Ancestors: A Reinvention of Mother Poem, Sun Poem, and
X/Self (New York: New Directions, 2001). Note, however, that references in
the text are to Mother Poem (MP), Sun Poem (SP) and X/Self (XS) all originally
published by Oxford University Press in 1977, 1982 and 1987.
16. Kamau Brathwaite, ‘The African Presence in Caribbean Literature’, in Roots
(Michigan: Arbour, 1993). Hereafter R in the text.
17. Jack Balswick, The Inexpressive Male (Lexington, Mass: Lexington, 1988);
Michael S. Kimmel, ‘Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame and Silence in
the Construction of Gender Identity’, in Stephen M. Whitehead and Frank J.
Barrett, eds, The Masculinities Reader (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 266–287; and
John Tosh, ‘Hegemonic Masculinity and the History of Gender’, in Stefan
Dudink, Karen Hagemann and John Tosh, eds, Masculinities in Politics and
War: Gendering Modern History (Manchester: MUP, 2004), 41–60.
18. David Bleich, ‘Gender Interests in Reading and Language’, in Elizabeth A.
Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart, eds, Gender and Reading: Essays on
Readers, Texts, and Contexts (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP,
1986), 234–266.
10
Autobiographical Narratives in the
Teaching of Masculinities
John Beynon
Introduction
This chapter is rooted in Cultural Studies, within which much valuable

deconstructive work on gender (both femininities and masculinities)
has taken place over the past two or so decades. Cultural Studies is the
archetypal inter-disciplinary field, drawing upon, on the one hand, the
Humanities (linguistics and literary studies, whether literary theory, text
analysis, content analysis, narratology and stylistics) and, on the other,
the Social Sciences (particularly ethnography, visual ethnography, life
history, oral reminiscence and narrative analysis). Meanwhile, the recent
‘narrative turn’ in social research has witnessed a renewed interest in the
autobiographical narrative, not only its form and content, but also its
function and purpose (for example, Crossley 2000; Elliott 2005; Mishler
1999). Oral reminiscence is about documenting events and experiences
(‘the spoken’), as well as about the narrator (‘the speaker’). Although
this chapter privileges the former, the latter focus upon function is
now being widely reflected in Cultural Studies: my own most recent
published work, for instance, examines how inmates sought to recover,
create and display masculinity through narrative in the midst of the
emasculating environment of prison (Beynon 2006).
Masculinities are not easy to teach for a multitude of reasons.
One pedagogical strategy that is likely to result in a fruitful learning
experience for students is collaborative, lecturer-led research, starting
with theory, moving to fieldwork, then ending with analysis (and
presentation). Below I outline such a project, currently work-in-
progress, focusing upon autobiographical narratives on the theme of
Old Industrial Man. In what follows I start by saying something about
students as researchers and the nature of autobiographical reminiscence
170
John Beynon 171
(Section A); then I outline a model for conceptualising masculinities in

all their varieties (Section B); and, finally, I comment upon two autobio-
graphical narratives (Section C) taken from the ongoing study of former
working men’s experiences of the industrial past in South Wales, cent-
ring on changes in work-related working class male identity since the
1930s. What factors, I ask, have shaped working class masculinities in
South Wales in the recent past?
Section A: Researching men’s lives
Old Industrial Man, along with the manual work-based masculinity

he espoused, has been dismissed as limited and limiting by feminists,
academics and journalists alike (Beynon 2002). With the advent of
more plural masculinities from the 1970s onwards, he has increasingly
been vilified as an oppressive patriarch trapped within an armour-plated
machismo, a dinosaur as outmoded as the smokestack industries in
which he laboured. Indeed, the glitzy, liberated New Man has been skil-
fully crafted to represent all that the Old Man is now held not to have
been, namely emotionally literate and understanding; feminised and
liberated; and all-too-willing to contribute to the full range of domestic
and child-rearing duties. But before Old Industrial Man finally disap-
pears should we not look more carefully at him and what shaped his
masculinity and contest a reductionist view, widely current in some
quarters, that caricatures him as little more than an ill-educated, Walter
Morel-like domestic tyrant.
Students as researchers
In my teaching of masculinities I have long encouraged students as
acolyte ethnographers to explore the minutiae of men’s lives and how
masculinities are lived, experienced and ‘brought off’ in everyday life. I
have recently been using the South Wales project above as a stimulus
to get students started on their own data gathering, something I have
done successfully with other ethnographic projects in the past. Whilst
I certainly do not present my own research as a template to be slav-
ishly copied by students, I do insist that they start with theory prior to
collecting data.
Students have ready access to a wealth of oral reminiscence within
their own families and communities that can be insightful into changes
in the nature of work; gender relations; the division of domestic labour;
social and sexual mores; past class composition and attitudes; recre-
ational pursuits; community life and so on. Gathered by both the
172 Autobiographical Narratives
lecturer and his/her students as a collaborative activity it can quickly

accumulate into a valuable, comprehensive, topic-based archive, in the
process throwing up a host of issues about both masculinities and
the nature of oral reminiscence itself as the research passes through a
number of stages:
• preparation, including reading, locating suitable respondents,

making the necessary arrangements, establishing rapport and so on.
• data collection based on sensitive, open-ended interviewing.
• data transcription and data coding and ordering.
• data analysis and presentation, whether as an oral and/or written
report.
The nature of autobiographical reminiscence

Autobiographical reminiscence is a particularly fruitful way of exploring
how masculinity was shaped and experienced in the recent past. Clearly
such data reveals something of the ‘way it was’, although its limita-
tions should be readily acknowledged at the outset: the ‘life-as-told’ is
not the same as the ‘life-as-lived’. Narratives are often suffused with
strong emotions, retrospective musings, memory condensations and
contradictions of which the speaker may be unaware. Nevertheless,
cross-triangulated with further accounts of working experiences (and
supplemented by archival and documentary sources) it can be an admir-
able starting-point for students-as-embryonic-researchers. It uses the
‘living memory’ of a previous generation to explore their lives, working
experiences and, in this case, masculinities. Such data, whilst it can
never be a transparent mirror of past ‘reality’, can certainly reflect some-
thing of ‘the way things were’. It is worth reminding ourselves, too, that
a number of mediations take place between ‘what happened’ and ‘the
account of what happened’, between how events were experienced then
and how they are recalled and perceived now. The ‘recollected past’
always sees past events interpreted through the screen of the present.
What was once experienced is recreated in an oral narrative framed by
spoken conventions and may not only be subject to memory distortion,
but also to the familiar human tendency to bathe aspects of the past in
a nostalgic glow.
These oral recollections undergo a further mediation as the researcher
renders them into text, drawing now on written and even literary
conventions. S/he may (or may not) attempt to convey (as do soci-
olinguistic scholars) dialect, accent, register, tone, speed of delivery
John Beynon 173
and associated paralinguistic features. S/he may even have to go to

considerable lengths to render comprehensible to the reader what was
said, as Lewis (1961) did, for example, in his classic ‘The Children of
Sanchez’. Furthermore, the interviewer has a considerable authorial role
because it is s/he who frames the questions; establishes the interview
agenda; and seeks clarification and, thereby, forces respondents to focus
and elaborate. In this sense such ‘auto/biographical’ (Stanley 1993) data
is ‘dually authored’. Also significant is how respondents interpret the
interview situation; view the interviewer and the topic under discussion;
and decide what is expected of them. This version of the past, then, is
not based on ‘static’ archival sources: indeed, the great majority of men I
have interviewed to date in South Wales have relished the occasion as a
rare opportunity to be listened to attentively as they momentarily ‘hold
the stage’ and talk about long-past experiences that had, in retrospect,
often been rendered into key incidents used to ‘explain’ aspects of their
life story.
Whilst autobiographical narratives can tell us a great deal about men’s
lives and masculinities (as ways of seeing and being) were personally
experienced in the recent past, it is important not to let the richness of
such data conceal the influence of socio-economic and cultural forces
beyond the individual. It is because of this that I insist that students
start with theory and locate their data gathering within a theoretical
framework. In my experience most students can, with the necessary
prior training, become competent data-gatherers, but there is a tend-
ency for the data gathering to develop into an end in itself. Some
students are reluctant to select or edit it and insist that it is sufficient
for ‘the voices’ to stand for themselves. Many find it difficult, even
unnecessary, to move from this autobiographical level to a more analyt-
ical, theory-informed one. In what follows, therefore, I emphasise the
centrality of theory as a starting point to inform both data gathering
and data analysis. I contextualise two autobiographical narratives within
a conceptual model of masculinities derived from the work of Mead
(1934) and through which I seek to demonstrate that, whilst masculin-
ities are experienced and expressed personally, they are largely shaped
by external cultural, economic, geographical and historical forces.
Section B: Starting with theory: A Meadian model
Much gender theorising has failed to capture the interplay between

society and individual agency, between the macro and the micro.
Indeed, a dogmatic biological determinism has been superseded by an
undue emphasis upon individual agency, so much so that masculinity

is in danger of being reduced to little more than what are taken to
be stereotypical ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ appearance and behaviour, as
follows (Figure 10.1):
The embodied The embodied

male female
______+____________+________________+____________+____________+_____
The The The The The

masculine feminised androgynous masculinised feminine
masculine feminine
Figure 10.1 Gendered performative codes.
Indeed, no less a figure than Morgan (1992) writes that ‘gender and
masculinities may be understood as part of a Goffmanesque presentation
of self, something which is negotiated (implicitly or explicitly) over
a whole range of situations we should think of doing masculinities
rather than of being masculine’ (1992: 47).
In an attempt to place the individual’s personal ‘bringing off’ of
masculinity more firmly into a wider social context I turn to Mead
(1934) on identity and self, particularly his distinction between the
‘Generalized Other’, the ‘I’ and the ‘Me’. I adapt this to propose a
conceptual framework based on four ‘life domains’ to encapsulate the
ongoing dynamic between the overarching social (‘The Societal’) and in
which all our lives are embedded; the ‘person inside’ (‘The Subjective’);
the ‘person-out-in-the-world’ (‘The Interactional’); and the unfolding
‘Life Story’ that chronicles, reflects upon and continuously seeks to
make sense of the ‘life-as-it-has-been-and-is-being-lived’. I believe such a
model facilitates a better appreciation of the complexity of masculinities-
in-the-plural (and also, of course, of femininities) and their socio-cultural
formations. It is, of course, a diagrammatic representation of something
that is far from static, with each of the life domains evolving as the life
unfolds and the individual’s sense of gendered identity gradually shifts
under the influence of day-by-day experience, the ageing process and
the ever-changing society in which the life is lived (Figure 10.2).
• The Societal. The equivalent of Mead’s Generalized Other, the Soci-

etal operates on the level of discourse. It is analogous to the ‘voice
of society’ as it ‘speaks’ to the individual through such agencies
as family, culture and community; education; the state and legal
John Beynon 175
The
societal
-------------------------------------------
The ----------------------------------- -------------------------------------The
subjective interactional
The
life story
Figure 10.2 A Meadian model of masculinities.
system; the mass media; and belief systems and so on. In other
words, the Societal is about ‘positioning’ the ‘male subject’ by
providing a regulatory framework, a template, for what is expected
of the individual in order to ‘be a man’ and to demonstrate ‘accept-
able’ masculinity. What is acceptable changes as social norms change
and, furthermore, rarely does society speak in a single, unequi-
vocal voice. What is more the individual can, of course, choose to
accept, reject or modify these ‘lifescript’ prescriptions (what Harris
1995, aptly describes as the ‘messages men hear’). The former relat-
ively (but only relatively) fixed gendered behavioural codes relating
to ‘being a man’ and ‘being a woman’ have today expanded and
become both more various and more fluid. Indeed, the sheer prolif-
eration of masculinities (that is, ways of ‘being a man’) in our
time has led to the claim that there is ‘a crisis’ as essentialist
views (which narrowly equate gender with biology) have been chal-
lenged, even overtaken, by those that define gender in more cultural
terms.
• The Subjective. The equivalent of Mead’s ‘Me’, this refers to the
person’s social construction of self and identity, more specific-
ally of an interior sense of gendered identity and of how the
individual determines himself (or herself) to be a masculine (or
feminine) ‘subject’. Whilst care has to be taken about mapping
the accounts people give of themselves too closely onto interior
subjectivities, autobiographical accounts are indicative both of how

they view the world and of how they wish to be seen. These narratives
are an essential part of the (direct and indirect) everyday presenta-
tion of self, which brings us neatly to the next domain, namely the
Interactional.
• The Interactional. The equivalent of Mead’s ‘I’, this draws specific
attention to the outward and performative aspects of gender
(e.g. Butler 1990). It refers to the ‘actor’ out in the world,
‘enacting’ masculinities in real life settings being informed by,
but also informing, the ‘Me’. From a dramaturgical standpoint
(Goffman 1959) men and women today (in Western culture) have
available to them an extended range of masculine and feminine
presentational ‘fronts’, even moving between the two as the occa-
sion demands. Indeed, the gendered link between the ‘I’ and the ‘Me’
is today is less direct, as illustrated in Figure 10.1, where the
embodied male or female (the physical level) has access to a range
of presentational and behavioural positions (the cultural level) across
a continuum from, at its extremes, the overtly ‘masculine’ and the
overtly ‘feminine’. Gilmore (1990) and Cornwall and Lindisfarne
(1994) are amongst the most insightful on ‘doing masculinity’ and
it is certainly the case that more studies of ‘masculinities-as-lived’
are now appearing (e.g. Beynon 2006; Blackshaw 2003; Williamson
2004; Winlow 2001). However, many more ethnographies of how
masculinities are ‘brought off’ in a variety of settings are badly
needed.
• The Life Story. Our life story is the outcome of the ongoing inter-
action of the three previous life domains. We make sense of our
life story by means of autobiographical narratives, especially the
ones we tell ourselves, continuously updating it on the basis of new
experiences. Our lives and the directions they take are never free
of society, but are suffused by it, although the scope for consider-
able individual agency always exists. Morgan (1992) usefully refers
to ‘gendered life courses’ in which ‘characteristics – age, material
status, class, ethnicity and so on – are not simply added to each
other, but are seen in terms of a dynamic interaction over time and
in relation to other life courses’ (1992: 45). By scanning across the
past, present and future (whether in thought or through autobio-
graphical narrative) the individual attempts to render his/her still
unfolding life story orderly and meaningful, a point I will return to
later.
John Beynon 177
Section C: Two autobiographical narratives
Old Industrial Man in South Wales

It has to be remembered that South Wales was at the forefront of
the Industrial Revolution and throughout the nineteenth century into
the first half of the twentieth was a major centre of coal mining and
heavy metal working. The gradual decline in the demand for coal finally
culminated in the Miner’s Strike of 1984–1985 against the closure of
their industry by the Thatcher Government. Thereafter ‘dirty jobs’ were
replaced by lower paid, light-industry-based and insecure ‘clean ones’.
What was left of Old Industrial Man in post-industrial, post-Devolution
Wales has now finally disappeared, whether in mining, steel making or
docking, along with the distinctive, class-based masculine culture asso-
ciated with him, living on now only in the memories of elderly men.
Carrying out fieldwork in South Wales today, therefore, involves not
only a research journey, but also a geographical one from a once heavily
industrialised landscape (and the vibrant human activity therein) to
a recently (and sharply) de-industrialised one. My respondents (the
oldest to date is 97, the youngest 60) to date have either been form-
ally approached to be interviewed or are people with whom I have just
fallen into conversation. The formally arranged interviews have taken
place in a variety of locales from an old peoples’ residential home to
pubs, clubs and a museum-based community memory project. Whilst
I have occasionally tape-recorded I have mostly jotted down what was
said, either at the time or as soon afterwards as possible. I have been
greatly aided in this by using Pitman Shorthand, a useful skill acquired
as a young journalist.
I want now to reproduce and comment upon two lengthy transcripts
taken from the project in South Wales, the first by ‘Handy Jack’ and the
second by ‘Posh Dai’.
‘Handy Jack’
I interviewed Jack (born Pontypridd, Rhondda, in 1916) in a Day Centre
for the Elderly, where he ‘helped out’ by ‘doing things around the place’.
His delivery was interspersed with long pauses (indicated in the text)
as he battled with an electrical plug he was changing on a hoover. He
tells of his frantic search for work and itinerant lifestyle as a young
man during the Depression and his subsequent willingness to ‘have a
go’ at anything. At the age of nearly 90 he was still active, forever busy
undertaking ‘odd jobs’ around his community. His narrative is a mixture
of pride (at always having provided for his family) and envy (at what he
sees as the ‘cushy’ lives of young men today).
I’m ‘handy’ – that is, I can turn my hand to virtually anything –

plumbing, electrics, roofing, decorating, brick-laying, mechanics, car
spraying, fitting windows, even digging ditches, if needs be! ‘Handy
Jack’ is what everbody calls me, always have! (Laughs) I learned
by watching, asking questions and doing. I served my apprentice-
ship ‘on-the-job’, so to speak. I’m no good at reading and writing,
these (holds up his hands) are my brains! I still do odd jobs about
the place. If it wasn’t for me half the houses round here would have
fallen down years ago! (Laughs) When I started in the 1930s there
was bugger-all work in Ponty. So I packed my gear into a little canvas
bag and went chasing after the work like you’d chase a rabbit! I was
young and strong then. You’d go where it was! So I went everywhere –
Berkshire, London, down to Devon, Bristol, Manchester, Liverpool –
you name it, I’ve been there! I’ve been running, ducking and weaving
ever since! I was a right little tough nut – still am! Put yourself first
was what I learned ‘cos no one else would! Mind you, I often think
what my life might have been like if only my early circumstances
had been different. But I always put bread on the table ‘cos I was
prepared to work eighteen hours a day if needs be, six days a week. I
did it for years, but I always took Sundays off ‘cos I’m a bit religious
and I was brought up to regard Sabbath as a day of rest Today? My
grandson today sees far more of his kids in one day than I did in a
month and does far more with them. I was always too busy scratching
a living! I only ever saw them for an hour here and there and they
grew up in next to no time! They were babies one moment, teenagers
the next! My grandson isn’t in that position. He had paternity leave
when his kids were born! Just think of the answer I’d have got in my
time if I’d asked for paternity leave! (Laughs) And he’s as good as any
woman about the place, cooks, cleans, does everything. His wife has
a full-time job. The way things are going right now men will stay at
home and women will be the breadwinners. Men and women could
disappear – you’ll not be able to tell the difference! My wife never
had a job. I brought the bacon home, she raised the kids – that’s the
way it was then, that was the deal. Most working men wouldn’t allow
their wives to work, even if there’d been jobs around. It would have
been a blow to their pride, their manhood. The man was the bread-
winner, the woman the nest-maker, full stop! Today is far better,
no question about it! There’s far more choices available. They’re not
John Beynon 179
pigeon-holed in the way my generation was. Then if you were a

man, you were told to do this, this, then that! If you were a women,
this, this and this! The path was laid out for you and you were pushed
hard on your way and that was that! I wasn’t eased out of the nest
at thirteen, I was bloody well hurled! (Laughs) It was start earning a
crust or starve! Simple as that! The afternoon I left school my mother
and father stood together and said, ‘You’ve done with your schooling
now, son, so get out and look for a job!’. (Laughs) Easier said than
done, given thousands were unemployed at the time and everywhere
you went there was a hundred waiting in front of you! So off I
went and I’ve been scurrying around ever since!. Young men today
don’t know they’re born compared to when I started. They’ve got it
cushy!
‘Posh Dai’
David, a distinguished diplomat and University Chancellor (born in the
Gower 1943) relates the indelible impression a summer job on Swansea
Docks prior to going to University more than 40 years ago made on him.
Born into a well-off, professional family (his father had been a Western
Circuit judge, his mother a general practitioner (GP)) and privately
educated, he was an observer of the industrial working class. I inter-
viewed him in his palatial London home and his narrative was delivered
in a slow, deliberate tone. From the summit of all he has achieved in his
successful career, he looks back nostalgically and concludes that some
of his Swansea stevedores of the early 1960s were ‘the finest kind of men
imaginable’.
It was July, 1962, and I was 18 and had a place up at Oxford that
Autumn. A pal of mine had landed a holiday job on the Docks and
he asked me to join him. I didn’t need the money and looked upon
it as an adventure, really, a bit of a lark. We turned up early one
lovely, sunny morning and were given the job of stacking sacks of
flour from Weaver’s Mill onto pallets ready for loading on board.
They weighed a ton! At the end of each day my arms were dead!
I’d cycle home covered in flour from head to foot, jump straight
into a piping hot bath and then regularly fall fast asleep! Then, as
the days passed, Johnny Walsh, my pal, and I began to come into
contact with some of the dockers. And, of course, in those days
there were hundreds of them. As ‘College Boys’ we were a prime
target for their wicked humour. You soon learned to think before you
spoke! From the moment I first opened my mouth I was nicknamed

‘Posh Dai’! (Laughs) As we got to know them better some absolutely
amazing characters began to emerge. There was a group of World
War II squaddies who told wonderful stories and who’d clearly gone
through God knows what and many of whom I now realise (forty
years on!) were still deeply traumatised, but who had had to button
it all up and get on as best they could and feed their kids. ‘Press on
regardless’ was their motto and that’s what they did – came home and
just got on with it. But of all of them there was one character I’ll never
forget, a great shambling bear of a guy with the biggest shoulders I’ve
ever seen on a man. His name was Edward Evans, but everyone knew
him as Big Ed! He was a genuine working class intellectual who had
left school at 14, gone to sea, then had worked on the docks for most
of his life. Anyway, every fortnight or so he and a few of his chums
used to take their flasks of tea and sandwiches during lunch hour
(11.30 to 12.30) to this little brick storage shed on the King’s Dock and
there they would sit around and discuss a particular book they had all
read since they last met! Today it would be called a book club. They
invited Johnny and me along because, as students, I suppose they
thought we would be able to contribute something. We weren’t at all
sure what to expect. I think we thought it would be a bit of a laugh!
You know- Zane Grey, ‘Titbits’, ‘The Reader’s Digest’, ‘News of the
World’ – that sort of thing! We were right little snobs, but were we in
for a big shock, boy were we in for a shock! As soon as they started we
knew straightaway that we were way out of our depth, that we were
high and dry! I remember the book under discussion was Anthony
Sampson’s ‘Anatomy of Britain’, which hadn’t long been published.
These ordinary working men- and there was about a dozen of them
there! – had read Marx, Engels, Galbraith, Maynard Keynes, Weber,
Durkheim, Freud, Tolstoy! I was never to come across a more intense,
animated, informed seminar in any of the universities I subsequently
attended including, after Oxford, Yale. They’d never had the remotest
chance of an education – they’d done it for themselves, not for job
advancement. But at the end of the day they were still stevedores.
At 12.30 sharp they all stood up and went back to their loading and
unloading! Looking back they were the finest kind of men imagin-
able and they deserved to go to Oxford far more than I did. All I’d
done was pass a few exams! They’d been pushed around all their
working life but had found dignity in books and ideas. There was
no Open University then, just the WEA, Coleg Harlech and Ruskin,
if you could get a place. I’d been brought up in a very closed world
John Beynon 181
of private schooling, church and sport and I was very naive. From
then on I had the deepest respect for self-educated and self-made
people who climb a very steep hill with no help from anyone. For
kids like me it was so much easier. We were born near the top of
the hill, whereas they started off at the very bottom. Things would
have been different if I’d been born in St. Thomas! I’ll always think
of them as heroic. In fact, those six weeks over forty years ago was an
experience that, looking back, I can honestly say marked me for life.
It changed the way I looked at the world. There are so many lessons
in the past for future generations. It made me determined to ensure,
as far as I could, that such terrible intellectual wastage was never
repeated.
Different worlds: ‘Handy Jack’ and ‘Posh Dai’

Jack and David provide vivid and insightful portraits of two very
different worlds, namely Jack’s impoverished Valleys’ background in
the 1930s and David’s privileged Gower upbringing in the early 1960s.
Both highlight the centrality of class to their subsequent life traject-
ories (Stearns 1990) and both are portraits of ‘respectability’, given that
the South Wales industrial working class has often being depicted as
straddling a continuum between the hard-working ‘respectable-and-
aspiring’ as opposed to the idle ‘rough-and-feckless’ (Croll 2000). If the
former willingly availed themselves of whatever self-improving oppor-
tunities were available (like education), the latter was more associated
with riotous behaviour and immorality. Both are ‘initiation-into-the-
real-world’ stories and each shifts between past, present and future,
combining the retrospective and the prospective as they each relate a
seminal event which each now imbues, in hindsight, with consider-
able significance. There the similarities largely end, because whereas
for Jack leaving school marked the onset of a lifetime of ‘scratching
a living’, David’s summer job was more akin to a participant observa-
tion project. For Jack, it was being ‘hurled out of the nest’ at 13 into
a life of labour (of ‘running, ducking and weaving’), whereas David’s
encounter with the dockside ‘book club’ was, albeit in a different way,
also a life-transforming experience. Both narratives recreate the past but,
in the process, tell us much about the speakers’ present outlooks and
life styles. If one looks upon Old Industrial Man from the ‘inside’ ( Jack-
as-participant), the other does so from the ‘outside’ (David-as-observer).
In both cases a fuller, more rounded and multi-dimensional, nuanced
picture of Old Industrial Man emerges than in the empty stereotype
which so often surfaces in both the academic and the popular press.
Finally, both come to a definite conclusion namely, ‘Young men today
don’t know they’re born compared to when I started. They’ve got it
cushy!’; and ‘It made me determined to ensure, as far as I could, that
such terrible intellectual wastage was never repeated’.
How typical the historical cameos portrayed are would obviously
need to be substantiated by further data, but it can be confidently
asserted that something of the ‘way things were’ comes through. Jack’s
narrative, in particular, tells us much about gender roles and domestic
labour encapsulated in his Old Man masculinity in comparison to
his grandson’s more New Man masculinity. Moreover, the pursuit of
work across the country was the common experience of many young
Welsh working class men in the 1930s and there were undoubtedly
scores of unfulfilled working class intellectuals like Big Ed scattered
throughout South Wales industrial communities. More to the point,
a number of masculinities are depicted: the young Jack’s pursuit of
work; the old ‘tough nut’s’ continuing ‘busyness’ even today; Jack’s ‘new
age’ domesticated grandson; David’s dogged World War II survivors
who ‘came home and just got on with it’; his group of unfulfilled
working class intellectuals of nearly half a century ago, led by Big
Ed; and David’s own confident, upper middle class, high achiever
masculinity.
Time in the autobiographical narrative

There are obviously many ways in which narratives might be analysed.
Elliott (2005) comments that ‘there is no standard approach or list of
procedures that is generally recognised as representing the narrative
method of analysis’ (2005: 36). Indeed, Mishler (1995), a leading figure
in narrative research, in reviewing the numerous competing approaches,
talks of a ‘state of near anarchy in the field’ (1995: 88). I want to take,
as an indicative example, an approach foreshadowed by the poet Seamus
Heaney (2003) when he argues that, riding on the back of language, the
ability to contemplate simultaneously the present, past and future is
uniquely human. One way of investigating this is by means of ‘time
perspectives’ and ‘time tenses’ (Schutz 1971), something Ricoeur (1981,
1984, 1985, 1988) takes further by distinguishing between ‘the chro-
nological’ (the manner in which a narrative is composed of recalled
events) and ‘the non-chronological’ (the manner in which the narrative
construes meaning out of those events). Both are evident in Jack and
David’s narratival sense-making. More recently Roberts (2004a, 2004b)
has argued that the understanding of our lives through narrative is
John Beynon 183
accomplished by means of a combination of, firstly, ‘tense’ (for example,

the past-in-the-present); and, secondly, ‘orientation’ (or mood). He
notes how in his study of Blaina and Nantyglo respondents ranged
over the past, present and future as they surveyed the changes to
their own lives and to that of their communities as past, present and
future were plotted. Indeed, for Roberts (2004b) the individual life is
‘formed within memory’ as we ‘reflect, but also objectify, our exist-
ence in giving it a meaning’ (2004b: 172). Such life history narratives
are undertaken within the ‘interpretation of time past selves are re-
lived, re-visualised and revised: future selves are “re-hearsed” ’ (2004b:
176). Also, in examining the past from the vantage point of the present
we invariably tend to review not only the actual ones but, also, the
possible outcomes that might have, in different circumstances, taken
place. This is evident in both Jack’s and David’s narrative when they
comment respectively that ‘I often think what my life might have been
like if only my circumstances had been different’ and ‘Things would
have been different if I’d been born in St. Thomas!’ (the dockside area
of Swansea). Roberts then goes on to identify nine ‘narratival tenses’
(Figure 10.3).
The life story

Past Present Future
Past Past-in-the-past. Present-in-the-past. Future-in-the-past.
Present Past-in-the-present. Present-in-the-present. Future-in-the-present.
Future Past-in-the-future. Present-in-the-future. Future-in-the-future.
Figure 10.3 Narratival tenses (after Roberts 2004b).
In the light of these I now return to ‘Handy Jack’s’ and ‘Posh Dai’s’
autobiographical narratives. Each of the nine tenses is evident in both,
particularly in Jack’s, who is particularly promiscuous in his time shifts.
• Past-in-the-past. ‘I was young and strong then’ ( Jack).

• Present-in-the-past. ‘Same as now – I never had a choice’ ( Jack).
• Future-in-the past. ‘We must ensure that the terrible intellectual
wastage that took place then is never repeated in the future’ ( David).
• Past-in-the-present. ‘I was a right little tough nut- still am!’ ( Jack).
• Present-in-the-present. ‘My grandson today sees more of his kids in a
day than I did in a month’ ( Jack).
• Future-in-the-present. ‘I’ll always think of them as heroes’ ( David).
• Past-in-the-future. ‘There are so many lessons in the past for future

generations’ ( David).
• Present-in-the-future. ‘The way things are going right now men will
stay at home and the women will be the breadwinners’ ( Jack).
• Future-in-the-future. ‘Men and women could disappear – you’ll not be
able to tell the difference!’ ( Jack).
So where does this lead us?
Conclusion: Matters arising
I want to conclude by restating my opening argument that there is

much to recommend the theory-led collection and analysis of autobi-
ographical narratives in ‘teaching masculinities’. The pedagogical uses
are twofold: the first relates to masculinities per se, the second to the
nature of the text.
As far as masculinities are concerned, the charting of the minutiae
of men’s lived experience in the recent past can correct the bland
assumptions currently being made concerning the Old Industrial Man.
A lecturer-led, collaborative project with students can quickly establish a
rich data bank. Referring back to Figure 10.2, autobiographical narratives
can serve a number of functions.
• The Societal. Narratives can reveal much about the social forces
bearing down upon the individual and helping to shape masculinities
at a particular time in a particular place.
• The Subjective. Narratives can tell us much about how the narrator
views the world, this subjectivity being closely allied to social, cultural
and geographical positioning.
• The Interactional. Narratives can be indicative of how the narrator
presents himself to the world and how he wishes to be seen, with
how something is said being as revealing as what is said.
• The Life Course provides a picture of how a life has unfolded and how
masculinity has been experienced and changed. The role of class in
helping determine the ensuing life course is considerable, as is amply
evident from both the narratives reproduced above.
Although text-related issues are less relevant to this book than the
above, the autobiographical narrative also raises interesting issues
about:
John Beynon 185
• the collection and transcription of texts, namely how the material

was elicited, recorded and the authorial decisions taken during the
process of ‘textualisation’.
• the (selective) role of memory in recreating the past as viewed through
the visor of the present with an eye on the future.
• narratives as retrospective meaning-making, identity-related projects.
• the ‘emplotment’ (Ricoeur 1984, 1985, 1988) of the narrative and the
speaker’s skills as a raconteur and so on.
And, of course, many more
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11
Atrocity and Transitivity
Cris Yelland
This discussion is based on the idea of using linguistic analysis as a ‘point

of entry’1 into a series of debates. In the first instance, I shall look at some
specifics of historiography; later, I shall use the same linguistic features
as a point of entry into a much broader debate, about masculinity. In
each case, the use of linguistic analysis is not at all a substitute for
knowledge of the debate itself, but the focus on linguistic detail provides
a heuristic tool for arranging and understanding material.
Teaching transitivity
Any course concerned with linguistic approaches to texts is likely to

include some attention to transitivity: transitivity is one of the most
powerful analytic tools which linguistic approaches have. As is often
the case in linguistics, there are differing and competing models of
transitivity, each with slightly different terminology. The most usual is
that of Berry2 as used by Burton,3 but Hodge and Kress offer a model of
their own in Language as Ideology, and Fowler’s later study of newspaper
language works with a more developed model still.4 In the present,
basically pedagogic, context, the theoretical differences between these
different models are of little importance – I shall work with a small
number of concepts which are common to all the different models of
transitivity available.
Most of the time, linguistic approaches are taught in a structural
way (to borrow the term from language teaching). The tutor outlines
the theory and concepts, then there are lots of examples, and then
the students work through analyses of their own. Working this way is
also working with a model of pedagogic power in which understanding
flows from tutor to students, especially as the technical terminology
of linguistics is, and sounds, difficult for the uninitiated. One of
187
188 Atrocity and Transitivity
the attractions of linguistic approaches is their hard-edged ‘scientific’

promise, and the question of how ‘scientific’ they are is a very long-
standing area of debate.5 In the present discussion I want to adopt a
different approach, one which more resembles a situational approach
(in language teaching terms) or in more general educational terms is
about problem-based learning. I am going to begin with a question in
historiography, about the accounts given of a particular episode in the
Vietnam War, the massacre at My Lai on 16 March 1968, and use only
a small part of the terminology available under the heading of ‘transit-
ivity’ to describe differences between the accounts. Then I will extend
the analysis, but by discussing the texts in different contexts, not by
introducing more terminology. Finally, I shall offer a follow-up exercise
and questions. Follow-ups of this kind are a familiar part of linguistics-
based discussions and pedagogy.
Writing about the Vietnam War
Before starting the discussion, I want to apologise in advance for the

harrowing nature of the material I shall be looking at. It can seem trivial
or impertinent to do linguistic analysis of an event like the massacre at
My Lai. Nevertheless, I believe that this kind of analysis is worthwhile
and necessary. Representations of past wars and proposals for future wars
are continuing features of the world, and that fact makes historiography,
and the analysis of historiography, important.
The first account I shall discuss is from a history of the Vietnam
War by an American journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner, Neil Sheehan.
Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie is deeply concerned with questions of
masculinity, and it understands and presents the Vietnam War partly in
terms of masculine rites of passage. Sheehan was one of a small group
of journalists in Vietnam in the early 1960s who were nicknamed the
‘Young Turks’.6 They had bad relationships with their official ‘fathers’,
the US Generals who wanted them to ‘get on the team’ and use their
journalism to support whatever the military line on the progress of
the War might be. Instead, Sheehan found a father figure in a more
independent-minded Army officer, Colonel John Vann. When he wrote
his history of the War, he structured it around Vann, using him as a
metaphor for US involvement in Vietnam. A selection of quotations
from Sheehan in an interview in 1988 shows how deeply he admired
Vann as an embodiment of traditional masculinity:
Vann helped us to understand the war in a way that other advisors

couldn’t, because he was fearless we were trying to come to grips
Cris Yelland 189
with this ourselves, and this man helped us come to grips with it in
a way we wouldn’t have been able to do without him
He was in Vietnam to fight other men, not to kill somebody’s
mother or sister or kid
First of all he was a marvelous soldier, a natural leader of men in
war, he was fearless and he had an indomitable will to win 7
As well as this very positive model of a tough but nurturing

masculinity, A Bright Shining Lie engages with a range of crises and prob-
lems about fathering and masculinity more generally. The book opens
with a dramatic demonstration of values in crisis, at Vann’s funeral in
1972. The range of mourners was unusually varied. President Nixon
was there, and so was Daniel Ellsberg. Vann’s widow was there, but
the couple had divorced only months earlier. Vann’s son Jesse, a draft
resistor, was there, and had placed half his torn-up draft card in his
father’s coffin. He was only dissuaded at the last minute from handing
the other half to the President in person. Sheehan used the funeral as
the opening of A Bright Shining Lie to dramatise the conflicting legacy
which Vann had left: in Sheehan’s sympathetic account of Jesse Vann,
the father’s military virtues of courage and independence issue most
clearly in the draft resistor son.
There are other crises of masculinity which are crucial to A Bright
Shining Lie. One theme of the book is the familiar one of a son’s recogni-
tion of his father’s sexuality. Vann was a compulsive philanderer, who
had been accused of unlawful carnal knowledge of a teenage girl (Vann
was cleared, but confessed his guilt to his wife, and to Sheehan). Vann
was married, but had two mistresses in Vietnam. In interview, Sheehan
described his sense of growing involvement with Vann, not as simple
admiration, but as a more mysterious fascination:
And he had this dark personal side He was a lot more complicated
than I had realised Turned out that no one knew John Vann.8
One of the most memorable9 parts of A Bright Shining Lie is its account
of My Lai:
The American soldiers and junior officers shot old men, women, boys,
girls,and babies. One soldier missed a baby lying on the ground twice
with a .45 pistol as his comrades laughed at his marksmanship. He
stood over the child and fired a third time. The soldiers beat women
with rifle butts and raped some and sodomized others before shooting
them. They shot the water buffaloes, the pigs and the chickens. They
threw the dead animals into the wells to poison the water. They
tossed satchel charges into the bomb shelters under the houses. A lot
of the inhabitants had fled into the shelters. Those who leaped out
to escape the explosives were gunned down. All of the houses were
put to the torch.10
This passage is harrowingly hard to read. The effect derives from a

number of things. There is the nature of the acts described, and the
appalling detail; there is the syntax – a sequence of brutally short sent-
ences. There is also the lexis, which is curt and concrete. I want to look in
more detail now at a different aspect of the passage – its transitivity.
Transitive material action processes

A process is a ‘material’ process when it describes something happening
in or on the material world. Most of the processes in the above
passage are brutally material: ‘shot beat raped sodomised
threw tossed’. The relentless violence of the passage is increased by
the fact that there is hardly any variation in it; almost all the processes
are material, and there is no indication of either thought or feeling on
the soldiers’ part or anyone else’s, other than the ‘laughed’.
A material process is said to be an ‘action’ process when it has, usually,
a human being performing it, or at least something animate. There
is a difference between ‘John burst the balloon’, which is a material
action process, and ‘The river burst its banks’, which is a material ‘event’
process. The difference relates to an important assumption which we
normally make – that people act purposefully, whereas inanimate things
do not. Almost all the processes in the passage are material action
processes.
Finally, the processes are all transitive. A process is ‘transitive’ when
it affects someone or something other than the performer of it. ‘Mary
moved the book’ is transitive, whereas ‘Mary moved’ is not. Mary seems
more powerful in the transitive process; she is capable of acting on the
world around her. In the passage above, the US soldiers are agents in a
sequence of transitive material action processes. They seem irresistibly
powerful, especially as their actions are listed in a strikingly repetitive
form: ‘They did a. They did b. They did c and d and e etc’. The change
comes at the end of the passage, where the soldiers’ last actions, gunning
down villagers and putting houses to the torch, are given in a different
form, the agentless passive. This is a formation which I shall discuss in
detail later. Here, it serves to reduce the intensity of the description at
the paragraph’s end, ready for a return to more orthodox history-writing.
Cris Yelland 191
To sum up, the Sheehan passage is shocking; it is a marked departure

from the norm of history-writing, and its lexis, syntax and transitivity
all reinforce each other in producing its very powerful effect.
The second account I shall consider is very different. It comes from a
later collection of essays on the Vietnam War:
On 16 March 1968, a company of US soldiers had landed by helicopter

near My Lai, a hamlet in the ‘Free Fire Zone’ established near the
provincial capital of Quang Ngai. The Americans, mostly young and
inexperienced, had taken casualties from snipers and booby-traps,
and were thoroughly upset and demoralised. Expecting to trap Viet
Cong at My Lai, they instead found only women, children and old
men. During the hours that followed, these civilians were murdered
and their homes razed. There was no justification for an act that,
according to the final US investigation, took the lives of 347 innocent
non-combatants.11
Several things differentiate this account from Sheehan’s. The list

includes:
Mental processes. Here, the mental condition of the US soldiers gets quite
a lot of attention; they had taken casualties;12 they were ‘thoroughly
upset and demoralised’, and they were ‘expecting’ to encounter Viet
Cong. The effect, coupled with the earlier statement that they were
‘mostly young and inexperienced’, is to invite the reader to empathise
with the US soldiers. In Sheehan’s account, by contrast, there are no
mental processes given.
Agentless passives. This is the biggest single difference between this

account and Sheehan’s. The events at My Lai are reduced to two
processes, civilians being murdered and their homes razed, and in
both cases these are acts without agents. The transformation involved
is a common, and ideologically crucial, one. The active-voice clause,
‘US soldiers murdered civilians’ becomes ‘Civilians were murdered by
US soldiers’ and then the agent is deleted to produce ‘Civilians were
murdered.’ The effect is to occlude agency and responsibility for the
massacre. Other acts, the torture and sexual abuse, are occluded in a
different way: they are not mentioned at all.
Nominalised non-human agent. In this account, it was not US soldiers who

killed civilians – it was ‘an act’ that took their lives. Like the agentless
passive, this is a device of agent-deletion, or at least agent-concealment.
It is appropriate here to set out the processes in which the US soldiers

are participants. They:
Material processes Mental processes

had landed were thoroughly upset
had taken casualties [were] expecting to trap Viet Cong
found instead only women etc.
At which point, half way through the account, the US soldiers disappear
from view, and the massacre is carried out by persons unknown, or by
an impersonal ‘act’.
I have described the agentless passive as the crucial construction in
the second passage, and I shall go on to argue that it is ideologically very
significant. Before I do that, it is only fair to point out that the construc-
tion has a number of effects, and there are a number of possible reasons
for a writer to use it. One of them is ‘fronting’ or ‘thematisation’. The
passive transformation reverses the order of front and back in a clause,
so that ‘the soldiers killed the villagers’ becomes ‘the villagers were killed
by the soldiers’. Another reason for using the agentless passive is that it
may well not be possible to know with certainty who did what in a situ-
ation as complicated and intense as the massacre at My Lai. Witnesses
often feared punishment themselves, or were reluctant to incriminate
others, or were just confused.13 Finally, a powerful motive for using
agentless passives is simply that they are common in history-writing,
impersonal, and thus appropriate for a relatively formal discourse.
Nevertheless, there is a correlation between ideology and the agent-
less passive in descriptions of My Lai. The book from which the second
passage comes is a collection of essays on the Vietnam War which argue
that the war was justified, and that it was won militarily but lost polit-
ically. The book has a foreword by the General Westmoreland who was
US Commander in Chief in Vietnam until 1968. It is easy enough to
see a connection between the defence of US military involvement in
Vietnam and the evasive transitivity of the passage quoted. In the next
two sections I shall argue that this correlation holds good more widely
than simply being true of these two texts.
Historiography – The revisionist position and the

neo-conservative challenge
American historiography of the Vietnam War has been strongly influ-

enced by issues and arguments outside that war – arguments about
Cris Yelland 193
the nature of the Soviet Union, and about political developments in

Central America. Melanson draws a contrast between an immediately
post-1975 consensus about the Vietnam War, which he calls a ‘revi-
sionist’ position,14 and a later ‘neo-conservative revisionist’ position.
Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie belongs to the earlier, revisionist, school
of thought, even though it was not published until much later. Sheehan
has described how he began work on the book in the mid-1970s, and
planned to spend ‘three or four years’ on it. Circumstances dictated that
he would take 15 years.15
The revisionist position was strongly associated with the Carter admin-
istration, and with Carter’s criticisms of the Vietnam War. As President,
Carter described America’s involvement in Vietnam as indicative of
‘moral bankruptcy’16 (although as Governor of Georgia in 1971 he had
called for support for Lt Calley).17 Carter’s foreign policy was widely seen
by its domestic critics as a neurotic response to defeat in Vietnam. It was
swiftly ‘rebuked’ by three events which seemed to challenge the United
States’ status as the world’s leading superpower. These were the Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan, the hostage crisis in Iran and the Sandinista
challenge in Nicaragua. Carter’s defeat by Reagan in 1980 involved a
return to a more traditionally confrontational foreign policy; part of the
justification for this would be a change in the historiography of the
Vietnam War:
To reiterate, the neo-conservative revisionists had correctly claimed

that the orthodox understanding of Vietnam had to be overturned
before a revitalised strategy of anti-Communist containment could
be effectively justified. A revised memory of Vietnam was a first step
along the road to a truly resurgent American foreign policy.18
This is the position taken by, for example, Moore’s collection of

essays on the War.19 Two things emerge very consistently from the
work by the political commentators, journalists and ex-servicemen who
are the book’s contributors. These are: firstly, the Vietnam War was
fought bravely and effectively, and was won militarily but let down
by weak politicians (the ‘stab-in-the-back’ argument); secondly, Central
America is the new Vietnam. In this debate between revisionists and
neo-conservatives, the My Lai massacre had particular status. For critics
of the Vietnam War, and of potential future wars, it was a strong argu-
ment in their favour; for neo-conservatives, what happened at My Lai
needed to be minimised or occluded. Apart from one dismissive refer-
ence, Moore’s book does not mention My Lai at all.
War is hell – Atrocity and crocodile tears
Another neo-conservative apologist, Michael Lind, adopts a slightly

different strategy, what Bilton and Sim describe as the ‘war is hell’ argu-
ment. In this argument, atrocity is commonplace and inevitable, and
so there is no point in complaining about it. In his one paragraph
mentioning My Lai, Lind claims that atrocity is ubiquitous in American
military history: ‘Individual acts of murder, rape and looting have been
committed by US troops in every American war’.20
The ‘war is hell’ argument is important because it pretends to be
much more critical of the atrocity at My Lai than it actually is. Because
of this, I shall spend a little more time on it, looking at a paper by
Stephen Ambrose, one of the contributors to the conference on My
Lai at Tulane University, Louisiana, in 1993. Professor Ambrose was a
military historian and, like Lind, he begins by asserting that atrocity is
ubiquitous, and thus unavoidable, and also like Lind, ends with reas-
serting the status quo ante. Ambrose’s paper opens and continues on a
folksy note: ‘We have a painful task – to examine a side of war that is
awfully hard to face up to but is always there’.21
Like Lind, Ambrose is perfectly explicit about agency when he is
describing atrocities in the nineteenth century, or even in World War
II. His purpose in doing so, however, is to minimise the effect of My Lai
as much as he can. He begins his paper with a very curious argument,
that combat is a uniquely stressful experience, which is surely true, and
moves from there to the conclusion that nobody who has not been in
combat has any right to judge what happens there, which is dangerously
false.22
When he comes to discuss My Lai, Ambrose has various arguments
to offer to explain the massacre. Lieutenant Calley lost control. The
system of rotation of individual tours of duty was a bad one because it
increased the stress and disorientation felt by individual soldiers. Finally,
Ambrose ends his discussion with a reassertion of his pride in the US
Army, which, he claims, was the only army in the world, which would
have publicly investigated the events at My Lai. All of which is strongly
argued, but Ambrose was strongly criticised by a member of the audience
who pointed out the multiple falsehoods in his account. The US Army
did not investigate My Lai until forced to; before then, they had lied
about it and covered it up. Calley did not lose control, either of himself
or of his men; every account of him at My Lai, including his own,
describes him as being in control. The system of rotating individuals may
well have been a bad one in general23 but as it happened C Company
Cris Yelland 195
had all arrived in Vietnam as a unit, and this argument does not work
in their case.24
So far, the analysis of transitivity has had a heuristic effect, leading
out into a consideration of the historiography of the Vietnam War and
its relationship with subsequent political debates. Within that context,
different formations of transitivity correlate with and function in posi-
tions in debates, so that the question of agency, especially, is one which
features in attempts to minimise the significance of My Lai, or, more
rarely, to stress it. There is widespread agreement about the facts of what
happened at My Lai; nevertheless, different formations of transitivity
offer different versions of what happened, and of how important it is.
At this point, I want to use the analysis of transitivity to broaden the
argument further; once again, however, I shall use transitivity as the
point of entry into the discussion.
Ordinary men: Transitivity and masculinity
The Vietnam War was the most problematic war in American history.
It was the longest war, the most expensive, the only war the United
States lost, the war with most opposition to it and so on. The contrast
which many people, from serving soldiers to historians, drew most often
was between the complexities of the Vietnam War and the moral clar-
ities of World War II. In particular, Herzog and Faludi both describe
a powerful contrast between entanglement in Vietnam and the heroic
achievements of D-Day in 1944.25 One of the heroic aspects of World
War II, in the West at least, was that it was relatively free of atrocity
against civilians by Allied infantry.26 Atrocity against civilians in the
Normandy campaign was perceived as something characteristic of the
enemy. Here is a description by an American historian of a German
atrocity against civilians in the Normandy campaign:
An exception was the 2nd SS Panzer Division (Das Reich) which had
been in Army Group G reserve at Toulouse, and was bombed, strafed
and harassed throughout its move by the Resistance and Allied air.
This division had earned notoriety for one of the most shameful acts
of brutality committed during the Second World War: the annihila-
tion of the village of Ouradour-sur-Glane, near Limoges, in reprisal
for suspected concealment of explosives. The entire population of the
village had been rounded up, the men locked in barns and the women
and children in the church. Six hundred and forty-two people were
then machine-gunned or burned to death and the village burned to
the ground. Only remnants of this once elite division arrived intact
in Normandy.27
The striking thing about this description is how closely it resembles

the second passage about My Lai discussed earlier. It has the same ‘shape’
in terms of transitivity as the earlier passage. It begins from the point of
view of the soldiers, not the civilians, and sees the soldiers as suffering
from the actions of others. They were ‘bombed, strafed and harassed’ on
their journey north to Normandy. Then there is a very odd shift to the
past perfect tense, ‘had earned notoriety’, which seems to imply that
the Division had committed its atrocity before the Normandy campaign
began. This is quite false – they murdered the population of Oradour
on 10 June 1944. The acts themselves are described in six agentless
passive clauses, ‘had been rounded up locked in barns [locked] in
the church people were then machine-gunned [were] burned to
death the village [was] burned to the ground’. At the end, the descrip-
tion returns to explicit agency when it constructs the SS as victim; ‘Only
remnants of this once elite division arrived intact in Normandy’. That
last sentence is downright odd – it implies that it is not clear whether
the soldiers of the division were the victims of Allied attack, or of their
own criminality.
In discussing the transitivity of passages about the Vietnam War, it
was possible to link devices like agentless passives to a neo-conservative
defence of the US Army in Vietnam. That connection is not available
here, in the sense that Professor d’Este is obviously not defending either
the atrocity at Oradour, or the SS in general. Yet the Oradour passage
minimises the impact of the atrocity, just as the neo-conservative
descriptions of My Lai do, and, like them, sees it in large part from
the point of view of the perpetrators, not the victims. Interestingly,
this does not mean that the language resembles actual participant testi-
mony. When people who have committed atrocities talk about it, they
characteristically do so in a direct, explicit way which does not obscure
agency. One brief example to illustrate this is the description by one
of the soldiers in C Company, who corrects himself to make agency
explicit:
And the mothers were hugging their children, but they kept on firing.
Well, we kept on firing.28
Of all the descriptions we have looked at, the passage from Sheehan is
in fact much the closest to the way that participants describe what they
Cris Yelland 197
have done. There are no doubt differences between writing and speech
at issue here – we probably expect greater explicitness in speech than in
writing; the agentless passive style is a distinctively written form which
sounds very evasive indeed if spoken.29 If the agentless passive style is
written in some sense in exculpation of participants, or from their point
of view, but it does not resemble the language of participants, then
what is it? As the similarity between the descriptions of My Lai and the
description of the Oradour massacre shows, the question goes beyond
the historiography of the Vietnam War.
The agentless passive style and the direct style with agency not obscured
correlate with different constructions of masculinity. In particular, they
relate to different ways of dealing with the implications of masculine atro-
city. It is true that atrocity against civilians had particular prominence in
writing about the Vietnam War: for Fertel, atrocity is the ‘primal scene’
of Vietnam fiction;30 for Jeffords, it is ‘the figure’ of Vietnam writing.31
Testimony to the Dellums Committee described atrocity as routine in
Vietnam.32 Beyond the question of atrocity in Vietnam, however, is the
broader question of what ordinary men are capable of.
Browning’s Ordinary Men33 is a study of atrocities committed between
1942 and 1944 by an armed police unit in German-occupied Poland.
Using this as a starting-point, Browning discusses how it is that
ordinary men can commit appalling acts. Using a combination of
historical research and social psychology, for instance the Stanford
‘prison’ experiment of 197134 and Milgram’s famous ‘obedience to
authority’ experiment,35 Browning concludes that the acts of Reserve
Police Battalion 101 in butchering several hundred civilians are within
the range of normal, or at least very possible, masculine behaviour.
He finds that atrocity is not determined or inevitable: there is always
the possibility of resistance. However, given the ‘right’ circumstances,
men will commit atrocities. The factors which Browning lists as the
‘right’ circumstances are, apart from war, all ominously ordinary:
racism; war; deference to authority; career advancement; bureaucratisa-
tion; peer-group pressure.36 The list ends with the question,
If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under
such circumstances, what group of men cannot?37
The same disturbing ordinariness is clear in the soldiers of C Company.

Their leader, Lieutenant Calley, was described as ‘horribly typical’38 by
Mary McCarthy, and his conduct at My Lai was based on very ordinary
motives – deference to authority and desire to impress his superior
officer, Captain Medina. The expert psychiatrist witness at Calley’s court

martial was certain that Calley was sane, and was not suffering from
any form of psychosis or neurosis,39 other than a ‘compulsion’ to obey
orders. The soldiers of C Company were not unusual for US soldiers in
Vietnam; their only deviation from the statistical norm was that their
educational level was slightly higher than average.40
The stylistic choice of whether to be explicit about agency or to
occlude it by agentless passives, nominalisations and other means,
is significant in this broader context, of examining and questioning
masculinity. Two recent works of historical research are especially
relevant here: one is Bourke’s An Intimate History of Killing41 and the other
Faludi’s Stiffed. Both of these make extensive and explicit use of parti-
cipant testimony; both are thus more direct and explicit about agency
than is usual in historiography; both are concerned to explore aspects of
masculine behaviour which have been de-emphasised or hidden because
they are highly problematic. In Bourke’s case (to drastically simplify
a long and complex argument) the received opinion is that men in
combat are primarily concerned to avoid danger and to survive, but
this received view omits a primary motive for many soldiers, which is
pleasure in killing. Using letters and other forms of participant testi-
mony from World War I, World War II and Vietnam, Bourke reaches the
conclusion that some aspects of military life which are considered most
horrible in civilian society, notably pleasure in killing, in fact appeal to
very powerful desires in many men.
Faludi’s argument is more narrowly focussed historically, on the ‘baby
boom’ generation of men born between 1940 and 1960. In a series of
case studies, one of which is about My Lai, she argues that this genera-
tion of men has been so damaged by economic change that it has proved
unable to achieve an adequate masculinity which would compare with
the historic victories of its fathers, or to pass on adequate masculinity to
its sons. My Lai she sees as a consequence of inadequate fathering, and her
discussion of the atrocity understands C Company as a kind of dysfunc-
tional family. She describes the Vietnam War in general as ‘a defining
event of American masculinity’,42 an event which C Company failed to
negotiate successfully. Faludi describes the relationship between officers
in an army, especially non-commissioned officers, and ordinary soldiers,
as traditionally based on a kind of fathering; older men support younger
ones through a process of initiation into achieved masculinity. In the US
Army in Vietnam, she argues, this traditional military culture was replaced
by a managerialist culture which had lost touch with authentic masculine
values: the result was that C Company did not behave like a family, but
Cris Yelland 199
like a different masculine organisation, a street gang. Street gangs, Faludi

says, are well known to fill ‘a void created by the absence of fathers’.43
Conclusion
Sheehan’s description of the massacre at My Lai is unforgettably vivid. It

is also part of his angry critique of the ‘false fathers’, the Generals West-
moreland and Harkins, and their masters, who fought the Vietnam War
in a way that made atrocity ‘inevitable’.44 Foregrounding My Lai is one
of the aspects of A Bright Shining Lie which make it work as metaphor-
ical exploration of masculinity as well as political history. The technical
means which achieve this include using the explicit transitivity which
is characteristic of participant testimony, not the transitivity with agent
deleted or obscured of conservative historiography. Many accounts of
My Lai seek to keep it within the bounds of the acceptable, the in-need-
of-minor-reform, or the inevitable. They seek, in other words, not to be
worried about it. Sheehan is one writer (Bourke and Faludi are others) for
whom My Lai and events like it bring about a profound questioning of
what it means to be American, or military, or male. Not using agentless
passives in the orthodox fashion is one defamiliarisation which enables
the questioning to start.
Follow-up exercise
Lieutenant Calley
In these extracts from Lieutenant Calley’s court-martial, how does his
transitivity indicate a confused or inconsistent sense of his own respons-
ibility for his actions at My Lai? Does he see himself as powerful
or powerless? (Calley’s words are in response to the defence lawyer’s
questions.)
Q: Now, did you see some live Vietnamese while you were going
through the village?
A: I saw two, sir.
Q: All right. Now, tell us, was there an incident concerning those two?
A: Yes sir. I shot and killed both of them.
Q: Under what circumstances?
A: There was a large concrete house and I kind of stepped up on
the porch and looked in the window. There was about six to eight
individuals laying on the floor, apparently dead. And one man was
going for the window. I shot him. There was another man standing
in a fireplace. He looked like he had just come out of the fireplace,

or out of the chimney. And I shot him, sir.
[Calley is asked a question about whether he was right to kill women
and children]
A: Well, I was ordered to go in there and destroy the enemy. That was
my job on that day. That was the mission I was given. I did not
sit down and think in terms of men, women and children. They
were all classified the same, and that was the classification that we
dealt with.
Q: Who gave you that classification the last time you got it?
A: Captain Medina, sir.
Q: Now, I will ask you this, Lieutenant Calley: Whatever you did at
My Lai on that occasion, I will ask you whether in your opinion you
were acting rightly and according to your understanding of your
directions and orders?
A: I felt then and I still do that I acted as I was directed, and I carried
out the orders that I was given, and I do not feel wrong in doing
so, sir.
Notes
1. Roger Fowler, Literature as Social Discourse (London: Batsford 1981) 27.
2. Margaret Berry, Introduction to Systemic Linguistics (London: Batsford 1975).
3. Deirdre Burton, ‘Through Glass Darkly: Through Dark Glasses’, in Ronald
Carter (ed.) Language and Literature (London: Allen & Unwin 1982) 194–214.
4. Roger Fowler, Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the Press
(London: Routledge 1991).
5. The debate goes back to Frank W. Bateson, ‘Literature and Linguistics: A
Reply’, in Essays in Criticism 17: 3 (1967) 335–347, and ‘Language and Liter-
ature: A Reply’ in Essays in Criticism 18: 2 (1968) 176–182. It continued with
Peter Barry, ‘The Limitations of Stylistics’, in Essays in Criticism 38: 3 (1988)
175–189, and with a series of debates in the 1990s: Peter Mackay, ‘Mything
the point’, in Language and Communication 16: 1 (1996) 81–93. Mick Short
responded in Short et al. ‘Stylistics, Criticism and Mythrepresentation Again’
in Language and Literature 7: 1 (1998) 39–50. Mackay replied in ‘There Goes
the Other Foot’ in Language and Literature 8: 1 (1999) 59–65, and Short and
Willie van Peer responded in ‘A reply to Mackay’, in Language and Literature
8: 3 (1999) 269–275. See also Henry Widdowson, ‘Discourse Analysis: A Crit-
ical View’, in Language and Literature 4: 3 (1995); Norman Fairclough, ‘A
Reply to Henry Widdowson’s ‘Discourse analysis’, in Language and Literature
5: 1 (1996) 49–55, and Widdowson’s ‘Reply to Fairclough’, in Language and
Literature 57–69.
6. William Prochnau, Once Upon A Distant War: David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan,
Peter Arnett – Young War Correspondents and Their Early Vietnam Battles (New
York: Random House 1995).
Cris Yelland 201
7. Neil Sheehan, in conversation with Harry Kreisler in the ‘Conversa-

tions with History’ series at Berkeley Institute of International Studies:
http://globetrotter/berkeley.edu/conversations/Sheehan.html (29 May
2006). See also http://www.refstar.com/vietnam/sheehan_interview.html
(29 May 2006).
8. Ibid.
9. One demonstration of the unforgettable quality of Sheehan’s description is
that whole phrases from it appear in a later travel book about South-East Asia,
Lucretia Stewart’s Tiger Balm (London: Chatto & Windus 1992) 118–121,
and also in Mark Kurlansky’s 1968 (London: Vintage 2005) 106. I am not
suggesting that Stewart’s or Kurlansky’s accounts of My Lai, which are very
fully researched, and in Kurlansky’s case fully referenced, are plagiarised; but
Sheehan’s account has clearly stuck in both their minds.
10. Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie (London: Picador 1990) 689.
11. Bernard C. Nalty (ed.) The Vietnam War (London: Salamander 1998) 233.
12. On the issue of casualties, it should be pointed out that C Company had
suffered rather fewer casualties than comparable units, that their most recent
casualty had been two days before the massacre, and that they had already
expressed their unhappiness at the death of Sgt Cox on 14 March by beating
up some children and shooting and beating to death an unarmed woman
they found in a rice paddy. See Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim, Four Hours in
My Lai (London: Penguin 1992) 92–93.
13. See Mary McCarthy, Medina (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1972)
19–20, 39–42, 56–57, and Richard Hammer, One Morning in the War (London:
Rupert Hart-Davis 1970) 142–143, 182–183.
14. Richard Melanson, Writing History and Making Policy: The Cold War, Vietnam
and Revisionism (Lanham, MD: University Press of America 1983)
15. Sheehan at Berkeley.
16. Melanson, Writing History and Making Policy 142.
17. Bilton and Sim, Four Hours in My Lai 340.
18. Melanson, 206.
19. John. N. Moore (ed.) The Vietnam Debate: A Fresh Look at the Arguments
(Lanham, MD: University Press of America 1990).
20. Michael Lind, Vietnam: The Necessary War (New York: Simon & Schuster
1999).
21. Stephen Ambrose, ‘Atrocities in Historical Perspective’, in David Anderson
(ed.) Facing My Lai (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press 1998) 107–120.
22. At this point, it is appropriate to cite the novelist Tim O’Brien, who
was on combat duty in Quang Ngai at about the same time as the men
who committed atrocities at My Lai. He is insistent that the men of C
Company who committed atrocities are self-confessed murderers and should
be severely punished. See Tim O’Brien, ‘The Mystery of My Lai’, in Anderson,
Facing My Lai 171–178.
23. The fact that American soldiers arrived at the war and left it as individuals
is cited by Herzog as one of the features of the Vietnam War which made
it especially disorienting. See Tobey Herzog, Vietnam War Stories: Innocence
Lost (London: Routledge 1992) 47–48 and Herzog’s response to John Leland,
‘Writing About Vietnam’ in College English 43: 7 (November 1981) 739–745.
24. Ambrose, ‘Atrocities in Historical Perspective’ 118.
25. See Herzog, and also Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of Modern Man (London:
Chatto & Windus 1999), Part 1: ‘The Promise of Postwar Manhood’.
26. Only relatively. See, for example, Stanley Whitehouse and George Bennett,
Fear is the Foe (London: Robert Hale 1995) 132–134.
27. Carlo d’Este, Decision in Normandy (London: Collins 1983) footnote to 233.
28. Quoted in Bilton and Sim, 262. For participant testimony about My Lai, see
The Listener, 8 April 1971, and about the Vietnam War in general, Richard
Stacewitz, Winter Soldiers: An Oral History of the Vietnam Veterans Against the
War (New York: Twayne 1997).
29. As it does in passages from Lt Calley’s testimony at his court martial. See
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mylai/MYL_calt.HTM (29
May 2006).
30. Robert J. Fertel, in Anderson (ed.) 199.
31. Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America (Bloomington: Indiana UP
1989) 73.
32. Hearings of the Dellums Committee on War Crimes in Vietnam:
http://members.aol.com/warlibrary/vwch1.htm (29 May 2006).
33. Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final
Solution in Poland (London: Penguin 2001).
34. http://www.prisonexp.org/index.html (29 May 2006).
35. Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1974). Milgram studied transcripts from My Lai in writing
the book: http://cla.calpoly.edu/∼cslem/Temp/Obey/history.html (29 May
2006).
36. Browning’s list of circumstances which tend to atrocity is very similar to
Robert Jay Lifton’s definition of an ‘atrocity-creating situation’. See Robert
Jay Lifton, Home From the War (New York: Simon & Schuster 1973) and
‘Conditions of Atrocity’, in The Nation, 31 May 2004.
37. Browning, Ordinary Men 189.
38. Mary McCarthy, Medina 14.
39. http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mylai/Myl_tALVER.htm
(29 May 2006).
40. Hays Parks, in Anderson (ed.) 138.
41. J. Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing (London: Granta 2000).
42. Faludi, Stiffed 298.
43. Ibid., 328.
44. Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie 690.
Works cited
Ambrose, S. ‘Atrocities in Historical Perspective’, in Anderson, D. (ed.) Facing My
Lai, Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press 1998 107–120.
Barry, P. ‘The Limitations of Stylistics’, in Essays in Criticism 38: 3 (1988) 175–189.
Bateson, F.W. ‘Literature and Linguistics: A Reply’, in Essays in Criticism 17: 3
(1967) 335–347.
Bateson, F.W. ‘Language and Literature: A Reply’, in Essays in Criticism 18: 2
(1968) 176–182.
Berry, Margaret, Introduction to Systemic Linguistics, London: Batsford 1975.
Cris Yelland 203
Bilton, M. and Sim, K. Four Hours in My Lai, London: Penguin 1992.

Bourke, J. An Intimate History of Killing, London: Granta 2000.
Browning, C. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in
Poland, London: Penguin 2001.
Burton, D. ‘Through Glass Darkly: Through Dark Glasses’, in Carter, R. (ed.)
Language and Literature, London: Allen & Unwin 1982.
D’Este, C. Decision in Normandy, London: Collins 1983.
Fairclough, N. ‘A reply to Henry Widdowson’s “Discourse Analysis” ’, in Language
and Literature 5: 1 (1996) 49–55.
Faludi, S. Stiffed: The Betrayal of Modern Man, London: Chatto & Windus 1999.
Fowler, R. Literature as Social Discourse, London: Batsford 1981.
Fowler, R. Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the Press, London:
Routledge 1991.
Hammer, R. One Morning in the War, London: Rupert Hart-Davies 1970.
Herzog, T. Vietnam War Stories: Innocence Lost, London: Routledge 1992.
Herzog, T. ‘Writing About Vietnam’, in College English 43: 7 (November 1981)
739–745.
Jeffords, S. The Remasculinization of America, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press 1989.
Kurlansky, M. 1968, London: Vintage 2005.
Lifton, R.J. Home From the War, New York: Simon & Schuster 1973.
Lifton, R.J. ‘Conditions of Atrocity’, in The Nation 31 May 2004.
Lind, M. Vietnam: The Necessary War, New York: Simon & Schuster 1999.
Mackay, P. ‘Mything the Point’, in Language and Communication 16: 1 (1996)
81–93.
Mackay, P. ‘There Goes the Other Foot’, in Language and Literature 8: 1 (1999)
59–65.
McCarthy, M. Medina, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1972.
Melanson, R. Writing History and Making Policy: The Cold War, Vietnam and Revi-
sionism, Lanham, MD: University Press of America 1983.
Milgram, S. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View, New York: Simon &
Schuster 1974.
Moore, J.N. (ed.) The Vietnam Debate: A Fresh Look at the Arguments, Lanham, MD:
University Press of America 1990.
Nalty, B.C. (ed.) The Vietnam War, London: Salamander 1998.
O’Brien, T. ‘The Mystery of My Lai’, in Anderson, D. (ed.) Facing My Lai, Lawrence,
KS: University of Kansas Press 1998 171–178.
Prochnau, W. Once Upon A Distant War: David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, Peter
Arnett – Young War Correspondents and Their Early Vietnam Battles, New York:
Random House 1995.
Sheehan, N. A Bright Shining Lie, London: Picador 1990.
Short, M. et al. ‘Stylistics, Criticism and Mythrepresentation Again’, in Language
and Literature 7: 1 (1998) 39–50.
Short, M. and van Peer, W. ‘A Reply to Mackay’, in Language and Literature 8: 3
(1999) 269–275.
Stacewitz, R. Winter Soldiers: An Oral History of the Vietnam Veterans Against the
War, New York: Twayne 1997.
Stewart, L. Tiger Balm, London: Chatto & Windus 1992.
Whitehouse, S. and Bennett, G. Fear is the Foe, London: Robert Hale 1995.
Widdowson, H. ‘Reply to Fairclough’, in Language and Literature 5: 1 (1996) 57–69.
Online sources
Conversations with Neil Sheehan

http://globetrotter/berkeley.edu/conversations/Sheehan.html (29 May 2006)
http://www.refstar.com/vietnam/sheehan_interview.html (29 May 2006)
Court martial of Lt Calley

http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mylai/MYL_calt.HTM (29 May
2006)
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mylai/Myl_tALVER.htm
(29 May 2006)
Dellums Committee on War Crimes in Vietnam

http://members.aol.com/warlibrary/vwch1.htm (29 May 2006)
Obedience to authority and the Stanford prison experiment

http://cla.calpoly.edu/∼cslem/Temp/Obey/history.html (29 May 2006)
http://www.prisonexp.org.index.html (29 May 2006)
12
Taking Possession of Knowledge:
The Masculine Academic in Don
DeLillo’s White Noise
Ruth Helyer
Don DeLillo’s 1986 novel White Noise provides a narrative which

critiques the educational reproduction of masculinities.1 The lecturers
in his ‘School of American Environments’ are portrayed as shallow
and insecure, desperate to outdo each other in feats of masculinity
which resemble rites of passage rather than pedagogic experiences. In
the Western world manliness has come to be closely aligned with reas-
onable behaviour. Victor Seidler reiterates the way in which reason
is put forward as, the ‘legislator of reality’, thus gaining authority
for men to form, and educate, a world according to their notion.2
This construction prioritises rationality and requires that men should
live a careful and controlled life – ignoring instincts and any uncivil-
ised urges to instead mimic what has been taught to them. DeLillo’s
academics noticeably struggle to align their urges with their society’s
expectations.
Jack Gladney, the text’s central protagonist, strives to fulfil the idea of
‘authentic’ masculine identity. Despite his chaotic postmodern setting,
his conventional principles prompt him to insist that, ‘people need to
be reassured by someone in a position of authority that a certain way
to do something is the right way or the wrong way’ (WN p. 172). His
fellow teachers are obsessed by the most banal things, including bodily
functions; toilet and hygiene habits; handling consumables and their
packaging; de-coding celebrity and nostalgia. They use their work as
part of their striving to make connections which validate some viable
masculine framework; their chair, Alfonse Stompanato, giving them the
blueprint for the manly academic, ‘large, sardonic, dark-staring, with
scarred brows and a furious beard fringed in grey’ (WN p. 65). Jack
205
206 Taking Possession of Knowledge
lives in the hope that his academic status is capable of elevating and
protecting:
I’m not just a college professor. I’m the head of a department. I don’t
see myself fleeing an airborne toxic event. That’s for people who live
in mobile homes out in the scrubby parts of the county.
(WN p. 117)
He teaches ‘Hitler Studies’ yet the transfer of knowledge and the encour-
agement of analytical debate are not his priorities. He sees his career,
rather, as an opportunity to create an impenetrable front for himself. He
tries to appropriate Hitler’s larger than life image as his own in a recyc-
ling aimed at absorbing his overwhelming fear of death. His colleague
Murray J. Siskind compliments him:
You’ve established a wonderful thing here with Hitler. You created

it, you nurtured it, you made it your own. Nobody on the faculty
of any college or university in this part of the country can as much
as utter the word Hitler without a nod in your direction, literally or
metaphorically. This is the center, the unquestioned source. He is
now your Hitler, Gladney’s Hitler.
(WN p. 11)
Murray is eager to imitate Hitler Studies by substituting Elvis, convinced

that the representation of any male icon will suffice in the act of myth
creation. Jack’s contribution to the sustenance of such myths leaves him
living in constant fear of being exposed as a fraud. He comments on
Murray’s conscious creation of ‘the male academic’:
There was something touching about the fact that Murray was dressed
almost totally in corduroy. I had the feeling that since the age of
eleven in his crowded plot of concrete he’d associated this sturdy
fabric with higher learning in some impossibly distant and tree
shaded place.
(WN p. 11)
Not only does Murray construct this image for himself, he constructs
academic courses he feels will court success, based upon Jack’s experi-
ence. Jack makes a guest appearance at Murray’s initial Elvis lecture to
give it his official seal of approval (WN pp. 71–72) and comments after-
wards that, ‘I had been generous with the power and madness at my
Ruth Helyer 207
disposal’ (WN p. 73). There is a certain ambiguity surrounding whose

madness this is, Jack’s, Hitler’s or both. He comments further on the
fragility of the created image, ‘We all had an aura to maintain and by
sharing mine with a friend I was risking the very things that made me
untouchable’ (WN p. 74). Jack’s identity is completely bound up in
ideas of academic self-aggrandisement. He foregrounds personal object-
ives; sharing insight and support are not cited in his list of priorities.
By choosing to create and teach a course about Hitler, Jack illustrates
the inherent irony of attempting to ‘teach’ in a society deemed post-
modern. Rather than dismissing grand narratives, teaching potentially
perpetuates them. He does not take the opportunity to re-visit and re-
assess the myths surrounding Hitler but rather validates fascist beliefs by
adhering to an ‘approved version’. Again there is no room for student
discussion: their role is rapt attentiveness. Lecturers presenting an undis-
puted version of an event or identity become inextricably implicated
in what they are discussing. As N. Katherine Hayles summarises it,
‘We are involved in what we would describe’.3 Insider knowledge, like
self-knowledge, illustrates a certain level of self-consciousness. Tradi-
tionally college novels present professors as objects of ridicule, either
intellectuals who cannot cope with life, or power-hungry individuals,
eager to dominate others. Both of these unflattering descriptions fit
Jack to a certain extent. The students do not simply study a narrative
history, rather they are encouraged to respond adoringly to Professor
Gladney, endowing him with the same hypnotic power his subject
matter commands. Jack claims to be teaching ‘Advanced Nazism’ due
to Hitler’s alignment with television. He feels that both have the same
dictatorial power over the enthralled masses, absorbing and destroying
any conflicting opinions. Like the Nazi faithful, Jack’s students give
up their minds to him and the education system; they give up their
individual powers of determination to become part of a crowd, a mass
consciousness.4
What Georges Bataille terms, the, ‘isolation of individual separate-
ness’ undoubtedly makes crowds more attractive.5 However, as well as
offering a certain homogenous comfort they are also, paradoxically,
frightening and threatening, with their potential to crush and obliterate.
Ironically, Jack’s charade with Hitler Studies only serves to make him
more vulnerable as he creates a front of invincible power impossible to
live up to, ‘Hitler I spoke the name often, hoping it would overpower
my insecure sentence structure’ (WN p. 274). He lives in fear of his
fellow professors and the ‘actual Germans’ at his forthcoming confer-
ence discovering that his grasp of the German language is inadequate, or
that the innocuous name ‘Jack’ is loitering behind the grandiose initials
J.A.K., describing his situation as, ‘living on the edge of a landscape
of vast shame’ (WN p. 31). He scrabbles around for origins, hiding
his ageing eyes and body behind dark glasses and academic robes. He
has compromised himself by taking the academic gown and the relative
security that goes with it in exchange for the unfettered vibrancy of new
and disturbing ideas. His methods of ‘teaching’ Hitler are dogmatically
predetermined. He has begun to nervously admit that ‘Hitler Studies’
puts him further away from his potential to have a ‘real’ self, if such an
autonomous state can ever be achieved:
The chancellor had advised me, back in 1968, to do something about

my name and appearance if I wanted to be taken seriously as a Hitler
innovator. Jack Gladney would not do, he said, and asked me what
other names I might have at my disposal. We finally agreed that I
should invent an extra initial and call myself J.A.K. Gladney, a tag
I wore like a borrowed suit. The chancellor warned against what he
called my tendency to make a feeble presentation of self. He strongly
suggested I gain weight. He wanted me to ‘grow out’ into Hitler.
He himself was tall, paunchy, ruddy, jowly, big-footed and dull. A
formidable combination. I had the advantages of substantial height,
big hands, big feet, but badly needed bulk, or so he believed – an air of
unhealthy excess, of padding and exaggeration, hulking massiveness.
If I could become more ugly, he seemed to be suggesting, it would
help my career enormously. So Hitler gave me something to grow into
and develop toward The glasses with thick black heavy frames and
dark lenses were my own idea Babette said [the disguise] intimated
dignity and prestige. I am the false character that follows the name
around.
(WN pp. 16–17)
He demonstrates Jean Baudrillard’s allegation that representation has

replaced reality in a surface-focused, ‘hyper-real’ society. Jack’s creation
of an academic persona supersedes the real, in that it dares to suggest
that there is nothing below the surface. The constructed stereotypical
‘College Professor’ he strives to be is an effort to reflect a certain aspir-
ational ‘perfection’ beyond what can exist.6 Baudrillard focuses on the
false and created nature of much of contemporary life, where, amongst
the abundance of copies and representations, fixed narratives of instruc-
tion become an anathema.
Ruth Helyer 209
New and different personae can be invented, and gradually authentic-

ated. The Chancellor does not admit to re-inventing Jack; he insinuates
that he is filling out his ‘true self’. The term ‘re-invent’ suggests that
what is being replaced was already an invention, part of a circularity
of creation amply illustrated by his fellow university lecturers who are
former journalists, sportsmen and celebrity bodyguards, merely rein-
vented as ‘teachers’. The J.A.K. Gladney that develops is simply another
disguise; Jack is no nearer to any tangible reality. Instead of security,
gleaned from the comfort of the elusive ‘authentic’, Jack is caught up in
his own hype, cocooned in self-myth, like Hitler, his hero and academic
inspiration. Both men are masquerading behind a show of power, which
is merely a façade waiting to be discovered. Indeed when one of his ex-
wives asks Jack how his academic job is going the conversation breathes
life into the long-dead aggressor. The question, ‘How is Hitler?’, brings
the reply: ‘Fine, solid, dependable’ (WN p. 89). Jack is referring to what
Hitler’s image is doing for his career.
Hitler asked Albert Speer to design buildings to represent the
Nazi party, which would decay magnificently, and astonish posterity
(WN pp. 257–258). These architectural decisions encouraged him to
believe that he could control the future. He thought that by ensuring
definite and predictable happenings he would create his own grand
narrative. Ironically, by trying to predict the future and dictate
nostalgia, he suspends chronology and emphasises the difficulty in ever
assessing modernity and postmodernity as separate entities. Tradition-
ally the present is lived in, whilst looking to the future, with the past
firmly behind. However, Lyotard suggests that viewing the future as
experienced before the past is a way of coming to terms with post-
modern times: ‘Post modern would have to be understood according to
the paradox of the future (post) anterior (modo)’.7 Jack, like his hero, tries
to control his future, but his impersonation of power cannot save him
from dying anymore than Hitler could keep himself from ruin.
Universities, and other educational institutions, where popular culture
vies with more traditional subjects, further illustrate this complex rela-
tionship between grand narratives and postmodernity. The courses
of learning do not exist chronologically, or historically, but instead
compete with each other for validity and superiority, within an uncom-
fortably incestuous, yet at the same time competitive, environment. The
traditional academic study of literature could be viewed as an archetypal
grand narrative with its veneration of the ‘Canon’, an approved version
with verifiable origins. What is taught centres upon ‘authentic’ liter-
ature; that which has already met with official approval. Contemporary
courses which offer the study of films and television adverts (in Jack’s
university there are ‘full professors who read nothing but cereal boxes’
WN p. 10), present alternatives. However, if these alternatives are
simply destined to become the grand narratives of the future, with
accepted readings reproduced in multiple text books, then individual
interpretation becomes part of a new normative, rather than part of a
multiplicity capable of overturning one official version.
Amongst the multiple strands forming society there are inevitably
sections that, for whatever reason, cannot adequately represent them-
selves. Jean François Lyotard names these unpresentable sections the
‘differend’, claiming them to be incommensurable with the dominant
societal ‘norms’, yet no less valid.8 The danger is that these small
sections will be ignored or abused. Lyotard suggests that this can be
avoided by celebrating the ‘differend’, ‘Let us wage war on totality; let us
be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save
the honor of the name’.9 He acknowledges that it is easier to accept the
majority opinion but wants to at least make the effort to question and
analyse, to refuse the, ‘consolation of correct forms consensus of taste
and common nostalgia’.10 Such common accord can be seen directly
illustrated in White Noise by ‘The Most Photographed Barn’, especially
when scrutinised in the light of John Frow’s writing on tourism, returned
to later in the chapter. As Frow states, nostalgia makes no allowance for
‘difference’.
Jack’s wife Babette’s son, Wilder, is an example of difference with
his protracted crying, lasting over seven hours (WN p. 79), and his
inability (or refusal) to speak. He is ‘wilder’ than the rest of the family,
actively, and seemingly instinctively, resisting the civilising potential
of ‘teaching’. He demonstrates his lack of cohesion with the modern
world by looking behind the television set for his mother after her brief
appearance on the screen and pedalling his tricycle across the motorway
(WN p. 322). Murray claims, ‘You cherish this simpleton blessing of his’
(WN p. 289). Learning and the amassing of knowledge only increases
fear. Rather than thinking of Wilder as retarded Jack sees him as, ‘the
spirit of genius at work’ (WN p. 209) and the family treat him as special
and revered:
His great round head, set as it was on a small-limbed and squattish

body, gave him the look of a primitive clay figurine, some household
idol of obscure and cultic derivation.
(WN p. 242)
Ruth Helyer 211
The value they place on Wilder is reminiscent of what Michel Foucault

suggests in Madness & Civilisation. He claims that before the inception of
lunatic asylums those failing to comply with limited societal categories
as deviant or pathological would have been viewed as having some-
thing special to offer, a certain insight or wisdom setting them apart
from ordinary mortals.11 When the asylum burns down (WN p. 239),
watched by Jack and Heinrich, it is a postmodern symbol for the over-
turning of such set categories, or at least some re-assessment of who
decides what constitutes ‘normal’.
Jack’s safe and contained version of what can be classed as ‘normal’
is challenged repeatedly by the events and characters of the narrative.
His German teacher (portrayed as threatening and uncivilised) commu-
nicates in American-English, the German language he teaches in his
rented room (secretly, in the case of Jack) is associated with primitive
regression; unformed, undisciplined and untutored. Jack comments on
the transformation Mr Dunlop undergoes when he reverts to German:
When he switched from English to German, it was as though a cord

had been twisted in his larynx. An abrupt emotion entered his voice,
a scrape and gargle that sounded like the stirring of some beast’s
ambition. He gaped at me and gestured, he croaked, he verged on
strangulation. Sounds came spewing from the base of his tongue,
harsh noises damp with passion. He was only demonstrating certain
basic pronunciation patterns but the transformation in his face and
voice made me think he was making a passage between levels of
being.
(WN p. 32)
The teacher’s unbounded return to his preferred language is not his

only breaching of boundaries, Jack finds it disturbingly inappropriate
when Dunlop puts his fingers into his mouth, ‘Once he reached in
with his right hand to adjust my tongue. It was a strange and terrible
moment, an act of haunting intimacy. No one had ever handled my
tongue before’ (WN p. 173). Jack begins his relationship with this man
by doubting his masculinity due to the softness of his skin, an opinion
which is shallow, but relatively harmless, ‘Soft hands in a man give me
pause. Soft skin in general. Baby skin. I don’t think he shaves’ (WN
p. 32). His doubts connect to Mr Dunlop’s seeming inability to face
teaching within the public domain; all of his transference of knowledge
goes on behind closed doors in a barricaded room (WN p. 238). Jack’s
perseverance with the tuition, despite grave doubts, demonstrates his
desperation to master the German language. This centrality (and ambi-

guity) of language is underpinned by Jack’s addiction to erotic literature,
and Babette’s objection to some of the phrases used, translating them,
as she does, in ways far beyond Jack’s thought patterns:
I don’t want you to choose anything that has men inside women,
quote-quote, or men entering women. ‘I entered her.’ ‘He entered
me.’ We’re not lobbies or elevators. ‘I wanted him inside me,’ as if he
could crawl completely in, sign the register, sleep, eat, so forth. Can
we agree on that? I don’t care what these people do as long as they
don’t enter or get entered.
(WN p. 29)
Babette and Mr Dunlop are aligned with one another as ‘feminine’; they
are united by difference and categorised as inferior. Jack, by contrast,
is the archetypal hero, a college professor: knowledgeable; North Amer-
ican; white; middle-class and male. His possession of knowledge is tied
to control and, therefore, masculinity, but as the doctor tells Jack, ever
eager for facts, ‘knowledge changes every day’ (WN p. 280). These
changes are reflected in the endless lists of fashionable commodities his
children compulsively recite, and the frequent mis-translations arising
from the changing and overlapping meanings of words. The result is
conversations doomed to remain forever misunderstood. Such changes
make Jack uneasy, as his manly image and his pedagogic superiority
must be constantly re-assessed and his claims to dominance justified. It
is impossible to conceive masculinity as unitary and coherent amongst
such fluidity. The vastness of what seems ‘unknowable’ is overwhelming
and aligns living with uncertainty and chance. Man must gamble if he
wants to find out more than he already knows, or experience more than
he is already experiencing. Bataille links this risk-taking with constructed
identities and posits that these should be cast aside. ‘Communication’
cannot take place from one full and intact being to another: it requires
beings who have put the being within themselves at stake, have placed
it at the limit of death, of nothingness.12
Jack’s fear of death, and his subsequent fear of sex’s potential to simil-
arly overwhelm completely, are irrevocably tied to a fear of literally
‘letting go’ of identity and the comfort of constructs. Jack is happier
sifting through, selecting and blending what has always already been
done, this circularity carries inferences of continuation rather than
ending. When a colleague suggests that awareness of death makes
humans cherish life he begins to question the value of knowledge, ‘Does
Ruth Helyer 213
knowledge of impending death make life precious? What good is a

preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It’s an anxious quivering thing’
(WN p. 284). Jack’s insistence that it is more comfortable and pleasant
not to ‘know’ could easily negate his own employment, which, after all,
hinges on the need to pass on what you ‘know’. Jack’s extreme response
in his bid to become a little more intimate with death, is the attempted
murder of Babette’s lover, spurred on by a philosophising Murray, ‘He
dies, you live’ (WN p. 291). If you are not an acting body then by
default you become a body being acted upon. Jack is furthering the
intimacy with death already fostered via his close connections to the
mass murderer he has chosen as his pedagogical focus.
Jack is a voracious consumer; desperately clinging to the belief that,
‘Here we don’t die, we shop’ (WN p. 38). He is convinced that the
amount he buys is directly linked to his validity as a ‘male’, ‘provider’,
‘academic’ and, most crucially, ‘living entity’. ‘The sheer plenitude
those crowded bags suggested, [ ] the sense of replenishment [ ]
the sense of well-being, the security and contentment these products
brought’ (WN p. 20). He believes that his acquisitiveness and his
eagerness to enter into the exchange system will ensure that he remains
alive. Baudrillard’s comments on America’s commodified culture like-
wise align it with death:
The proliferation of technical gadgetry inside the house, beneath it,

around it, like drips in an intensive care ward, the TV, stereo, and
video which provide communication with the beyond, the car (or
cars) that connect one up to that great shopper’s funeral parlour, the
supermarket, and lastly, the wife and children, as glowing symptoms
of success everything here testifies to death having found its ideal
home.13
Jack relies on his surface appearance to deflect death. When one of his
colleagues sees him away from the campus, denuded of his academic
uniform and trademark sunglasses, and comments that, ‘You look so
harmless Jack. A big, harmless, ageing, indistinct sort of guy’ (WN
p. 83), he is horrified and afraid at the suggestion of his lack of substance.
He takes his family on a spending-spree in the Mid-Village Mall to coun-
teract his feelings of unease. This provides material goods to support his
construction of an identity, and also offers him therapy and affirmation.
He claims that what he spends comes back to him in the form of ‘existen-
tial credit’ (WN p. 84). He lavishes gifts on both his family and himself
and consequently feels rewarded, underlining the affirmative aspects of
purchasing and consuming; the business of exchange, ‘I began to grow

in value and self-regard. I filled myself out, found new aspects of myself,
located a person I’d forgotten existed’ (WN p. 84). Jack’s behaviour
recalls the ancient tribal ritual of gift-giving, ‘Potlatch’, a ruinous act
of outdoing and undoing, which Bataille suggests always more acutely
answers something in the giver.14
The crowds shown in supermarkets and malls trying their utmost
to sustain an identity, hence a life, are the same crowds who attend
Jack’s lectures. Jack’s son Heinrich comments on how becoming part of
a crowd can be likened to becoming part of a machine, impersonal and
technological, doing as you are told to make the larger machine run
efficiently. Baudrillard also confirms the way in which modern life is
increasingly experienced as part of a mechanical crowd. He terms them,
‘the masses’, huge ungainly and inert. However, when confronted by
multiplicity and choice they ironically still huddle together to carry
out the same acts and buy the same products and services, accepting
the lecturer’s version, totally in the thrall of what Baudrillard terms,
‘The networks of influence’,15 powerfully mass-mediated images. The
students use their studies as part of this consuming lifestyle. Jack craves
the purported safety his lofty academic position offers. His students
long to ape his confidence and knowledge, eager to create clones. Their
unquestioning approach to Jack’s knowledge perpetuates, rather than
breaks down, grand narratives. Day-to-day life is not homogenous, and
the same for everybody in every place, it is instead disorderly, frag-
mented, heterogeneous. The fact that the human sciences are known as
‘disciplines’ speaks of Academia’s efforts to tame this unruly mess. Jack
believes that his students are attracted to the concept of the crowd for
its potential to offer a safety in numbers. As a personal and obsessive
fear of death dominates his life he presumes that his students share this
terror, claiming that they come together to form, ‘a shield against their
own dying. To become a crowd is to keep out death. To break off from
the crowd is to risk death as an individual’ (WN p. 73). Ironically such
mute obedience also brings death closer. As the narrative progresses Jack
realises this and tries to stop conforming, to ‘escape the pull of the
earth, the gravitational leaf-flutter that brings us hourly closer to dying.
Simply stop obeying’ (WN p. 303).
Academic colleagues Jack and Murray become part of the crowd when
they visit the site of, ‘The Most Photographed Barn in America’ and
discuss the collective perception of this famous tourist site, ‘No one
sees the barn We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to
maintain one’ (WN p. 12). Frow suggests that humans’ acceptance of
Ruth Helyer 215
constructed representations as lived reality results in them being linked

to their surroundings by a constant mediation of words and texts, for
example, an adherence to the instructions on maps and billboards. Jack
and Murray illustrate this by responding to the textual commentary
on what is purported to be a site of interest in much the same way
that Jack’s students respond to his ‘teaching’; both sets of behaviour
helping to perpetuate mythical narratives. Frow describes this reification
as a process of acknowledging a definitive ‘type’, ‘suffused with ideality,
giving on to the type of the beautiful, or the extraordinary, or the cultur-
ally authentic’.16 Reality is therefore not palpable, but rather revealed
emblematically, through signs and symbols. Murray and Jack follow
posters advertising the barn, and imitate the other tourists, who are also
doing what those who came before them did. Again, like Jack’s students
they are driven by a hunger both to belong, and to place other people
and events within this belonging, what Frow describes as ‘nostalgia for
a lost authenticity’.17 The authenticity is not ‘mislaid’ but lost because
it never existed and so can never be reclaimed. Such mythologising of
‘types’ results in an attraction to typicality, and consequently to soci-
etal constructions, like normative masculinity, being lived as reality.
Within the education system adhering to the particulars of type fosters
a culture of sameness, inevitably leading to feelings of non-validity for
non-conformers. Postmodern theory encourages variety and multipli-
city; the empowerment of thinking and feeling for yourself. However,
Jack, rather than welcoming this liberty, as both university professor
and man, is afraid and suspicious of it.
Frow discusses perpetual imitation in the light of the Platonic simu-
lacrum; a copy of a copy. The act of copying endows the copied with
a certain validity, even reality, much in the manner that man can be
seen to be endlessly copying himself via the education system. This is
Baudrillardian hyper-reality, more real than real. It is a world consisting
of closed, self-referring systems where ‘ideas’ of what constitutes reality
are indefinitely reproducible and the consumption of these reproduced
images dominates to the point of replacing experience, with future
definitions made against that which is already a reproduction within a
thoroughly commodified society.18 Supposed originals, often offered as
part of an accepted canon of knowledge, are actually copies: ‘tradition’;
‘heritage’; ‘the past’, are all part, like the famous barn, of the nostalgia
for a lost authenticity that never was. Foucault suggests that, ‘[Man]
constitutes representations by means of which he lives’.19 In other words
these surface representations are what come to be known as ‘reality’.
Jack’s questioning of this reality leads him to take a highly techno-

logical health check. He is unnerved to see his existence translated as
a series of ‘pulsing stars’ and ‘flashing numbers’ on a computer screen.
His reduction to, ‘the sum total of (his) data’ (WN p. 141) seems
strangely appropriate for a teacher who relies on, and believes in, what
is in his data banks. Just as his teaching encourages, rather than ostra-
cises, fascism, so too does the technology to which he is drawn, for
its purported power to save or extend his life, paradoxically offer the
opportunity for others to alienate him from his own body and his own
death. As he summarises, ‘It makes you feel like a stranger in your own
dying’ (WN p. 142). He longs for the supposed security of his invented
identity, ‘I wanted my academic gown and dark glasses’ (WN p. 142)
and is clinical, even patronising, about the deaths of others, ‘An emer-
gency ward where people come in gun-shot, slashed, sleepy-eyed with
opium compounds, broken needles in their arms. These things have
nothing to do with my own eventual death, non-violent, small-town,
thoughtful’ (WN p. 76).
His nonchalant stereotyping of deathly circumstances, with his own
death ‘booked in’ to be peaceful and thoughtful merely because he
is an academic, is now being rudely questioned by the probing, and
apparently sinister, technology. Like the Mylex suits worn by the rescue
workers, whose composition compromises the precision of the vital
computer readouts, the cure is worse than the disease. Jack feels afraid
and distant from his own flesh and concludes that a healthy person
would become ill after the tests, with their insinuations that the body
is rendered superfluous in cyberspace. Modern citizens are conditioned
not to question the knowledge of ‘The Doctor’, ‘The Scientist’ or ‘The
Teacher’, even if this requires the feigning of ignorance about ‘The Self’.
Accepted knowledge overrules anything a person thinks he knows, even
to the extent that instilled attitudes are accepted as gut reactions, in an
illustration of Marx’s ‘false consciousness’ or, as Victor Seidler terms it,
‘We can be so used to constructing our experience according to how we
think that things ought to be, that it can be difficult to acknowledge
any emotions and feelings that go against these images’.20
Lyotard claims that this determination to prove, to label and to tie
down is impossible to satisfy due to the evolving and circular status
of life.21 There is always room to question, to discuss and explore
further. He also predicts that if knowledge is accepted as finite and
passed on as unquestionable it will come to be accrued instantly with
the implantation of microchips in the brain, without any studying or
analysis. Recalling Jack’s description of the experimental drug Dylar
Ruth Helyer 217
this, literally, presents ‘technology with a human face’ (WN p. 211). If

knowledge is intrinsically bonded to the creation of masculinity because
of the control it offers, then technology, via such developments as
microchips in the brain, can be viewed as a direct threat to masculinity,
as presently perceived. The rapid progression of computer technology
includes the enormous resources of the internet, comparable to a micro-
chip in the brain, where learning is superfluous because someone, or
rather something, will do the knowing on your behalf. But as Jack’s
eldest son, Heinrich comments, ‘What good is knowledge if it just floats
in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows
every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything (WN
p. 149). The idea that technology will not just help humans but will in
fact replace them is once again apparent.
The value of knowledge and what can be learned is intrinsic to the
father–son relationship. Jack does not know what to teach Heinrich, a
failure which only adds to his anxiety. He tries to establish a ‘normal’
relationship with him by taking him to watch the local mental asylum
burning down, believing that there is something primal about such
raging destruction and the virile physicality of firefighters that cannot
help but unite a father and son. Despite his pride in his scholarly life-
style, and his arrogant belief that academia will shield him Jack remains
uneasy about his lack of physical skills, feeling that this makes him less
of a ‘man’. He comments, ‘What could be more useless than a man
who couldn’t fix a dripping faucet – fundamentally useless, dead to
history, to the messages in his genes?’ (WN p. 245). The action of the
narrative suggests that perhaps there are no such messages and that men
are emulating what they believe their society requires of them. Jack is
torn between his modernist principles and his chaotic postmodern situ-
ation, ensuring that his psyche remains undecided about whether to
emulate a philosopher or a firefighter. His lectures have become dramatic
productions – rehearsed and copied; his carefully honed identity as male
academic makes him the central protagonist of his own play, spectacular
and revered yet ultimately unfulfilling.
Notes
1. Don DeLillo, White Noise (London: Picador, 1986). Further references to this
text are made in parentheses within the body of the chapter.
2. Victor J. Seidler, Unreasonable Men: Masculinity & Social Theory (London:
Routledge, 1994), p. 65.
3. N. Katherine Hayles, The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models & Literary Strategies
in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 20.
4. Don DeLillo’s Mao II (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991), also illustrates this
crowd mentality with the combination of photographic images and narrative.
5. Georges Bataille, Eroticism, Trans. Mary Dalwood (London: M. Boyars, 1987),
p. 20.
6. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, Trans. P. Foss and P. Patton (New York: Semio-
text(e) 1983), pp. 1–4.
7. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Trans.
Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1984), p. 81.
8. Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1988).
9. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 82.
10. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained to Children (London: Turn-
around, 1992), p. 24.
11. Michel Foucault, Madness & Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of
Reason, Trans. Richard Howard (London: Routledge, 1993).
12. Georges Bataille writing about Nietzsche, quoted by Derrida in Writing &
Difference (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 263. Italics in original.
13. Ibid.
14. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, Trans. Robert Hurley (London: Zone
Books, 1988), pp. 68–69. Marcel Mauss discusses ‘potlatch’ in The Gift: The
Form & Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, Trans. W.D. Halls (London:
Routledge, 1990).
15. Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’, Postmodern Culture, Ed.
Hal Foster (London: Pluto, 1985), p. 133. The ‘masses’ are also discussed in,
In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983).
16. John Frow, Time & Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory & Postmod-
ernity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 67.
17. Ibid.
18. Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities.
19. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaelogy of the Human Sciences
(London: Routledge, 2000), p. 352.
20. Seidler, Unreasonable Men, p. 138.
21. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 79.
Bibliography
Bataille, Georges. Eroticism, Trans. Mary Dalwood (London: M. Boyars, 1987).
——. The Accursed Share, Trans. Robert Hurley (London: Zone Books, 1988).
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations, Trans. P. Foss and P. Patton (New York: Semio-
text(e),1983).
——. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983).
——. ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’, Postmodern Culture, Ed. Hal Foster
(London: Pluto, 1985).
——. America (London: Verso, 1999).
Connell, R.W. Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity, 2005).
DeLillo, Don. White Noise (London: Picador, 1986).
——. Mao II (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991).
Ruth Helyer 219
Derrida, Jacques. Writing & Difference (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978).
Edwards, Tim. Cultures of Masculinity (London: Routledge, 2006).
Foucault, Michel. Madness & Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason,
Trans. Richard Howard (London: Routledge, 1993).
——. The Order of Things: An Archaelogy of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge,
2000).
Frow, John. Time & Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory & Postmodernity
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
Hayles N. Katherine. The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models & Literary Strategies in
the Twentieth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984).
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Trans.
Geoff Bennington & Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1984).
——. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1988).
——. The Postmodern Explained to Children (London: Turnaround, 1992).
Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: The Form & Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, Trans.
W.D. Halls (London: Routledge, 1990).
Seidler, Victor J. Unreasonable Men: Masculinity & Social Theory (London:
Routledge, 1994).
——. Man Enough: Embodying Masculinities (London: Sage, 1997).
Simon, William. Postmodern Sexualities (London: Routledge, 1996).
13
High Visibility: Teaching Ladlit
Alice Ferrebe
Contemporary study of literary masculinities is under pinned by a

founding assumption: that the specificity of male gender constructions
and experience is initially, and tactically, hidden beneath the textual
surface. Antony Easthope began the influential What A Man’s Gotta
Do with a claim that, ‘despite all that has been written over the past
twenty years on femininity and feminism, masculinity has stayed pretty
well concealed. This has always been its ruse to hold on to its power’
(Easthope 1990: 1). At Liverpool John Moores University, an important
part of our work on the gender-based English modules is engaged with
uncovering the (male) gendered particularity of purportedly ‘universal’
themes, in the man-making experiments of Victor Frankenstein, for
example, and the contemporary parables of Ian McEwan. In the 1997
article ‘Integrating Men Into the Curriculum’, Michael Kimmel, himself
a founding father of the contemporary paradigm of masculinity studies,
has traced a similar blind-spot in teaching as well as textual processes,
remarking of the ‘educational endeavour’ that ‘at every moment in
the process, men are invisible’. They are invisible, he claims, ‘as men’
(Kimmel 1996: 181): that is, as men involved in a complex negotiation
and performance of gender. It is, of course, precisely this failure to see
the dynamics of masculinity at work in teaching and its designated texts
that this volume seeks to redress.
When teaching Ladlit, the most prominent genre of British male
fictional self-expression of the 1990s, this trope of invisibility, and its
attendant pedagogical practices, are disrupted. ‘A man would never set
out to write a book on the peculiar situation of the human male’, Simone
de Beauvoir claimed with understandable conviction in The Second Sex
in 1949 (De Beauvoir 1988: 15), yet much of the work of, for example,
Mike Gayle, Nick Hornby and Tony Parsons, is driven by precisely this
220
Alice Ferrebe 221
purpose. In a 2002 piece entitled ‘Ladlit’, Elaine Showalter traces an

English continuum in the genre beginning in the 1950s, from Amis père
through fils to Hornby, reaching its demise with the century ‘as tradi-
tional distinctions of maturity and coming-of-age collapsed’ (Showalter
2002: 76). She characterises the style of the deceased genre as ‘comic
in the traditional sense that it had a happy ending. It was romantic
in the modern sense that it confronted men’s fear and final embrace
of marriage, and adult responsibilities. It was confessional in the post-
modern sense that the male protagonists and unreliable first-person
narrators betrayed beneath their bravado the story of their insecurities’
(2002: 60). Showalter nominates Martin Amis’s 1984 novel Money as
the apotheosis of Ladlit. This honour she bestows with reference to the
initial invisibility of the novel’s covert gendered dynamics, in partic-
ular its ‘subtextual worries about marriage and paternity’ (2002: 69)
and the ‘suppressed identification with fairy-tale romance’ (2002: 70)
gradually unveiled by John Self’s creeping obsession with the Royal
Wedding.
Crossing the categories of the comic, romantic and post-modern, as
well as incorporating the Bildungsroman, Showalter’s taxonomy prompts
an awareness of ‘Ladlit’ as a highly contestable genre category. The
term’s contemporary commercial origins ensure a semantic multi-
tasking that allows it to designate on demand the sanctioned literary
fiction of Martin Amis, John King’s violent reworkings of the hoolie
book in his football trilogy, or Tony Parsons’ carefully populist and
eminently popular novels, with the gender composition of readership
altering in each case. Such contestation, however, does not concern us
in this chapter, which uses as Ladlit case studies selected novels by Nick
Hornby and Tony Parsons. These texts’ narratives – their confessional
modes, registers of address, themes and characterisation – merit their
discussion as at least partially representative of this shifty genre. Import-
antly too, for the purposes of my discussion, they are the texts that I
have most recently taught. The following consideration of classroom
gender dynamics is prompted by the way in which these Ladlit novels
disrupt the normative practice of masculinity studies by making the
male gender, its performances and structural contradictions, highly
visible.
Three years of teaching these novels to undergraduates has yielded
(perhaps only) one reliable maxim – male students don’t write about
Ladlit. Their work in the analysis of literary gender (like that of many of
their female peers) gravitates towards the project I have already outlined
as common practice in masculinity studies, a practice owing much debt
222 High Visibility: Teaching Ladlit
and deference to feminist literary criticism. Choosing instead to write

about texts by, for example, William Golding, D.H. Lawrence or John
Fowles, they prefer to unearth masculinity, the deeper anxieties and
contradictions that lie beneath a textual surface fostering that illusion
of existential equality, the ‘human condition’. In a discipline (‘English’)
that tends towards concerns most conventionally designated feminine,
this task, for practitioners of either gender, may be seen as satisfy-
ingly dynamic, a kind of ‘muscular archaeology’ akin to that enacted
by Indiana Jones and his post-feminist successor, Lara Croft. Paradox-
ically, the ‘deep truths’ to be mined here are not organic, but rather
the post-structuralist ultimatum of gender’s artificiality. Relishing the
performance of machismo while exposing the insubstantiality of its
foundations: naturally, this sense of conflict between the aim of a theor-
etical paradigm and its attendant gender assumptions and dramatur-
gical pleasures is not new. Robert Scholes was worrying at the clash
between feminism and Derridean aspirations of rationality and intellec-
tual dominance in the 1987 piece ‘Reading as a Man’ (though pleasure
does not figure in his account of deconstruction). Complicating these
gender dynamics still further, however, we can also think of this kind
of critical work as contributing to the characterisation of English as
feminine, concerned as it is with the revelation and validation of deep
emotional realities. In other words, our pedagogic practices are perform-
ances too, and they are fraught with conflicting gender implications.
In ‘Performing Gender Identity: Young Men’s Talk and the Construc-
tion of Heterosexual Masculinity’, Deborah Cameron remarks upon
the way in which the vignettes of ‘typical’ masculine and feminine
behaviour in popular self-help manuals could reverse genders without
compromising plausibility. The notorious male reluctance to ask direc-
tions while driving, for example, can be understood as motivated by
anxiety at appearing ignorant. However, citing instead a predominant
female reluctance easily prompts explanations of a desire to avoid
imposing upon others and/or placing oneself in a position of physical
vulnerability. This Cameron uses as a means of stressing such scenarios
to be part not of a presiding empirical, or essential, experience, but
rather scenes in various dominant, performative, cultural narratives. She
concludes that:
The behaviour of men and women, whatever its substance may

happen to be in any specific instance, is invariably read through a
more general discourse on gender difference itself. That discourse is
subsequently invoked to explain the pattern of gender differentiation
Alice Ferrebe 223
in people’s behaviour; whereas it might be more enlightening to say

the discourse constructs the differentiation, makes it visible as differ-
entiation
(Cameron 2002: 443)
This chapter, then, aims to trace some of these constitutive discourses

and the gender differentiation they make visible within the masculinity
studies classroom, in the dynamics of its theoretical models, its teacher-
talk, and student responses. It is not a detailed ethnographic study of
classroom conversations, but instead an often speculative product of
recent experience of teaching gender-focused modules and working on
contemporary British male-authored fiction, intended to illicit further
debate and welcome suggestions. It finds in Ladlit, with its insistent
confessional register and characteristic political and thematic concerns,
a useful engine for generating these gendered discourses in both texts
and their teaching, as well as an informative site of epistemological
conflict between conceptions of masculinity as both essentialist and
performative.
Performing Ladlit
Ladlit’s register characteristically cultivates a sense of unmediated, inter-

personal communication between a first-person narrator and his reader.
The title of Nick Hornby’s 1995 High Fidelity puns, of course, on the
novel’s themes of long-playing records and potentially long-lasting rela-
tionships, but it is fitting too for its aspirations authentically to repro-
duce a narrative voice, that of Rob Fleming, without aural distortion. In
The Bonds of Love, psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin refers to what she
calls ‘the exchange of recognition’ amidst friendly social interaction,
during which each participant gains ‘that response from the other
which makes meaningful the feelings, intentions and actions of the
self’ (Benjamin 1990: 12). This process of inter-recognition is crucial,
of course, to laddishness – as Martin Amis put it in an interview with
Alan Rushbridger: ‘A lad is not a lad by himself, he’s only a lad when
he’s with the lads. You can’t walk around in your own house being a
lad, can you? It’s a communal activity’ (Amis 2000: 2). In High Fidelity,
Rob’s confession makes regular appeals for this exchange of homoso-
cial validation with an ideal laddish reader: ‘I never remember their
birthdays – you don’t do you, unless you are of the female persuasion?’
(Hornby 1995: 170). Though couched as an inevitable, and biological
characteristic, recognition of this forgetful trait is generated in a reader,
whatever their gender and propensity with calendars, by their supplying

the necessary cultural script to make the trait meaningful, that is that
laddish masculinity involves a reflex carelessness of social niceties.
Yet a Habermasian ideal speech situation, that consensual, rational,
total act of social communication, is far from assured, either in Hornby’s
novel or the genre more widely. The referent of Rob’s insistent ‘you’
register frequently shifts, appealing often to this unlikely figure of the
bookish lad (reading being a most unladdish activity), but also to Laura,
his ex-partner. Rob is partially engaged in trying to hurt Laura, as, for
example, with the news of her failure to appear in the top-five of his
‘memorable split-ups’, because ‘those places are reserved for the kind of
humiliations and heartbreaks that you’re just not capable of delivering’
(1995: 9). Yet he often, and ostentatiously, addresses her as represent-
ative of a female moral authority. His deference to this female superego
figure is symbolic of his identity not as a New Lad, but as that older,
Eighties stereotype, the New Man: ‘You’d say that this was childish,
Laura. You’d say that it is stupid of me to compare Rob and Jackie with
Rob and Laura who are in their mid-thirties, established, living together’
(1995: 20). Indeed, Rob appeals to so many differing cultural scripts, so
many competing gender discourses and stereotypes, for validation or
condemnation; the hapless lad, the pitiful wimp (in the cinema queue,
1995: 117–118), the wise female, the unfair feminist (1995: 156); that
the ideal interpretive community for his confession becomes hopelessly
fragmented and confused.
This confusion surrounding audience is reflected in the patterns,
and volume, of the genre’s sales. A 2004 article in the US publication
Publishers Weekly quotes Leah Rex, fiction buyer for Borders book-
shop, claiming that ‘the only place lad lit exists as a viable genre is
in the imaginations of publishers’.1 Some American companies have
attempted to address sales flagging further after an initial failure to
match their media hype by including novels by, for example, Mike
Gayle, within established chick-lit imprints. This demonstrates the Ladlit
market’s tacit anomaly: that this alleged indicator and communicator
of a new masculinity is only purchased and read with any avidity
by women. Showalter’s recognition of the romance element of Ladlit
might invite further investigation of the processes of identification
between female readers and the voice and sexual politics of the genre.
In Reading the Romance, Janice A. Radway observes the way in which
‘in ideal romances the hero is constructed androgynously. Although
the women were clearly taken with his spectacularly masculine phallic
power, in their voluntary comments and in their revealed preferences
Alice Ferrebe 225
they emphasized equally that his capacity for tenderness and attentive
concern was essential as well’ (Radway 1994: 13). These gender iden-
tifications Radway characterises as central to the (female) reading of
romance, and their conflicts and androgynously constructed heroes
coincide suggestively with those of Ladlit, not least in the simultan-
eous nostalgia for and dissatisfaction with traditional gendered stereo-
types that they demonstrate. Certainly the notable reluctance of my
male students to engage with Ladlit texts in their written work seems
worthy of more consideration than space permits here.
More arresting still is the wider confusion apparent in student discus-
sion of, for example, High Fidelity, over precisely which of the conflicting
gender discourses present in the text it might be most satisfactory, or,
in the context of looming assessment, ‘most correct’, to espouse. In
relation to traditional masculine traits of rationality and taciturnity,
the novel’s confessional tone is easily cast as feminised – domesticated
gossip rather than sanctified proclamation. Such lowly associations, of
course, interfere still further with Ladlit’s claims to be an authentic-
ally male form of communication, as well as its much-hyped claims
to be authentically new. Yet both claims, authentically masculine or
feminised, are constituted by the same antithesis between maleness
and confession. In the article ‘The narrative construction of reality’,
Jerome Bruner invokes the idea of ‘tellability’ in social conversation, of
having a point, which he identifies in contemporary Western culture as
usually involving deviance from the expected norm: a breach of what
he calls the ‘canonical script’ (Bruner 1991: 11). The tellability of Ladlit
confessions relies upon exactly such a breach, that of a canonical script
inscribing men as ‘naturally’ unable to communicate their emotions.
The contemporary canonical gender script of English as a discipline
in higher education, of course, seeks to estrange such assumptions in
favour of a post-structuralist discourse of performativity and decon-
struction of the ‘natural’ and inevitable, with an attendant promise
of political and social liberation. Nick Hornby’s earlier, autobiograph-
ical Fever Pitch explicitly seeks to reclaim masculinity from fashionable
cultural discourses perceived as pejoratively artificial rather than dynam-
ically constitutive:
Masculinity has somehow acquired a more specific, less abstract

meaning than femininity. Many people seem to regard femininity as
a quality; but according to a large number of both men and women,
masculinity is a shared set of assumptions and values that men can
either accept or reject. You like football? Then you also like soul
music, beer, thumping people, grabbing ladies’ breasts, and money.

You’re a rugby or cricket man? You like Dire Straits or Mozart, wine,
pinching ladies’ bottoms and money. You don’t fit into either camp?
Macho, nein danke? In which case it must follow that you’re a pacifist
vegetarian, studiously oblivious to the charms of Michelle Pfeiffer.
(Hornby 1993: 79–80)
In defence, his football fanaticism Hornby genders genetically, and occa-

sionally pathologically, male, and roots it firmly in a series of child-
hood traumas, predominantly his parents’ divorce: ‘I would have to be
extraordinarily literal to believe that the Arsenal fever about to grip me
had nothing to do with all this mess. (And I wonder how many other
fans, if they were to examine the circumstances that led up to their obses-
sion, could find some sort of equivalent Freudian drama?)’ (1993: 17).
Tony Parsons is similarly intent upon delineating ‘natural’ male traits
and linking them, if not to childhood per se, then to an ‘inner child’
within his protagonist Harry Silver. Parsons’s 1999 novel Man and Boy
draws attention to the possibility of the titular ‘boy’ role being filled
not just by Harry’s son Pat but by Harry himself, a boy still inno-
cent enough to be granted forgiveness for his inadequacies – infidelity
and inarticulacy among them (a similar pun and project is apparent in
Hornby’s 1998 novel About a Boy). In the sequel Man and Wife (2002)
this is made still more explicit by an amplified role for Harry’s mother
and the narrative’s investment in the organic wisdom of her frequent,
home-spun truisms: ‘My Mum was right. Pat was in a right old pickle.
Her boy was in a right old pickle. It took me quite a while longer to
realise that my mother was talking about me’ (Parsons 2002: 74). His
mother’s adages are set in opposition to the phony macho banter he
encounters daily in his job as a television producer, where his colleagues
tend to speak ‘as though working in television was a lot like running an
undercover SAS unit in South Armagh’ (1999: 59). This crucial binary
of social performance (compromising, debilitating) and essential iden-
tity (organic, nurtured in the domestic sphere) coincides instructively
within the central theme of Parsons’s novel sequence – fatherhood.
The figure of the father forms a similar nexus of competing discourses of
the ‘natural’ and the ‘social’, the biological and the epistemological. The
high visibility of the negotiation in Man and Boy of laddish (or childlike)
masculinity, together with the simplicity of its narrative construction
and expression relative to the more explicitly literary fiction on the
course, freed the better part of the seminar devoted to it for the consid-
eration of recent understandings of fatherhood. Though initially careful
Alice Ferrebe 227
to acknowledge the need for an increased cultural recognition and

protection of fathers’ rights, discussion soon focused upon a prolonged
condemnation of the hero during his crucial period of education in
Parsons’ Bildungsroman: Harry Silver’s (3 months) crash course in single
parenthood. Students’ suspicions were especially aggravated by overt
textual attempts to garner a recognition of heroism by implication
for Harry: ‘I did our shopping at the local supermarket. It was only a
5-minute driveaway, but I was gone for quite a while because I was
secretly watching all the women I took to be single mothers. I had
never even thought about them before, but now I saw that these women
were heroes. Real heroes’ (1999: 80). The narrator seeks an own-brand
heroism to match that of his warrior father, whose medals are invoked
insistently in nostalgia for war-won, state-sanctioned masculine self-
assertion. One student read similarly pathetic aspirations in the media
images of representatives of the (now disbanded) ‘Fathers for Justice’
group, balanced precariously on the edifices of public structures in the
tattered costumes of out-dated comic book heroes.
My students are acutely aware of the inadequacies of contemporary
discourses surrounding fatherhood, specifically the recurring trope of
male childcare as admirable but part-time, hierarchically arranged below
a full-time mother/line-manager and centred upon more frivolous duties
such as entertainment and sports coaching. It is often difficult to
discern, however, whether their condemnation stems from the rejec-
tion of this particular, culturally prescribed performance of father-
hood, or from an inherent bias against performativity per se, as it
is judged against an indistinct but abiding concept of essentialism.
The model of masculinity provided by Man and Boy, and Ladlit more
generally, was similarly judged as ‘artificial’, a judgement that would
strike at the core of Harry’s insecurities: ‘In my heart,’ he tells us, ‘I
believed that Gina was only pretending to be a housewife, while I
pretended to be my father’ (1999: 21). This sense of inauthenticity is
both provoked and amplified by the overt appeals for sympathy by
its narrator, and the overt publicity surrounding the genre that brands
it purveyor of a ‘new’ British masculinity. Such scepticism towards
‘alternative’ (and commercialised) masculinities is apparent in R.W.
Connell’s charge of ‘complicity’ in Masculinities (1995), which he levels
against men who present themselves as personally reformed whilst
continuing to accept the persistent privileges of a patriarchy dressed in
more fashionable discourses. Students display a distinct lack of patience
with Harry Silver’s confession of his anxieties and the ‘exchange of
recognition’ his narrative voice repeatedly entreats. We debated this
relationship – Harry’s special pleading and our most common response,

the reflex retort of the need for a stiffer upper lip – as a possible British
(or specifically English) and more subdued version of the explicit US
discourse of ‘white male as victim’ circulating in some of our other set
texts (Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 Fight Club, for example). This discourse
has been met with some equally explicit reactions, such as that in
Epistemology of the Closet as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, with characteristic
verve and venom, diagnoses a high level of self-pity in non-gay men in
contemporary American society:
The sacred tears of the heterosexual man: rare and precious liquor
whose properties, we are led to believe, are rivalled only by the
lacrimae Christi whose secretion is such a speciality of religious kitsch.
What charm, compared to this chrism of the gratuitous, can reside
in the all too predictable tears of women, of gay men, of people with
something to cry about?
(Sedgwick 1990: 145–146)
Performing pedagogy
Another important dynamic within this discussion is, of course, the

influence of my own talk around and about the text. Though pale in
comparison to Sedgwick’s rhetoric, my own frustration with the failure
of Tony Parsons’ text to yield insight into anything other than the
superficiality of its own narrative constructions (and an attendant uncer-
tainty about how, and whether, to include such popular fictions on
the ‘Representing Masculinities’ module in the future) was undoubtedly
communicated in my lecture on Ladlit that preceded the seminar.
Indeed, a previous experience might suggest that my own gender
alone is enough to elicit certain calculated student responses. An assess-
ment on the same module the year before involved a critical written
response to a piece of writing about masculinity presented ‘blind’ (that
is, with date but no source). This, I had conjectured, would serve a
number of purposes. On a basic level, it would initiate analytical engage-
ment with contemporary gender debates. It should also encourage
awareness of the kind of assumptions made in response to the figure (and
gender) of an author-figure; of the textual work done to position readers;
and of theoretical, or non-fictional, texts to be as open to insights
through the close reading of their style and narrative as the literary.
The selected extract, from Rosalind Coward’s Sacred Cows: Is Feminism
Relevant to the New Millennium? (1999), focused on precisely the idea of
Alice Ferrebe 229
the ‘invisibility’ of men that began this piece. In it, Coward notes the
way in which men were ‘often absent from discourses’ (Coward 2000:
96–97), and traces the accelerating deconstruction of what she calls
‘ungendered man’ (2000: 97) from the early 1980s onwards. Her central
anecdote; the proposal ‘a few years ago’ (2000: 97) of a session to discuss
the (now ubiquitous) idea of a ‘crisis of masculinity’ on a Women’s
Studies course, and its rejection by the course leader as irrelevant and
imperialistic; together with Coward’s assessment of ‘feminism’s hostility
to any male self-consciousness’ (2000: 98), led all but one student (in
a cohort of 50) to assume a male author. The critique of feminism was
automatically judged to equate to maleness. By such logic, of course,
female = feminist: my very presence in the classroom, I can thus assume,
invokes a pro-feminist discourse that students need to negotiate (not
that such a skill is not a crucial one). This awareness, no doubt, is ampli-
fied by my determined deconstruction of a favoured (and disheartening)
opening conversational gambit in class, especially for female first-year
students: ‘I’m not a feminist but ’. The wise (or at least well-informed)
woman and the unfair feminist: the roles projected upon me as a female
tutor of masculinity studies can be as contradictory and stereotypified
as the female figures in High Fidelity noted above.
Jane Sunderland has noticed the circulation in contemporary culture
of what she calls the ‘Boys will be Boys’ discourse, which seeks to
excuse boys from particular kinds of effort. In wider social debate,
Sunderland notes, this is usually academic effort, and we have seen
how, within Ladlit, its remit is expanded to prompt exoneration, say,
for forgetting birthdays (High Fidelity) or even, in Silver’s case, infi-
delity: ‘The reason that most men stray is opportunity, and the joy of
meaningless sex should never be underestimated. It had been a mean-
ingless, opportunistic coupling. That’s what I had liked most about it’
(Sunderland 2004: 43). Sunderland identifies too a ‘Poor Boys’ discourse,
usually related to the received wisdom that boys are unable to commu-
nicate effectively. As already discussed, Ladlit’s characteristic register is
predicated precisely upon this discourse, its Poor Boy/Man narrators
dependent for the tellability of their tales and their (precarious) contem-
porary constructions of heroism on the idea of a daring male breach of
emotional self-repression. In a seminar dedicated to an overview and
analysis of theoretical writing about masculinity, we considered David
Morgan’s innovative ‘critical autobiography’ Discovering Men (1992), in
particular his account of his own experience of fatherhood. Morgan says
of his son that ‘I have tried many times to talk about what’s going on
between us but he sees this as my usual ‘ear-grinding’ and doesn’t seem
to want to notice that I’m in the process of changing’ (Morgan 1990:

107). Initial condemnation of the text’s perceived ‘special pleading’ was
swift and as ironic as Sedgwick’s comments above. This has regularly
been my experience: that students react the same way to the register
characteristic of (male) theoretical writing about masculinity as they
do to that of Ladlit, and that this reaction is motivated for the most
part by a judgement of stylistic similarity. Students’ critical responses
to Michael Kimmel’s 1994 essay ‘Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear,
Shame and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity’ indicated
a suspicion of the textual manipulation inherent in the ‘we’ register
of the piece comparable to reaction against, for example, Hornby’s
insistent appeal to shared, homosocial experience through the repetition
of ‘you’. Such a response, of course, is also prompted by the assign-
ment’s context in a module that self-declaredly aims to critique mascu-
line, universalising modes of address. The fact that Kimmel’s use of ‘we’
functions to undermine such universalisation by its explicitly gender-
specific address (its solidarity demanding the male reader’s negotiation
of personal complicity) was almost exclusively overlooked. This points
to the crucial need for teachers of gender studies to place emphasis
upon the context of theoretical writing, prompting the understanding
of, say, Morgan’s autobiographical work as an interventionary gambit in
a longer process of political change. Yet it also indicates an interesting
ambivalence: well-steeped now in popular discourses of male confes-
sion and male performances of emotional honesty, my students demon-
strate a wariness of both the occlusion and the amplification of male
particularity.
A similar ambivalence, I would suggest, is present within contem-
porary masculinity studies more widely. The confessionalist strand
within men’s studies claims the lingering Enlightenment paradigm of
the opposition between reason and emotion as a source of male repres-
sion at the same time as a feminist approach denounces it as a patriarchal
political instrument. There remains an abiding and endemic confusion
between the competing demands of the masculine denial of emotion as
both male power gambit and as a male curse. We are left anxious about
our inability to distinguish the ‘Poor Boys’ from the Good Men. Such
anxiety has been partially eclipsed by the academic move into more
fluid and Foucaultian critiques of power and discourse, yet such critiques
too are rife with gendered dynamics. The vacillating allegiance between
explanations of biology and performance observed in Nick Hornby’s
Fever Pitch, for example, is not absent from the masculinity studies
classroom. There too, discourses of liberation, complicity and blame
Alice Ferrebe 231
are regularly mobilised to various ends. An enduring, unexamined link

between masculinity and maleness allows, depending on our agenda,
either punishment for men for their legacy of privilege, or the promise
of solidarity and progress for a group long-debilitated by the demands
of the society in which it exists. Binary oppositions, gender amongst
them, I am suggesting, are reinscribed as well as renounced.
Last year a taciturn (male) student submitted an essay which struggled
to construct a biological explanation for gendered characteristics (the
only such agenda apparent amongst a group of 50). After my initial
response to the unsatisfactory and insubstantial nature of an old argu-
ment, I was struck with a strong sense that I had failed to provide
him with any materials with the potential to progress his argument
(this, surely, being one of my key professional roles). When steeped
in post-structuralist practice, essentialism seems easy to dismiss, and I
realised I had done this somewhat perfunctorily on the module, with a
look at Robert Bly’s Iron John: A Book about Men – his metaphor of the
‘hairy man’ (Bly 1999: 6) provoking much amusement – and the more
serious condemnation of an essay by Abby L. Ferber drawing parallels
between the discourses of the mythopoetic movement and the white
supremacist movement. Ladlit texts might be similarly easily discarded,
with the ready visibility of their underlying essentialism robbing crit-
ical readers of the potential pleasure of muscular archaeological prac-
tice. In upholding the ways in which it is discourse that constitutes
‘the natural’, it is possible to forget the way in which these discourses
about discourses construct the paradigms, or ‘truths’, by which we teach:
one being that essentialism is essentially fallacious. It is possible, too,
to forget the way in which such discourses are gendered. I mentioned
above the need for teachers to contextualise political moves such as
the adoption of the personal register by men’s movement writing in
order to temper quick student condemnation of the outdated. My own
response in this situation has most often been to draw comparison with
Second Wave Feminist tactics – in this case with attempts to dismantle
the possibility of the (inherently patriarchal) objective stance in theor-
etical writing. This impulse – of justifying the trajectory of masculinity
studies by reference to the implicitly more advanced but parallel progress
of feminism – seems on reflection suggestive of a more fundamental
paradigm underlying contemporary gender studies: the reflex feminisa-
tion of good practice.
In The Aristos, the seductively adolescent conviction of which hints
at its position as John Fowles’s first written book, the ninety-third
aphorism provides a useful indication of the mythic and dualistic nature

of its author’s proto-feminism:
Adam is stasis or conservatism; Eve is kinesis, or progress. Adam

societies are ones in which the man and the father, male gods, exact
strict obedience to established institutions and norms of behaviour,
as during a majority of the periods of history in our era. The Victorian
is a typical such period. Eve Societies are those in which the woman
and the mother, female gods, encourage innovation and experiment,
and fresh definitions, aims, modes of feeling. The Renaissance and
our own are typical such ages.
(1980: 165–166)
This seems quaint now, yet I want to posit the idea that our
own current canonical script within the gender studies classroom
is constituted by and constitutive of just this sense of an ‘Eve
society’. Sunderland identifies a discourse she brands that of ‘Bounded
masculinity/Unbounded femininity’, noting that it is ‘highly situ-
ated’ (Sunderland 2004: 89), for in many cultural contexts normative
feminine practices remains as hidebound and resistant to transgression
as their masculine counterparts. However just such a discourse, I am
suggesting, is situated, and often highly venerated, in contemporary
Western academia. Within it, the liberational potential of difference and
differance is preached, whilst leaving unexamined an enduring binary
which privileges performativity and post-structuralism above essen-
tialism precisely by a process of gendering. In Sacred Cows Coward coins
the neologism ‘womanism’, defined as ‘feminism’s vulgate’ and ‘a sort of
popularized version of feminism which acclaims everything women do
and disparages men’ (Coward 2000: 11). ‘Womanism’, then, connotes a
potent confusion of the terms and associations of feminism with those
of both the female and the traditional feminine. In the discourse of
‘Bounded masculinity/Unbounded femininity’, practices recognised as
having more potential to achieve progress, to admit transgression and
allow play are gendered in this womanist way – they are, purportedly,
‘more’ post-structuralist and thus superior. Like Rob to Laura in High
Fidelity, the appeal is to a type of knowledge validated by the gender
placed upon it. As in Ladlit more generally, the epistemological structure
of gender categories, though still binary, is fraught with both essen-
tialist and anti-essentialist assumptions and implications. In a striking
reversal from traditionalist gender configurations, such a discourse uses
a coalescent (and perceivedly transcendent) masculinity/maleness to
Alice Ferrebe 233
signify an out-dated and logocentric reliance upon biological and bodily

explanation, a narrative easily read in the primal solutions of set-texts
like Fight Club, or the investment in the power of biological fatherhood
in Man and Boy.
The presiding sense of antagonism here is, of course, disappointing:
the Battle of the Sexes updated to that of the Genders. Yet I am seeking
here not so much to condemn this contemporary discourse as to admit
some complicity with it, in the hope of prompting a shared recogni-
tion of its relative robustness within masculinity studies, and of the role
that essentialist and transcendent ideals still play in the classroom, and
in analytical work. At the crest of the Second Wave in 1979, Angela
Carter wrote in The Sadeian Woman of the silliness of the notion of
matriarchal goddesses. ‘If a revival of the myths of these cults gives [us]
emotional satisfaction,’ she warned, ‘it does so at the price of obscuring
the real conditions of life’ (Carter 1993: 5); and those of our teaching
and critical paradigms too. A great portion of our work on gender-
focused modules must still remain the expunging of the invisibility of
masculinity, and the exposing of the naturalising discourses that are
mobilised to conceal it. Yet despite the high visibility and narrative
simplicity of masculinity that characterises the genre, Ladlit has hope-
fully emerged from this discussion as an interestingly conflicted site
generative of wider and vital questions about gender, textual address
and classroom practice.
Note
1. Natalie Danford, ‘Lad Lit Hits the Skids’, Publishers Weekly, 29 March 2004.
Works cited
Amis, Martin. Interview. ‘All About My Father’. By Alan Rusbridger. The Guardian,
8 May 2000. 2.
——. Money: A Suicide Note. 1984. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.
De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. 1949. London: Picador, 1988.
Benjamin, Jessica. The Bonds of Love. London: Virago, 1990.
Bly, Robert. Iron John: A Book About Men. 1990. Shaftesbury, Dorset: Element
Books Ltd, 1999.
Bruner, Jerome. ‘The Narrative Construction of Reality’. Critical Inquiry 18 (1)
1991. 1–21.
Cameron, Deborah. ‘Performing Gender Identity: Young Men’s Talk and the
Construction of Heterosexual Masculinity’ In The Discourse Reader. Eds Adam
Jaworski and Nikolas Coupland. London: Routledge, 2002. pp. 442–458.
Carter, Angela. The Sadeian Woman. 1979. London: Virago, 1993.
Connell, R.W. Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity, 1995.

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Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990.
Ferber, Abby L., ‘Racial Warriors and Weekend Warriors: The Construction of
Masculinity in Mythopoetic and White Supremacist Discourse’, In Feminism
and Masculinities. Ed. Peter F. Murphy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
pp. 228–243.
Fowles, John. The Aristos. 1964. London: Triad/Granada, 1980.
Hornby, Nick. About A Boy. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1998.
——. Fever Pitch. 1992. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1993.
——. High Fidelity. 1995. London: Indigo, 1996.
Kimmel, Michael. ‘Integrating Men Into the Curriculum’. Duke Journal of Gender
Law and Policy 4 1996. 181–195.
——. ‘Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame and Silence in the Construction
of Gender Identity’, In Theorizing Masculinities. Eds Harry Brod and Michael
Kaufman. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994. pp. 119–141.
Morgan, David H.J. Discovering Men. London: Hyman, 1990.
Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. London: Vintage, 1997.
Parsons, Tony. Man and Boy. 1999. London: Harper Collins, 2000.
——. Man and Wife. 2002. London: Harper Collins, 2003.
Radway, Janice A. Reading The Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature.
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Paul Smith. London: Methuen, 1987. pp. 204–218.
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Afterword
From the editor
This book represents one step on a long journey, and one which might
perhaps be personally exemplified. It was as an adult education tutor
in the early 1980s that I first realised how problematic was masculinity
in English Studies. Men represented a small minority in classes (indeed
there were classes in which I was the only man). Yet – with some excep-
tions – the men who were present plainly felt they had a special relation-
ship both to me as male tutor and to the subject matter. On average, men
took disproportionately more airtime, and worked harder to demon-
strate their superior grasp of the topic. Many of them both enjoyed the
attention of women and simultaneously needed to establish that they
had a special, even if often rivalrous, relationship with me as tutor. ‘We’,
I was sometimes made to feel, shared an intellectual authority which
created for us what might now be called a homosocial bond (the word
was not yet available to us) in our superiority to women students. As
both Mark Dooley and Chris Thurgar-Dawson note in their chapters, it
is difficult for the male tutor not to respond to – or even to be drawn
into – the behaviours they describe. At the same time, we should not
see the masculine performance of the subject as solely one more ruse
for the assertion of male power. Tutors both male and female need to
be sensitive to the legitimate subjective needs of those men drawn to
the subject – reading, among other things, being the secret domain of
shy and perhaps bullied boys.
There were a number of historical reasons for a growing self-awareness
of myself as a male teacher. In the Workers Education Association and in
university adult continuing education, feminism fuelled a rapid growth
in women’s education. Courses under titles like ‘New Opportunities for
Women’ (and an early generation of creative writing courses) supplied
much of the surviving political energy of British adult education. And
the larger environment contributed strongly to the growth of a feminist
politics of education. For these were years of crisis in the cold war,
the era of the deployment in Britain of US cruise missiles as part of
the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) ‘twin track’ policy; of
‘protest and survive’, of the Greenham peace camp, and the resur-
gence of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). The indictment
235
236 Afterword
of patriarchy and of men as witting or unwitting agents of terminal

devastation was intellectually and politically convincing. These were
the circumstances in which scattered ‘men’s groups’ set about trying
to re-think their own complicity in oppression and violence. In these
circumstances, the drive to dominate symbolic meanings and access to
ideas – even at the microlevel of the literature group – started to seem
more significant. Was the compulsion to establish or maintain control
over the generation of privileged meanings simply one mutation of a
much larger history, a history where (as the new Theory was simultan-
eously arguing) it no longer made sense to separate out material and
symbolic power?
While the environment has changed, those or related questions have
not gone away. The dominant apocalyptic narrative has shifted from
thermo-nuclear exchange to environmental catastrophe. Few people
would now uncomplicatedly attribute to one gender alone respons-
ibility for pillaging the earth. Yet this does not mean that men and
masculinity are no longer problems. Very real gender inequalities persist.
Internationally, patriarchy is on the warpath, enlisting dispossessed
(and not so dispossessed) young men in a macabre body politics of the
Word. Commitment to a transformative gender politics requires atten-
tion not only to the symbolic forms in which inequalities are repro-
duced. It demands a radical critique of nostalgia for subservience to the
Father God.
We are not in this book calling for an obsessive re-routing of Literary
and Textual Studies. We do not seek to revive a cultural politics of guilt
or accusation. Yet, while we have no clear-cut policy recommendations
to make, we write out of a shared belief that highly wrought symbolic
forms provide a terrain for the examination and gradual extension of
human agency. In the disciplines which are the subject of this book, we
need to estrange the taken-for-grantedness of hegemonic masculinity
and its perspectives. The biological basis of masculinity, we have argued,
leaves what Ross Chambers has referred to as ‘room for manoeuvre’.1
But if teachers and their students are serious about change, then they
have to look beyond the establishment of magisterial commentary on
text to a conscious intervention in the gendered situations in which
that discussion takes place.
Note
1. Chambers, Ross. Room for Maneuver: Reading the Oppositional in Narrative.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1991.
Index
Aaron’s Rod, 99, 104, 105, 91 96 Anxiety, 11, 21, 23, 26, 50, 91, 212,
Aautobiographical narrative, 170–1, 217, 222, 230
173, 176–7, 182, 184 Arcadian mythology, 162
Academic self-aggrandisement, ideas Archaeological traces, 24
of, 207 Argamon, S., 118, 124
Acceptable heterosexual masculinity, Aristotle, 72
43 Armstrong, N., 31
Adamic naming, 163 Assimilation class, 128, 130, 134, 139
Adams, R., 30 Assimilation course, 135
African American community, Atherton, C., 31
dynamics of, 143 ‘Authentic’ masculine identity, idea
African American literary tradition, of, 206
146 Autobiographical reminiscence,
teaching of the, 145 nature of, 172
African American masculinity, 141–3,
145, 152 Balswick, J., 165
construction of, 144 Barker, F., 31
curricula constructions of, 142 Baron-Cohen, S., 7, 9, 30
disempowerment of, 149 Barrett, F.J., 29, 169
form of, 149 Barry, P., 200
heterosexual, demonisation of, 147 Bataille, G., 207, 212, 214, 218
historical formation of, 144 Bateson, F.W., 200
Baudrillard, J., 78, 208, 213, 214, 215,
literary manifestation, 147
218
racial constructions of, 151
Becher, T., 17, 18
writing, 142, 145
Becket, F., 107
African-American writings, 145
Bell, M., 107
Alexander, 62, 66–70
Benjaminian aura, 163
Alloway, N., 43 Bennett, G., 202
Alternative kids, 128 Berger, M., 1
Althusserian approaches, 28 Bernard, J., 56
American cultural politics, 159 Berrill, D., 40, 56
American political philosophies of Berry, M., 60, 187, 200
citizenship, 146 Beynon, J., 3, 12, 170, 171, 176
Anglo-American feminist literary Binary categorisation of gender, 117,
criticism, 142 120, 177
Anti-communist containment, 193 Binary oppositions, 231
Anti-essentialist assumptions, 232 Biological sex and storytelling, 118
Anti-feminist, 90, 99 Black men, 143–4, 148, 150
Anti-humanist left, 16 Black power, 148, 151
Antithetical and oppositional terms, movement, 142, 147
41 rhetoric, 148
237
238 Index
Blackshaw, T., 176 code-switching, 19

Bleich, D., 12, 28, 29, 167, 168, 169 Coetzee, J.M., 16
Blount, M., 143, 153 cognitive
‘bookish’ child, 60 difference, biological origin of, 7
Boulton, J.T., 106 neuroscience, 6
Bounded masculinity, 232 styles, 25
Bourke, J., 198, 199, 202 Cohen, E., 159, 169
Bradley, J.R., 21 Coleman, W., 39
Brady Aschauer, A., 118, 124 Coleridge, S.T., 43, 86, 87
Brantlinger, P., 23 Connell, R.W., 3, 13, 29, 31, 227
Brathwaite, K.E., 162, 163, 164, 165, constructed representations,
169 acceptance of, 214
Bray, A., 67, 73 constructionist view of gender,
Bristow, J., 29 cultural or social, 5
British modernism, experimental contemporary gender debates, 228
principles of, 165 contemporary Western culture, 225,
Brod, H., 30 232
Bronfen, E., 30 conventional narrative, 113–14
Brook, S., 29, 31 conventional pedagogy, 136
Brooks, P., 123 Cornwall, A., 176
Brown, S., 146, 153 Coulter, R., 48
Browning, C., 197, 202 counter-cultural movements, 148
Budd, M.A., 21 Croll, A.J., 181
Buhle, M.J., 106 Crossley, M., 170
Burden, R., 4, 11–12, 90, 107 Cultural repetition, 22
Burton, D., 187, 200 Cunningham, G.P., 143, 153
Butler, J., 6, 21, 39, 40, 79, 82, 87, cyberspace, 216
131, 176 elements of, 122
cyborg-like imagery, 119
Campaspe, 62, 64–8, 71
Canadian university, 39 d’Este, C., 196, 202
‘canonical’ literature, 27 Dacre, C., 4, 75–88
Canonical script, 225, 232 Damasio, A., 7
Carrington, B., 38, 39 Darby, R., 21
Carter, A., 233 Darwinism, 21
Carter, R., 31, 193, 200, 233 Davies, B., 27
Castiglione, 68, 72 Davis, A.Y., 153
Ceramella, N., 105 De-coding celebrity and nostalgia, 207
Chaotic postmodern situation, 217 Deconstruction, 11, 53, 82, 99, 102,
Childhood traumas, 226 122, 160, 222, 225, 229
Christabel, 86, 87, 88 degrees of, 91, 99
Civil rights, 151 Dekoven, M., 106
movement, 126 DeLillo, D., 205–17
Cixous, H., 110, 112, 123 Dellums Committee, 197
Cixous’ description of écriture Derrida, J., 102, 105, 107
feminine, 112 Development of University English
Clark, K., 146, 153 Teaching Project, 16
Clarkson, J., 129 DiGangi, M., 74
classroom conversations, 223 Digital technology, 114, 119
Index 239
Dinshaw, C., 112, 123 Female Masculinity, 79–80, 82, 85,

Dollimore, J., 97, 107 87–8
Domestic labour, division of, 171 Female moral authority, 224
Dominant societal ‘norms’, 210 Feminine
Doss, E., 153 idealism, 100
Douglas, J., 123 marginalization of the, 100
Douglas, M., 19, 31, 109 ritual expulsion of the, 10
Dramatic demonstration of values in Femininity
crisis, 189 commonsensical’ ideas of, 80
Dualisms, 7 conservative Romanticist
‘dually authored’ dat, 173 conceptions of, 86
limited conception of, 77
Early modern sex and sexualities, 62, notions about, 77, 79
64, 70–2 Feminisation, 25, 146, 231
Écriture feminine, description of, 110 of culture, 90, 104
Edward II, 14, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72 fear of, 14
Electronic reading, conventions of, Feminist interpretation, 86
109 Fever pitch, 225, 230
Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Fictional gender identity, 120–1
Ontario, 39 Fictional hypertext, 119
Eliot, T.S., 17, 26, 93, 97, 163 Fijian style, 45
Elizabethan court, 66, 68 Filippis, S. de, 105
Elizabethan masculinity, 68 Fine, J., 209
Elliott, J., 170, 182 Fishnet, 111–12, 114
Ellmann, M., 17 hypertext version of, 114, 117
Emo girl, 128 Fitzgerald, L., 80
Emotional self-repression, breach of, Fjagesund, P., 106
229 Flannigan Saint-Aubin, A., 148, 153
Epic masculinity in English poetry, Foster, T., 38, 39
158 Foucauldian fashion, 80
Essentialism, concept of, 227 Foucault, M., 16, 39, 64, 78, 82, 153,
Ethnic masculinities, 78 210, 215, 218
Evans, C., 13, 16, 24, 32 Fowler, R., 187, 200
‘evidence-based’ educational research, Francis, B., 38, 42
4 Frank, B.W., 37, 38, 51, 53, 54
Exaggerated performance, 9 Friendship and sodomy, 68
Existentialism, 48 Frow, J., 210, 214, 215, 218
Expressionists, 97
Gardiner, J.K., 30, 127
Factionalism, 69 Gay and Lesbian studies, 126, 136–7
Fairclough, N., 200 Gay or homosexual, 5, 64, 66, 126,
False consciousness, 216 132
Faludi, S., 29, 195, 198, 199, 201, 202 culture, commercialization of, 126
Fantasia of the Unconscious, 92, 94 marriage, 126, 135, 137
Fascism, 216 straight-acting, 129
Father–son relationship, 217 Gender
‘female gothic’ versus ‘male gothic’ balanced workforce, 39
texts, 80 bending, 51
Female emancipation, 91 bending practice, 52
240 Index
Gender – continued masculinity, 8, 45, 48, 53–4, 129,

difference, 95, 97–8, 104, 121, 223; 132, 138, 165; extreme form of,
pattern of, 222 130; representations of, 56
expectations, 45, 133 Hegemony, 25
hierarchies, 39 Heiland, D., 84, 85
non-conformity, 44, 127 Henderson, R., 32
politics, 39, 50, 52, 54, 81, 122, 236 Henriques, J., 31
presentation, variations in, 130 Hephestion, 67–70
regime, 13, 39, 47, 53–4 Herman, D., 115
representations of, 110 Hermaphroditic, 76
specific patterns of socialisation, ‘heroic automata’, 93
118 Heroism, 9, 16, 28, 93, 95, 227, 229
stereotypes, 51 resonances of, 16
theory, 127, 133 Herzog, T., 195, 201
in the storyworlds, 115 Heterosexuality, 37, 40, 42, 53, 65,
Gendered characteristic, biological 150–1
explanation for, 231 regulatory apparatus of, 40, 42, 44,
Gendered dimensions of English, 40 46, 53
Gendered identities, 3, 14, 128, 152 Heterosexual masculinity, 43, 50, 53,
Gendering process, 232 56
Gender Trouble, 6, 79, 82 High Fidelity, 223, 225, 229, 232, 234
German atrocity against civilians, 195 Historiography, 187–8, 192, 193, 195,
Gilbert, S.M., 31 197–9
Gilligan, C., 30 History of masculine subjectivity, 22
Gilmore, D., 26, 176 History-writing, norm of, 191
Hitler, 206–9
Goffman, E., 176
Hoeveler, D.L., 75, 81, 87
Goffmanesque presentation, 174
Hollinghurst, A., 20, 22
Grammatical and lexical
Homoeroticism, 64, 68, 87, 96
choices, 118
Homoerotic nature, 69
Greig, C., 38
Homoerotic relations, 71
Gubar, S., 31
Homophobia, 21, 37, 42, 44–5, 51,
Gun, gang or drug cultures, 145
53–4
Gunslinger, 158, 159, 162
intensification of, 46
Homosexuality, 37, 44, 64–5, 70–2,
Halberstam, J., 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 88, 96–7, 137
129 Homosocial experience, 230
Halliday, M.A.K., 115, 124 Hooks, B., 145, 153
Halliday’s system of transitivity, 115 House of Representatives, 39
Hammer, R., 201 Humanities, 13, 15, 42, 62, 135, 170
Harding, J., 42 Humphrey, N., 27
Harris, I.M., 175 Hunter, I., 14, 41, 55
Hayles, N., 207, 217 Huyssen, A., 25
Heaney, S., 182 Hypermasculine properties, 149
Hegemonic Hyper-real, 208
gender, 127 Hypertextual narratives, 114
heterosexual masculinity, 42, 51,
53, 56 Ideas of linguistics, 162
male, 53–4, 132 Identity formation, processes of, 73
Index 241
Imagined community’ 8 Leavis, Q.D., 23, 25

‘implied reader’, analogy of the, 17 Ledger, S., 107
‘implied student’, identification of Lesbians, 126, 128–9, 132
the, 17 Lewis, O., 173
Intellectual interchange, agonistic Liberal feminism, 80–1
style of, 133 Liberty and equality, historic struggle
Intellectualism, 60 for, 141
Inter-group fantasy, 16 Lifton, R.J., 202
Inter-recognition, 223 Liggins Hill, P., 153
Intertextual analysis, 69 Light, A., 141, 142, 152
Intra-uterine androgens, 11 Liminal activity, 19
Lind, M., 194, 201
JanMohamad, Abdul R., 147, 153 Lindisfarne, N., 176
Jardine, A., 29 Linguistic
Jeffords, S., 197, 202 analysis, 187–8
Johnson, M., 31 choices, 118
Johnson, S., 109, 118, 123, 124 terminology of, 187
Johnston, J., 38 Link between masculinity and
Johnstone, B., 118, 124 maleness, 231
Jones, A., 49 Liverpool John Moores University,
Julien, I., 144, 153 220
London Borough comprehensive
Kangaroo, 91, 94, 96, 98, 104 school, 60
Kaufman, M., 30, 33 Longer-term learning goals, 167
Kauko, M., 32, 34 Long poem anthology, 156
Keats, John, 41 Love, J., 110, 123
Kehler, M., 39 Lyly, J., 62, 64, 65, 66, 73
Kimmel, M., 2, 6, 13, 16, 129, 130, Lyly, John, 62, 64, 66
132, 133, 146, 153, 165, 169, 220, Lyotard, J.-F., 78, 209, 210, 216, 218
230
Kimura, D., 7 MacInnes, J., 11, 29
King, J., 38, 221 Mackay, P., 200
Knights, B., 1, 3, 5, 10, 13, 16, 17, 20, Madness & Civilisation, 210
21, 31, 32, 63, 73, 78, 95, 98, 129, Magna Mater, 92
133, 134, 135 ‘male gothic’ narrative, 83
Kriesteva, J., 10 ‘male leadership’, 98
Kroetsch, R., 157, 159, 161, 162, 169 Male authored fictions, 10
Kurlansky, M., 201 Male epic poetry, 158
Male feminization, threat of, 133
Lacanian psychoanalysis to Male gender constructions, 220
feminisms, 82 Male inexpressiveness, 165
Lakoff, G., 31 Male teachers tensions or anxieties, 37
Landow, G. P., 110 Manliness, 1–2, 8, 11, 21, 23, 27,
Lane, C., 32 95–6, 149, 205
Latter Days, 126 androgynous version of, 21
Lawrence, D.H., 4, 26, 61, 90–107, definition of, 9
153, 222 handling of, 162
Lawrence’s theory of power derives, 94 Marlowe, C., 62, 64, 65, 68, 69, 74
Leavis, F.R., 25 Marlowe’s play, 64
242 Index
Marriage and paternity, worries about, Melanson, R., 193, 201

221 Mercer, K., 144, 153
Married Love, 97 Meta-narrative markers, 103
Martino, W., 13, 14, 31, 37, 38, 39, Metropolitan womanartist, 100
43, 49, 53, 54 Middleton, P., 23, 29, 30, 31, 95, 106
Masculine Mieszkowski, S., 32
dominance and sexism, 110 Miles, R., 81, 84
identities, 11, 22, 55, 63, 65, 67, 68, Milgram, S., 197, 202
72, 122, 205 Militant masculinity, 147
ideology, 101 Millard, E., 1, 3, 13, 14, 31, 37
modality, 9 Millett, K., 29, 93, 103, 107
pedagogical practice, 135 Mills, M., 37, 38
‘masculine credentials’, 42 Mishler, E.G., 170, 182
Masculinities Misogynistic attitudes, 67
analysis of, 56 Modernism, 22, 90, 92, 94, 96, 103–4,
binary classification of, 117 163
concept of, 121–2 less authoritarian approach to, 105
conceptual model of, 173 representationalist crisis of, 103
confirming practices, 43 Modernist
construction of, 109 literature, 26
crisis of, 101, 189, 229 poets, 163
cultural norms of, 120 Modern masculinity, 80
dubious, 60 Modest female, the iconography of
gatekeepers of, 54 the, 84
interrogation of, 159 Modleski, T., 25
literary discussions of, 1 Monolithic gender perspectives, 121
metaphorical exploration of, 199 Monotheistic neofundamentalisms, 2
model of, 61, 63, 72, 227 Montaigne, 72
normative status of, 51, 215 Monuments of unageing intellect, 23
notions about, 77, 79 Moore, J.N., 123, 193, 201, 220
performative dimensions of, 38 Moral bankruptcy, 193
performative practices of, 39 Morgan, D.H.G., 174, 176, 229, 230
policing of, 46 Mortimer Junior, 69
proliferation of, 80, 129 Mortimer Senior, 70
in textual studies, 2 Mr Noon, 92, 99, 102, 103, 104
theoretical writing about, 230 Mullany, L., 122, 124
variations in conceptions of, 130 Munton, A., 169
varieties of, 138 Murry, J.M., 103, 107
‘mass’ civilisation, 25 Muscular archaeology, 222, 231
Mass destruction, transpersonal My Lai, massacre at, 188, 191–2, 194,
instrument of., 95 195, see also Vietnam War
Mass mediated images, 214 neo-conservative descriptions of,
Matriarchal goddesses, notion of, 233 196
Mauss, M., 218 Mystification, veils of, 26
McCarthy, M., 197, 201, 202
McWilliam, E., 49 Nalty, B.C., 201
Mead, G.H., 173–6 Narrative analysis, 112
Meadian model, 173 Nation-language adoption of ancient
Mechanics of reading, 112 African ritual, 164
Index 243
Native Son, 146, 147 Pallotta-Chiarolli, M., 43

Natural feminine instinct, 91 Palmer, P., 82
Nazi party, 209 Parks, M.R., 119, 122, 124
Nazism, 207 Pathologized masculinity, 87
Nelson, C., 21 Patriarchal masculinity, modes of, 152
Neo-conservative apologist, 194 Patriarchal privilege, critique of, 134
Neologism ‘womanism’, 232 Pedagogic
‘new masculinity’, 90 orientation, 12
Newbolt Report, 18, 23 strength, 18
‘new’ British masculinity, 227 Pedagogical
New Left challenge of the, 1980s, 18 commitment, 47
Newman, E., 38, 39 domain, 40
New World Trilogy, 162 implications of masculinities, 55
‘Nommo’, concept of, 162
limits, 50
Non-Anglo-Saxon men, 83
potential, 48, 54
Nonce taxonomies, 129
practices, 37–40, 47, 53, 56, 78, 134,
Non-conformist and non-normative
220
gender, 77
scholarly models, 78
Non-gender-specific characters, 118
Pedagogy, 2–3, 5, 17, 21, 27–8, 49, 55,
Non-human identity, 115
59, 60, 63, 73, 78, 102, 126,
Non-normative compromised
128–30, 133–4, 136, 138–9, 155,
masculinity, 83
165, 188, 228
negative portrayal of, 87
Pepperell, S., 38
Normalization, regimes of, 54
Personal Development
Normative pattern of representation,
Planning, 59
116
Nostalgia, 205, 209–10, 215, 225, 227, Plato, 23, 72
236 Plausibility, level of, 100
for a lost authenticity, 215 Plutarch, 68, 72
Nussbaum, M.C., 4, 29 Police relevance, 16
Nymphomaniac, 76, 87 ‘poopapadoo’ and ‘boobabaloo’, 165
Post-1960s critical theory, 77
O’Barr, W.M., 129 Postmodern
O’Brien, T., 201 symbol, 211
Odyssey XI, 156 theory, 215
Ohi, K., 21 Post-Sadean gothic, 88
Old Industrial Man, 170–1, 177, 181, Pound, E., 26, 155, 156, 157, 168
184 Power-hungry individuals, 207
Old man masculinity, 182 Prairie Poets’, community of, 161
Old Testament Church Fathers, 93 Pre-Columbian ‘natural’ aristocracy,
Ong, W.J., 25 93
Online communication, 119 Prochnau, W., 200
Opera buffa, 101 Proliferating languages, 24
Oral narrative, 172 Protestant low countries, 66
Oral reminiscence, 170–2 Proto-feminism, 232
Oscar Wilde, 22 Proto-lesbianism, 79
Proto-modernist moment, 21
Paechter, C., 31 Pseudo-secular soothsayers, 156
Page, R.E., 109, 123, 124 Psychoanalysis, 19, 97
244 Index
Psychosexual dynamics, Savran, D., 30

nature of, 72 Schiesari, J., 29, 31
Psychosocial gender, 78 Scholes, R., 23, 29, 222
Pykett, L., 23 School of American Environments,
205
Queer Theory, 77, 82–3, 126 Schutz, A., 182
Second wave feminist tactics, 231, 233
Racial and class hegemony, 88 Sedgwick, E.K., 1, 21, 65, 73, 228
Racial and colonial power, histories Seduction process, 73
of, 142 Seidler, V.J., 205, 216, 217, 218
Racial and gender classification, 77 ‘self-aggrandizement’ fantasies of, 95
Racial constructions, 141, 143 Self-crippling masculinity, 159
Racist stereotypes of black men, 143 Self-identified feminists, 83, 86, 88
Rape as a weapon of racial Self-improving opportunities, 181
insurrection, 148 Self-perceptions, 39
Recreational pursuits, 171 Self-surveillance, 37
‘red hot poker’, 64 Sentimentality, 26
Relational pedagogy, 50 Sexism, perpetuation of, 42
Renaissance Sexual
culture, 62 harassment, 133
literature, 61–2 manifestations, 77
studies, 65 misconduct, perception of, 50
texts, 62, 67–8 politics, 93
tragedy, 66 revolution, 91
Renold, E., 43 Sexuality, questions about, 49
Representational choices, 116 Sheehan, N., 188, 189, 191, 193, 196,
Resistance and transgression, 47 199, 200, 201, 202
Ricoeur, P., 182 Short, M., 200
Rights of woman, vindication of the, Short-term antagonisms, 167
75 Simpson, H., 90, 105, 106, 126, 137
Rivkin, J., 123 Skelton, C., 37, 38, 42
Roberts, B., 182, 183, 184 Smedley, S., 38
Roberts, L.D., 119, 122, 124 Smith, B., 29
Robertson, L., 155, 156, 168 Smith, L., 8
Robson, C., 21 Smith, P., 29
Robson, J., 21 Social learning, primacy of, 5
Romance Social performance, crucial binary of,
intermediaries, 156 226
of the Fifteenth Century, 75 Sociolinguistic scholars, 172
Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, Sociological literature, 130
10 Sodomitical element, 69
Romantic period, 80 Sons and Lovers, 92, 96
Rose, J., 22 Sorority girls, 128, 138–9
Rough-and-feckless, 181 South Wales industrial working class,
Rowan, L., 38 181–2
Rylance, R., 106 Stacewitz, R., 202
Stanford ‘prison’ experiment, 197
Sadistic attack, 93 Stanley, L., 173
Sadker, M., 131 Stearns, P.N., 181
Index 245
Steedman, C., 21 Turner, M., 31

Steiner, G., 61, 73 Two-sexuality model, 78, 87
Stephanson, R., 29, 30
Stewart, L., 169 Unbounded femininity, 232
Stigmatization, 44 ‘universal human’ dramas, 26
Still, J., 28 Untameable hyaena, 76
‘strong narrative voice’, absence of,
168 van Peer, W., 200
Stryker, S., 77, 78 Vathek, 83
Sudoku puzzle, 136 Victor Frankenstein, experiments of,
Sullivan, L.L., 110, 123 220
Sundt, C., 111, 123 Vietnam War, 188, 191, 193, 195–6,
Suppressed identification with 198–9
fairy-tale romance, 221 historiography of the, 192–3, 197
Surgical lobotomy, 149 metaphor for US involvement in,
Suttie, I., 10 188
‘symbolic violence’, 15 Violent deferral, 144
Virtual learning environment (VLE),
Takayoshi, P., 124 15
Textual instabilities, 105 Visual ethnography, 170
Textualisation, process of, 184
T he Children’s Hour, 126
Walkerdine, V., 31
T he Color Purple, 141, 142, 143
War-affected weariness, 101
T he Giaou, 83, 85
Wells, R.H., 9, 29, 30
T he Lost Girl, 104
Whitehead, S.M., 29, 169
Thematisation, 192
Whitehouse, S., 202
T he Monk, 81
White Noise, 12, 205, 210
T he New Long Poem Anthology, 156,
Widdowson, H., 200
157
Wiegman, R., 144, 145, 148, 153
Theories of race and ethnicity, 82
T he Plumed Serpent, 91, 94, 96, 98, 99, Williams, A., 81
104 Williams, C., 39, 56
T he Rainbow, 61, 93, 95, 96, 97, 103, Williamson, H., 176
104 Winlow, S., 176
T he Second Sex, 220 Wish-fulfilment, 25
Thomas, K., 13, 15, 37 Women in Love, 92, 93, 96, 97, 103,
Thornton, M., 38 104
Thurgar-Dawson, C., 4, 155, 235 Woodcock, G., 160, 169
Tomasello, M., 27 World War I, 26, 91, 95, 198
Tosh, J., 21, 165, 169 World War II, 180, 194–5, 198
Transformative gender politics, World Wide Web, 119
realization of, 52, 54 Worton, M., 28
Transitive material action processes,
190 Xenophobic anxieties, 88
Transsexual individuals, 78
Trotter, D., 22, 25 Zofloya, 75, 76, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84,
Trowler, P., 17, 18 85, 87, 88

C.B. Knights-Masculinities in Text and Teaching (2008)

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Masculinities in Text and

1 Masculinities in Text and Teaching 1

2 Training to be an English Teacher: Negotiating Gendered

3 Queer Teaching/Teaching Queer: Renaissance Masculinities

4 Charlotte Dacre’s Nymphomaniacs and Demon-Lovers:

5 Masculinity and Modernism: Teaching D.H. Lawrence 90

6 Gender and Narrative Form 109

7 Bois will be Bois: Masculinity and Pedagogy in the Gay and

8 Invisible Men: Reading African American Masculinity 141

9 Lifelong Learning in the Lifelong Poem 155

10 Autobiographical Narratives in the Teaching of

11 Atrocity and Transitivity 187

12 Taking Possession of Knowledge: The Masculine Academic

13 High Visibility: Teaching Ladlit 220

The performance of masculinity in English does not concern men alone.

Many people have sustained the intellectual and human environment

Dennis W. Allen is Professor of English at West Virginia University.

John Beynon is Head of Communication, Cultural and Media Studies

Robert Burden is Reader in English Studies in the School of Arts and

Rachel Carroll is Principal Lecturer and Subject Group Leader in English

Ranita Chatterjee is Assistant Professor of English at California State

Mark Dooley is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Teesside

Renaissance culture. The main focus of his research is on the dramatic

Alice Ferrebe is Lecturer in English at Liverpool John Moores University.

Ruth Helyer is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Teesside; her

Ben Knights is Director of the English Subject Centre of the UK Higher

Wayne Martino has recently moved to the University of Western

Ruth Page is interested in the many different ways in which gender

Having lectured in the Czech Republic, Chris Thurgar-Dawson is

and critical-creative writing. With Ben Knights he is co-author of Active

Cris Yelland is Principal Lecture in English Studies at the University of

As a woman, I am a consumer of masculinities, but I am not

Reading and the associated behaviours of sitting quietly with a

Masculinity, it is now widely accepted, can no longer be treated as

There is a paradox here. This recipe for ‘manliness’ as defined by a

book is that it is increasingly necessary to take the debate beyond textual

upon women’s or gay studies. The formation of male subjectivity needs

phenomenographic kind could productively complement the kind of

Thinking about masculinities

and cultural studies. From this perspective, masculinities (the term is

constantly changing collection of meanings that are constructed

As articulated above, the meanings of masculinity vary across cultures,

femaleness emerging from a variety of sources: from the new cognitive

It is by now a truism that behaviour is determined by both physiolo-

Biological and evolutionary pre-dispositions of personality and beha-

muted or enhanced by environmental factors. In what follows, then, we

1. Hegemonic masculinity seeks to impose unity upon plurality. A vast

Let us conclude these propositions by saying that in this book we are

Burden demonstrate – can themselves be read as commentary upon the

While this book concentrates on the production of masculinities within

Kingdom, in North America and in Australia around ideas about why

A main argument of this book is that we need to consider not only

While historically men have dominated university teaching (a situ-

as sensitive to the implicit messages of ‘the hidden curriculum’ as are its

English is a subject more profoundly engaged with the processes of

Inasmuch as teacherly ideologies are perceived as threatening

In higher education too, fear of feminisation can be countered by

With my current tutor, I tend to be rather argumentative because

The ambiguities of a situation in which a woman tutor is identified

teacher as charismatic hero, a role crystallised in Peter Weir’s 1989 film