Reading Notes for February 12 Class

Joan Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis" (1985)

-- "gender as a way of referring to the social organization of the relationship between the sexes" -- new discourse begun by feminists
-- against the biological determinism of "sex"
-- "women and men were defined in terms of one another"-- Natalie Davis -- 1975
-- put on par with class and race, making gender only one of the factors in power plays that usually end in the oppression or suppression of certain histories

Scott argues that these three are not on part with one another at all:

-- there are certain assumptions that go with class analysis (economic causality, historical processes, the dialectic) that do not apply to the ways historians use race or gender in their analysis
-- need for gender as a new category because there are limitations to simple descriptions of women's history that require a larger look at the mechanisms that support that history

Review of past theories and how they've limited the scope of useful analysis:

-- gender as a synonym for women -- adds academic and social science cache to the study; less politically charged
-- gender used to denote social constructedness, that femininity doesn't exist without masculinity, etc., which also opens the door to a specific study of sexuality as separate from gender as a social role
-- Marxist-Feminism as an approach to gender, as in Powers of Desire -- materialist analyses that focus on consumption/production and gender as a reflection of this power struggle -- but then it's not an independent analytical category, is it?
-- Psychoanalytic approaches -- Chodorow and Gilligan from Anglo-U.S. perspective (moral behavior, limit to the family and home); French psychoanalysis borrowing from Freud and Lacan with a focus on language (so, unconscious and internalized gender roles, but limited to the subject and individuality instead of the larger social structure) -- Alexander's reading is useful here-- Feminist Studies symposium in 1980 -- Gilligan's insistence on binaries works against feminist projects

The project:

-- accept the allies within post-strucuralism and the humanities who open a space for this disuccsion
-- focus not on the individual or the society, but how each is interconnected with the other
-- bring in Foucault's interpretation of power as a constellation of smaller hierarchies and interactions
-- "gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power." -- cultural symbols that mean a multiplicty of representations (Eve, light vs. dark, etc.) and how they are used and contested in different moments and to what purpose

Some examples she shares:
-- power determined by limtation of women's legal rights
-- power determined by expanding welfare for women
-- gendering of labor roles or of populations (like some men of color in America denoted as feminine in certain contexts)

Questions to explore further:

How can this lead to change?
Does she provide an answer?
What's the point of writing this kind of history then?
What does this tell us about masculinity?
How might we apply this to comics and graphic novels?
One possibility is that by using gender as a category of analysis, we see it as just that and not as a fixed system that defined social roles in ways that cannot and have never been subverted. What does she mean by utopia at the end here?

Bryce Traister, "Academic Viagra: The Rise of American Masculinity Studies" (2000)

-- Masculinity studies as heterosexual masculinity studies with some overlap into gay male studies
-- This heteromasculinity is awkwardly defined against and in tandem with homomasculinity
-- Strongly Americanist
-- Phallocentrism – writing this history of "men as men"
-- “Crisis theory” – instability of American masculinity vs. Butler’s performative and contingent masculinity
-- Criticism: this just puts masculinity back at the center of the story and crowds out femininity
-- Response to the pro-“men’s rights” strain in popular culture
-- These studies tend to begin with a confession of the author’s own subjectivity
-- Kimmel : “make gender visible to men.” “constructedness”
-- Kimmel: the ideal version vs. the lived version
-- Butler: the performance is based on regulatory practice that naturalizes gender and is based on compulsory heterosexuality

Some questions asked in the texts discussed in the essay:

-- “What is the role of the warrior in a society that no longer requires defending?”
-- How do men confront the patriarchy as much as women do? Might patriarchy be the creation of both? In other words, is power always lodged with the male in a patriarchy? Must we assume that the benefiter of a system is always the creator of it?
-- Are the paths of masculinity different for African American men? Working-class men?
-- Is there always a dominant narrative of masculinity with which everyone must contend? Or is this a dominant discourse from which different eras borrow for different reasons (Scott)?
-- Is it possible that no man is a “real man” according to the ideal? If everything is a performance, if we’re all anxious, all queer, all “not living up,” then what’s “normal”? Can we even write this narrative?
-- Are masculinity and femininity equal analytic categories? (Traister says no)
-- Why are we not pushing toward an analysis of masculinity as strength, the force of domination, the force of imperialism, etc.?

Militarization and masculinity

Given some very rudimentary research, it seems as if we can track the peculiar American phenomenon of the Superhero with militarization in American society. There are a number of possible explanations, steeped in the same tradition that brought Homer to fame, but the core of our examination is withing the purview of the masculine context.

On the subject of the guh I don't even know where this is going. I know nothing about gender studies, everything i've done is social science in one way or another, but not of this sort.


Alright, let's talk about the original superman: he was created by two Jews (siegel and shuster), on the eve of the Second world war, in '38. Superman's story,was supposedly intended to parallel aspects of the Golem of Prauge. This raises a number of questions regarding notions of impotence, testosterone driven strength, and the most puzzling of all, hubris. This is possibly a discussion that requires an entire course to properly capture, but it is easy to see how superman was able to catch on with incredible speed and popularity. However, just as the Golem of Hebrew tradition ultimately falls, with the close of WW2 we see a hiatus in superhero comics, with publishers reverting to teen humour such as that depicted in Archie comics. I wonder if this is perhaps an attempt to recover some notion of lost pubescence, but then it would also be important to examine those works' readership.

It would not be until the mid-1950s, in a period of increasing nuclear tensions and American intervention overseas that we would see the resurgence of superheroes onto the comics scene, even inserting themselves and performing on the very site of American intervention (For instance, Iron Man, the Punisher, and others have their start in Vietnam in addition to the evocation of SGT. Rock's WW2 legacy during America's late-50's re-militarization)


This also brings to mind the question of women in this militarized comics scene-- What precisely is the role of Super girl, or Wonder Woman? Cynthia Enloe, author of Maneuvers asserts that standing armies that operate for extended periods of time have always been dependent on women, and societies that mobilize themselves to an extent such as the military take many steps in the process of militarizing military dependents', and civilians' lives.

Just as an aside, when we speak of homosexual overtones (that seem to be all but canon when discussing Batman and Robin) one has to wonder about the sexual undertones of the inclusion of women into the comics scene. How are these relationships reflective of how our society militarizes women? Is the role a filial support role? perhaps reflective of the need for women to assume previously gender-specific jobs? or is it a sexual re-appropriation, a de facto prostitution? As Enloe puts it, are women (such as these fictional female superheroes) being maneuvered or empowered? or both?


However, given the changing face of comics, militarization, and masculinity, it seems that these subjects are never far apart, and should serve as a framework for further discussion, as I develop my research further.