Violent Manhood. J. E. Sumerau
and prominent component of U.S. media in recent decades, chapter 4 turns to discussions of this phenomenon. Specifically, I examine how my respondents interpret guns in the United States and the role guns play in their construction of what it means to be a man. To this end, I outline the ways they construct guns as a symbolic demonstration of power, control, and aggression necessary for real manhood. Then, I examine how both media depictions and my respondents’ explanation of reasons for mass shootings and other gun violence mirror components of their definitions of manhood and the compensatory manhood acts people may engage in to repair threatened masculinity. Finally, I outline how their reliance on symbolic notions of guns as a signifier of power and control influence their opinions on gun control and other gun-related policies in the United States.
In chapter 5, I continue looking at specific topics by examining the ways my respondents conceptualized and made sense of sexual violence in society. Specifically, the chapter addresses how they define and construct heterosexuality itself as a form of potential violence. As such, I outline the ways their interpretations of sexualities represent a game wherein heterosexual potential equates to confirmation of manhood and the ways their own sexual activities, stories, and opinions represent compensatory actions by which they seek to avoid feeling insecure about their status as men by dominating or otherwise sexually controlling others. Finally, I discuss how these beliefs define sexual activities in terms that justify the enactment of rape, sexual violence more broadly, and relationships predicated upon domestic violence. In so doing, I demonstrate how their opinions on such topics mirror their own definitions of these topics as part of normal masculine sexual behavior.
Considering the rise of movements and campaigns seeking to combat men’s violence in recent years, chapter 6 turns to the ways in which men respond to such efforts. Specifically, I detail how my respondents interpret movements for gendered, sexual, and/or racial justice in the United States. First, I outline how they defined #MeToo as an attack on manhood and argued that it was the real source of gender problems in today’s United States. Further, I examine how they negotiate whiteness in their reactions to the Black Lives Matter movement. Specifically, they argue each of these movements are threats to what it means to be a man and how men and other groups are supposed to act in society. Finally, I discuss the ways their conceptualizations of these movements suggest they may see any minority movement as threats that call for them to protect themselves, and manhood itself, over time.
Taken together, these chapters demonstrate the ways violence has been embedded in definitions of what it means to be a man and the ways men respond to movements seeking to curb or lessen violence in the United States. In the final chapter, I outline the ways my respondents’ constructions of manhood, violence, and challenges to either reveal how violence operates as a way for men to compensate for perceived slights or threats to their identity claims and privileges as a social group. As such, I argue that fostering less violence and more equitable social relations requires unpacking and transforming what it means to be a man and the ways violence has become part of that definition. In closing, I outline some ways groups seeking more equitable social relations can interrogate and respond to the construction and enactment of violent manhood by problematizing definitions of what it means to be a man in U.S. society.
Notes
1.
For further elaboration and examples of my autoethnographic writing about sexualities, gender, violence, and health over time, see Nowakowski and Sumerau, “Out of the Shadows”; Nowakowski and Sumerau, “Aging Partners Managing Chronic Illness Together”; Nowakowski and Sumerau, “Reframing Health and Illness”; Nowakowski and Sumerau, “Should We Talk about the Pain?”; Sumerau, “I See Monsters”; Sumerau, “Embodying Nonexistence”; and Sumerau and Mathers, America through Transgender Eyes. See also my posts on the academic blog www.writewhereithurts.net, such as Sumerau, “Experiencing Gender Variation.”
2.
I use this term because, due to pervasive cisnormativity in society (i.e., a social world wherein people are taught to see only cisgender women and men), people are trained to only see cisgender people and thus often read others as members of cisgender groups whether the said others ever identify in such a way themselves. Thus, although I do not identify as a man, people may read me or interpret me as such based on their determination of what it means to be a man in a cisgender social order (see also West and Zimmerman, “Doing Gender”).
3.
For background in these research areas see, for example, Connell, “Doing, Undoing, or Redoing Gender?”; Connell and Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity”; Goffman, “The Arrangement between the Sexes”; Moon, Tobin, and Sumerau, “Alpha, Omega, and the Letters in Between”; Ridgeway, Framed by Gender; West and Fenstermaker, “Doing Difference”; and West and Zimmerman, “Doing Gender.”
4.
For discussion of this element in the social sciences and humanities, see Butler, Gender Trouble; Serano, Whipping Girl; and Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic. For such discussion in the physical sciences, see Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body.
5.
For my scholarship to date on men and masculinities, see Cragun and Sumerau, “No One Expects a Transgender Jew”; Cragun and Sumerau, “Men Who Hold More Egalitarian Attitudes”; Sumerau, “That’s What a Man Is Supposed to Do”; Sumerau, Barringer, and Cragun, “I Don’t Need a Shotgun”; Sumerau, Cragun, and Mathers, “Contemporary Religion and the Cisgendering of Reality”; Sumerau, Cragun, and Mathers, “I Found God in the Glory Hole”; Sumerau, Cragun, and Smith, “Men Never Cry”; Sumerau, Padavic, and Schrock, “Little Girls Unwilling to Do What’s Best.” For reviews and collections of other scholarship on men and masculinities see, for example, Connell, Gender and Power; Connell, Masculinities; Connell, The Men and the Boys; Connell and Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity”; Pascoe and Bridges, Exploring Masculinities; Schrock and Padavic, “Negotiating Hegemonic Masculinity”; and Schrock and Schwalbe, “Men, Masculinity, and Manhood Acts.”
6.
For work on the social production of what we call manhood or masculinities, see, for example, Barber and Bridges, “Marketing Manhood in a ‘Post-Feminist’ Age”; Carrigan, Connell, and Lee, “Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity”; Connell, Gender and Power; Connell, Masculinities; Connell, The Men and the Boys; Connell and Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity”; Eastman and Schrock, “Southern Rock Musicians’ Construction of White Trash”; Evans and Davies, “No Sissy Boys Here”; Ezzell, “I’m in Control”; Ezzell, “Pornography, Lad Mags, Video Games, and Boys”; Ferguson, Bad Boys; Goffman, “The Arrangement”; Johnson, The Gender Knot; Linneman, “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Will Truman?”; Martin, “Mobilizing Masculinities”; Martin, “‘Said and Done’ versus ‘Saying and Doing’”; Messerschmidt, “Becoming ‘Real Men’”; Messner, “Boyhood, Organized Sports, and the Construction of Masculinities”; Messner, Out of Play; Messner, Power at Play; Pascoe, Dude, You’re a Fag; Pascoe and Bridges, Exploring Masculinities; Prokos and Padavic, “There Oughtta Be a Law against Bitches”; Schrock and Padavic, “Negotiating Hegemonic Masculinity”; Schrock and Schwalbe, “Men, Masculinity, and Manhood Acts”; and West and Zimmerman, “Doing Gender.”
7.
See also Acker, “Inequality Regimes”; Buggs, “(Dis)Owning Exotic”; Buggs, “Does (Mixed-)Race Matter?”; Butler, Gender Trouble; Collins, Black Feminist Thought; Collins, Black Sexual Politics; Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins”; Martin, “Gender as a Social Institution”; Padavic and Reskin, Women and Men at Work; Ridgeway, Framed by Gender; Serano, Whipping Girl; and Sumerau and Mathers, America through Transgender Eyes.
8.
For discussion on the “becoming” of identities that exist within a given social world, and the processes whereby people draw on existing cultural archetypes to fashion