STUDYING MASCULINITIES AS SUPERORDINATE STUDIES

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STUDYING MASCULINITIES AS SUPERORDINATE STUDIES

• By Harry Brod

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Psychological VS. Sociological

• Part of the content of contemporary mainstream
  male roles is to show competence and knowledge.
• Knowledge of masculinity one should know or is
  assumed to already know.

• Many of the women in Brods class are womens
  studies majors or minors.
• Why take a course on men when academia as a whole
  is one grand course of mens studies?

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How The Other Half Lives

• Harry Brod states his own orientation to the
  subject matter of the course is primarily
  sociological.

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How The Other Half Lives

• For some women, the course promises an
  opportunity to get inside the heads of the guys
  they know.
• Its still, to a degree, a mans world and
  knowledge is power.
• Women want to gain knowledge of how the other
  half lives, thinks, and feels in order to move
  more effectively in that world.

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Gender

• MEN ARE GENDERED TOO!
• To study gender is not to just study women.
• The study of masculinities sees men as
  specifically gendered beings.
• E.g. fathering rather than mothering or
  parenting

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Gender

• Brods course focuses on gender but doesnt
  rule it as more important than any other
  categories such as race, religion, class, etc.
• Brod believes that gender is not an attribute of
  individuals, but a relational category.
• Separating womens lives and mens lives does not
  mean an analysis of gender.

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Gender

• Female students address a problem with Brods
  course
• That theres no discussion about male- female
  relationships that are platonic and non-sexual
  of content.
• The course text teaches mens relationships with
  other men.
• Brod notes that cross-gender relationships are
  not present in womens studies and mens studies.

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Masculinities and Behaviours

• Emphasis on how social institutions and their
  cultures tend to elicit certain types of
  behaviours, not how certain types of men band
  together in order to gang up on women.
• E.g. Fraternities and Sororities
• Brods class able to analyze how societies and
  social groups function rather than placing blame
  on individuals.

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Feminism

• The relationship between feminism and the goals
  of empowerment.
• Feminism embodies a disparaging view of women as
  victims.
• Many young women resist feminism.
• Sociological and not psychological in that women
  compared to men have less then proportionate
  share of resources.

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Going With The Flow

• When men act out their own interests, they are
  going with the flow.
• Women, on the other hand, are against the
  current.
• In the stream that Brod describes to his
  students, the current will obviously help some
  and hurt others

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Going With The Flow

• Superordinate
• in reality, they have a built-in advantage
  because were all immersed in the same stream
  whose currents favour some over others.
• E.g. Mens voices heard more clearly and
  registered as more rational than womens.
• --gt Women should be seen not heard.

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Link to Cyborg Manifesto

• WOMEN IN THE INTEGRATED CIRCUIT
• Women and their place in a social locations
• Advancing in society, women
• E.g. While its true that a talented, energetic
  woman may be able to break through and advance,
  its equally true that a man need only to be
  average to move up.

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Privilege and the Individual

• It is not that some of us are oppressed it is
  also and necessarily equally the case that some
  of us are privileged.
• PRIVILEGE and OPPRESSION are 2 ways of speaking
  of the same thing.

• Difference between being seen as an individual
  and being seen as a member of a group is
  essential in Brods course.
• Resist any categorization of people into groups,
  as groups violation of individual rights.

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Privilege and the Individual

• While the oppressed are continually subject to
  being invisible as themselves, to being seen by
  the dominant society as marked by the stamp of
  their oppression

• those in dominant groups carry the privilege of
  being unmarked, and they are therefore available
  to be seen as individuals.

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Stereotype VS. Generalization

• Learning something about a person and than
  assuming something else would be stereotyping and
  it thus leaves no room for individual difference.

• Generalizations may be held valid about a group
  as a general matter without assuming that it
  applies to any or all particular individuals
  within the group.

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Harry Brod

• As a Jew, I know and appreciate that in my
  culture a certain kind of intellectual,
  book-centered learning is greatly valued. But if
  someone upon learning that I am Jewish says to me
  Oh, you must like books. I experience that as
  anti-Semitism, despite the fact that it is
  factually true that I do like books.

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DISCUSSION