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Masochism Masculinity

Kent L. Brintnall

in Ecce Homo: The Male-Body-in-Pain as Redemptive Figure

This chapter examines psychoanalytic discourse about masculine subjectivity—with an eye toward its gendered representations, and attention to the fissures and instabilities within these ... More

This chapter examines psychoanalytic discourse about masculine subjectivity—with an eye toward its gendered representations, and attention to the fissures and instabilities within these representations—to understand how it secures, and subverts, prevailing fantasies of masculine power and privilege. Psychoanalytic discourse, especially that of Freud and Lacan, seeks to establish a gendered order organized around wholeness and lack. Although such discourse frequently undoes itself in its articulation, usually containing the very materials that make critical intervention possible, the move toward an equation of maleness with plenitude and femaleness with incompletion is undeniable and has made psychoanalysis legitimately suspect in the eyes of many feminist critics. In considering these materials, the author draws upon the work of Kaja Silverman. In The Acoustic Mirror Silverman studies the anxieties “lack” creates within film theory and psychoanalysis. She notes that both discourses enable masculine subjects to overcome lack's attendant displeasures by displacing it onto female subjects and bodies.Less

Toward the Private Self: Desire, Masculinity, and Middle English Romance

in The Masculine Self in Late Medieval England

This chapter analyzes the issues of desire and the private self in relation to masculinity in medieval England. It reviews a variety of late medieval romances to sketch out a generalized template for ... More

This chapter analyzes the issues of desire and the private self in relation to masculinity in medieval England. It reviews a variety of late medieval romances to sketch out a generalized template for masculine subjectivity, and the findings reveal that many romances dramatize the struggle of a central male character to establish himself in a masculine social identity. The chapter also explores how the romances dramatize the psychic conflicts inherent in a masculine gender identity.Less

Vulnerable Masculinity and Self-Transformation: Ali’s Story

Gul Ozyegin

in New Desires, New Selves: Sex, Love, and Piety among Turkish Youth

Raised in a what he refers to as a "closed milieu," Ali embarked on a total questioning of his conservative upbringing when moved to Istanbul to attend Boğaziçi University. Over the course of his ... More

Raised in a what he refers to as a "closed milieu," Ali embarked on a total questioning of his conservative upbringing when moved to Istanbul to attend Boğaziçi University. Over the course of his four years in Istanbul, Ali has come to inhabit a "flexible" self - one that allows him to distance himself from his upbringing while in the company of his middle-class, high-achiever peers, yet remains malleable enough for him to maintain his connection to his family and place of origin. Given the uneasiness of Ali's claim to urban, middle-class masculinity, success in romance is an important domain by which Ali judges and understands his success in self-making. In this regard, Ali's failure to build a long-term romantic coupling with a young woman named Arzu becomes a major source of anxiety and tension in his search for a new middle-class, masculine subjectivity.Less