Gender & History ISSN 0953–5233Stephen Whitehead, ‘Masculinities, Race and Nationhood – Critical Connections’Gender & History, Vol.12 No. 2 July 2000, pp. 472–476.

© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

THEMATIC REVIEWS

Masculinities, Race and

Nationhood – Critical

Connections

Stephen Whitehead

Hazel V. Carby, Race Men (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1998),

pp. 228, $14.95. ISBN 0 674 74558 2 (hb).

Gillian Creese, Contracting Masculinity: Gender, Class, and Race in aWhite-Collar Union, 1944–1994 (Oxford University Press,

Ontario, 1999), pp. vii + 278, $21.95. ISBN 0 19 541454 3 (pb).

Dana D. Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and theImagined Fraternity of White Men (Duke University Press,

Durham, 1998), pp. xiv + 345, £34.00 and £11.95. ISBN 0 8223

2130 0 (hb) and 0 8223 2149 1 (pb).

Since the mid 1980s, research on men and masculinities has been a growing

area of sociological enquiry. The last decade alone has seen over 400 books

published; the introduction of two specialist journals; and, more recently, a

proliferation of web sites devoted to exploring the cultural conditions of

men and masculinities at the turn of the millennium. In the USA alone,

there are now some forty-six universities offering specialist courses in this

subject. It is not so surprising, then, that the three books under review all

originate from North American university publishers. Also, this is entirely in

keeping with the influence that the USA has had on the sociology of

masculinity. Writers such as Bob Connell, Michael Messner, Joseph Pleck,

Michael Kimmel and Michael Kaufman have, since the early 1980s, set the

political tone and theoretical framework within which the critical study of

men now prospers.

Importantly, these and other writers (for example, Jeff Hearn and David

Morgan in the UK), have constantly sought to retain pro-feminist under-

pinnings in their writings and, thus, to the sociology of masculinity. Con-

sequently, as feminist discourse has gathered influence across Australasian,

European and American scholarship especially, so a corresponding feminist-

informed critique of men and masculinities has developed. This critique has

left few areas of the social web unexplored. However, it is only recently that

attention has turned to the relationship between masculinities and race. In

the UK, the most prolific writer in this area has been Martin Mac an Ghaill;1

in the USA, Messner has been particularly influential.2

The work that has emerged in this field has generally recognised not only

the multiplicity of men and masculinity, but, importantly, has exposed the

discursive or ideological dimensions surrounding power differentials between

women and men, and between men. Thus it is possible to recognise the non-

essentialist conditions under which masculinities proliferate, while retaining

a political awareness of women and men as gender categories.3 The three

books reviewed here make an important contribution to this understanding,

for they lend weight to the notion of masculinity as not only a historical

product of social and economic conditions, but moreover, an important

influence on national identities and associated epistemologies. As scholars

and commentators struggle to make sense of those events directly arising

from men’s often inexplicable values and practices (e.g. Kosovo; Rwanda;

Northern Ireland; Columbine, Colorado), it is timely to be reminded of the

masculinist hegemony which has always, to some degree, been implicated in

maleist thinking, fraternities and racialised social formations.

In Race Men, Hazel Carby connects masculinities, race and national

identity through an appraisal of the historical shifts in the portrayal and

imagery of black male bodies in popular culture. The book critically

interrogates the cultural inscriptions and representations of various black

masculinities visible at different historical moments and in a variety of media

settings: literature, photography, film, music and song. Carby’s aim is to

raise critical questions concerning the gendered processes by which par-

ticular understandings and epistemologies surrounding African Americans

have acquired cultural and intellectual dominance. Thus she seeks to expose

the gendered ideological and maleist assumptions which have come to

underpin and inform ideal(ised) depictions of black men. An example of

such imagery is given in her deconstruction of the Lethal Weapon film series,

which, Carby argues, seeks to reify a ‘threadbare’ black masculinity through

its exclusion of women and in its claim to ‘resolve’ the existential and

political crisis of a nation wrought with racism.

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Carby’s study is powerful, detailed and wide-ranging. It opens with an

examination of W. E. B. Du Bois’s, book, The Souls of Black Folk, considered

by Carby to be a defining text in American culture, in so much as it served

to create a (flawed) paradigm within which to ‘explain the nature’ of African-

American soul. Chapter 2 considers the black American icon Paul Robeson,

whose complex character and often contrasting political and personal

imagery is explored to good effect. Where Du Bois is subjected to telling

critique as a black male intellectual, his work being seen by Carby to be

gendered and sexist in its orientation, Paul Robeson’s ultimate rejection of

the division between art and politics in 1937 is applauded by Carby. Having

established this critical framework, subsequent chapters explore the work

and lives of a number of black male writers and artists, including Leadbelly,

Miles Davis and Danny Glover.

While from the outset Carby declares her standpoint as a black feminist,

her theoretical position is less explicit. Indeed my only criticism of this

excellent book is its lack of theoretical underpinning. Many of the debates

are contextualised in a notion of the postmodern age, and poststructuralist

terms such as ‘performativity’ and ‘discourse’ are used throughout the work.

However, perhaps too much is assumed in the utilisation of such terms,

particularly when unproblematically located alongside structuralist concepts

such as ‘ideology’ and ‘hegemony’. Useful supplementary readings, which in

different ways nicely complement Carby’s work, include Middleton,4

Stanley5 and Silverman.6

Although quite different in its empirical site – a Canadian white-collar

office workers’ union – Contracting Masculinity connects with Carby’s book

in a number of ways. Firstly, there is the emphasis on masculinities as pro-

cesses and outcomes of power relations, not only gendered but also racial-

ised and imbued with class inequalities. Secondly, the book explores how

identities such as White and Black connect with dominant notions of mascu-

linity across national boundaries and within specific organisational contexts.

Also, like Carby’s text, Contracting Masculinity recognises the role of the

individual in this process, whilst emphasising the wider structural forces

which are both a condition and outcome of individual agency.

Located in the period 1944–94, the book is a detailed empirically-based

examination of union activity in a Canadian corporation, B. C. Hydro. The

research site is well chosen, for both the union and the company have,

apparently, numerically gender-balanced memberships. However, as Gillian

Creese stresses, this fact does not stop inequalities becoming embedded in

the work culture. Thus a key strength of this book lies in the insightful

manner Creese addresses this paradox, in the process illustrating some of the

ways racialised–gendered hierarchies become legitimised across an

organisation. Recognising that the materialisation of inequality is not neces-

sarily the outcome of deterministic external forces, Creese notes the often

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unseen racialised and gendered processes at work in organisational sites, in

this instance a pioneering, ‘gender sensitive’ white-collar union. As the book

illustrates, despite having a declared political position vis-à-vis race and

gender inequalities, the men of the white-collar union continue to ‘do

gender’ as discourses of masculinity, in the process maintaining white male

dominance in the office through both policies and individual practices. As a

feminist and supporter of progressive unions, Creese stresses that the book

is not intended as an exposé of forms of union discrimination. Rather, the

study seeks to contribute to our understanding of how masculinities are

implicated in work-place culture, and how (white-male-dominated) unions

can, often inadvertently, contribute to structural inequalities.

Despite being otherwise extremely well referenced, the one weakness in

this book is the lack of discussion on masculinities themselves. At least part

should have been given over to some of the contemporary debates in this

area. Nevertheless, the book will make a useful contribution to the sociology

of masculinity and I would particularly recommended it for students and

researchers in both organisational studies and gender studies. I would also

point researchers and students towards a very similar study by Kirk Mann7

which looks at racialised and gendered divisions in UK unions.

The final book under review, National Manhood by Dana Nelson, marks

an ambitious project. That is, to describe and subsequently critique the ideal-

ised concept of ‘white manhood’; moreover, to recognise not only its power

as the dominant ‘representative’ identity in the United States, but also its

defining capacity as a fundamental determinant and exemplar of the nation.

Nelson’s aim is to disrupt the ‘concrete referentiality’ of the term ‘white

man’, by recognising the diversity of ‘white men’ and by asking what hap-

pens to those posited as ‘Others’ in this powerful ideology, one which reifies

a male fraternity by privileging a largely unattainable yet culturally desirable

(white) masculine imagery. In undertaking this critical exploration, Nelson

enjoins the ideological surrounds of national manhood with ‘crises’ in demo-

cratic and constitutional processes; problematic notions of citizenship in the

postmodern age; the socio-economic inequalities manifest in national and

global market competition; and, implicitly, the subsequent existential (and

anti-democratic) dilemmas (for men) which the above factors engender.

The vehicle by which Nelson explores the above cultural and gendered

configurations is text; specifically, political, scientific, medical, personal and

literary works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By detailed foren-

sic deconstruction of contemporary writings and reports associated with, for

example, the Lewis and Clark expedition of the early 1800s, Nelson exposes

the sexualised, racialised and gendered processes implicated in the ‘found-

ing’ of America by white men.

For all that this is an impressive book, certain aspects left me feeling

uneasy. For example, for Nelson’s argument to really work, it is necessary to

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suspend any disbelief possibly arising from an acceptance of the premise that

national manhood is a unifying, compelling ‘anti-democratic structure’, a

supposedly Gramscian if not Althusserian ideology which ‘conditions’ white

men to the prevailing market economy, and does this, according to Nelson,

‘by blocking those men’s more heterogeneous democratic identifications

and energies’ (p. ix). The model of power which this understanding draws

on leaves little room for the agentic capacities of individuals to resist, reform

and rearticulate. Moreover, if one accepts the concept of postmodernity, as

Nelson appears to do, then it is extremely difficult to argue that one model

of anything, as a grand narrative,8 has such unifying potency.

Like Race Men and Contracting Masculinity, National Manhood is most

effective in its detailed analysis of certain key historical texts and conditions

seen to have contributed to reifying and privileging a particular imagery and

discourse of (national) masculinity in certain locations. However, as the con-

temporary study of masculinity informs us, there is no one fixed masculinity

as an ideological condition. The sheer complexity and diversity of the human

subject (not forgetting agentic capacity) denies the possibility of such abso-

lutism, at least in the manner presented in National Manhood. Nevertheless,

in different ways, each book does make a valuable contribution to under-

standing the interconnections of masculinities, race and (national) identities,

and will be useful additions to most libraries and personal collections.

Notes1. Mairtin Mac an Ghaill, The Making of Men (Open University Press, Buckingham, 1994).

2. Michael A. Messner, The Politics of Masculinities (Sage, Thousand Oaks, 1997).

3. Alison Assiter, Enlightened Women: Modernist Feminism in a Postmodern Age (Routledge,

London, 1996).

4. Peter Middleton, The Inward Gaze: Masculinity and Subjectivity in Modern Culture(Routledge, London, 1992).

5. Liz Stanley (ed.), Knowing Feminisms (Sage, London, 1997).

6. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (Routledge, New York, 1992).

7. Kirk Mann, The Making of an English ‘Underclass’? (Open University Press, Buckingham,

1992).

8. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester

University Press, Manchester, 1984).

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