Forms of Masculinity

According to common opinion, at least in Poland, masculinity still appears as a highly questionable subject of scholarly research. Everyone roughly knows what masculinity means and entails. Therefore, the question often arises whether the topic deserves studying at all. Although recent years have seen a number of diverse works on the matter, Polish scholars still treat masculinity studies as a field in its preliminary development phase. One feels uncertain whether this field will develop to the extent and scale of global men’s studies. Astonishingly, scholars in Poland tend to avoid studying masculinity, as if the matter was absolutely obvious – largely due to politics and religion – and should not belong to the domain of scholarly inquiry. Moreover, I believe that avoiding such studies in Poland represents a conscious – or sometimes an unconscious – rejection of gender-oriented feminist research. The history of masculinity studies clearly shows that they emerged globally as a complement to feminist research, not as its counterbalance. Scholars can certainly draw much inspiration from the extensive field of international research on masculinity. However, transferring, borrowing, or applying the conceptual framework and results of various research projects to the Polish context proves simply impossible. Historical conditions shaped various forms of “Polish masculinities,” just as they shaped other national or cultural forms of masculinity. Thus, the same problem occurs in any country where highly specific forms of masculinity emerge. In addition, the language itself causes many problems in translating terms such as manhood, men’s studies, and masculinities. The fact that the title of Richard Linklater’s famous film Boyhood did not receive a Polish translation illustrates this problem vividly: translating the title as chłopięcość (boyishness) would fail to convey precisely what the film expresses and represents. The same applies to the French words masculinité and virilité: although both appear to mean “masculinity,” they actually signify entirely different concepts. Masculinité denotes a set of male traits, properties, or qualities, and derives from masculin, which serves only as a grammatical term, and whose dictionary definitions refer to virilité. The latter term denotes both the biological features of an adult man, including his sexual behavior, and the culturally attributed moral qualities. In French, a true man is viril. This fact explains why the three-volume French history of masculinity bears the title Histoire de la virilité.1

Certainly, scholars need to conduct and expand research on masculinity in Poland, and the findings may prove fundamental to understanding the condition of contemporary Polish masculinities. Even preliminary studies on this phenomenon already require us to speak of “masculinities” in the plural, not of “masculinity” in the singular. Key guidelines on this matter appear in numerous works by Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell, especially in her book Masculinities.2

When a colleague recently asked me what I was working on, I answered: masculinity. He reacted, “Masculinity, what is that?” And this is precisely the point. No clear-cut, definitive answer exists, and today, one cannot speak of a single masculinity. Nor can one employ any simple, dictionary definition, because definitions tend to exploit stereotypical notions and repetitions. These include statements that masculinity shows a tendency toward egocentrism, dominance, and aggression, or that masculinity equals conservatism. These definitions usually approximate what Connell calls hegemonic masculinity, which forms a model standard within every culture and provides a basis for judgment. However, global research demonstrates that no single, exemplary masculinity exists to serve as a fundamental, central reference point. To verify this, one need only consult Men & Masculinities: A Social, Cultural, and Historical Encyclopedia, published in 2004 by Michael Kimmel and Amy Aronson. Here, the term “masculinities” refers to social roles, behaviors, and meanings assigned to men in a particular society and time, which closely links the term to cultural gender, not to biological sex. Various forms or types of masculinity emerge within social institutions. Consequently, the encyclopedia includes entries such as “Native American Masculinities,” “Black Masculinities,” “Cold War Masculinities,” “Latino Masculinities,” and many others. Connell’s article “Margin Becoming Centre: For a World-Centred Rethinking of Masculinities” addresses masculinity studies from a global perspective and clearly identifies numerous masculinities dispersed worldwide across different social, political, historical, and economic contexts.

At this preliminary stage in the development of Polish research on masculinity, I find it significant that the field immediately took shape and spread across several distinct areas of knowledge. Primarily, these include psychology and sociology3 – fields that naturally closely connect to gender studies and queer theory, both of which play an important role in the assumptions underlying our grant proposal.

When our team began work on the grant application at the turn of 2012 and 2013, Poland had produced few literary studies dedicated to the phenomenon of masculinity. During the project, Tomasz Tomasik’s published his pioneering book Wojna – Męskość – Literatura (War – Masculinity – Literature), followed shortly by Mateusz Skucha’s Ładni chłopcy i szalone. Męskość i kobiecość w późnym pisarstwie Józefa Ignacego Kraszewskiego (Pretty Boys and Crazy Girls: Masculinity and Femininity in the Late Oeuvre of Józef Ignacy Kraszewski).4 Slightly later, almost simultaneously, two other projects emerged: the NCN Preludium 4 project by Agnieszka Wróbel, Polska proza powojenna (1945–1989) w perspektywie badań nad męskością (Postwar Polish Prose (1945–1989) in the Perspective of Men’s Studies), and the NCN Opus 5 project by Monika Szczepaniak, Męskość militarna w literaturze i kulturze polskiej w kontekście Wielkiej Wojny (Military Masculinity in Polish Literature and Culture in the Context of the Great War).5 Also during the course of the project, Sebastian Jagielski published an exceptionally compelling monograph, Maskarady męskości. Pragnienie homospołeczne w polskim kinie fabularnym (Masquerades of Masculinity: Homosocial Desire in Polish Cinema).6 All of these initiatives resonated with the themes of our project, so we adjusted our research plan to emphasize other, equally important aspects of Polish masculinities from the nineteenth century to the present.

The team’s research focused primarily on a corpus of literary texts from the nineteenth century to the present, without imposing any top-down selection of texts. We also avoided traditional historical, literary, or thematic approaches, which immediately appeared unattractive and, in this case, entirely anachronistic as research methods. Texts of fundamental importance to the project emerged during discussions at grant seminars. Research on masculinity remains inherently interdisciplinary by definition. One might even argue that interdisciplinarity becomes a necessity in global studies on masculinity rather than a new critical idiom, as Joe Moran notes in his study.7 Men’s studies draw extensively from sociology, ethnology, psychology, psychoanalysis, gender studies, and many other academic fields. In contemporary scholarship, interdisciplinarity dismantles all caesuras and censorships – that is, all obstructive divisions and separations. This change facilitates the creation of new models for describing various phenomena – models that rely on transdiscursivity. I do not intend to make interdisciplinarity a fundamental methodological principle of this project. However, its subject matter indeed demands the creation of a new idiom and a new descriptive language. In regard to the understanding of interdisciplinarity, I strongly adhere to what Roland Barthes wrote many years ago:

We might say, as a matter of fact, that interdisciplinary activity, today so highly valued in research, cannot be achieved by the simple confrontation of specialized branches of knowledge; the inter-disciplinary is not a comfortable affair: it begins effectively (and not by the simple utterance of a pious hope) when the solidarity of the old disciplines breaks down-perhaps even violently, through the shocks of fashion-to the advantage of a new object, a new language, neither of which is precisely this discomfort of classification which permits diagnosing a certain mutation.8

Studies on Polish masculinities address the emergence of a new research subject and underscore the necessity to develop a new language. The texts presented in this volume demonstrate ongoing efforts to pursue such linguistic innovation. The research team conducted attempts to forge this new language during sometimes turbulent seminar meetings. This volume reflects the outcomes of their efforts. The project encompasses Polish literature from Romanticism to the present and constitutes an attempt to thoroughly rethink the history of Polish literature in the context of the diverse types of masculinity that have shaped our culture over the past two centuries. The analysis focuses on selected literary texts – products of imagination that nonetheless contain invaluable cultural data and often represent the most important source of knowledge about reality, which no other area of creative activity can name with such precision. From the outset, this project relies on interdisciplinarity and transdiscursivity, because neither a single discipline nor a homogeneous discourse suffices to describe Polish masculinities of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, nor the “new masculinity” that becomes increasingly distinct in the early twenty-first century. This holds true in every text presented here, where psychoanalysis merges fluidly with deconstruction, feminist literary criticism, and queer studies.

In developing the methodological foundations of the project, we unanimously adopted the assumption that they would rely on discourse analysis – motivated by the thought of Michel Foucault and his followers – and on psychoanalysis. We decided that our research must possess an anti-metaphysical character, hence its crucial reliance on various deconstructions. I do not mean deconstruction, often mistakenly understood as a methodological checklist. After all, no single deconstruction exists, only deconstructions, as Jacques Derrida himself would have it.9 Thus, our efforts draw on discourse analysis, gender and queer approaches, and feminist literary criticism, whose extensive research experience proved invaluable in describing masculinity. We treated the vast corpus of Polish literary texts from the nineteenth century to the present as a dataset on masculinity. From this collection, we selected various texts, and we nearly always followed a principle derived from Barthes’s thought during the selection process, namely that the book creates meaning, and meaning creates life. Thus, along with other cultural texts, literature became the primary source of documents for research on Polish masculinities.

Literary studies on masculinity in Poland occupy a somewhat different position than those in the West. In his chapter “De(re)construction of Masculinity,” Krzysztof Kłosiński refers to the work of Alex Hobbs, who highlights that literary studies on masculinity originate from sociological research – men’s studies – and from the men’s rights movement. Neither of these fields has developed significantly in Poland, which compels us to build such work from the ground up. This happens because masculinity studies, which researchers around the world have intensified since the 1970s, certainly produce strongly diversified conceptual apparatuses for describing their subject. However, as I mentioned above, we cannot simply adopt the methodology or the terminology, which function and carry meaning in an entirely different way in the West, failing to capture the specifically Polish experience. Certainly, this experience aligns more closely with that of Central and Eastern Europe, and permits a description in postcolonial or postdependency terms, though only within limited temporal frameworks. Still, such frameworks would not provide tools to address questions unique to Polish culture.

There also exists a clear need to write a history of Polish masculinities. Tomasz Tomasik draws attention to this fact in his chapter “Remarks on the Still Unwritten History of Masculinity in Poland” – this presents a great task for the future. I assume that the works our project generated will contribute to this, at least in part, even though none qualifies as a classical literary study. In the conclusion of his reflections, Tomasik invokes the Freudian concept of Durcharbeitung and rightly states that rewriting history involves not only a scholarly task but also a therapeutic one. We focused on fulfilling this second task in our project, as evidenced by the many publications that emerged. We departed from the premise that there exists no single, homogeneous discourse of literary history expression, and that multiple discourses continuously overlap and intersect. Consequently, we aimed to undertake at least a partial, sometimes fragmentary, reworking and rewriting of the history of Polish literature. In doing so, we looked for various discontinuities and ruptures in literary and other texts which reveal places that remain indeterminate or underarticulated. This approach explains why Filip Mazurkiewicz’s chapter “Nineteenth-Century Masculinity: A Prolegomenon” examines “Mazurek Dąbrowskiego” (“Poland Is Not Yet Lost”), composed at the end of the eighteenth century. The song bears great significance also for masculinity studies, and Mazurkiewicz provides a surprising and illuminating reading of the piece that later became the Polish national anthem.

Recently, a number of studies have emerged that address the crisis of contemporary masculinity. However, this topic proves far from new and does not pertain solely to the present, since scholars in the United States already discussed such a crisis in the late 1950s. Historian Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr. included a chapter titled “The Crisis of American Masculinity” in his 1958 book The Politics of Hope.10 I believe various masculinity crises began much earlier – specifically, with the collapse of the Enlightenment galaxy, the “birth of man” (Foucault), and the rise of bourgeois civilization (Barthes). Masculinity crises resulted from nineteenth-century processes of alienation. Yet, does contemporary society truly face another masculinity crisis? Psychologists and sociologists frequently and tiresomely repeat this phrase today, but Jean-Jacques Courtine questions this stance, and I believe he is right. The subtitle of the third part of the aforementioned Histoire de la virilité, which addresses nineteenth- and twentieth-century masculinity, ends in a question mark: La virilité en crise? How does this crisis relate to Polish masculinity – if it relates at all? I think people have dealt with masculinity crises ever since they started discussing, describing, and defining masculinity. The masculinity crisis remains largely a discursive matter; there is nothing extraordinary about contemporary men’s effeminacy, use of cosmetics, or care for their bodies, nor about colorful magazines for men appearing alongside those for women. Today, we face a masculinity paradox rather than a masculinity crisis.

Diverse representations of masculinity span from strength and authoritarianism on one side to delicacy and instability on the other. This paradox constitutes the fundamental problem of contemporary masculinity in Western countries and Poland alike. Should paternal sensitivity, rarely expressed in the past, seem negative or indicate a masculinity crisis simply because signs of tenderness traditionally belonged to mothers? An excellent result of gender studies proposing a “new sensitivity” has become what we call “new masculinity,” which involves entirely different male behaviors, where men neither hide nor fear showing paternal tenderness. Grzegorz Olszański writes about this insightfully in his chapter “The Prose of Life: (Un)canny Stories.”

Finally, we cannot fully describe the phenomenon of masculinity without the participation of women. This collective volume features two female authors: Krystyna Kłosińska, an outstanding expert in feminist literary criticism, and Agnieszka Wróbel, who has engaged successfully in gender studies for years and, as I mentioned above, recently developed an interest in studies on masculinity. Their contributions provide an invaluable, supplementary voice, without which the quality of the studies on masculinity would simply lack depth.11

The monograph Forms of Masculinity: Volume 1, which we present to readers, constitutes the first in a series of collective works produced within the National Science Center’s (NCN’s) Maestro 4 research project Męskość w literaturze i kulturze polskiej od XIX wieku do współczesności (Masculinity in Polish Literature and Culture from the Nineteenth Century to the Present) conducted by a research team from the University of Silesia in Katowice. The project comprises works previously published in Pamiętnik Literacki, Teksty Drugie, and Śląskie Studia Polonistyczne. Alongside chapters by the project’s principal investigators, this volume includes contributions from other scholars who have addressed or continue to address this subject: Tomasz Tomasik, Agnieszka Wróbel, Mateusz Skucha, Sławomir Buryła, Paweł Wolski, Grzegorz Olszański, and Dezydery Barłowski.

In her article “Masculinity Studies and Literature” (2013), Alex Hobbs so explores the relationship between masculinity studies and literary studies:

Literary masculinity studies, like other gender studies approaches to literature before it, stems from sociological concepts. In this case, the critical framework employed by masculinity studies scholars originates in men’s studies and, to some extent, the men’s rights movement (men’s studies is a term used more frequently within sociology; whereas masculinity studies usually pertains to literary study). Thus, any account of masculinity studies must first establish the central principles of men’s studies.12

Studies devoted to the subject of men are “relatively new” and, as such, “do not always receive recognition as worthy of inclusion within sociology.” For this reason, texts belonging to this field “tend to begin with a defense or theory justification.”

I will proceed along this line, attempting rather hastily to characterize the “central principles” within men’s studies. But first I must highlight the linguistic difficulties encountered when translating the main categories in this research area – or rather, in these areas. The latter encompass various disciplines such as sociology (listed first), psychology, history, and, finally, gender studies. By definition, this field of inquiry operates as an interdisciplinary domain.

The studies in question originated primarily in the American context and became dominated by the English language. In English, studies devoted to men contrast with women’s studies, which concern women, within the broader context of gender studies. Men’s studies begin with a fundamental premise: to eliminate the homonymy inherent in the word “man,” meaning both “human” and “male,” and provide it with a gendered interpretation. This intention further manifests in the use of the plural noun “men,” to underscore that “human” constitutes a conceptual construct based on the belief in its unity or identity, whereas “man” never exists as a singular entity “in itself.” Attributing unity or identity to “man” always entails ideological appropriation, elevating the particular to the status of the universal: man = human.

Michael Kimmel conveys this intention in the foreword to the first encyclopedia devoted to “men and masculinities,” which he edited. Kimmel arguably represents the most prominent figure in masculinity studies: he authored numerous scholarly works, including a history of masculinity in America, as well as popular texts, such as the high school textbook The Guy’s Guide to Feminism (2011), which he co-wrote with Michael Kaufman, or the bestselling Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men (2008). Kimmel founded and serves as editor of the most important academic journal for men’s studies, Men and Masculinities, and frequently appears in the media as a lecturer. His speeches attract large audiences, and he discreetly acknowledges this theme in his lectures available online. In short, Kimmel functions as a celebrity of masculinity studies, effectively its icon; according to Wikipedia, “Kimmel is considered a leading figure in the academic subfield of men’s studies.”

Kimmel’s Introduction to the encyclopedia begins as follows:

This is the first encyclopedia on “men and masculinities.” As such, it both celebrates the establishment of a new field of study and hopes to participate in the inauguration of a new phase of that field of inquiry. To be sure, there are libraries filled with volumes about men. And university course catalogs are overflowing with courses about men. But rarely are these volumes or these courses about men as men – that is, rarely are they also about gender. Instead they are called “history” or “literature” or “political science.” It’s probably fair to say that if the course doesn’t have the word “women” in the title, it’s more than likely about men – except that it’s rare for “masculinity” to be discussed at all.13

Kimmel cites the academic experience of the encyclopedia’s coeditor, Amy Aronson, who observes that scholars use the term “gender” almost exclusively in reference to feminist criticism, restricted to literature written by women – that is, to what Elaine Showalter calls “gynocriticism.”

And my collaborator and coeditor tells me that in her nineteenth-century American literature class at Princeton, gender was the main topic of conversation when the subject was Edith Wharton, but the word was never spoken when they discussed Henry James, in whose work gendered anxiety erupts variously as chivalric contempt, misogynist rage, and sexual ambivalence. James, we’re told, is “about” the form of the novel, narrative technique, the stylistic powers of description, and characterization – certainly not about gender. (p. XVII)

I begin with an encyclopedia because, as a constative speech act, it seems to sanction the existing state of knowledge. At the same time, and perhaps even more importantly, it operates as a performative act, establishing a distinct field of research:

The sheer size of an encyclopedia makes clear that there is a “there” there – that this field of study exists and that many scholars are toiling in that field. In the case of the study of men and masculinities, it [encyclopedia] demonstrates that in three short decades, an entirely new, interdisciplinary field has emerged and is now an accepted part of gender studies. (p. XIII)

The encyclopedia’s Enlightenment origin also carries significance, which the editors reference already in the second sentence of the brief Preface:

The idea that one could collect, in a single volume or set of volumes, the entire corpus of human knowledge, represents the height of Enlightenment optimism. Such was Diderot’s stated vision as he sought to accomplish this task in the years before the French Revolution; his “reference work covering all knowledge” captures both the inspiring effort of such an undertaking as well as its hubris. (p. XIII)