Hegemony and Trauma

Until recently, masculinity signified “what remains invisible precisely because of its omnipresence.”1 Making this omnipresent category visible generated a considerable body of literature within masculinity studies,2 particularly in the Anglophone world, but also in France. I refer here mainly to the three-volume Histoire de la virilité, edited by Alain Corbin, Georges Vigarello, and Jean-Jacques Courtine.3 In the social sciences, masculinity began to attract interest as early as the 1960s. In the humanities, this occurred somewhat later; as Alex Hobbes writes, “literary masculinity studies, like other gender studies approaches to literature before it, [stem] from sociological concepts.”4

Therefore, Polish literary studies face a double delay. The first, whose kind one might call genetic, results from the social sciences’ precedence in identifying masculinity as a research problem.5 The second delay lies in the fact that the first Polish dissertation devoted to masculinity in literature appeared only in 2013. By contrast, in the West, cultural and literary studies have challenged the assumption of masculinity’s omnipresence since the 1970s. I refer here to the recently translated study by Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, among others.6 Today, one easily senses that over the past two or three years, literary scholars have been trying to reclaim the lost time somewhat feverishly. Numerous initiatives have recently emerged: research projects, books, meetings, articles, journal issues devoted to masculinity, and grants—this volume also resulting from one.

In his important and, in a way, foundational article, Krzysztof Kłosiński draws attention to the terminological and conceptual complications this new (sub)discipline must confront. For instance, the distinction between the terms it employs produces translational confusion, as exemplified by “man,” “masculinity/masculinities,” “maleness,” “manhood,” “male sexual role,” and other phrases. Quite rightly, Kłosiński’s excellent text focuses on masculinity itself, leaving aside the numerous adjectival qualifiers that have proliferated in masculinity studies. Indeed, one can find a number of adjectives referring to masculinity in the scholarly literature, such as hegemonic, complicit, marginalized, sticky, inclusive, Jewish, bourgeois, military, postmodern, and gay. Virtually all these terms appear in the thematic issue of Teksty Drugie which Kłosiński’s article opens.

Polish masculinity studies follow this inflationary path. Though still in our infancy, we have already multiplied “our own” terms: “Sarmatian masculinity,” “nineteenth-century masculinity,” “dislocated masculinity,” “grotesque-ironic masculinity,” “the masculinity of modern Antaeuses,”7 “prosthetic masculinity” (see Chapter 1), “ironic masculinity,” or “uhlan masculinity.” This set also includes variants of military masculinity, namely the masculinity of the September Campaign soldier, the partisan, the poet-soldier, or the Polish soldier on the fronts of the Second World War.8

This situation, for which I bear some responsibility, considerably troubles my mind. As Józef Olejniczak writes in his most recent book, “thinking about literature does not, and should not, inflate terminology by endlessly multiplying new names for the same thing.”9 But how can we avoid this when the study of masculinity aims precisely to rename the same thing? The editors of Men and Masculinities: A Social, Cultural, and Historical Encyclopedia write:

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.10

In other words, masculinity studies concern renaming the same thing! They aim to demonstrate that the male subject is not universal, transhistorical, or transparent, and that it possesses particularity, historicity, and internal dynamics. The latter becomes evident in the tension between masculinity postulated as a cultural ideal and its actual experience under specific conditions. Thus, we witness an aporia between the fundamental goal of masculinity studies and the requirement to keep terminological inflation in check. In my opinion, the only sensible solution to this aporia lies in the approach suggested by Hobbes, whose article “Masculinity Studies and Literature” states that “any account of masculinity studies must first establish the central principles of men’s studies.”11

In the case of the concept I am developing, the central principles that I employ rely on three primary categories drawn from canonical works in masculinity studies: “hegemonic masculinity,” “dominant fiction,” and “historical trauma.” These categories originate from two classical studies: Masculinities by Raewyn W. Connell and the still underappreciated book on Polish soil, Male Subjectivity at the Margins by Kaja Silverman. Kłosiński writes that Connell’s concept “plays a similar role in the field of masculinity studies to Jakobson’s model of communication in structuralism.”12 Although both scholars’ works share many convergent points, their concepts developed independently of each other, and my argument requires an attempt to harmonize their theoretical languages.

Following Connell, I understand hegemonic masculinity not essentially but relationally, as a “position” in the system of gender relations. Thereby, I acknowledge the historical variability of its constitutive features.13 Connell draws her concept of hegemony from Antonio Gramsci’s works and his analysis of class relations, in which hegemony defines cultural action through which a group claims and maintains a leading position in social life.

At any given time, one form of masculinity rather than others is culturally exalted. Hegemonic masculinity can be defined as the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women.14

Hegemony understood in this way establishes itself through a network of connections among institutional power, a specific cultural ideal, a group, and even individuals. Hegemonic masculinity possesses a somewhat corporate and exclusive character: feminists and men who reject this concept do not undermine its foundations, and its existence somehow legitimizes the social structure of patriarchy in general. The number of men who rigorously embody the values of hegemonic masculinity tends to remain small, yet most men benefit from the “patriarchal dividend” that hegemony provides.15 This male massa tubulettae establishes complicit masculinity, which disseminates hegemonic values throughout the social fabric, reinforcing them as a result. Consequently, complicit masculinity reinforces itself through the aforementioned “patriarchal dividend.”

In my view, the historicization of masculinity represents a particularly valuable aspect of Connell’s definition—and several similar definitions. Historicization recognizes that culture, understood as a phenomenon of “long historical duration,” and the unfolding history jointly constitute and construct masculinity/masculinities. This simply means that new political and social configurations sometimes require profound reconfigurations of masculinity. The truth of this thesis reveals itself when one poses questions about the criteria and models of masculinity, even over the course of the last half-century. How did men becoming fathers in the mid-twentieth century understand their fatherhood, and how do they understand it today? This question represents only one example.

The historicization of masculinity also constitutes its geographical location, as Connell and Messerschmidt emphasize.16 Masculinity is closely connected with national categories. To use a pharmaceutical simile, masculinity does not serve as a passive vehiculum of Polishness, since both these properties of the sovereign subject enter into numerous and diverse relations: for example, Polishness as a cause of impotence in Stefan Kisielewski’s Sprzysiężenie (The Conspiracy), or Polishness as a guarantor of masculinity in Stanisław Dygat’s Jezioro Bodeńskie (Lake Constance). Nevertheless, masculinity undoubtedly conditions Polishness, and in cases of its significant deficiency, one must feign its existence. In other words, non-masculinity—or, as Connell would put it, alternative masculinity—very often signifies exclusion from the national community. Such was the case of Jews or homosexuals, whom others accused of succumbing to external influences; depending on the context, these could include French, Tatar, Turkish, or German influences.

Defined masculinity necessitates defining corporeality and how these categories function in relation to each other. Here I must refer to Connell, too: “The body … is inescapable in the construction of masculinity; but what is inescapable is not fixed. The bodily process, entering into the social process, becomes part of history (both personal and collective) and a possible object of politics.”17 Connell believes that one cannot omit the body in describing masculinity, because masculinity expresses itself through the body, remains grounded in the body, as well as produces, historicizes, and politicizes the body. The body’s materiality is not constant and offers no biological foundation: both in individual development and in collective history, corporeality assumes certain political, cultural, and social forms.

Connell remains highly structuralist in her thinking. Therefore, the answer, or rather answers, to what constitutes the content filling the structure of hegemony holds secondary significance in her reflection. At this point, Silverman’s concept comes as an aid. Her thinking derives from psychoanalysis—mainly Lacanian, and even Freudian, whose main line of thinking about masochism she adopts. Still, Silverman apparently does so to present male masochism as a subversive and liberatory project, thus using Freud against himself. In this way, she historicizes the concept of masochism,18 which becomes, using Richard Fantina’s term, “progressive masochism.”19 Therefore, one can boldly call masochism an actor in “libidinal politics”:

First, I hope to show that male mastery rests upon an abyss, and that the repetition through which it is consolidated is radically and ceaselessly undermined by a very different and much more primordial kind of repetition—by that insistence within the present of earlier traumas that I have associated with the death drive. Second, I hope to dramatize the central part which the equation of penis and phallus plays in the maintenance of a certain “reality” …. Although I have characterized the occasions on which masculinity and the dominant fiction experience at least a temporary disintegration as “historical,” my wish is that every subject’s encounter with the death drive might become in time more of an everyday occurrence—that the typical male subject, like his female counterpart, might learn to live with lack.20

The theoretical assumptions guiding the book state that “‘exemplary’ male subjectivity cannot be thought apart from ideology, not only because ideology holds out the mirror within which that subjectivity is constructed, but because the latter depends upon a kind of collective make-believe in the commensurability of penis and phallus.”21 These assumptions refer to the critique of ideology. No surprise, then, that Louis Althusser, Ernesto Laclau, and Michel Foucault represent important thinkers for Silverman.22 She also introduces the concept of dominant fiction:

Our dominant fiction calls upon the male subject to see himself, and the female subject to recognize and desire him [the male subject], only through the mediation of images of an unimpaired masculinity. It urges both the male and the female subject, that is, to deny all knowledge of male castration by believing in the commensurability of penis and phallus, actual and symbolic father.23

This fundamental equation of penis and phallus proves so foundational to the dominant fiction that “at those historical moments when the prototypical male subject is unable to recognize ‘himself’ within its conjuration of masculine sufficiency, our society suffers from a profound sense of ‘ideological fatigue.’”24 According to Silverman, the dominant fiction means more than an ideological system through which the normative subject experiences its imaginary relation with the symbolic order. Referring to Laclau, Silverman describes dominant fiction as a mechanism through which society establishes itself on the foundation of closure, the fixation of meaning, and the refusal to acknowledge the infinite play of differences:

The dominant fiction neutralizes the contradictions which organize the social formation by fostering collective identifications and desires, identifications and desires which have a range of effects, but which are first and foremost constitutive of sexual difference.25

By historical trauma, Silverman understands

a historically precipitated but psychoanalytically specific disruption, with ramifications extending far beyond the individual psyche. To state the case more precisely, I mean any historical event, whether socially engineered or of natural occurrence, which brings a large group of male subjects into such an intimate relation with lack that they are at least for the moment unable to sustain an imaginary relation with the phallus, and so withdraw their belief from the dominant fiction. Suddenly the latter is radically de-realized, and the social formation finds itself without a mechanism for achieving consensus.26