Abstract
Based on participant observation and in-depth interviews, this article analyzes the ways that male residents in a drug treatment program signified a masculine self through compensatory manhood acts. I analyze four strategies of identity work that men used during group accountability sessions called “games”: (1) signifying masculinity through aggression; (2) subordinating women and nonconventional men; (3) calling others to account as men; and (4) “keeping your head”: managing emotions to (re)assert control. This article adds to our understanding of the ways that compensatory manhood acts are structured locally through interaction, highlighting ways that men’s interactions may be self-defeating and also reproduce inequality by reinforcing dominant ideologies of misogyny and homophobia. In addition, it speaks to the ways that masculine subjectivity is constructed against and through dominant narratives of addiction and treatment.
Introduction
In the midst of a confrontational, sex-segregated group-accountability session one evening at Substance Abuse Treatment Headquarters (SATH), 1 a man’s voice rose above the din. As the cacophony died down, the man pointed at another resident, shouting angrily, “If you got something to say to me, you need to fucking say it to my face! You need to be a man, motherfucker. You need to grow some nuts and be a man!” For the male residents in the program, “being a man” was a primary focus of identity work. Disproportionately poor and Black, the men’s ability to enact a sense of control—a central tenet of patriarchal masculinity (Johnson 2005)—was undermined by addiction, the criminal justice system, and their participation in SATH, a residential substance abuse treatment program. The group sessions provided space for the men to signify a masculine self in a compensatory fashion.
This article contributes to our understanding of compensatory “manhood acts”—acts that signify a masculine self and that arise as part of a refusal or inability to enact the hegemonic masculine ideal (Schrock and Schwalbe 2009; see also Connell 1987; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). Signifying a gendered self is a dramaturgical accomplishment (Goffman 1977; West and Zimmerman 1987). Gender is not who we are but what we do, and our gendered identities must be maintained through interaction. Because gender is an organizing principle of social life and a category of inequality, to signify a gendered self is to claim status within an economy of power (see, e.g., Connell 1987; Lorber 1994). When a man’s ability to reap the full “patriarchal dividend” (Connell 2009) is undermined by other features of identity (age, race, ethnicity, class) or within a particular social context, he may “compensate” (Babl 1979) through exaggerated displays of manhood. For example, for some of the urban, poor Black men Anderson (1999) studied, projecting a physically intimidating masculinity was the only source of power they perceived as available to them.
This article builds on existing research by identifying strategies subordinated men use to signify a masculine self within a total institution (Goffman 1961), analyzing ways that masculinity is constructed through face-to-face interactions (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005), and highlighting the role of emotion work in compensatory manhood acts (Hochschild 1983; Sattel 1976). Specifically, through an ethnographic analysis of SATH, I analyze how male residents, disproportionately poor and Black, signify an identity as men in a context in which they have had to forfeit control. My analysis highlights the ways that organizations—the very organizations that may discredit a masculine self—can structure men’s interactions as a form of compensation for a collective masculinity “deficit” and as a form of social control. I expand on existing literature on compensatory manhood acts to highlight ways that such acts reproduce inequality not only because they can be self-defeating and reproduce dominant ideologies but because they can protect organizational dominants by channeling anger and frustration laterally.
Finally, although therapeutic communities—residential programs designed to aid individuals seeking some form of personal growth (see De Leon 2000)—have been studied with an eye toward evaluation (Doherty and Harry 1976; Welsh 2007; Wilson and Snodgrass 1969), emotion work (Wiley 1990), and gendered programming for women (Eliason 2006; Haney 2010; McCorkel 2003; McKim 2008), little attention has focused on the construction of masculinity within this arena of the social world. How is masculine subjectivity—the perceptions, desires, and dispositions tied to being a man—constructed and enacted in these settings? How is masculinity constructed against and through narratives of addiction and treatment? What are the consequences for the men and for the organization? The current study addresses these questions.
Compensatory Manhood Acts and Emotion Work
To make sense of patterns at SATH, we must make sense of patriarchy. As Johnson (2005) notes, patriarchal systems are male-dominated, male-identified, and male-centered. This reflects patterns and does not mean that every man has equal ability to exercise power. Many men, in fact, are dominated at work or outside it and do not feel powerful. Reflecting the intersections of systems of oppression, working-class men, men of color, queer-identified men, and immigrant men may not reap the full “patriarchal dividend,” the advantages typically conferred on men as a group for enacting hegemonic masculinity—those displays of masculinity most revered within the culture (Connell 1987; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). When the masculine self is discredited, a man may respond with compensatory (Babl 1979) “manhood acts”—acts that signify “a capacity to exert control over one’s self, the environment, and others” (Schrock and Schwalbe 2009, 286).
Men perform compensatory manhood acts in many social settings. Some men with physical disabilities, for example, center their masculine identities on the control they exert over others occupationally, while others emphasize their physical or sexual prowess (Gerschick and Miller 1995). Men working low-status jobs have to take orders from others, and they may compensate by emphasizing the physical demands of manual labor in their conceptions of a masculine self (Collinson 1992; Ramirez 2011) in contrast to the “effeminate” activity of the managerial class (Willis 1977, 149). And despite gay fraternities having one foot “in an oppositional gay culture” (Yeung and Stombler 2000, 134), researchers have found that members eschew public feminine behavior so they will not be dismissed as “flaming queens” on campus (Yeung and Stombler 2000, 142). Although compensatory manhood acts can promote an affirmed sense of self, they can also be self-defeating. For example, although humor targeting management used by the working-class men Collinson (1992) studied promoted cohesion on the shop floor, the competitive and personal joking between the men could create distance and distrust. Compensatory manhood acts can also reproduce—intentionally or unintentionally—dominant ideologies of inequality. For instance, Chen (1999, 585) analyzes the “hegemonic bargain” that is evident when some Chinese American males achieve manhood “by consciously trading on, or unconsciously benefiting from, the privileges afforded by [their] race, gender, class, generation, and/or sexuality.”
One aspect of accomplishing masculinity is emotion work: “the management of feeling to create a publically observable facial and bodily display” (Hochschild 1983, 7). Beneke, in fact, argues that “compulsive masculinity”—the pressure for men to prove their masculinity and assert superiority over women—can be understood, in part, “as a form of structured, developmental, emotion work in the service of gender” (1997, 65). This involves facilitating the display of “manly emotions [such as] lust and anger” (1997, 47) and suppressing emotions, such as fear, that could discredit a masculine self.
Emotional inexpressiveness, in fact, functions as “an instrumental requisite for assuming adult male roles of power” (Sattel 1976, 471). Indeed, the inexpressive male is an iconic image of managerial manhood in the United States (Sattel 1976; see also Collinson and Hearn 1994; Pyke 1996). But subordinated males also turn to inexpression as a way to guard their status as men. Signifying manhood is partly about resisting being controlled, and one way to do that is to avoid letting others “push your buttons.” In the economic sector, this can function as a form of “emotional capital” (Cahill 1999), a set of emotional dispositions and emotion management strategies that “channels individuals toward different occupations and social positions” (Cahill 1999, 112).
For working-class men and men of color, who are more likely to be channeled into work in which they are dominated and controlled, a masculine habitus (Bourdieu 2001) that includes emotional restraint can be a resource in securing and maintaining employment. For example, Majors and Billson argue that living under prolonged racism has conditioned Black males to develop a “mask” of emotional concealment necessary to avoid “social rejection and loss of employment as well” (1993, 59). For subordinated men, pushing others’ buttons and resisting letting others push your buttons are two sides of the same coin of compensatory emotional manhood.
This two-sided play of emotions is evident in “playing the dozens,” a ritualized verbal competition common among adolescent Black males (see Abrahams 1970; Chimezie 1976; Foster 1986). In “the dozens,” boys and men engage in verbal sparring, trading insults. The ritual serves as a form of entertainment, an opportunity to develop verbal skills, and a mechanism of conferred status. It creates space in which young, marginalized men can signify a masculine self. But beyond this, the dozens functions as a mechanism of social control as it conditions Black men and boys to “develop self control and to handle [their] temper” (Lefever 1981, 76). As an example, Lefever (1981) cites the memoir of Ossie Guffy (1971), in which Guffy recounts her grandfather’s description of the ritual’s origin as a game among enslaved peoples: “The whole idea was to learn to take whatever the master said to you without answering back or hitting him, ’cause that was the way a slave has to be, so he could go on living” (Guffy 1971, 48, quoted in Lefever 1981, 79). Self-control can be a survival strategy.
The stakes of signifying a masculine self through emotional (in)expression can be high and materially significant. In this article, using an interactionist (Blumer 1969; Mead 1934) frame, I analyze the ways that SATH orchestrated group sessions for the male residents that functioned similarly to the dozens, allowing men to signify masculine selves through aggression—exerting control over others—while (ostensibly) learning to control themselves. This adds to the literature on compensatory manhood acts by showing not only how masculinity is constructed locally through face-to-face interaction but how it is scripted within an organization. In a context in which the male residents had to forfeit control to a total institution, these sessions allowed the men to engage in compensatory manhood acts. Their interaction reproduced inequality by reinforcing dominant ideologies of misogyny and homophobia, but also by shielding organizational dominants from challenge and critique.
Gender, Therapeutic Communities, and Control
Many people struggle with drug use problems, and many of those people will end up as part of the skyrocketing, racially disproportionate prison population in the United States (see Garland 2001). With the emergence of “drug courts,” which “combine the ‘carrot’ of substance abuse treatment with the ‘stick’ of penalties for missing treatment or failing a drug test” (Pew Center on the States 2008, 18), in 1989, treatment has become integrated in the criminal justice system (Wilson, Mitchell, and MacKenzie 2006). One of the most common methods of (mandated) treatment, in both prison and community-based programs, is the therapeutic community (Lurigio 2000), an intensive, residential treatment modality for drug users. These programs view addiction as a “disorder of the whole person” (De Leon 2000, 38) and use a “community-as-method” (De Leon 2000, 85) approach to treatment.2,3 Important for the analysis in this article, the programmatic core of the therapeutic community is “the game,” a confrontational group accountability session that emerged out of Synanon, a drug rehabilitation program started in California in the 1950s (Janzen 2001).
Drug use problems have been traditionally defined, including in the therapeutic community model, through a “male” perspective, and women’s patterns of drug use and treatment were generalized from the “male” model (Hodgins, El-Guebaly, and Addington 1997). When researchers trained a feminist lens onto these patterns they began to address gendered presentations of “addiction” and to highlight the need for “gender sensitive” programming (Bloom, Lind, and Owen 1994; Covington 1998; Eliason 2006; Lockwood, McCorkel, and Inciardi 1998; McKim 2008). Yet, most of the research on gender and substance abuse treatment, to date, has focused on women. 4 For example, in her study of a prison-based program for women, McCorkel found gender to be a “salient and urgent component of punishment” (2003, 47): Policies centered on a “typical” (male) addict; female inmates were viewed as deviant; and, programming pushed a conventional, heteronormative femininity. Haney documents the shifting programmatic narratives and practices of “the feminized arm” of the penal system in California through the 1990s and 2000s (2010, 3). Although moving from discourses of (state) dependence to discourses of desire, the employed narratives and practices all worked to control the women. As I will discuss, therapeutic modalities used in these programs were similar to the “games” at SATH.
Rehabilitation, for both men and women, is gendered. The current study adds to our knowledge by highlighting the forms of masculinity that are scripted by and in relation to cultures of treatment. While the men at SATH were drawing on aspects of hegemonic masculinity in the wider culture with their central focus on control, they were also acting against narratives of addiction and treatment that defined them as out of control.
Setting and Methods
SATH was a two-year therapeutic community in the southeastern United States. It was organized as a total institution (Goffman 1961), orchestrating every aspect of residents’ lives and daily activities. There were approximately 45 staff members and 370 residents in SATH at any point during my research. An estimated 70 percent of the residents were male, and about 80 percent were Black. The overwhelming majority were poor. More than 90 percent had criminal convictions, and almost half had not graduated from high school. Although officially “voluntary,” one in three of the residents came to SATH to avoid immediate incarceration. If they “chose” to leave, they would immediately (re)enter the prison system. Other residents entered the program at the urging of parole officers (but not a judge’s order) or family and/or friends, or out of an identified need for assistance after “hitting rock bottom.”
From April 2006 to October 2007, I conducted between six and 20 hours of fieldwork per week at SATH. I continued my involvement with the agency, as a peripheral observer, through August of 2008. In addition to numerous informal interviews (Lofland et al. 2006) conducted with staff members and residents, I completed 22 in-depth, semistructured interviews. I cast a wide net, sitting down with the founder and president, current staff, residents, staff in training, 5 a former staff member, and a former resident. Questions covered a range of material. Although I worked and participated in a number of contexts across the organization, this article focuses heavily on my time sitting in on the male residents’ “games.” Between September and December of 2006, I attended one to two games a week.
I jotted brief notes during my fieldwork and typed detailed fieldnotes after leaving the setting. I also wrote “notes-on-notes” (Kleinman and Copp 1993), thoughts and reflections on analytic themes that I discovered in my fieldnotes. I recorded and transcribed all interviews. I coded my notes and transcriptions and wrote analytic memos to build my analyses (see Charmaz 2006). As a white, male, middle-class, (pro)feminist (Schacht 2003) ethnographer, I strive to connect interactionist (Blumer 1969; Mead 1934) concerns to issues such as the reproduction of race, class, and gender inequality in an attempt to highlight strategies of resistance. This is only a jumping-off point. Themes and analysis emerged inductively. For example, although gender is done in every social setting in various ways, it was not until I attended several games that compensatory manhood acts emerged as a dominant theme in the research.
Signifying a Masculine Self
According to staff accounts and residents’ self-reports, in various ways the (mostly) poor Black men who formed the resident population at SATH had lost control: Most were members of multiple subordinated social groups; all had an “addiction” to drugs; most had lost financial and structural stability through their drug use; and most had histories of arrest and incarceration. Further, all of them, by coming into a total institution, forfeited control of their day-to-day lives.
SATH policies and programs orchestrated every aspect of the residents’ days, including “appropriate” hairstyles, facial hair, style of dress, recreational activities, correspondence, and interaction. Contact between men and women was strictly managed: Men and women were not allowed to speak to one another for their first six months in the program and could say only “hello” and “goodbye” from that point until they reached one year. Important for the analysis presented here, residents were not allowed to challenge or confront staff members in any setting. If they did, they were given a “contract” (period of disciplinary action). Given this, throughout most of their days in SATH the male residents did not have ready access to symbolic resources they could use to enact hegemonic masculinity. The group accountability sessions, “games,” provided the men space in which they could signify masculine selves.
Residents began participating in games on entering the program. Internal literature provided the following account: “Games allow [residents] the opportunity to express their feelings, laugh together, gain better and deeper relationships with others, practice speaking, and hopefully gain some awareness.” According to resident and staff reports, staff members rarely participated in the games; apart from my first observation (when a staff member walked me to the room), staff never made an appearance. Importantly, this made the games appear as if the residents controlled them. However, the interaction in the games was scripted by SATH norms and enacted in relation to the broader therapeutic community model. In short, organizational and informal norms encouraged the men to undertake compensatory manhood acts, emphasizing aspects of masculine performance to which they had access: aggression, (verbal) violence, homophobia, and heterosexual display. These performances can be seen as a version of what Majors and Billson term the “cool pose”—“a ritualized form of masculinity that entails behaviors, scripts, physical posturing, expression management, and carefully crafted performances that deliver a single, critical message: pride, strength and control” (1993, 4).
I outline four themes that emerged from my observations of the men’s interactions in games: (1) signifying masculinity through aggression; (2) subordinating women and nonconventional men; (3) calling others to account as men; and (4) “keeping your head”: managing emotions to (re)assert control. All four themes were prevalent in every game that I observed.
Signifying Masculinity through Aggression
Many men at SATH resorted to displays of compensatory manhood acts through verbal aggression and confrontation—hallmarks of therapeutic community games in general (De Leon 2000), but also markers of hegemonic masculinity. To be sure, men (and women) from any social location and status position can engage in acts of violence and aggression. However, as many studies of subordinated men have noted, instances of violence are frequently used in compensatory manhood acts (see, e.g., Anderson 1999; Majors and Billson 1993; Schrock and Schwalbe 2009; Stretesky and Pogrebin 2007). Explicitly barred from acts of physical aggression by organizational policy, and barred from any form of direct confrontation in other areas of the program, men at SATH resorted to verbal violence in the games.
In other contexts, the men’s interactions in games would likely be read as a challenge to fight. Herbert, a staff in training, reflected on his first game: “It was a zoo! People were yelling and screaming and, I mean, I was still in the prison mentality, and there were things being said that you just did not say to people, period.” The angry, confrontational interactions were scripted and enabled by the physical setting and by organizational norms: The men were seated in a large circle, usually with no staff members present; they were explicitly encouraged to “tell others how [they] feel about them”; and they were barred from doing so in any other setting.
After attending several “intern” (residents who have just entered the program) games, I began to expect aggressive confrontations. When I sat in on a game for longer-term residents, I was struck by a more sedate game. That was short-lived:
A loud group began confronting a man, and he was raising his voice in return, screaming that he would change what he wanted to change. . . . A security “guard” [a resident working a security detail] came in, looked at everyone yelling, and then looked at me and smiled, saying, “Ooohhhh, here they go!”
The excitement of the guard in this instance was telling. It demonstrates the role the games played as a form of entertainment and competition for the male residents. This is further evidenced by an interaction from a different evening:
Things started off when an older Black man in nice slacks and a button-up shirt asked another resident, a younger Black man in a red “contract” shirt [meaning that he was being disciplined], “So, John, what are you doing in that red shirt?” “Man, fuck you! I’m not sayin’ anything about that!” The room erupted into shouts and laughter at this point, and Reggie leaned over and said excitedly, “Here they go!”
Reggie, along with most of the men who were not actively involved in the interaction, smiled and laughed as the verbal sparring got started. As the interaction unfolded, residents, taking on an expected role for staff members, policed one another’s behavior, demonstrating one of the ways that the games functioned as a mechanism of social control:
The man in the red shirt was being gamed, and he did not want to say what he had done to get his contract. There were four or five other men yelling at him at the same time, with him yelling back. John screamed, “Fuck you, motherfucker, I ain’t sayin’ nothing about why I got this contract. That’s my fucking business and you can go fuck yourself!” Another man shouted, “Fuck you, man, I know why you got the contract, and if you don’t tell ‘em, I will!” The first man, starting calmly but with increasing anger, said, “Man, I don’t know what you did; tell me what you fucking did so that I know not to do it myself!”
In addition to its focus on rule enforcement, this example revolves around another core tenet of masculinity, and a common focus of compensatory manhood acts: respect (see, e.g., Bourgois 2008; Schrock and Schwalbe 2009).
The men used demands for respect, and displays of disrespect, as resources in their attempts to signify a masculine self. For instance, one night two residents got into a shouting match because one of them had “pulled rank” and told the other man, who had more time in the program, what to do at work. The “younger” resident never backed down, dismissing the other man by saying, “Okay, Jimmy,” with derision, moving his hands as if speaking in sign language (suggesting that the other man was stupid and did not understand). Jimmy marked the importance of respect, exploding with anger: “Don’t disrespect me! Don’t disrespect me!”
These interactions revolved around symbolic resources used to elicit attributions of possessing a masculine self: anger, aggressive confrontation, and (dis)respect. The side comments of Reggie and the “guard” (“Here they go!”) highlight the game as spectacle and entertainment—a chance for the men to claim status through symbolic battle. And the focus on rule infractions demonstrates one way the games functioned as a mechanism of social control. Significantly, all of these aspects of the games mark similarities to playing “the dozens,” discussed above. By playing the game in these ways, the male residents could claim status as men through aggression and competition—hallmarks of hegemonic masculinity—while reproducing the norms and rules of the very institution that undermined their identity claims in other settings.
Subordinating Women and Nonconventional Men
Another prominent feature of hegemonic masculinity is the suppression and denigration of women and “the feminine” through misogyny and homophobia (Johnson 2005). Researchers have identified misogyny and homophobia as identity resources for boys and men in an array of social contexts, including, for example, high school (Pascoe 2007), the military (Higate 2007), and sport (Schacht 1996). Not surprisingly, these are also resources in the enactment of compensatory manhood acts (Schrock and Schwalbe 2009).
Although no women were present during the male residents’ games at SATH, at times women made an appearance in the men’s talk. When this happened, in an echo of the treatment of women Anderson (1999) found among working-class men of color, the women were usually presented as manipulative or good only for sex. Referring to women most often as “bitches,” the men framed women as “out to get them.” In the following example, Jeremy, a white man, has been accused of laziness. Another resident, a Black man named Albert, suggested that this stemmed from Jeremy’s interest in a woman. Jeremy responded:
“I know, you’re talking about Caroline, but that’s not what’s going on, man. I hear that all the time, but I promise you that’s not going to happen.” “Look, man,” said Albert, “that’s what they got that room for, the ‘boom-boom room’ [a room for residents to spend the night together, with staff approval]. It’s just about pussy, man! That’s all this is about! They’re all bitches, and they’re all interchangeable! There’s 50 women [residents] and, what, 270 men? And they just play with us, man. They’re all the same!”
Albert’s numbers were off, but he accurately pointed to the skewed ratio of male to female residents at SATH. The ratio, coupled with the regulations policing interactions between men and women and the denial of other signifying resources of manhood within the organization, made the use of women as a symbolic marker of (heterosexual) masculinity more likely. In every game that I attended, women were used in these ways and, thus, were othered.
The men also used homophobic rhetoric to signify masculine selves and police the gender performances of one another. Despite an explicit rule forbidding residents from gaming others on their “sexual preference or orientation,” such interactions were common. One night, a man angrily questioned the sexuality of a man who challenged the sexual objectification of women:
“John, you called me out the other day for checking out a woman, saying that I didn’t need to be doing that, didn’t need to be looking at women. So, I just want to ask, no disrespect or anything, I just want to know, would you rather I looked at you? Do you want me to look at you, instead?” People laughed loudly at this, some slapping their legs exuberantly as they did so.
In this instance, the man othered women, discredited another man’s masculine self, policed masculine transgressions, and performed an aggressive heterosexuality. Recall Jeremy, who in the interaction above was “gamed” for his interest in a woman. In an earlier interaction he told me that he did have feelings for the woman in question. However, in the game, he did not challenge the misogynist presentation of women. Perhaps it was the homophobic policing of conventional masculinity in the games that kept him from speaking out.
Only one resident, Herbert, was openly gay and out to the organization during the time of my research. I asked him about homophobia in the games:
There’s a lot of undertones, wording that people will use and who they’ll use that wording to, you know? There are other guys that I know in the program who are gay or bi, and people have gamed them, pushed those boundaries in the games just far enough so they don’t get an infraction, but you know what they’re trying to get at.
Direct or indirect, homophobic comments were frequent across all of the games I observed.
Extending this identity work strategy, the men made frequent reference to one another as “motherfuckers” and “bitches.” The word “motherfucker” has peppered many of the interactions already quoted. Used in the ways demonstrated, it can generally be read as an insult to another man’s masculinity (see Dawson 2009). The word “bitch” was used to similar effect. For example: “Only bitches bitch, you little bitch!”; “You need to fall back some, bitch!”; and, in response to “What’s your name?”, “Fuck you! My name is Greg, bitch!”, and so on. This mirrors the use of words like “bitch” to feminize and subordinate men in traditionally patriarchal institutions like sports (Messner 2002; see also Kleinman, Ezzell, and Frost 2009). The label works, in such instances, to place other men in the symbolic role of women (i.e., inferior).
In these ways, the men used women, misogyny, and allusions to homosexuality to construct a feminized Other, cast aspersions on the masculinity claims of other men, and signify masculine selves. These interactions may have kept some men closeted, and they may have kept other men from openly challenging misogyny and other normative displays of masculinity.
Calling Others to Account as Men
Although addiction is a socially constructed concept without a uniform definition (Wincup 2007), dominant understandings of addiction and recovery center on narratives of control, framed in both moral and neurobiological arguments (see, e.g., Baler and Volkow 2006; McCorkel 2003; O’Donoghue and Rabin 1999). Because control is a central tenet of masculinity (Johnson 2005), masculinity is implicated in patterns of drug use and recovery (Bourgois 2008). At SATH, the framing of “addicts” as “out of control” further undermined male residents’ claims to a masculine self. Thus, getting “clean” emerged as a compensatory manhood act. By gendering recovery as explicitly masculine, male residents were able to promote it in ways that enabled a salvaged masculine self while also functioning as a means of social control.
The male residents’ gendered endorsement of sobriety often took the form of pushing other residents to adhere to SATH norms. For example, one evening a resident was gamed for “passing a note”—passing written information in secret, a transgression of organizational policy. Another resident angrily pointed out the slippery slope of concessions that could lead, in his account, to relapse:
“Look here, motherfucker, you already relapsed into the same behavior you had on the outside, because you passed a note for someone when you know you’re not supposed to do that. That’s how it starts, motherfucker. I thought I could make those little concessions when I got out the first time, and it didn’t take long before I was fucking smoking crack again, motherfucker!” The man yelled back that he could take care of himself and that he was in control. Paul said, “Hey, no one can make me do anything, right, because I’m a man. But I know I’ve got to change myself and be accountable. You need to grow some nuts, motherfucker, and do the same. They don’t sell ’em on the street, so you better start growing ’em here.”
Although organizational policy undermined the residents’ claims to a masculine self, this example demonstrates ways the men reproduced those norms by policing one another’s behavior. With this strategy, however, residents were able to do so in ways that reinforced their identities as men. Indeed, the directive to “grow some nuts,” also evidenced in the scene that opens this article, was common. In these ways, the men framed recovery/sobriety as an explicitly masculine process. On this issue, the overlap of therapeutic community norms with larger notions of hegemonic masculinity encouraged male residents to buy into programmatic norms and policies.
In a related pattern, the men sometimes were called to account for their previous drug use. Despite the dominant framing of “addicts” as out of control, and despite the fact that the therapeutic community model is built around residents’ admission of a loss of control, the men would often account for their lives in ways that highlighted that concept. For example, one evening during games, Trip was challenged for “passing a note” for another resident. As the cacophony of yelling and shouting increased, Trip shouted back that he was a man and didn’t need SATH to “get clean.” Albert screamed at Trip that both of them were probated to SATH (there to avoid incarceration). He yelled that Trip had been in jail, gotten out, relapsed, and been arrested again. He noted that Trip was not always in control. Trip exploded:
I made that decision, motherfucker! I knew what I was doing! I knew I would either end up back in jail or dead, and that was okay with me. I’m doing this now, and I’m in control! If I don’t want to use again, I won’t!
Trip’s assertions of control rely on discourses of responsibility and self-governance while challenging the organizational frame of him as out of control—whether he uses or not, in this account, is a result of his choices. At the same time, Trip conveys that message through a conventionally masculinist assertion of control and a denial of the importance of the community in the therapeutic process. As such, both the routes to sobriety and addiction were framed as masculine acts. This strategy allowed the men to signify masculine selves while reproducing organizational norms and wider therapeutic narratives of addiction and treatment.
“Keeping Your Head”: Managing Emotions to (Re)Assert Control
Emotional display is an important aspect of signifying a masculine self (Beneke 1997; Hochschild 1983). Other strategies used by the male residents at SATH involved the display of “appropriate” masculine emotions such as anger or lust. This fulfilled the organizational goal of, as internal literature put it, “emotional release.” At SATH, where residents were barred from confronting one another or staff in other settings, staff justified games as a space in which the residents could “vent.” However, the emotions “vented” in the games were structured and scripted (see Thoits 1996)—as I will discuss, expressions of outlaw emotions, such as appreciation, were policed. In most instances, the men who engaged in an interaction displayed only anger and aggression, while those watching the interaction laughed and smiled. However, emotional inexpression—as a stated goal and in practice—was an important aspect of the men’s interaction.
As noted, the men performed an aggressive masculinity. As they targeted one another, policing gendered performances and organizational norms, they pushed one another to “bite” and respond with anger. As soon as a resident did so, other residents would mime reeling in a fish. They would sometimes yell, “Bite, motherfucker! Bite!” or “Come on, catfish!” For the men, the stated purpose of these exchanges was to condition residents to maintain self-control. Malcolm, a resident with 18 months in the program, highlighted the ways that such emotional inexpression functions as a form of emotional capital (Cahill 1999):
Yeah, they’re trying to see if they can make you lose your cool. Because when you get out of here, people aren’t always going to be nice and professional with you, and you’ve got to learn how to deal with that and keep your head.
Another resident, commenting on the program as a whole, made a similar point:
Out on the street it’s always about the right now, immediate gratification. Here, you have to earn your way up to everything. You start with nothing, and you have to see where you’re going and get there step by step. It teaches you to plan and think about the future.
The focus of the games and lessons learned, in these accounts, is on emotion control and impulse control with an eye toward securing/maintaining employment and promoting sobriety.
“Keeping your head” promotes a professional emotional habitus associated with middle-class masculinity (Cahill 1999; Sattel 1976; Schrock and Padavic 2007), a habitus that could aid residents in a job on the outside. Stan, a white resident at the end of his program, made this point explicit: “We have to learn to control ourselves. We can’t lose control in a job in the real world, you know?” And in a relapse prevention meeting, a less confrontational and gender-integrated meeting for residents with 18 months or more in the program, a Black woman made a similar point when another resident, also Black, complained about what he felt was unfair treatment from his supervisor: “Andy, you’ve got to just learn to say ‘Okay.’ My boss now, I can’t stand him. I think he’s an idiot. But he says all this shit to me and I just say ‘Okay.’” For these residents, as for men and boys who learn emotional control by “playing the dozens,” the personal and professional stakes of emotional control were high.
In addition to promoting job security, male inexpression can function as a way to (re)assert power and control in a given situation. “Keeping your head,” in this sense, is a masculine signifying act: “To not say anything in this situation is to say something very important indeed: that the battle we are engaged in is to be fought by my rules and when I choose to fight” (Sattel 1976, 474). This can be especially important for men at work, as deferring to those in authority—particularly in the face of disrespectful treatment from managers—could be read as discrediting to a masculine self. By staying in control of their emotional display, men can interpret the interaction as a manhood act. As Leidner, discussing male insurance salespersons, notes, “Accepting abuse calmly [can be] interpreted as a refusal to let someone else dictate the terms of the interaction, not as a loss of control” (1993, 208). Although occurring between peers, an interaction involving Simon, a white resident with six months in the program, illustrates this point. One evening, a number of men gamed Simon forcefully about his experiences at SATH. Simon calmly asserted that he felt different from most of the residents because he had never used drugs other than alcohol, whereas most of the residents had used cocaine, heroine, and crack. The other residents screamed at Simon that he was no different from them. A man demanded to know what Simon was getting out of SATH. Simon shrugged his shoulders and said that he had nothing positive to say. The other residents continued yelling, growing louder and getting more personal, but Simon remained calm. Finally, a man pleaded with Simon to bite: “Tell him to shut the fuck up. Yell back at him!” Simon refused. After a few more minutes of yelling, a resident focused attention on another man. By staying cool and calm, Simon controlled the interaction, eliciting an emotional reaction from the other men while controlling his own emotional display.
Simon’s example highlights the two-sided emotional habitus of hegemonic masculinity: Be ready to display anger and aggression (give it), and be ready (and able) to use emotional inexpression as well (take it). As another example, Rick was gamed one evening about his “bad attitude” at work. Rick erupted with anger, the veins in his neck bulging as he forcefully pointed at other men and screamed. Rick signified a masculine self through a display of aggression and physical posturing, and he discredited the other men’s masculine selves through a display of disrespect: “Fuck you! You’re like one of those yappy little dogs. You’re good for nothing and you’re just annoying!” But aggressive emotional displays can also be turned against a man, used to position him as out of control. As Rick continued screaming at the other residents, one man’s voice rose loudly in response: “That’s right, Rick! Get angry! Get angry! I control you! I control you!” Unlike the example with Simon, this game was not played on Rick’s terms.
Emotional display and emotional inexpression can signify a masculine self. For the male residents at SATH, emotion work was at the heart of their attempts to claim status as men. They had to both “give it” and “take it.” With felony convictions and a G.E.D., most of the residents were unlikely to find work that offers a great deal of structural support or conferred status. Moreover, SATH operated in a right-to-work state that barred public employees from engaging in collective bargaining, which undermined the ability of residents staying within state to find some forms of support in the workplace. And, as felons, some of whom had not completed the terms of their sentences or probation, many of the residents had (temporarily) lost the right to vote. There were social, political, and economic constraints on their lives, and those constraints carried material consequences. Just as the dozens teaches Black men and boys “how to face up to an antagonistic society and to deal with conflicts both with the larger white society and within their own family and peer groups” (Lefever 1981, 76), the games serve to condition the male residents to become adept at verbal sparring while also learning to control themselves, promoting sobriety and shoring up their masculine selves and future material support.
Discussion
The male residents’ interaction in the games allowed them to signify masculine selves. This was important given the men’s broader marginalized identities as, overwhelmingly, poor men of color with felony convictions and histories of addiction, in addition to their status as residents in a total institution. The strategies of compensatory manhood acts the men used allowed them to assert a degree of control. As noted, these strategies reproduced inequality by reinforcing dominant ideologies of misogyny and homophobia. They were also self-defeating—discouraging cohesion and connection between the men and potentially undermining their attempts to maintain sobriety on the outside—in addition to reproducing organizational norms and shielding organizational dominants from challenge or critique.
As the male residents at SATH signified a masculine self in the games, they tore into one another. The games could be playful, and laughter was frequent in every game I attended. But the laughter was often at the expense of a particular resident. Echoing the ways that shop floor joking could create tension among the male workers Collinson (1992) studied, the “playful” aggression in the games could distance the men from one another and diminish a sense of unity. This was exacerbated by the policing of emotional display. As noted, anger and aggression were “appropriate” emotions in the games. If a man veered outside of these emotions, the sanctions were quick and intense. Of particular note, at times a resident would attempt to thank another man for his support or speak openly about his respect for another resident. This was quickly shut down. For example, one evening a man “put the game” on Smalls, who was nearing the end of his program. Another man broke in to support Smalls: “Man, I’m just going to say that whenever I’ve needed something, Smalls has been there for me, man. I’ve got nothing bad to say about you, man.” This was met with immediate derision: “Man, why are you wiping his ass?! Smalls don’t need that! He don’t need you to wipe his ass!” In another instance, a young resident named Truck praised Bruce, thanking him for his support and guidance in the program. Other men quickly condemned this praise, including Bruce: “Why were you kissing my ass before, like they said? Why are you so soft, motherfucker?! You got to toughen up and be a man!” In these ways, the men’s interactions reinforced associations of hegemonic masculinity with rugged individualism, cutting themselves off from one another.
Within the larger narratives of treatment in the therapeutic community model, expressed locally as “break ’em down to build ’em up,” interaction in the games focused almost exclusively on “breaking ’em down,” limiting cohesion and connection among the men. This is echoed by the interactions in the “focus seat” sessions among the incarcerated women Haney (2010) studied and the “pinball” sessions among the incarcerated women in McCorkel’s (2003) study. Different from the games in that individual female inmates were physically singled out, in addition to the participation of staff along with other inmates, these sessions were similarly derisive. Haney argues that the purpose of the focus seat was “to get the targeted inmate to come undone” (2010, 137). Remarking on the construction of these sessions as a form of entertainment, she notes:
When targeted and treated as individuals, the inmates became individualized; when denied their commonalities, they turned on each other; and when taught to find pleasure in pain, they transformed their sisters’ punishment into an enticing spectacle (2010, 189).
For both male and female participants, these types of sessions turn residents and inmates against one another, encouraging them to police one another’s actions and identity displays in ways that reinforce conventional gendered subjectivities and reproduce organizational norms. This creates a form of verifiable, “embodied surveillance” (McCorkel 2003) in which the observed and observer, who are peers, are known to each other. 6
The games could also be self-defeating by potentially undermining residents’ attempts to maintain sobriety. The masculine individualism promoted in the games, an echo of dominant narratives of treatment and addiction that focus on “personal responsibility,” ignored the structural inequalities that framed the men’s previous drug use and material realities and into which they would reemerge after graduation. But it also denied the importance of community and interdependence in both the therapeutic process and in “right living” on the outside. Truck, the young resident mentioned earlier who was attacked for expressing appreciation of another man, told me that he didn’t feel safe sharing anything personal with other residents:
I haven’t opened up much to any of the guys here because they don’t really listen. I’m scared if I open up that they’ll use that against me. I’ve tried to do that once with someone, and he brought up what I had told him in games.
It clearly was not safe to “vent” just any emotion. And comments from Lefty, a “re-start” (a resident who graduated from the program, used drugs again, and reentered) describing his return to SATH, suggest that the lessons of the games could be counterproductive on the outside:
I was struggling, and I thought, “SATH tells us to be men, so I’m going to be a man and suck this up and just deal with it myself.” That was a mistake, I should have talked to somebody about it, you know?
Although the male residents framed “right living” and accountability as “masculine” pursuits, Lefty’s comments suggest that “being men” can also be part of the problem.
I have discussed the ways the SATH games functioned as a mechanism of social control by encouraging the male residents to police one another’s actions, reinforcing the norms of the very organization that discredited their masculine selves. But the games also controlled residents by shielding organizational dominants from critique. SATH policy forbade residents from challenging staff or one another in any context outside of the games. To do so could result in a disciplinary contract or a “haircut,” a “verbal corrective” that was targeted, public, and demeaning. 7 But, as noted, staff rarely made an appearance in the games, meaning that residents had no recourse to address frustrations in response to policy or abusive treatment from staff. 8 Instead, as in the dozens, residents’ anger and frustration was “vicariously released” (Lefever 1981, 84), channeled toward one another. To the extent that residents were able to “blow off steam” or “vent” within the tightly scripted emotional performances of the games, the benefit was arguably not for the residents themselves but for the organization as a whole.
Conclusion
Male residents at SATH faced challenges to their abilities to signify creditable masculine selves. Disproportionately poor and Black, with histories of addiction and criminal convictions, the men had lost control in key aspects of their lives. This was compounded by their participation in a total institution. In games, a core therapeutic process in the modern therapeutic community, SATH offered the men a chance to perform scripted compensatory manhood acts, salvaging their masculine selves. The men’s interactions in the games, which conditioned a masculine and emotional habitus, enabled them to signify masculine selves; but their performances reproduced inequality by reinforcing dominant ideologies of misogyny and homophobia, reproduced organizational norms as the residents policed one another’s actions, and shielded staff from challenge or critique.
The structured interaction in the men’s games exposes something deeper. Patriarchy as a system is driven by a dynamic relationship between fear and control (Johnson 2005). Men in patriarchal systems tend to seek power through the control of others, fear being controlled by others, and see control as the means through which they can achieve desired ends. The cycle of seeking to control others and fearing others’ control is ongoing in patriarchal systems, and it is evident in the men’s patterns of using manhood acts to claim control in the face of a loss of control at SATH. Given the links between substance use, in and of itself, as a manhood act that fulfills the “risk taking” ideals of hegemonic masculinity (Bourgois 2008; Royster et al. 2006) and the male residents’ subordinated status as (mostly) poor men of color, it is arguable that their drug use was driven in part by the same cycle of fear and control that SATH replicated in the men’s games. Perpetuating that cycle did not offer these men a way out. They may have learned how to “be men” without being high when they did so, but being men was part of the problem.
Although limited by the focus on only one program and by the lack of access to women’s games within that program, this research adds to our understanding of how situated forms of hegemonic masculinity, in the form of compensatory manhood acts, are constructed through interaction (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). It also adds to the literature on gender and therapeutic communities—most of which focuses on women—by highlighting the ways that masculinity is constructed within such organizations against and through dominant narratives of treatment and addiction. In addition, by identifying ways men signify a masculine self through compensatory manhood acts, this research adds to our knowledge of the ways that identity work can reinforce inequality while promoting an affirmed sense of self (see Schwalbe et al. 2000). Indeed, the identity work of men at SATH has similarities to the identity work of men in other contexts in which their masculine self is discredited. For example, men in batterer intervention programs (Schrock and Padavic 2007), female-to-male transsexuals (Dozier 2005), gay and “ex-gay” Christian men (Wolkomir 2006), Mexican immigrant gardeners (Ramirez 2011), and men in low-status jobs (Collinson 1992) engage in local identity projects in an attempt to signify creditable masculine selves. They work together to construct such selves, policing and supporting one another’s performances along the way. In each case, their manhood acts are understandable in context. And, in each case, although not (necessarily) the intention of the men in question, compensatory manhood acts work to uphold patriarchy and reproduce gender inequality.
Footnotes
The author would like to thank Sherryl Kleinman for guidance and comments at every stage of this research project. Additionally, the author thanks Beth Eck and Michael Schwalbe for insightful comments on several drafts, Amy Wilkins for helpful comments on an earlier draft, and the editors and anonymous reviewers of Gender & Society for their incredibly thoughtful feedback. None of this work would have been possible without the support of Brigid Bronik.