Abstract
… following the trail of responsibilities is a sure way to notice the intimate entwining of moral and social positions that are not all comparably advantaged or esteemed. Some may be intolerable. Walker 2007, 83
This special issue brings together an interdisciplinary collection of voices to engage with ideas about men, masculinities, and responsibility. Our aim in putting this issue together is to open up a trail of eclectic and imaginative questions to help illustrate how complex webs of masculinist subjectivities and performative practices interact across and inform various topic areas and lived experiences. Ideas about and practices of responsibility are, politically and culturally, persistently anchored in liberal and androcentric assumptions about individualism, free will, agency, subjectivity, and morality. As such, the masculinist veneer of this significant philosophical concept and personal/collective practice is worth considering in depth, at a variety of levels and in diverse ways. The articles here draw on a range of disciplines and perspectives, including anthropology, postcolonial studies, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, critical race theory, visual and popular culture, political science, international relations, sociology, economics, and development studies. In different ways, each of the articles in this special issue works with questions about relationships between responsibility, men, and masculinities, using the authors’ specific research interests to exemplify their discussion. This multipronged approach reflects a concern to problematize concepts of individual, collective, personal, and moral responsibility and also to challenge the ways such grandiose terms have slipped almost unnoticed into a range of everyday languages, legislations, policies, and practices; the hypermediated case of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) serves as a preliminary and profound example.
In April 2009, speaking at a joint news conference with the UK’s then Prime Minister Gordon Brown at the G20 Summit in London, the President of Brazil, Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva, stated that the global financial crisis (GFC) “is a crisis caused and encouraged by the irrational behavior of white people with blue eyes” (ABS News 2009). Questioned further by a reporter, President Lula expanded on his theory by saying: “As I do not know any black or indigenous bankers, I can only say it is not possible for this part of mankind, which is victimized more than any other, to pay for the crisis” (ibid.).” His comment is often (mis)quoted, replacing the phrase “white people” with “white men”—perhaps unsurprisingly, given that Lula’s suggestion speaks unmistakably to the overwhelming dominance of white men in the senior ranks of the global financial market and banking conglomerates. Later in November 2009, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon marked the 10th anniversary of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women by launching a `Network of Men Leaders' (United Nations 2009). Introduced as a major new initiative (bringing together current and former politicians, activists, religious, and community figures), the aim of the Network is to combat the global pandemic of violence against women. The primary rhetorical referent in Ban Ki- Moon’s speech revolved around the responsibility of men, especially in their paternal, fraternal, and other familial roles, to refuse to ignore such violences and to take up the role of acting to stem the scourge of sexual/gendered violences.
The entanglement of concepts of responsibility in individualist, colonialist, and neoliberal epistemologies, metaphors, and discourses means that these concepts are important targets for critical analysis. This special issue offers some openings into developing such an analysis. In both the above examples, it is apparent that the concept and practice of “responsibility” are riven with masculinist undertones, which suggests the necessity of asking questions about both responsibility and the GFC and further implies that we take seriously the sexist and racist underpinnings of contemporary financial systems. Given, however, that men are persistently deemed to be largely responsible for the perpetration of violence against women, particularly in familial contexts, it is not yet clear how to make sense of a call to responsibility for eliminating the “global pandemic” of sexual violence against women aimed exclusively at men. Can the violent work of gender be ameliorated via recourse to traditional masculinist modes of responsibility and protection operating in tandem with equally traditional feminized modes of innocence and vulnerability? The slippage of logic is intriguing and life threatening.
We use this introduction to emphasize three key aspects of the contributions in this special issue. First, we draw attention to the ways in which the contributions here indicate how men in varying contexts have internalized but are also often working to reject, violent social standards and norms (see Inhorn, Sukhu, Shepherd, Kirby, Griffin). Second, we highlight the ways in which these articles show how masculinist subjectivities intermingle with the dominant imaginations of neoliberal capitalist practices, as embodied in organizations such as the United Nations (see Shepherd), the global financial system (see Griffin) and markets for sex work (see Serughetti). Third, we stress the discussion that runs through these articles concerning the ways in which legislative, philosophical, and social legacies reconstitute traditional inequalities and violences (see Kirby, Shepherd, Serughetti).
Penny Griffin’s contribution focuses on the contemporary, neoliberal global financial system (GFC) to discuss the intricate relationship between ideas about responsibility, masculinities, and global finance. She argues that to understand the global financial system it is necessary to engage with the hierarchies of gender and sexual relations on which this system depends and indeed flourishes. While the majority of public and academic discussions of the GFC have underestimated or ignored the ways in which power in the global political economy has been, is, and might continue to be gendered, accounts of the financial crisis that do not interrogate the culture of privilege, competitive success, and masculine prowess created and sustained by contemporary financial discourse will fail to understand the root causes as well as the effects of the crisis. Griffin draws our attention to the masculinist underpinnings of global finance to suggest, in counterpoint to the abstractionism of contemporary neoliberalism and its advocates, that to engage with responsibility in and for financial crisis, it is imperative to understand the locations and effects of gendered power and privilege in the global political economy. Gendered configurations of power, knowledge, representation, and identity (concerning, e.g., the profitability of “high-risk” investment strategies, the assumed “rationality” of economic actors, or the “natural fact” of economic liberalization) have enabled contemporary global financial discourse to reproduce profoundly gendered ideas and practices of individual, collective, and moral responsibility.
Giorgia Serughetti’s contribution also highlights the importance of working with gender to consider so-called economic transactions as she retraces a shift of focus in discourses on prostitution (scientific, philosophical, political, and/or public) toward an emphasis on the “client.” She argues that while the condition of women who become sex workers is increasingly investigated as a psychological, social, and political issue, the motivations and attitudes of men who buy sex have been less clearly documented or investigated. Serughetti focuses on the discourse of male responsibility in prostitution (in which the client is primarily considered male and his behavior often framed in similar ways to discourses on male violence against women) to argue that turning our consideration from the sex worker to the client offers us a chance to develop new gender-aware theorizing on prostitution, fully recognizing the agency of both actors involved. Such a focus also, she suggests, enables us to avoid the dangers of a unilateral and all too common interpretation of the sex market that fails to capture its relationality and its extensive connections to the transformations of sexuality, cultural expectations, and economic structures.
A similar care to refocus analysis more clearly on understanding the role of masculine subjectivities infuses Marcia Inhorn's contribution, which takes us to the subject of male infertility in the Middle East. Inhorn examines discourses surrounding the etiology (causation) of male infertility in the Middle East by asking how men themselves have attempted to answer the “why me?” question. She argues that men in the Middle East engage in personal and political stories about the origins of their own infertility problems and of male infertility more generally, making sense not only of why they are infertile but also “taking responsibility” for their infertility by admitting to past mistakes such as exposure to harmful influences on their fertility. Inhorn suggests that, in a “new millennial” Middle East, responsibility for infertility is increasingly seen to rest on the shoulders of men who are assessing their reproductive risks and seeking assistance from in vitro fertilization clinics across the region.
Raquel Sukhu’s contribution examines the relationship between men, masculinity, and responsibility by looking specifically at men’s violence against women they know in the context of the Caribbean island of Trinidad (part of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, West Indies). Her analysis draws from interviews conducted on the topics of male violence, malevolence, and misogyny to explore responsibility in relation to sexual violence (evoking the rhetoric of Ban Ki-Moon’s network launch speech). In particular, the study focuses on a small sample of Trinidadian men of working class background against whom there were allegations of domestic violence. Sukhu seeks to ask how we might theorize the distancing from responsibility that has marked these men’s excuses, justifications, and attempts to apportion blame on their female intimate partners. She stresses that violence is viewed as such an integral and significant element of local masculinities that, in many instances, for men to reject violence they must effectively vacate their masculinity. Sukhu asks, in an environment wherein masculinity and sexual violence have become symbiotic, who should take responsibility for this violence, who should take responsibility for eradicating it, and how can men become key agents both of their own and societal change?
Paul Kirby’s contribution seeks also to theorize sexual violence, this time through a legal lens. His analysis follows recent criticisms of individual legal and moral responsibility for rape as a war crime in international law, and he asks how we might think of war rape as a collective action in moral and sociological terms. Kirby draws on critiques of collective responsibility to argue that causal accounts focusing on structure pose a challenge to ideas of both individual and collective moral responsibility. Kirby suggests that the only way to carefully engage with assumptions that men as a group bear a kind of responsibility for war rape, and thus avoid falsely homogenizing “men” or their experiences, is through gender and feminist perspectives that pursue both ethical and sociological inquiry into the workings of masculinity and the political means for undoing gendered wrongs. Assigning men collective responsibility for rape, Kirby argues, has produced two key effects. First, such a move can highlight the many ways that men are enabled to rape, and the benefits they gain from such practices. Second, and paradoxically, however, by limiting responsibility to men as a group and in the concept of a “collective” itself, this assignation of responsibility might also work to diminish claims that men, individually or in groups, can be held morally responsible for acts of sexualized aggression.
Laura Shepherd and Rosemary Grey’s contribution highlights another important and often overlooked aspect of sexualized violence in contemporary world politics; this time within the framework of scholarly and policy efforts to accommodate male victims/survivors of rape and/or sexualized violence in war. Their article investigates the (in)visibility of male victims/survivors of rape and/or sexualized violence in war to argue that, despite various UN efforts to lead policy and practice in this issue area, male survivors/victims remain a marginal concern. The authors argue that this has profound implications for the facilities that exist to support male victims/survivors during and after periods of active conflict. By reflecting on the themes of violence, masculinity, and responsibility in the context of sexualized violence in war, Shepherd and Grey suggest that all actors (in policy or scholarly fields) have a responsibility, in this context, to theorize violence with careful attention to gender and, in so doing, avoid perpetuating a pathological model of masculinity, which has particularly pernicious effects.
Being in one’s skin means that one cannot escape responsibility. (Barad 2007, 392)
Responsibility is, of course, a multilayered concept inflecting a wide range of practices. Though as Karen Barad infers, however or wherever responsibility materializes, it works through and on all of us, though manifestly differentially. It emerges as an especially significant concept to critique, given its longstanding attachment to classical rationalist and empiricist theories of knowledge, which retain a strong resistance and even resentment of the claim that aspects of meaning making (which so fundamentally inform daily lives from the personal to the international), such as responsibility, are inevitably tainted. The “reasonable man” test still holds force in a multitude of legislative, political, and social arenas.
As Margaret Urban Walker eloquently suggests in the quotation opening this Introduction, following the multifaceted trail of responsibilities through different sites may help illustrate the many undernoticed ways that gender (the focus here on masculinities) deeply inhabits theories and practices around responsibility. It is perhaps especially interesting to notice and trace “whose responsibilities are spotlighted as representative of ‘moral obligation,’ and which (whose) do not show up at all” (Walker 2007, 83).
We are thankful to all of our contributors for highlighting the ways that we might problematize the relationship between human bodies, gender identities, and conceptualizations of individual, collective, personal, and moral responsibility. We hope that the contributions herein provide both food for thought and a demonstration of confidence in the value of challenging the many ways that gendered subjectivities and performative practices interact in varying contexts as well as pointing the way toward avenues of further research.