The Return of Nature: Feminism,Hegemonic Masculinities,and New Materialisms

Feminist Theory: From Materialisms to New Materialisms

There have long been important materialist trends within feminist theory. Such work, which overlaps with forms of Marxist and socialist feminism, has had a significant influence on the development of CSMM (Hearn 1987, 1992). Feminist materialisms have generally been organized around the critical interrogation of the intersection of patriarchy and capitalism. Materialist feminists have argued that analysis of the economic basis of capitalist relations of production needs to be supplemented by a critical examination of the sexual division of labor and domestic processes of social reproduction. The spirit of these studies is captured in Acker’s (2006) Class Questions: Feminist Answers, which highlights the tendency of social critics to deploy the concept of “class” in a neutral way that privileges the experiences of white men while obscuring the diverse economic and material situations of women and people of color. In particular, women’s unpaid reproductive labor is thereby neglected as a dimension of capitalist economy.

The meaning of “material” in such feminist work tends to be somewhat limited however. Even though there is an expansion of the economic domain to encompass processes of social reproduction, an economic materialism remains privileged insofar as nature does not appear as a significant actor within the social. This is the case in both important Anglophone (Hennessey 1993) and French (Delphy 1984) traditions of materialist feminism. Through critical analyses of the historical construction of women’s ongoing oppression, such work situates the category of women firmly within the realm of social relationships. As Wittig (1993, 103) writes in her well-known essay “One Is Not Born a Woman,” “a materialist feminist approach to women’s oppression destroys the idea that women are a ‘natural group.’” This line of thinking has been important and productive of many critical insights into the production and maintenance of gendered inequalities, yet it also depends on a particular (and unexamined) understanding of what it means for a group to be “natural.”

While acknowledging that there are many materialist feminisms, this section of the article first examines the limits of the concept of “materiality,” as it is deployed in the work of one of the most prominent contemporary materialist feminist theorists: Nancy Fraser. I then suggest that Fraser’s recent work paves the way for a renewed appreciation of another materialist current of feminist thought: ecofeminism. The latter offers its own contribution to the conceptualization of materiality but also has its limits that lead us to consider the emergence of new materialist versions of feminism. It is on the basis of a new materialist concept of nature that new avenues for engagement between materialist work in CSMM and contemporary feminist theories may be opened up.

Fraser’s critical feminist theory attempts to incorporate different dimensions of social injustice into a single materialist framework. Initially focusing on the relationship between injustices of recognition, which deny status and access for certain people to full participation in social life, and injustices of economic distribution, understood in terms of Marxian class relations, she argues both for the irreducibility of one form of injustice to the other and for a reading of misrecognition or cultural injustice as a material aspect of social life (Fraser 1997a). Misrecognition is a material form of injustice because it is not merely a psychological state but involves institutionalized forms of disrespect that have very real consequences for people’s lives. For Fraser (1997b), misrecognition is both materially instantiated and, although it may be intertwined with and exacerbated by distributional injustices, it is not reducible to economic factors.

Fraser’s conceptualization of injustice has subsequently undergone two significant shifts. First, she has argued that in response to transnational forces that are reshaping the world, theories of justice must become three-dimensional and incorporate political representation. For Fraser (2005, 75), “the political dimension of justice is concerned chiefly with representation,” and the question is whether political boundaries or procedures exclude some people affected by transnational economic structures and cultural hierarchies from participating in decisions that have material consequences for them. Fraser’s (2009, 116) vision for the future of feminism is linked to a renewed materialist critique of capitalism, to the revaluation of “care work,” to enhancing participatory democracy, and to establishing transnational forms of political community. Notably, the material dimensions of these arguments primarily concern the concrete external realities that govern women’s lives. In this analysis, the embodied material underpinnings of such lives remain just beyond the horizon of thought.

In Fraser’s (2014a, 2014b) more recent work, however, the material dimensions of injustice have taken on a more expansive cast. She has proposed that the present transnational crisis of global capitalism has three key dimensions—“the ecological, the financial, and the social”—and that “a critical theory for our time must encompass all three of these crisis dimensions” (2014a, 542). Most significantly, Fraser’s expanded conception of capitalism now incorporates an ecological dimension that brings nature within the frame of social conflict. Not only does capitalism depend upon unpaid, unacknowledged, and gendered social reproduction, it also assumes nature as a freely given resource that may be exploited at will. “Thus, nature’s capacity to support life and renew itself constitutes another necessary background condition for commodity production and capital accumulation” (2014b, 63). Fraser here picks up a materialist theme that runs back through critical theory to Horkheimer and Adorno’s (2002) analysis of the linkage between capitalist modernity, patriarchy, and the domination of nature. She argues that capitalism is more than merely an economic system; rather, it is an “institutionalized social order” premised upon “its non-accidental, structural imbrication with gender oppression, political domination…and ecological degradation” (2014b, 68).

From this perspective, social struggles can emerge not only in connection with labor exploitation at the point of production but also in relation to gender domination, to political domination, and to the domination of nature. A question that would seem to follow, but which Fraser herself does not raise, is whether there might be a distinct form of injustice linked to the ecological dimension. With regard to the latter, we can note that nature is not simply nonhuman. We all embody nature, and the ways that we do so are intimately tied to prevalent technologies of gender. Fraser’s work points out that the materialist dimensions of injustice are more than merely economic, yet her concept of materiality remains limited in certain respects. Specifically, it does not appear to encompass the agency or activity of material bodies in the world. Yet, if nature is a site of conflict in contemporary capitalist societies, that struggle may take place within or through us in terms of our embeddedness in a socionatural ecology and not merely insofar as nature is a resource for capital.

I suggest that the logic driving Fraser’s recent work leads toward a renewed consideration of the contribution of ecofeminism to a materialist analysis of gender. In a sense, Fraser partially recuperates Mies’s (1998) critical analysis in Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, first published in 1986, of the ongoing reliance of global capitalism on the tripartite exploitation of women’s unpaid labor, colonized peoples, and the natural world. For Mies, capitalist accumulation fails to acknowledge its dependence on a patriarchal system that exploits both women and nature. She advances an enlarged materialist account of capitalist patriarchy centered on human nature and its embodied relations to the world. Mies criticizes the conceptual distinction between sex and gender for presuming that bodies are ever “purely biological affairs,” insisting instead that “‘human nature’ has always been social and historical” (1998, 23). Although she does not advance an analysis of masculinity per se, Mies (1998, 62) argues that men’s privileged social status largely derives from the particular “object-relation to nature” that developed over time via the mediation of their hunting tools. The accuracy of her broad-brush history of gender relations has been disputed, but I believe that her fundamental insight into the importance of the control of nature for men’s embodied mode of being is central to what the ecofeminist tradition has to offer to a new materialist analysis of masculinity today.

Ecofeminism (or ecological feminism) is a collective term for a range of approaches that consolidated through the 1980s and 1990s into a shared critical perspective on the connections between women, Indigenous peoples, and nature. Authors such as Merchant (1980), Plumwood (1993), Salleh (1997), Mellor (1997), Sandilands (1999), and Warren (2000), along with Mies’s work with Shiva (1993), have contributed to a body of work that critically addresses the intersection of patriarchal gender relations, colonialism, and the domination of nature. Notably, this work contains openings to Indigenous conceptions of nature that might potentially enter into productive correspondences with new materialisms. Unfortunately, the insights of ecofeminism became obscured, as both the dominance of social constructionism and the emergence of poststructuralist theories led to the field becoming mired in debates over “essentialism.”

Moving beyond such debates, Plumwood’s (1993) influential Feminism and the Mastery of Nature offers a philosophical foundation for the project of a “critical ecological feminism” by tracing the intersection of environmental crises with gender and racial oppressions back to the modern Western dualistic understanding of the human and nature. Arguing that the dominance of nature by reason is the defining characteristic of both the Western idea of progress and the model of masculinity that informs it, Plumwood offers a critique both of women’s equation with a passive, nonagentic concept of nature and of the dominant form of masculinity that is equated with reason and full humanity. She calls this masculine framework “the master model” and describes it as “a model of domination and transcendence of nature, in which freedom and virtue are construed in terms of control over, and distance from, the sphere of nature, necessity and the feminine” (1993, 23). Thus, Plumwood takes the important step of centering gender relations on the ways that differing relationships to nature come to produce men and women as properly masculine or feminine. Although she does not engage in any detailed analysis of masculinity per se, her insight is that it is established via the domination of nature.

Plumwood (2001) is very aware that the feminist response to this situation cannot be one of mere reversal in which nature and the feminine is raised up and affirmed. Instead, nature must be reconceptualized—a task that she develops further in “Nature as Agency and the Prospects for a Progressive Naturalism.” Her contention is that feminist theory must embrace a form of naturalism that respects the otherness of nature as well as being consistent with the insights of social constructionism. Pointing out that “to be other is not necessarily to be purely other,” Plumwood (2001, 22) claims that arguments which move from the observation that human influence is everywhere to the conclusion that “there is no such thing as nature” are flawed. This is an important point and, although there are certainly occasions when denaturalizing strategies are appropriate to combat biological reductionism, it speaks to the need to develop better ways of talking about nature within gender theory. For Plumwood (2001, 16), “the reconception of nature in agentic terms as a co-actor and co-participant in the world” must be central to this project. Hence, she begins to anticipate a new materialist position in positing a need “to think of nature as a positive presence” (p. 30), to “demassify” the concept while creating “a more complex and less centric configuration of the world” (p. 31), and thus to “open the way for a culture of nature that allows for much more in the way of contextual and negotiated relationships of communication, balanced dialogue, and mutual adjustment between species” (p. 32).

Plumwood’s work, however, remains mostly in the realm of critique rather than reconstruction. She provides convincing criticisms of predominant conceptualizations of nature but does not go very far in terms of theorizing the agency of nature itself. The impetus for her materialism is mainly derived from her repudiation of rationalism and the dualism of reason and nature. It is therefore largely a negative form of materialism rather than one that develops new ways of incorporating the activity of nature into feminist or gender theory. Moreover, as with most ecofeminist theory, the critical analysis of masculinity remains underdeveloped. Notably, although Plumwood (1993, 20) briefly notes that “dominant and ancient traditions connecting men with culture and women with nature are also overlain by some more recent and conflicting ones in which unchangeable ‘male’ essence (‘virility’) is connected to a nature no longer viewed as reproductive and providing but as ‘wild’, violent, competitive and sexual,” she does not pursue this thought. Yet, it surely suggests that the formula of men/culture/reason versus women/nature is too simple to encompass the spectrum of contemporary gender relations. The dualism of reason versus nature is clearly important in constructions of masculinity and femininity, but reason is only one means by which women and nature can be controlled and dominated.

If ecofeminism puts nature on the agenda, the new materialist turn in feminist theory takes up this project and begins to advance a more affirmative sense of natural agencies. Even though advocates for a new materialism, or for a renewed materialist feminism, tend not to acknowledge earlier ecofeminist work, it is becoming apparent that a productive engagement between these two approaches may be possible (Casselot 2016; Phillips and Rumens 2016; Moore 2016). I think that this convergence also offers much to the project of strengthening CSMM by drawing it closer to recent theoretical innovations in feminist theory and, in turn, could contribute to deepening the analysis of masculinity in both ecofeminism and new materialism. A critical return to nature has the potential to bridge these three fields of study in ways that promise to make each more adequate to the challenges of the present day.

New materialism is a collective term for a range of theories that aim to move beyond the critical focus on discourse, subjectivity, and culture often associated with both poststructuralism and social constructionism and, instead, to turn toward bodies, matter, and a more positive and dynamic conception of materiality. New materialisms are grounded in a rethinking of the agency of material life in a way that is very different both from older biologically reductionist or essentialist modes of thought and from analyses of the discursive or social construction of “the body.” In general, we could say that new materialist theories are concerned with the vitality, dynamism, and creative powers of material life and with the ways that these forces are entwined with culture and human social relations. They are primarily concerned not with epistemology but with an ontology of life that incorporates the human into a broader set of ecological processes. This shared focus manifests itself in a number of different forms such as affect theories, posthumanism, biopolitics, and complex systems theories. My suggestion here is that new materialist theories provide an invitation to rethink the material and embodied dimensions of masculinity and thereby to reapproach the place of nature within CSMM. Although there has been a significant amount of work devoted to the critical analysis of how men’s bodies are socially constructed, the ontological nature of those bodies remains undertheorized.

In the introduction to their pathbreaking book Material Feminisms, Alaimo and Hekman (2008, 5) write that a new “materialist feminism demands profound—even startling—reconceptualizations of nature.” They posit the emergence of a new materialist paradigm within feminist theory in the work of authors such as Elizabeth Grosz, Rosi Braidotti, Karen Barad, Claire Colebrook, Elizabeth Wilson, Vicki Kirby, and Donna Haraway. Grosz’s work, in particular, serves as a good example of how feminism is being drawn toward new materialist perspectives. Beginning with Volatile Bodies, and influenced by Luce Irigaray’s theorization of sexual difference, Grosz (1994) has long been a critic of social constructionism. Although she doesn’t explicitly characterize her work as new materialist, for Grosz, questions about nature are central to the project of feminism. Moreover, it is through rethinking dominant conceptualizations of nature that she believes issues of sexual difference can be reapproached beyond debates over “essentialism.”

Grosz has more recently extended this line of thinking, via an engagement with the work of Charles Darwin, to argue that it is crucial to understand nature in terms of time or becoming. In contrast to feminist critiques that view nature as a resistant force outside of human culture, Grosz suggests that Darwin’s work “provides a dynamic and open-ended understanding of the intermingling of history and biology…and a complex account of the movements of difference, bifurcation, and becoming that characterize all forms of life” (2005, 17). Countering the way that Darwin’s work is often taken up in a reductionist manner by evolutionary psychologists, in Grosz’s Darwinian perspective nature is not a limited, deterministic, asocial, or stable basis upon which culture builds. Nature is not inherently incomplete, but rather is overfull and productive of cultural differences. Instead of an ontological break between nature and human social relations, Grosz proposes a serious examination of the proposition that culture is nature. Thus, she claims that “it is not the natural that limits the cultural, for there is no essential characteristic that constrains cultural possibilities because the natural produces rather than inhibits” (2005, 44). Nature is conceived as being imbued with dynamic forces of life that are indeterminate, unpredictable, and open to the future.

In her contribution to Diana Coole and Samantha Frost’s collection New Materialisms, Grosz’s (2010) essay “Feminism, Materialism, and Freedom” takes up the question of what a new materialist conception of nature means for feminist politics. She asks whether feminist theory should remain focused on attaining freedom from patriarchal domination or whether it might be better served by a more positive conception of freedom as the capacity for creation and action. As I discuss in the final section of this article, the answer to this question also holds significant implications for the study of masculinities, especially with regard to rethinking the tight linkage between patriarchy and “hegemonic masculinity.” For Grosz, freedom is primarily to be defined in terms of the capacities of bodies to act, and it “is attained only through the struggle with matter, the struggle of bodies to become more than they are” (2010, 152). The import of these claims, in turn, depends upon exactly how the materiality or nature of bodies is understood. Matter may tend toward regularity and habit, but it is also a source of invention and openness to a future that is yet to be created. If human bodies are understood as open systems embedded in material ecologies characterized by the indeterminacy and becoming of life itself, then their freedom is, in an important sense, given by their participation in nature. Thus, drawing on Henri Bergson, Grosz suggests that freedom is not a property of the human “but an immanent and sometimes latent capacity in life in all of its complexity” (2010, 149).

This focus on increasing freedom links Grosz’s new materialism to the tradition of critical social theory, but in a way that emphasizes the more positive or affirmative orientation of the former. A new materialist feminism does not merely critique “women’s lack of freedom, or simply the constraints that patriarchal power relations impose on women and their identities”; rather, “the challenge facing feminism today is…how to enable women to partake in the creation of a future unlike the present” (Grosz 2010, 154). In the remainder of this article, and in response to this vision of feminism, I take up the question of what a new materialist theory of masculinity might look like. Importantly, this would still be a critical theory of masculinity, but it would also be one that brings men’s relations with nature firmly into view and that doesn’t prejudge the forms that such interactions may take.

Masculinity, Nature, and Complexity

Before outlining new materialist thinking on nature in more detail, I want to briefly consider some of the main ways in which nature currently appears within CSMM. As noted above, men’s or masculine bodies are the prime sites in which this topic is addressed and, in particular, the study of sports is important here. Messner’s (1992) influential book Power at Play: Sports and the Problem of Masculinity provides a useful example. Messner’s (1992, 9) basic argument is that sport should be considered as a “social institution” rather than as belonging to “the realm of the ‘natural’, separate from society.” In his chapter on “The Embodiment of Masculinity,” he argues that male athletes are alienated from their own bodies as the result of both sporting institutions and the internal structure of masculine identities, which encourage men to take up instrumental relationships to their bodies. Messner analyzes the ways in which the association between men, aggression, and violence is socially constructed, thus producing a situation in which “males often view aggression, within the rule-bound structure of sport, as legitimate and ‘natural’” (1992, 67). Ultimately, he (1992, 159) argues that sports have given men “a means of ‘naturalizing’ dominant forms of masculinity.” What is notable here is that Messner, like many CSMM scholars, often places scare quotes around the word “natural.” The effect is to suspend the meaning of the term, and through that suspension to open up a space in which sociological analysis can occur. The latter is insightful and of great value, but the nature of men’s bodies remains suspended throughout, appearing only as the object of a form of gendered violence.

The work of Victor Seidler, to take another example, also emphasizes the extent to which modern Western masculinity is constructed through control of men’s bodies. In an analysis that shares much with Plumwood’s ecofeminism, Seidler (1997) claims that dominant, white middle-class masculinity, especially, is associated with “reason,” with the result that men have been taught to take an instrumental attitude toward their bodies and to treat them as machines. Men are thereby “radically separated from nature” (1997, 1). The focus of critique here is on the way that masculinity degrades or denies the existence of men’s emotional lives and works “to suppress [their] emotions as if they only exist as reminders of an aggressive ‘animal’ nature and as interferences to our rational selves” (1997, 197). I think there is much of value in Seidler’s emphasis on the relationship between masculinity and the control of nature, but the way in which his analysis pivots on clear distinctions between mind and body, reason and emotion, positions masculinity solely as the socially constructed other to nature. Moreover, although Seidler advocates for a reconciliation between men and their embodied natures, his reduction of bodies to emotions produces a strangely cognitive version of embodiment that has little to say about the connection between the materiality of men’s bodies and masculinity. His work continually gestures toward the importance of nature but does not develop a positive account of natural agencies.

This is where new materialist theories have something to offer. Within most new materialisms, nature is conceptualized in a way that is, either explicitly or implicitly, subtended by an ontology derived from complexity science or complex systems theory. Grosz, for example, claims that “Darwin develops an ontology…in which life is now construed as an open and generative force of self-organization and growing material complexity” (2005, 37). Her rereading of Darwin’s legacy does not explicitly embrace complexity theory, but something like an ontology of complexity underlies and animates her thought. In what follows, I suggest that complexity theory, alongside new materialist and ecological versions of feminist theory, provides an opening for CSMM to reengage with the concept of nature and to develop a renewed critical theory of masculinity. In doing so, I start from Grosz’s contention that we should understand culture as “subtractive” in relation to the self-variation and perpetual becoming of nature. Rather than directly following her Irigarayan notion of sexual difference, I suggest that Grosz’s claim that culture “is the selection of only some elements or facets of the natural, and the casting of the rest of it into shadow, a kind of diminution of the complexity and openness of the natural order” (2005, 48) is suggestive of a different theory of gender. Masculinities, specifically, might be understood in these terms as biopolitical techniques for the reduction or management of the complexity of embodied life.

Complexity theory is itself not easy to define because of the numerous different ways that it has been taken up across disciplines. Nevertheless, Urry (2005a) speaks of a “complexity turn” in the social and cultural sciences in the late 1990s. In one sense, this move can be viewed as the reemergence of systems-based theorizing, which had been largely neglected since the demise of Parsonian functionalism in the 1960s. Unlike Parsons’s (1952) closed and tightly integrated social systems, however, complexity theories are grounded in an ontological perspective that understands the world as composed of dynamic, self-organizing, open systems that breach the nature–culture divide. These complex systems are characterized by nonlinear interactions and emergent higher-level properties that are irreducible to their elemental units. Complexity theories thus provide a way of acknowledging the agency of natural processes in a nondeterministic manner, as they participate in and become inextricably entwined with social and cultural processes. In this way of thinking, nature is as much an emergent phenomenon as are societies or cultural aspects of social life.

The groundbreaking work of Prigogine (Prigogine and Stengers 1984; Prigogine 1997) on thermodynamics and complex systems has perhaps been the most influential in promoting complexity theory across disciplines. For Prigogine, a complexity perspective means that we need to rethink the passive conception of nature given to us by modern Western science. Complexity is linked to the irreversible time of the physical world and to the emergence of order out of disorder under “far from equilibrium” conditions. His work posits socionatural systems that are open to energy, matter, and information and which evolve via dynamic, nonlinear, self-organizing processes that cannot be reduced to predetermined laws or simple, commensurate relations between causes and effects. System crises and the changes that occur at bifurcation points cannot be precisely predicted. The products of complex nonlinear processes, which proceed via feedback loops, are what Prigogine calls “dissipative structures.” These are emergent forms of order that resist the pull toward entropy as energy flows through open systems. The notion of emergence—the appearance of system properties that are irreducible to individual components—is central here. As in Grosz’s work, it endows complex socionatural systems with a degree of freedom, as emergent phenomena cannot be predicted based on the properties of their components alone.

Identifying the current of complexity thinking that runs through recent new materialist theorizing, and which also appears in recent ecofeminist work (Merchant 2003), is crucial for appreciating how feminist theory is being drawn back to embodied life and to a renewed conception of the place of nature in social relations. Where, then, does CSMM fit into this picture? If the world is composed of complex socionatural systems, how does masculinity address itself to this complexity? How would our conception of the nature of masculinity change if we were to embrace a new materialist perspective?

Connell’s theory of masculinity has probably been the most important resource for critical work on men and masculinities over the past thirty years, at least in Anglophone scholarship. Yet, as Wedgwood (2009) has noted, the uptake of Connell’s work has been very uneven. While the concept of “hegemonic masculinity” has attained wide currency, other aspects of her thinking have received less attention. In particular, Connell’s emphasis on the importance of the agency of bodies in theorizing gender has been relatively neglected, despite the fact that each of Connell’s major texts foregrounds bodies in a way that disrupts the social constructionist orientation of most masculinities research. Whereas her early work speaks of the “practical transformation” of natural patterns (Connell 1987, 79), in Masculinities, she introduces the notion of “body-reflexive practices” in order to theorize bodies as both objects and agents of practice that enter into interactive circuits with cultural meanings. Connell argues that theorizing on bodies has been dominated by two opposing conceptions, biological determinism and social constructionism, both of which she faults: the former for lacking evidence and the latter for effacing the materiality of bodies. The way forward, Connell (1995, 60) argues, is to “assert the activity, literally the agency, of bodies in social processes.” This impetus sits uneasily, however, with the theory of hegemonic masculinity, and as Connell and Messerschmidt (2005, 851) have more recently noted, “the pattern of embodiment involved in hegemony has not been convincingly theorized.” I suggest, however, that the connection between masculinity and embodiment points toward an unappreciated but important facet of Connell’s work. The relationship between hegemonic masculinity and what she calls body-reflexive practices is one of the least explored aspects of her work, but it perhaps portends a potential convergence of masculinity studies, feminist theory, and new materialisms. Developing this potential, however, requires working through some tensions and inconsistencies in Connell’s writings.

Men’s bodies have held a somewhat paradoxical position within modern Western discourses and practices of masculinity. On the one hand, as Connell points out, “true masculinity is almost always thought to proceed from men’s bodies—to be inherent in a male body or to express something about a male body” (1995, 45). Popular understandings of masculinity often reference testosterone or other presumed biological markers of gender. On the other hand, the body is often that which must be denied in order to constitute a properly masculine condition. Indeed, one of the main points of emphasis in ecofeminism is a critique of the association of men with reason and women with nature and embodiment. For Plumwood (1993, 44), “a gendered reason/nature contrast” provides the basis for a series of dualisms that structure Western culture. Here, the body belongs to nature; it is that which must be disavowed in order that the man of reason may transcend his natural condition. Indeed, historians of masculinity agree that men’s continual struggles to define and secure their bodies are central to their topic in the modern period. Forth’s (2008) Masculinity in the Modern West highlights the ways that forces and elements of “civilization,” such as technology and luxury, continually undermine the value of men’s bodies and position them as contested sites in an ongoing quest for the achievement of secure masculine status. In this context, Connell’s repeated calls for taking the materiality of bodies more seriously point toward something that remains still to be fully thought in CSMM.

The main thrust of Connell’s materialism, however, is found in a different area. Her early and long-standing interest in economic class-based inequalities manifests itself in a perspective on gender relations that emphasizes the “patriarchal dividend” that accrues to men, as a class, as a consequence of their domination over women. For Connell (1995, 82), this is a “material dividend” defined in terms of income, wealth, and power. The material here is figured primarily in terms of economic interests, which are given by the realities of power relations. The materiality of life itself is subject to less scrutiny. Indeed, when talking about bodies, Connell often enacts the a-temporal assumption that Grosz criticizes in her work. For example, Connell (1995, 64; 2000, 27) writes that “through body-reflexive practices, bodies are addressed by social processes and drawn into history, without ceasing to be bodies,” and that “the bodily process, entering into the social process, becomes part of history…and a possible object of politics” (1995, 56). Here, despite Connell’s avowed position on bodies, embodiment is cast in opposition to historical processes and social relations. Somewhat paradoxically, in making these claims Connell’s intention is to emphasize the importance of the materiality of bodies and to argue that it “is not erased, it continues to matter” (1995, 65; 2000, 27). Yet, by placing biological bodies outside of history and the social, this remains a gesture that does not fully give them their due. Connell (1995, 57) emphasizes the negative points that bodies are “inescapable” and can be “positively recalcitrant” in resisting social construction, but her claim that “gender exists precisely to the extent that biology does not determine the social…[and] marks one of those points of transition where historical processes supersede biological evolution as the form of change” (2000, 27) does not fully consider the extent to which the biological dimension of life is within history and is marked by a fundamental degree of indeterminacy.

Moreover, I suggest that this positioning of embodiment outside of history and social relations is inconsistent with the considerable potential of Connell’s concept of body-reflexive practices and with her efforts to theorize the activity of bodies beyond existing paradigms. As she describes it, “with bodies both objects and agents of practice, and the practice itself forming the structures within which bodies are appropriated and defined, we face a pattern beyond the formulae of current social theory” (1995, 61). Everything turns, however, on how both agency and bodies themselves are conceptualized and understood. Connell’s position often seems to implicitly rely upon an essentially stable biological body defined in terms of an organism—a body with a pregiven integrity—that either resists or is incorporated into history and social life, thereby becoming a social body. Thus, Connell (2000, 65) asserts that “conservative, essentialist ideologies see masculine embodiment as the limit of politics. Masculinity, being ‘natural’, can never be changed…. The opposite is true: masculine embodiment is an arena of politics, open to change and constantly affected by social power.” Here, the meaning of the term natural is precisely what requires further interrogation. Connell takes the first, necessary steps, yet does not pursue the question of how an appeal to nature itself might perhaps serve a different type of politics.

In contrast, if we take up a complexity perspective, we can begin to develop a new materialist understanding of embodiment that expands both the concept of bodily agency and the politics of nature, while still resisting both biological reductionism and the overreach of social constructionism. Here we might draw on Connell’s own insight that bodies are open to the world and situated within circuits of body-reflexive practices. Understanding the socionatural ecosystems in which bodies are situated as complex systems that are open to flows of energy, matter, and information takes embodiment beyond the human organism and moves us toward a conception of the nature of bodies as active, indeterminate, self-organizing, and potentially creative of new forms. Masculinity, from a new materialist perspective, is not merely forged in opposition to a resistant body but is the delimitation of a more expansive range of virtual potentialities that inhabit or flow through the nature of men’s bodies.

This enlarged conception of nature should not be understood as a rejection of the social and technological contexts in which bodies are shaped. Grosz’s reflections on the relations between bodies, technologies, and prostheses are perhaps helpful here in illustrating the stakes of a new materialist theory of masculinity. For her (2005, 137), “technology is in a sense the inevitable result of the encounter between life and matter, life and things, the consequence of the living’s capacity to utilize the nonliving (and the living) prosthetically.” Similarly, I suggest that reconceptualizing the nature of masculinity requires dispensing with the idea of nature as foreign or completely other to technology. Grosz (2005, 146) claims that “prosthetic incorporation is not a rare or isolated phenomenon but seems pervasive in all cultural life.” Nature opens itself to technology; it calls forth technological prostheses. Crucially, however, the prosthetic does not merely compensate for a lack or for lost capacities; rather, prostheses reorganize, create, and potentially open bodies to the emergence of new properties and actions. Masculinities can be understood as prostheses or technologies of embodiment that try to produce and stabilize a particular type of self by regulating its relations to the ecological complexity that characterizes the socionatural systems through which life flows. As I have argued elsewhere (Garlick 2016), masculinity can be understood as a technology of embodiment that limits and channels the potentials of men’s bodies through the invention of habitual ways of being that aim to dispel ontological insecurity through achieving and maintaining control over nature. As a prosthesis, however, masculinity is not something wholly external to nature that operates merely in terms of social construction; rather, masculinities are technologies forged through a process of subtracting and bringing to order the proliferation and continual becoming of life that animates them.

Hegemony and Nature

A key insight emerging out of materialist, ecofeminist, and new materialist feminisms is that the activity, domination, and control of nature is central to contemporary Western gender relations. If this awareness is to foster greater convergence of materialist currents in feminist and CSMM scholarship, then an important question that arises concerns Connell’s influential theory of hegemonic masculinity: does it still make sense to foreground an ideological concept of hegemony if nature is a key player in gender relations? Moreover, as noted above, Grosz (2010) raises the possibility that the primary concern of new materialist feminist theories should not be delimited by the project of attaining freedom from patriarchal domination. Taking this claim seriously poses a challenge to the way that we understand the dynamics of hegemonic masculinity, which have generally been assumed to be grounded in patriarchy. The final section of this article takes up this challenge. I suggest a way of reformulating the concept of hegemonic masculinity that places the control of nature at its heart. Doing so requires answering a difficult question: can nature be complicit in its own domination?

Connell’s theory of hegemonic masculinity has played a key role in shaping critical work on men and masculinities over the past thirty years. Crucially, patriarchal domination is generally understood to be at the heart of hegemonic masculinity, which “is hegemonic so far as it embodies a successful strategy in relation to women” (Carrigan, Connell, and Lee 1985, 592). Hegemony is a concept that references leadership, and central to the functioning of hegemonic masculinity is its position atop a hierarchy of masculinities, with complicit, subordinated, and marginalized masculinities beneath it, all within a system that reproduces the structural dominance of men over women. Consistently throughout her work, Connell has tied the concept of hegemonic masculinity to the general domination of men over women as expressed in the notion of patriarchy. As she states in Masculinities (1995, 77), “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.”

Despite critiques of monolithic or one-dimensional concepts of “patriarchy” within feminist theory, this aspect of Connell’s work has drawn little attention from her critics. Since the late 1990s, numerous scholars have subjected the concept of hegemonic masculinity to critical examination but, to the extent that it has been addressed, the grounding of hegemonic masculinity in patriarchal domination has mostly been approached only obliquely through the proxies of power and structure. Seidler (1997, 2006), especially, has criticized Connell’s work in terms of its equation of masculinity with power. For Seidler, the theory of hegemonic masculinity is a structural theory that is too static and too dependent on power relations to be able to capture the contradictions and ambivalences that men experience in their lives. Similarly, Moller (2007) claims that Connell reduces the diversity of masculinities and the complexity of men’s lives to expressions of power. More directly, Whitehead (2002, 94) claims that “conflating patriarchy with hegemonic masculinity merely results in a ‘lost subject’ (woman and man), subsumed under a blanket, often bland, descriptor of male dominance.” The subject is lost because men’s agency is viewed as the product of the patriarchal structure within which they exist. These critiques, however, are limited to the goal of introducing more nuances into the relationship between men’s lives and masculinity rather than questioning the location of the conceptual basis of hegemonic masculinity in patriarchal domination.

For Connell, the patriarchal dividend is the material reward that accrues to most men as a result of their active participation in the reproduction of institutionalized gender inequalities. There is no doubt that such gendered power relations are important. The questions that I want to pose here concern whether this limited focus on patriarchal domination encompasses everything that is at stake in the hegemonic relationship between masculinity and femininity. Should hegemony be conceived simply in ideological terms? Or should the materialist dimension of hegemonic masculinity be expanded to incorporate embodiment more explicitly? My argument is that patriarchal domination over women is only a subset of a wider range of actions that are directed toward gaining control over nature and, ultimately, of the world that is an outgrowth of nature. Moreover, this broader perspective requires that we forgo the approach of speaking of hegemonic masculinity in the singular and, as Beasley (2008) has argued, recognize that multiple forms may coexist within overlapping social systems. Of course, to claim that the workings of hegemonic masculinities should not be reduced to the reproduction of patriarchy is not to deny that there is much gendered inequality around the world that can be legitimately labeled as patriarchal. My point is simply that patriarchal inequality does not exhaust the issues at stake in contemporary gender relations. It is only by sequestering the domain of nature outside the social, and outside of history, that hegemonic masculinity and patriarchal domination can be abstracted from the broader economy of life in which they are inevitably situated.

Can hegemonic masculinities be reconceived in order to appreciate how they function within socionatural ecosystems? Can nature be complicit in its own domination? Answering such questions requires a more embodied concept of masculinity and a more active sense of nature as a vital, self-organizing, and emergent force. We might begin to move in this direction by considering one of the most distinctively masculine acts: violence. Violence is arguably one of the most physical manifestations of masculinity, even if its overtness means that its relationship to hegemonic masculinity is ambiguous. The problem of gendered violence against women has long been addressed in CSMM and is a key topic in connection with men’s bodies. In approaching this issue, however, I wish to turn to Collins’s (2008) microsociological theory of violence as a situational process. Collins’s work is a substantial contribution to the sociology of violence, and it is also a theory that highlights the embodied aspects of violence in a way that is potentially amenable to a reconceptualized theory of hegemonic masculinity, despite the fact that Collins himself has little to say on the topic of gender.

For Collins, violence is the product of characteristics that are peculiar to certain situations. Building on his (2004) theory of interaction rituals as the fundamental units of social life, he focuses on particular situations in order to identify patterns of confrontation, tension, and emotional flow that generate violence. One of his central contentions is that violence is much harder to enact than previous theories have allowed. This claim involves a conception of human nature as normally oriented toward microinteractional rituals of solidarity. An act of violence is difficult because it must overcome the tension and fear that accompany any break from our evolved natural propensity for empathy and solidarity with others. Thus, Collins (2008, 20) argues that “no matter how motivated someone may be, if the situation does not unfold so that confrontational tension/fear is overcome, violence will not proceed.” Usefully, this allows for an understanding of violence as an emergent phenomenon that is dependent upon contingent elements of particular situations. Specific mechanisms of collective emotional entrainment can propel people beyond fear, incompetence, or bodily revulsion and toward violence. Notably, there is an interaction here between situational characteristics and the embodied condition of participants. Violence, as a situational process, emerges as a result of physiological changes that are sociologically shaped.

Less helpfully, Collins relegates other considerations such as race, gender, and class to the status of external factors or “background conditions.” He acknowledges the connection between men and violence, and notes that some background conditions can predispose people to violence, but then brackets the question of why it should be men, in particular, who find themselves in or appear to be more affected by the situational factors that condition the emergence of violence. His microinteractional approach, with its downgrading of the so-called background conditions, perversely ignores obvious historical and contemporary links between men, masculinity, and violence. If there “is a palpable barrier to violent confrontation” that lies in “one’s physiological hard-wiring” (2008, 80), then why is one type of human beings able to overcome that barrier apparently with more ease? I suggest that there are resources available within Collins’s own theory that would allow us to begin to answer the question of why men find it easier to overcome their natural, embodied propensity toward solidarity rather than violence. By following such leads, we may begin to understand how nature may become a dominated subject of hegemonic masculinity.

One of Collins’s key claims is that emotional energy is central to social action. The main mechanism here is what he (2004, 42) calls “emotional entrainment,” which refers to recurrent bodily patterns that become enmeshed during successful interaction rituals. Collins argues that successful interaction rituals are those through which human nervous systems become mutually attuned as people come to mimic one another’s bodily rhythms. Violence, on the other hand, “battens on confrontational tension/fear as one side appropriates the emotional rhythm as dominator and the other gets caught in it as victim” (2008, 19). Processes of rhythmic bodily entrainment can sometimes ensue quite noticeably, but often occur below the level of consciousness, taking place in bodies rather than minds. Although Collins describes his interaction ritual theory as a social psychology, this emphasis on embodied reactions points toward a new materialist perspective in which bodies interact with one another not merely emotionally, as Collins characterizes it, but also at a nonconscious level of sensation or affect. Unlike new materialist theories, however, Collins appears to take for granted that bodily affects and emotions follow a natural chain of linear causality that subtends the interactions and feedback between the physiological and the social. Yet, if we restore a degree of indeterminacy and openness to the natural forces that compose human bodies within socionatural ecosystems then things start to look different. Rather than undifferentiated presocial bodies that are “hard wired” for particular behaviors, the biological patterns or predispositions of bodies become factors to be explained within a given situation. This is where hegemonic masculinities (and femininities) enter the picture.

Collins usefully describes agency as “the energy appearing in human bodies and emotions and as intensity and focus of human consciousness” (2004, 6). From a new materialist perspective, this poses the question of how the energy that flows through bodies is delimited into particular patterned forms. Collins himself alludes to this issue in claiming that in situations of potential violence “the fundamental tension is not fear of an external object; it is the struggle of opposing action tendencies within oneself” (2008, 82). I suggest that this is precisely where masculinity plays a role. If masculinities are technologies of embodiment oriented toward the control of nature, then they function to reduce the complexity of embodied responses to a situation and sometimes to channel incipient potentials for action into forms of violence. If nature, as Grosz (2010) would have it, is subject to patterning and habit, then hegemonic masculinities can in a sense govern embodied nature in such a way that it becomes complicit in its own domination (and in the domination of others). Nature, or matter in the form of men’s bodies, becomes complicit in the enactment of a violence that simultaneously delimits the affective potentialities and responses of those bodies through which it manifests. This allows us to envision how hegemony and violence may coexist.

Although I do not have the space here to explore this process in depth, we can briefly turn to Bourdieu’s (1990) concept of habitus as a way of approaching the embodied existence of hegemonic masculinity. As a mode of “embodied history,” habitus refers to the unconscious patterning of bodily energies and capacities in a way that is oriented toward the smooth reproduction of domination. Indeed, despite the limitations of its structuralist underpinnings, Bourdieu’s (2001) Masculine Domination can be read as an account of how hegemonic masculinities colonize bodies and make nature complicit in the reproduction of gendered inequalities. In a crucial passage, Bourdieu writes,

The masculinization of the male body and the feminization of the female body, immense and in a sense interminable tasks which, perhaps now more than ever, always demand a considerable expenditure of time and effort, induce a somatization of the relation of domination, which is thus naturalized. It is through the training of the body that the most fundamental dispositions are imposed, those which make a person both inclined and able to enter into the social games most favourable to the development of manliness. (2001, 55–56)

Conclusion

This article has argued that masculinity studies scholars may profitably draw upon new materialist theories in developing stronger links with contemporary approaches in feminist theory. This is not to suggest that such a project would be without its challenges or that the work of Grosz or any other theorist contains all the answers. There are different varieties of new materialist theories and no agreement among feminist theorists concerning the merits of any particular version or, indeed, of the approach of new materialism itself. Influential critics such as Ahmed (2008) have questioned whether feminist new materialism overstates the novelty of its break with social constructionist approaches and neglects other feminist work in relation to biology and science. This is a valid point in relation to some articulations of feminism and new materialism, and it provides a useful cautionary note. At the same time, however (and as Davis [2009] points out in her response to Ahmed), what is crucially at issue is the way in which matter or materiality is conceived, not simply whether it is addressed. Similarly, if I am suggesting a “return to nature” here, this is not to claim that nature or bodies have been absent from CSMM scholarship, but it is to suggest that new materialist theories may offer a productive way of engaging with issues that have often been obscured by assumptions about what is social and what is not.

Another important question related to new materialisms concerns the viability of borrowing concepts from the natural sciences and of their translation into the social sciences and humanities. Such practices are characteristic of much new materialist theorizing and have been criticized in terms of both misunderstanding scientific concepts and of their inappropriate use (Papoulias and Callard 2010). In this regard, I think it is important to recognize and to build upon existing approaches within the social sciences and humanities that are conducive to new materialist theorizing, rather than simply importing scientific concepts. Urry’s (2005b) work is exemplary here in its identification of a nascent form of complexity analysis in Marx’s historical materialism. Such an approach also counters the criticism that new materialisms privilege scientific knowledge and downgrade the contribution of social and cultural theories.

As I have explained in more detail elsewhere (Garlick 2016), I believe that we may draw on the tradition of critical social theory in combination with the language of complexity theory to say that a hegemonic masculinity is an “attractor,” that is, a position within a web of symbolic meanings, around which material patterns of gendered behavior (i.e., embodied masculinities and femininities) are organized. Hegemonic masculinities serve to regulate and pattern complex systems by offering the promise of a position from which nature and the world can either be controlled or is under control. They generate order and relative stability by reducing complexity, thereby providing particular practical technologies of masculinity with symbolic legitimacy, ontological security, and enough direction to prevent them from dissolving into a never-ending proliferation of masculinities. From this perspective, nature, or the matter of bodies, is repositioned at the center of gender relations.

The potential of new materialism to foster a fruitful new avenue in the relationship between CSMM and feminist theory is enhanced by the already strong materialist orientation that characterize both of these fields. It is a matter of reorienting our understanding of the material dimension of life and of its relationship with culture or the discursive elements of sociality. In so doing, we can also potentially foster greater connection with forms of ecological feminism and Indigenous feminisms. Again, this turn to nature is not entirely new, and there is important work within CSMM that is already pushing the field toward “material-discursive” perspectives (Hearn 2014, 2015; Messerschmidt 2016) as well as other work in feminist theory that seeks to reimagine sociopolitical embodiment in terms of “social flesh” (Beasley and Bacchi 2007). As Hearn (2014, 7) notes, “I see a key challenge as talking about, analyzing, recognizing the embodied nature of knowledge, materiality, and discourse at the same time, even if this is often very difficult.” There is no doubt that this is a difficult undertaking; it perhaps requires new concepts and a new way of thinking about the nature of materiality especially. This article has suggested that new materialist feminisms may have something to offer to this project.