Hegemonic Masculinity and Globalization: ‘Transnational Business Masculinities’ and Beyond

In recent years masculinity studies writers, in particular R. W. Connell, have focused on the relationship between globalization and ‘hegemonic’ forms of masculinity. This paper provides an assessment of this scholarship and argues that whilst Connell and others have usefully identified the gendered nature of globalization, masculinity scholars have also provided a somewhat limiting account of the global hegemonic role of a monolithic top-down ‘transnational business masculinity’. By contrast, we suggest a demassification of this notion of hegemonic masculinity. Such a demassification enables the opening up of a dialogue between masculinity studies and feminist and other critical globalization scholars, allowing for a more nuanced analysis that can attend to both the unevenness of globalization in different settings and more detailed awareness of interactions between global and local/cultural/state imperatives. Our aim here is to move away from conceptualizations of globalization and hegemonic masculinity that are exceptionally top-down towards an analysis of the contested and shifting nature of gender identity at the global as well as the local level, to highlight the ways in which different hegemonic masculinities are negotiated, and even resisted. We argue that by understanding ‘transnational business masculinity’ as a discursive ideal that legitimates the workings of global capitalism, there is scope for a greater level of engagement between critical globalization scholarship and gender studies. This might also open the door to an account of globalization that entails more detailed reference to women and femininities.

En años recientes, los escritores sobre Los Estudios de la Masculinidad, y en particular R.W. Connell, se han enfocado en la relación entre la globalización y las formas ‘hegemónicas’ de la masculinidad. Este artículo proporciona una evaluación de esta beca y sostiene que mientras Connell y otros han identificado de manera útil la naturaleza del género de la globalización, los académicos sobre la masculinidad también suministraron un reporte de cierta manera limitado, sobre el rol hegemónico global monolítico del más alto al más bajo, de ‘una masculinidad en los negocios transnacionales’. Por el contrario, nosotros sugerimos una desmasificación de esta noción de masculinidad hegemónica. Tal desmasificación hace posible la apertura de un diálogo entre Los Estudios de la Masculinidad y de Feministas y otros académicos críticos de la globalización, permitiendo un análisis más matizado que puede acudir tanto a la disparidad de la globalización en diferentes escenarios como a una mayor conciencia detallada sobre las interacciones entre los imperativos locales/culturales/estatales. Nuestra meta es separarnos de las conceptualizaciones de la globalización y de la masculinidad hegemónica que son excepcionalmente jerárquicas hacia un análisis de los controvertidos y trasladar la naturaleza de la identidad del género tanto a nivel global como al local, para resaltar las formas como las masculinidades hegemónicas diferentes han negociado, e incluso resistido. Sostenemos que al entender ‘la masculinidad en los negocios transnacionales’ como un ideal discursivo que legitimiza el funcionamiento del capitalismo global, existe un propósito para un nivel mayor de participación entre la investigación crítica de la globalización y los estudios del género. Esto también puede abrir la puerta a un informe de globalización que conlleve una referencia más detallada de mujeres y feminidades.

     

Managing ‘American Islam’

Focusing on the case of Islam in post-9/11 United States, this article highlights the particularity of how US secularism is enacted by the state. In much sociological theory, the United States has been understood to be a neutral and non-interfering state with regard to religion, thereby fostering a pluralist religious context of free consumer choice. Some Muslim reformists have argued that this context makes the US highly fertile ground upon which to reform Islam and to improve women's status in Islam. This article argues that, in the context of the US-led ‘war on terror’, the government has drawn on and amplified this discourse in the service of producing a representation of the US as tolerant, while also seeking to promote a concept of ‘true’ Islam and produce patriotic Muslim citizens. At the center of this discourse are contested portrayals of Muslim women as symbolic of a modern and liberated Islam that is uniquely ‘American’ and opposed to other presumably oppressive Islams. While this context may in fact promote the reform of Islam, it does so with state involvement rather than as a result of state neutrality.     

‘A Floating Population’: The Niagara Corridor and Canadian/American Radicalism in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

In both Canada and the US, Niagara Falls was famous from early on as a tourist and honeymoon destination. With the rapid settlement of the ‘northwest’ occasioned by the building of canals and railroads, the region also became a centre of commerce, transit, and industry in the years before the Civil War. The Niagara corridor held an important position on the Underground Railroad, as fugitive slaves moved up into Canada (and back). After the failed uprising of 1837, Canadian revolutionaries fled to safety in Rochester, Buffalo, and other cities south of the border. The ‘burnt over’ region of western New York spawned a variety of radical utopian communities and the first Women’s Rights convention was held in Seneca Falls in 1848. Drawing on a variety of texts, testimonials, and documents, and taking a transnational approach, ‘A Floating Population’ contends that the Niagara region was a matrix of political radicalism as flows and exchanges of people, capital, and radical ideas through and across the border contributed to an unprecedented ferment of utopian, progressive, and radical forms of thought and social experimentation. The essay considers the uniquely radical republican culture situated in the border region of the Niagara corridor, a crossroads traversed by all manner of militant insurrectionists, radicals, abolitionists, feminists, journalists, fugitives, immigrants, homesteaders, itinerant labourers and tramps, Native Americans, mystics, and tourists.     

‘Race War’: Black American GIs and West Indians in Britain During The Second World War

During the Second World War some three million American service personnel came to the British Isles. Among them were more than 130,000 African-Americans who were segregated and subjected to the discrimination that crossed the Atlantic with their white countrymen. However, while many of the British hosts often welcomed the African-American GIs, the American-style Jim Crow was not welcomed. But while it has often seemed that the wartime British were free of race prejudice, treatment of troops and workers from the colonies, particularly the West Indies, suggest that this was not so. This article looks at the response to black GIs and West Indians in order to demonstrate that there was in fact greater continuity between British wartime and post-war race relations than has often appeared to be the case.     

Beyond Employment and Income: The Association Between Young Adults’ Finances and Marital Timing

This study tested an extension of the theory of marital timing (Oppenheimer, Am J Sociol 94:563–591, 1988) by assessing whether visible and less visible financial assets and debt mediated the relationship between employment and the likelihood of marriage. We conducted these prospective, longitudinal analyses using a sample of 1,522 never-married young adults from the National Survey of Families and Households. For participants who were not cohabiting at Wave 1, financial issues such as car values predicted marriage but did not mediate the relationship between work hours, occupational prestige, and the likelihood of marriage. For cohabiting participants, employment factors were the strongest predictor of marriage.     

Beyond ‘developmentalism’: A relational and embodied approach to young children's development

This article begins by discussing ‘developmentalism’, one of the key debates that has characterised the current theoretical impasse in the development of childhood studies. I use Norbert Elias's concept of the relation between love and learning as a foundation to develop the way in which young children's development is a non-linear, temporal and embodied process. I argue that we need to develop a relational approach that moves beyond some of the binary divisions between ‘nature’ and ‘biology’, drawing on concepts from particular theoretical traditions that have been under-utilised, particularly the relational school of psychoanalysis and the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.     

The ‘compliant’, the ‘pacified’ and the ‘rebel’: experiences with Swiss disability insurance

Switzerland’s social policies in the field of disability have been significantly reshaped over the last two decades by reducing the number of allowances awarded and by increasing the recourse to vocational rehabilitation measures. What stances do individuals who experience the implementation of these policies adopt? What kind of tests are they subjected to? How can we explain the posture they adopt – be it ‘compliant’, ‘pacified’ or ‘rebellious’ – when facing the (re)assignations of their identity and professional status? Drawing on interviews conducted with individuals who have recently been involved in programmes set up by Swiss disability insurance, we highlight their uncertainties and concerns relating to their place in society, as well as their reactions to disability insurance’s interventions.     

‘The invisible enemy’: disability,loneliness and isolation

Abstract

The aim of this article is to quantitatively explore the relationship between disability, emotional loneliness and social isolation. The data analysis presents a number of statistically significant findings which illustrate that disabled people (N?=?250) were at increased risk of experiencing emotional loneliness and social isolation compared with the nondisabled group (N?=?355). This study identifies a number of disabling barriers which result in this overrepresentation of disabled people. The study aims to move away from a pathological explanation of linking loneliness and social isolation to disability, in order to explain this occurrence from a barrier-based approach.     

‘The performative surprise’: parody,documentary and critique

Can parody help us to ‘re‐imagine’ the organizations and institutions we live with (Du Gay 2007 Du Gay, Paul. 2007. Organizing identity: Persons and organizations after theory, London: Sage.  [Google Scholar], 13)? Or, like many forms of critique, does parody risk being incorporated: becoming part of the power it aims to make fun of? In this paper, drawing on Judith Butler’s work, I argue that certain circumstances enable parody to destabilize hegemonic, taken‐for‐granted institutions (Butler 1990 Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity, London: Routledge.  [Google Scholar]). I explore these ideas through a reading of the Yes Men documentary (Tartan Video 2005 Yes Men. 2005. “Directed by Chris Smith, Dan Ollman and Sarah Price”. Tartan Video.  [Google Scholar]). This film features a series of humorous representations of the World Trade Organization (WTO). I show how these act to denaturalize and effectively critique this dominant force in global trade. This paper discusses the value of parody for helping us to re‐think and re‐make particular institutions and organizations. In doing so, I point to the importance of creating a spectacle in which parody can travel beyond its immediate location, so that it can reach ever newer audiences with its ‘performative surprise’ (Butler 1990 Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity, London: Routledge.  [Google Scholar], xxvi). I suggest that the rise of the Internet and inexpensive documentary techniques offer interesting new ways for achieving this.     

‘Between Two Evils,I Refuse To Choose The Lesser’

For French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the issue of the agency of intellectuals was paramount. Bourdieu maintained that intellectuals have a fearsome form of social responsibility. Having witnessed the ‘institutional misuse of authority’ common among academics, the ‘canonized stupidity’ that was part and parcel of the educational system, the faddishness of intellectual trends and the ‘cult of “transgression”‘ that underwrote this faddishness, Bourdieu crafted an alternative position and practice that were to bear fruit in the context of the fight against neo-liberalism during the last two decades of the twentieth century. This essay provides an examination of Bourdieu's theory of the gap between theory and practice, how intellectuals shape and are influenced by this gap and what can and should be done to challenge it.     

Philosophy of Communication and Umberto Eco’s Infinity of Lists: The Interplay of the Poetic and Pragmatic

This article conceptualizes the importance of Umberto Eco’s understanding of lists for philosophy of communication. Philosophy of communication is understood as the necessary and insightful interplay of the poetic and pragmatic through which meaning emerges. In The Infinity of Lists, Eco offers an essay-length interpretation of lists presented alongside a collection of art and literature that represent his theoretical work in action. Eco articulates lists as a means for cultural order and form in the attempt to convey what is otherwise beyond articulation. Although philosophers of communication have recognized the importance of Eco’s philosophical and semiotic project for human communication, his work on lists has received little attention within and outside of the field of communication. This article assumes that lists are significant to Eco’s project and to philosophy of communication, situated in the interplay of the poetic and the pragmatic.     

‘Beyond the Scope of the Possible’: Art,Photography and Organisational Abjection

This paper explores the impacts Wal‐Mart's operations have on community culture. However, through the application of the psychodynamics of mirroring and a thorough version of dialectical analysis, we can see that community culture turns on itself to mirror what Wal‐Mart wants that culture to be. As such, community culture has little or no power or even desire to counter Wal‐Mart's negative affects and the result is an unfinished dialectic. The unfinished dialectic parallels the rudimentary concept of dialectics as being only thesis, anti‐thesis and synthesis, where synthesis is assumed to be, generally, a positive outcome, for everyone involved. As the investigation into Wal‐Mart continues, we see that there are negative outcomes on community culture as well as on Wal‐Mart leadership that require negation but are not negated. With that which fulfils our desires, we allow ourselves to become enraptured by only positive images or the perceived ‘good’ of something or someone when it is too difficult to unravel ambivalence and ambiguity of the mutual causality of opposites inherent in relationships.     

‘It’s Quite Stylish’: Representations of American English and American Culture in English-Training Milieus in Delhi,India

English-training institutes seem to be ubiquitous in India, and they often index the United States through reference to ‘American accent’ training, American teachers, or simply American flags on their storefront signs. Against the broader backdrop of globalization, and through an examination of institute signs and advertisements and interviews with institute students and teachers, I show how ‘America’ is represented, produced, and consumed as a symbolic and cultural category within the cultural domain of English-training institutes.     

‘The Anarchists' World Cup’: Respectable Protest and Media Panics

In 2005 225,000 people marched through Edinburgh enjoining the G8 to ‘Make Poverty History’. The coalition's own assessment of their campaign highlighted the importance of media by focusing on the extent of media coverage. Media outlets, however, have their own agendas. Detailed analysis of newspaper coverage preceding the G8 Summit suggests a disjuncture between campaign objectives and media frames. This paper explores how far newspaper accounts of G8-related protests were ‘framed’ in terms of social movement aims, and how far in terms of anticipated violence. Our findings lead us to caution against an uncritical equation of ‘coverage’ and ‘success’, offering a more nuanced account of the interplay between social movements and media.