Proceedings of The 6th Global Conference on Women’s Studies
Year: 2024
DOI:
[PDF]
Masculinity: foundational elements, performativity, and power relations. An analysis from the studies of Raewyn Connell and Judith Butler to counter male hegemony
Alberto Grandi
ABSTRACT:
Feminist considerations have led to rethinking many aspects of our contemporaneity, such as the concept of gender and power relations. In the field of gender studies, it’s becoming central to reflect on masculinity; the latter being ‘invisibilised’ from the beginning, developing hegemonic practices. In Western civilisation, in fact, the man is the archetype, thus making his supremacy part of the natural order of things; in an inevitable biologism that defines power relations and nails down pre-established categories. A being-nailed in the Levinasian sense, thus an adherence between the accord of voices (Stimme) and being, which produces ‘category-beings’ in which the pre-delineated social identity is hidden in a condition of ‘nature’. It’s precisely this naturalness, discursively produced and performed, that has made man universal, therefore without the need to think – and think himself – in terms of gender. As a result, man has convinced himself that he’s not influenced by his own masculinity and can speak for all of humanity, becoming the logos through which he declines the rest. Declinations that have produced rigid and hierarchical categories that precede and define each person, prescribing “proper” ways, rhetorically assumed as the “human nature” of being man or woman. In this process, different power relations have developed, generating forms of toxic masculinity that daily reiterate a hegemonic and sexist social model. The purpose of this analysis will be to bring the concept of masculinity, and the consequent hegemonic structures, into the field of philosophical discussion, with the aim of releasing being from the socio-cultural categories, which historical-performative praxis nails to every body; counteracting the unequal power relations.
keywords: language – male – power – performativity – toxic masculinity