does end with boyhood or men continue to live with fear and anxiety throughout their lives as adults. The answer is simple and yet complex, in that psychoanalysis offers a means of understanding how the internal realm of fear and anxiety seems to interweave with the external tensions of realities as men negotiate masculine identities in the process of searching for a sense of ‘security’.
Addressing this notion of fear and anxiety, Langa (2012:50) draws on several theorists who indicate that the fear of castration does not disappear but continues to threaten to engulf the masculine subject, who continuously lives under the threat of a possible psychic disintegration. Citing Whitehead, Langa (2012:50) has shown that any fear of castration could lead to ‘masculine anxiety’, which is the fear of collapse in self-identity as a man. To this I add, that fear of castration at times might be as a result of dissatisfaction with the masculine self. In a discussion that points to the fragile nature of masculinities, Langa (2012:50) goes further in explaining why men experience pressure to display their
‘manliness’ in front of other men; through, for example, engagement in risk-taking behaviours in order to prove that they are not castrated, but still men. This is an interesting phenomenon in itself in that it demonstrates the complexities that exist as masculinities are constructed and reproduced. This study therefore seeks to explore further the contours of possible contradictions apparent in such constructions of emerging forms of masculinities among Christian men in South Africa. As I will show below, exploring changes in gender/social roles leads to such contradictions. In the subsequent section, I investigate how sex role as a category of understanding the social genderedness of a society has informed understandings of masculinities.
Donna Winslow (2010:6) observes that traditionally, sociology saw the binary division of men and women into distinct social roles but never questioned the ways that patriarchy and heterosexuality exerted social control. Viola Klein illustrates the point even more clearly:
There is a peculiar affinity between the fate of women and the origins of social science, and it is no mere co-incidence that the emancipation of women should be started at the same time as the birth of sociology (cited in Carrigan et al. 2002:101).
Research therefore indicates that Social Science as a distinctive field of study took shape during the later ninetieth century, at the height of European imperialism (see Connell et al. 2005:5). At this stage gender issues were among its main concerns, but not until after critique by feminists who then began to study the ways in which gender influenced society (see Winslow 2010). This must have led to struggles towards emancipation of women that later seemed to many social scientists as a measure of social progress (Connell et al 2005:5). At the heart of this struggle were concerns that came with sex/social roles.
The ‘male sex role” (Connell 1995:22) is a concept that dates back to the 1930s but appeared in American social science journals in the 1950’s. As an approach in gender studies, the ‘role’ theory emphasised sexual difference, gender patterning of roles for men and women within the family setting and the society, as a process of learning norms for conduct where being a man or a woman meant enacting a general set of expectations which are attached to one’s sex (see also Whitehead 2002:19). Used in explaining social behaviours as cultural norms, Connell (1995:23) has argued that roles are defined by expectations of norms, sex roles by expectations attached to biological status. From such articulation, one begins to see that masculinity and femininity can be interpreted as internalised sex roles, the product of social learning or ‘socialization.’ Social science theorists have therefore argued that this way of conceptualising gender through roles goes back to an early psychoanalysis approach which first took its shape from the social- psychological concept of the “male sex role theory” (Connell 1995; Connell 2000;
Connell 2001).
For instance, the “father absence” was one such social concern that became a focus of research then, where the home was separated from workplace as seen in the historical tendency of capitalism.
For Whitehead (2002:19-22) as a by-product of functionalism and the role theory, sex/gender role was in part a response to the impact of the social and economic transformations that took place in the Western world by then. As a process of acquiring the “appropriate” model of functionalism and codes of gender behaviour, the sex role theory was used to give some insights into, and make sense of, the changing roles of men and women and the new expressions of masculinity being acted out and ‘forced on’ men following social changes arising at the end of the second World war (Whitehead (2002).
By the mid-century the sex role paradigm had dominated Western sociological discourse on women (Connell 1995; Carrigan et al 2002) and was later termed as the concept of
‘social role.’ Carrigan et al (2002:101-102) deduce that this social gender pattern of sex- roles established structural differentiation and reproduction across generations as structural requirements of any social order whatsoever.21
Further, using notions of performance which are very crucial to sex role theory, Whitehead (2002) argues that sex role goes along with some kind of masculine essentialism that creates a belief that, in essence, successful performance (of roles) forms the basis of all gender roles and being. What stands out here in relation to representation of ideal masculinity is how culture (and religion) has essentialized certain masculine and feminine roles as divinely unquestionable. For instance, we see strains brought by the dichotomy between the private (for the feminine) and the public (for the masculine).
Such have been adopted in relation to understanding masculinities only from a performative perspective as informing the being of men.
2.2.1 Criticisms of Sex Role Theory
A thorough critique of sex/gender role theory did not begin until the mid—to late 1980s with the second-wave feminism and theorists of patriarchy who argued for a new trajectory in critical study of men (Whitehead 2002:22). Even though we no longer raise similar questions as those raised by feminists then, the tension along sex role notions for both men and women might not have changed but must have turned complex with our
21 Carrigan et al (2002:101) mention that the key figure in the developments of the functionalist sex-role theory was Talcott Parsons, who by the early 1950s wrote the classical formulation of America sex-role theory, giving it an intellectual breath and rigor it had never had.
modern contexts.
First, critiques arise on the basis of socialisation as neither uniform nor unproblematic to men. Noted by theorists of masculinity (Whitehead 2002:22; Connell et al 2005:5) the sex/gender role theory was erected on biological determinism, where ‘roles are added to biology to give us gender.’ In this way, it can be argued that in analysing the sex role theory, it is evident that the theory cannot provide an explanation for differences between women and men, especially in respect to issues of power. Further, and as Whitehead (2002:22) has highlighted, ‘gender role strain’ is equally problematic and damaging to men as they are to women. Partab (2012:19) has shown that through the lenses of the ideological dimensions of masculinities, masculine gender role socialisation is viewed as contributing to gender-related cognitive distortions for men who are overcommitted to modifying their behaviour according to masculine prescribed behaviour.
Second, biological determinism advances the notion of biological essential difference as the basis of an ‘essential identity’ to what it means to be a real man from a universal perspective. Even though traditional forms of essentialism were applied mostly in describing women, the belief that emerges as Serene Jones (2000:24-28) has detailed, is the fundamental biological difference between men and women that is seen as undergirding society. If, ‘essentialism’ and ‘universalism’ (used interchangeably by many feminist theorists) refers to any view of women’s nature that makes universal claims about women based on characteristics considered to be an inherent part of being female (Jones 2000:26); then I deduce that an essentialist approach to masculinity argues for inherent and unchanging qualities or masculine ‘essences’ for men universally, detrimental to the being of women. As Whitehead (2002:132) notes, and I concur, biological determinism reinforces an essentialist view of gender while locking female and male into a gender dichotomy that underpins inequalities.
Similar trends of gender binaries have been adopted in religious circles. These are evident through the language of ‘biological determinism’ and traditional essentialist masculine ideas that reflect the absoluteness and unchanging nature of gender and sex roles. This by itself supposes that conventional forms of masculinity are natural facts and hence,
‘divine’; and so, sex/social roles are not cultural products of socialisation. New questions
are beginning to arise with changes that are taking place currently in societies. First, how does the pressure to maintain an essentialist state of manhood impact, for instance, on Christian men in ensuring that they retain the enacted general set standards of who a real man should be? Second, if changes arose at the end of the second World war that necessitated new expressions of masculinities, what then are the changes taking place in current contemporary societies, influencing emerging masculinities? It is interesting to explore how social, political and economic transformation in South Africa, for instance are currently forcing, and informing new models of functionalism and whether such have effects on roles for men. Further, do these changes portray new expressions of masculinities?
In what follows, I turn to examine the Sexual Anatomy theory that has contributed to social scientific knowledge towards the study of masculinity, thereafter analysing its implications to constructions of masculinities.