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- Author: Terrell Carver x
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At present Marx's record on these issues - sex and gender - looks much the same as that of any other social theorist. Neither sex nor gender is an especially important analytical category in his scheme of things, in theoretical works or in political activities. This chapter looks at Marx's scattered and inconclusive comments on sexual difference and gender equality in civilised but class-divided societies and putatively in communist societies. Marx's main complaint about the 'German ideologists' was that they organised a bogus history of humanity, purportedly derived from 'concepts'. Those concepts, so Marx argued, merely tracked their conventional and confused predilections and thus fogged any possibility of a truly radical understanding of contemporary society. Given his revolutionary views on social relations, it seems surprising that the 'categories of sex and sexuality' did not occupy Marx, who stuck firmly to the 'economic categories' in his critique.
This chapter explores masculinities in Machiavelli, not to reinforce a binary line of difference over and against the feminine, but rather to do something different. It observes that he is indeed the ultra-theorist of the alpha-male but focuses instead on his use of subordinated or 'failed' masculinities. These are deployed to make his conception of virtu visible, intelligible and vivid. This has the effect of making 'man' a complex category, in order to view more directly the political structures within 'men's world'. Modern liberal readings of Machiavelli drive towards the generalisation of a republican ideal of citizenship, thus erasing or limiting what there is to be learned about men, as differently masculine, in his writings. Reinforcing modern-day sociology of masculinities, Machiavelli's analysis argues that access to, and prowess in, sporting and military activities are crucial to the establishment of hierarchical masculinities of men over men.
Aristotle is known as the founder of political science, the proto-scientific 'observer' who noted what he saw, collected his evidence, made his judgements and contributed to knowledge. This chapter examines the authorial search in The Politics for fixed points of certainty. These are read as tropes making up a concept of nature such that social distinctions (famously, the male citizen elite, women, barbarians and slaves) can then be read out again as natural. This results in a gender hierarchy in the wide sense (race/ethnicity, class, culture and sex) that establishes a hegemonic masculinity. Historically this Aristotelian 'ideal' has been widely admired and imitated as quintessentially 'Athenian' and 'Greek'. Femaleness, for Aristotle, functions as a point where human difference and hierarchy are at their clearest, whereas other boundaries and distinctions that he wishes to establish among males require recourse to animal and machine metaphors to make them visible to 'observation'.
The gender lens works differently for men and things masculine than it does for women and things feminine. While masculinism and gender inequality works to subordinate women as such, it is crucial for the way this works that a further hierarchy among men is defined, described, naturalised and defended. The chapters in this book have presented some evidence for this, and have analysed some of the ways in which this works. In sum, the obvious conclusion is that political theory is already about men, but the chapters have shown that the masculinised dynamics of politics depend on concepts of 'man' that are inflected with other factors. These vary from an attribute of supposed 'de-genderedness' to markers of race/ethnicity, class, sexuality and culture that are intriguingly deployed. The emphasis on metaphor throughout has been crucial to utilising the gender lens and to drawing out the gender politics in each text.