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Political theory rests on an established canon of 'great texts' by 'great authors', from which contemporary political concepts derive their genealogical origins and from which contemporary political theorists (and politicians, sometimes) draw their argumentative ammunition. Traditionally all these great authors have been male. This book focuses on how male theorists present men in political theory as men. It builds on feminist re-readings of the traditional canon of male writers by turning the 'gender lens' onto the representation of men in these widely studied texts. The book explains the distinction between 'man' as an apparently de-gendered 'individual' or 'citizen', and 'man' as an overtly gendered being in human society. Both those representations of 'man' are crucial to a clearer understanding of the operation of gender as a power structure of difference and domination. The book traces out the foundational discourses of political theory that have been instrumental in producing the extensive political exclusion of women from public life and full citizenship. It is the first to use the 'men's studies' and 'masculinities' literatures in rethinking the political problems that students and specialists in political theory must encounter: consent, obligation, equality, legitimacy, participation and life-cycle. It reexamines the historical materials from which present-day concepts of citizenship, individuality, identity, subjectivity, normativity and legitimacy arise. The book draws on newly theorised concepts of dominant and subordinate masculinities that are co-defined with concepts of race/ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, nationality, language-use and similar markers of 'difference' and subordination.
Like all concepts in political theory, gender has a history. This chapter includes three theories of gender: behavioural theories, power theories and performative theories. Concepts of sex and sexuality are linked to behaviour via theories of gender. Political theorists in the malestream canon have certainly noticed sex, taking sex as the two 'opposite' sexes, male and female, and considering them reproductively. Sexual behaviour became a subject of study in the fields known as psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology and anthropology and a concept was needed to indicate that biological sex itself did not produce uniform patterns of behaviour in individuals. Within the social science of human sexology, masculine women and feminine men were defined conceptually, located, observed, recorded and studied. Gender came to stand for the behavioural aspects of sex and sexuality, whether in correct correspondence with 'reproductive biology' or in deviance from it in diverse but problematic ways.
Any reader of The Republic is confronted with formidable challenges. While there is a biographical tradition about Plato, and about his mentor and teacher Socrates, the attribution of an authorial voice to Plato in the text itself is made unusually tiresome by the text itself. Exploring the ways that men and masculinities are represented in The Republic is a way of tracing out gender in a representation of social relationships. The opening of The Republic not only introduces all the characters and their masculinised world but also reaches the highest point of physical drama in the work. Certainly the 'problem' of gender-relations as they bear on women is the subject of a dramaturgical build-up in The Republic. Socrates outlines the three-class society, focusing on the education of the 'guardians', some with the military power necessary for policing and security, and some with philosophical skills necessary for ruling and making judgements.
This book focuses on how male theorists present men in political theory as men. It builds on feminist re-readings of the traditional canon of male writers by turning the 'gender lens' onto the representation of men in these widely studied texts. The book explains the distinction between 'man' as an apparently de-gendered 'individual' or 'citizen', and 'man' as an overtly gendered being in human society. Both those representations of 'man' are crucial to a clearer understanding of the operation of gender as a power structure of difference and domination. The book uses the 'men's studies' and 'masculinities' literatures in rethinking the political problems that students and specialists in political theory must encounter: consent, obligation, equality, legitimacy, participation and life-cycle. It draws on newly theorised concepts of dominant and subordinate masculinities that are co-defined with concepts of race/ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, nationality, language-use and similar markers of 'difference' and subordination.
This chapter explores the gospel accounts, reviewing well-established but often disregarded hermeneutic difficulties concerned with authorship, narration and historicity. Taking the narratives as a set of ambiguous but dramatic scenes and encounters, it focus on the reactions that other characters in the set pieces have to Jesus, and his reactions to them. This exposes the extreme novelty and disturbing quality that Jesus' teachings have on his interlocutors, variously, according to who they are and what (else) they want. It also reveals that his teaching and example recommend and perform an inverted masculinity that runs quite opposite to any recognisable hegemonic conception, of his time or ours, without making Jesus feminine, or woman-centred as such. Jesus' gender politics is not just transgressive within himself, as a performer of a reinterpreted masculinity. The chapter argues that Jesus represents an interesting challenge in political theory, as he is so literally 'something else'.
This chapter turns to two contemporary political theorists, writing on Augustine, and putting their own answers to these questions - Jean Bethke Elshtain and William Connolly. It is a meditation, not on Augustine's political theory, but on what political theorists have made of Augustine, on what they want their theorists to be like, and on what does and does not give someone an authorial presence in our imaginations. The chapter views the surviving surfeit of autobiographical material about Augustine as a disadvantage to political theorists who generally need to conceptualise an 'author' for their readings of his texts. It is more about the way that biography is handled within the political tradition, than the political theory of Augustine himself, as we read it today. Reading Augustine for what he writes about himself as a man could make the vagaries of masculinity visible and problematic today in interesting ways.
Sovereignty itself is a concept that is politically deployed, in just the way that Hobbes intended, to create states of a certain sort, rather than merely to represent them. This chapter aligns Hobbes's materialism, his use of mechanical metaphors and his political theory with early modern conceptions of masculinity. These famously contrast the calculating, 'rational' man of commerce and government with older, less egalitarian conceptions. To explicate this, Hobbes chooses a colourful language of metaphor that apparently works against his materialist literalism, yet the chapter argue that his consistent materialism is so bizarre that these outlandish tropes are required to express it. Ultimately Hobbes outlines a dominant masculinity that is mechanistic at the level of individual reasoning and behaviour, at the level of collective action and at an ontological level.
This chapter uses the gender lens to explore narratives in Locke's Two Treatises of Government that have become foundational for the documents and practices of liberal democracy. It reviews what has previously been conceptualised in commentary as the family and household, parental and filial obligations, the 'sexual contract', patriarchy, the public/private 'split' and gender-neutral concepts of 'man'. The overtly gendered narrative about men that occurs in Locke's Two Treatises 'genders' power-relations in political society. The chapter draws out what he has to say about rulership, householdership, parenthood and conjugal relations by showing that there are effectively three kinds of dominant masculinities at issue. One is related to the rational/bureaucratic masculinity of modern commerce, which he endorsed, and another is related to concepts of masculine tenderness and solicitude. The third is related to the warrior mode of Filmerian absolutism, conquest and tyranny, to which he was deeply opposed.
Rousseau is probably the most gender-conscious of political theorists, and the most conscious of sexual difference and sexuality. This chapter examines some of Rousseau's political theory for what it has to say about 'man', that is 'public man'. It explores him as the political theorist with the most extreme view of gender rooted in sexual difference between men and women, namely that this is both physical/natural and yet secured in society through education and politics. The chapter analyses a film that crosses the final frontier of sexual difference: male pregnancy and childbirth. It argues that Rousseau is just as guilty as other state-of-nature theorists in projecting 'civilised norms' onto the human animal. Rousseau's vision of 'man' in his earliest state is profoundly andromorphic, masculinised, and homosocial, because it expresses and reinforces persistent hunter/warrior fantasies about men that are generative of, and deployed in, contemporary armed conflict.
Engels adapted Marx's concept of 'material' production to include human reproduction, and attempted to build on this revision an apparatus of twin-track 'determination' in history, involving sex-oppression, as well as class-oppression. This chapter notes the contrast between Marx and Engels, in terms of involvement with gender issues. Engels's The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State famously outlines a history of female oppression and gestures at gender-liberation under socialism. Yet in focusing on women in his narrative, Engels effectively disguises the role he assigns to men, that of historical agency rooted in a naturalised and dominant masculinity that is singular and universal. Engels's assumption about civilised monogamy was that it arose out of the concentration of wealth in the hands on one person - a man - and out of his desire to bequeath this wealth to his own children exclusively.