Masculinity

Definition

Masculinity, in the wiki's sources, is not an attribute of men but a spatially produced and policed performance. Lee Edelman's formulation is the most radical: masculinity is "the cultural compaction of masculinity into a logic of visual relations" (p. 108) — a subject-position solicited and certified by built space. Its law is heterosexual: "the law that reads the male body, in its potential to be seized, overwhelmed, by erotic stimuli not provoked by the 'proper' object (a woman) or centered in the 'proper' place (the genitals), as requiring consignment to a psychic space analogous to a closet" (p. 104). The masculine subject is therefore constitutively on guard: "the straight male body becomes a closet itself," and its inhabitant must "performatively shelter the structural flaw that opens his body… to the various psychic vicissitudes able to generate illicit desires" (p. 104). Masculinity's performance has a signature: "a vigilant nonchalance that responds to the disciplinary pressure that the men's room exerts upon visual relations" (p. 105) — display that must not look like display, looking that must not be caught looking. The concept mirrors and completes the wiki's gender cluster: where gender-and-the-interior tracks the identification of women with the domestic and the decorative, masculinity names the unmarked term's own apparatus — the spaces (the dining room, the club, the men's room) in which male identity is staged, its codes (solidity, authenticity, the "natural finish") and its policing made architectural.

Key Thinkers

• Lee Edelman — masculinity as solicited performance: the law of heterosexual masculinity; the body as closet; "vigilant nonchalance" as the gender's built signature (1996/2006).
• William W. Braham — the palette register: achromatic surfaces and natural materials "deemed masculine by virtue of their authenticity (or are they authentic by virtue of their masculinity?)" — masculinity as the unmarked pole of the natural/applied opposition (1999/2006).
• Charles L. Eastlake — the furnishing register: the masculine-coded downstairs (oak, solidity, gloom) against the feminine upstairs — gender as furniture grammar (1868/2006).
• Diana Fuss & Joel Sanders — the Stud frame's origin case: Freud's self-reflection as masculine self-vision — the bust, the decapitated head, the "dread" of self-reflection issuing "from a fear of castration," the "optical erection" purchased by its price (1996/2006). See mirror, castration-anxiety.
• (Referenced, not paged — see log: R. W. Connell's hegemonic masculinity; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's homosocial triangulation. Joel Sanders, editor of Stud: Architectures of Masculinity (1996) and co-author of the Berggasse essay, is now paged at Fuss & Sanders.)

Related Concepts

• The Men's Room — masculinity's built apparatus: the room whose design "has palpable designs on men; it aspires… to design them."
• Homosocial Space — the audience-form: "the only public, the male one, whose witness can matter."
• The Closet — masculinity's container: the straight male body "as container and thing contained; as being and needing a closet."
• The Gaze — masculinity's visual regime: "how their looking may be looked upon in turn"; the penis as "the visible gaze of the symbolic."
• Gender and the Interior — the cluster masculinity completes: the feminine-coded interior's unmarked counterpart, and the professional split (architecture masculine, decoration feminine) both sides of.
• Gendered Space — the ordering system that assigns masculinity its spaces (the public, the solid, the "natural") and polices its boundaries.
• Natural Finishes — the palette register of masculine coding: the "authentic" achromatic surface against the applied, feminine, decorative.
• Separate Spheres — the spatial doctrine that distributes masculinity to the public interior and solidity to the downstairs room.
• Privacy — masculinity's "cultural shelter": the closet-form privacy that protects the subject only while he shelters his own "structural flaw."
• The Dining Room — the domestic register: the "solid, gloomy" masculine room of the Victorian furnishing code.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Men's Room (Edelman 1996/2006) — the concept's definitional source: the law of heterosexual masculinity and the body-as-closet (p. 104); the men's room "marks a critical stage both for and in the solicitation of masculine subjectivity" (p. 104); "vigilant nonchalance" (p. 105); the penis as "the visible gaze of the symbolic" (p. 106); "ground zero, in the cultural compaction of masculinity into a logic of visual relations" (p. 108).
• A Wall of Books (Braham 1999/2006) — the palette and profession register: achromatic/natural finishes "deemed masculine by virtue of their authenticity"; interior design's activities "implicitly assumed to be feminine"; Emily Post's "Room for a Man."
• The Dining Room (Eastlake 1868/2006) — the furnishing register: the dining room's "solid, gloomy, and often cumbersome" masculine code against the drawing room's feminine gold-and-walnut.
• Bodies and Mirrors (Colley 1999/2006) — the childhood register: male writers remembering habitation of the feminine-coded domestic interior — the permeable child's body against the masculine public Ruskin of "prospect."
• Berggasse 19: Inside Freud's Office (Fuss & Sanders 1996/2006) — the Stud anthology's psychoanalytic register of masculine self-vision, staged in the inventor's own study: Freud's mirror reflection as "the unmistakable impression of a bust – head and shoulders severed from the body… His head decapitated by the frame of the mirror, Freud is visually identified with one of his own classical sculptures, transformed into a statuary fragment" (p. 118) — read through Schreber's transvestic mirror-scene; the clinical "dread of self-reflection" that "appears to issue from a fear of castration" (p. 120); and the culminating gender economy — "the subject's 'optical erection' could only be achieved at the price of its castration, its instantaneous, fatal transformation into a broken relic" (p. 120). Masculinity here is a regime of looking at oneself that petrifies: the male gaze reflected back as Medusa's shield. See mirror, castration-anxiety, gaze.

Open Questions

• Edelman's masculinity is policed from within (every patron's own eye); Braham's is marked by materials (the "authentic" natural finish). Are these the same mechanism — the unmarked pole maintained by what it excludes — or two independent gendering systems (visual vs. material)?
• The wiki's gender cluster has rich sources on the feminine-coded interior; is masculinity better theorized through its rooms (the study, the club, the washroom) or through its finishes (the "natural") — and which register does interior design practice actually manipulate?
• If masculinity requires "a psychic space analogous to a closet," does the designed environment ever give masculinity that closet — and what would a design that refuses to build the closet look like?