David Buchbinder’s insightful new book, Masculinities and Identities, seeks to articulate and explore what he calls the current crisis for masculinity, brought about by (or at least particularly evident in the face of) some of the new feminist positions. Masculinity, argues Buchbinder, is not unitary and universal but plural, fragmented, diffuse and partial:

... masculinity’s pervasive tyranny over both men and women ... masks an uncertainty felt by many men but which the model itself dictates should not be expressed ... For men within patriarchy ... the ‘Other’ is not only women but also other men.

It seems to me that for all its plurality feminism is ideologically unified in a way that the fractured male speaking position aren’t.

Masculinities and Identities arises out of a final-year undergraduate class Buchbinder has taught (to increasing numbers) and follows on from his very readable Contemporary Literary Theory and the Reading of Poetry. Buchbinder’s aim is to explore:

... some of the conditions and requirements imposed culturally on men and how there produce ‘masculinity’, ... to challenge a number of assumptions about men ... [to contribute] to the growing impetus among men to break the silence in which their emotions and feelings as well as their anxieties and hopes have traditionally been cocooned.

Buchbinder’s Introduction sets up a context in which he explores the construction of masculinity (in a conceptual and social sense), work, war and the women’s and gay rights movement. He rejects essentialist for constructivist approaches and invokes studies deconstructing the binary relationship between sex and gender. Balanced and readable, Buchbinder’s book is sensitive to the implications of both methodology and the different reading factions addressed.

Chapter two offers several readings of Bartok’s opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (including a radical interpretation of the final chamber scene) and Angela Carter’s version of it as a way of exploring an ‘allegory of the structure of the masculine’. In this chapter men’s relationship to women is explored, arguing that ‘though men may have been born male, they do not ... in our patriarchal society, automatically possess equal power, any more than all the men in traditional patriarchies do.’ Patriarchy therefore ‘generates a paradoxical condition of existence for men’ in that ‘though women might confirm their masculinity, it is other men [all of whom are rivals] who confer it upon them’.

Australian mateship in reality offers no ‘haven of refuge from the otherwise highly rivalrous nature of men’s relation with other men ... The condition of many men, therefore, is lonely, traversed by tension, conflict, and confusion.’

Chapter 3 discusses ‘marginal masculinities, specifically transvestism and homosexuality’, interwoven with an analysis of Tootsie and Some Like it Hot. Buchbinder sees the latter as subversive to ‘the homophobia implied in the culture’s model of masculinity’.

The final chapter uses a discussion of the infamous magazine photograph of the naked rugby player tho.t led to a court case to examine phallocentrism, before imaginining a possible masculinity of the future:

... how much more demeaning must it have been to suffer prolonged debate in court about whether a mere shadowing in the photograph might or might not have been one’s penis, and whether the shadow was so placed anatomically as to constitute the probability that it was one’s penis! If the individual penis can indeed never equal the imaginary phallus, for a man to hear learned counsel and testifying witnesses contesting the actual existence of his penis must be extremely belittling, of both his ego and his sense of phallic worth.

In pointing to the ‘fragile, even treacherous foundations of masculinity’ Buchbinder not only challenges the essentialist links between actual bodies and gendered roles, but provides new ways of reading some key cultural texts and points up possible ways forward to a new masculinity (a ‘non-masculine yet male subject’).

This is a timely, sensible and sensitive book, the latest volume in the ‘Interpretations’ series under the general editorship of Ken Ruthven.