Monsters of Men: Masculinity and the Other in Patrick Ness’s Chaos Walking Series

ABSTRACT

To date, studies of gender issues in young adult dystopian novels have been dominated by a focus on constructions of female subjectivity, girlhood, and the potential for female empowerment. However, little critical attention has been correspondingly dedicated to examining how regimes of masculinity, traditional privileges of male power, and male adolescence are represented and mediated in dystopian fiction for teenagers. Patrick Ness’s exploration of normative and transgressive embodiments of masculinity in his dystopian Chaos Walking series for young adults powerfully addresses tensions between power and vulnerability, autonomy and conformity, and concepts of boyhood and manhood. Through their experiences with the possibilities of telepathy, biotechnology, and interspecies relationships, Ness’s protagonists must negotiate with the simultaneous attraction of the fragmented self and its threat to the regulation of conventional manhood, as male characters struggle to sustain their inherited understanding of themselves and the relation between self and other. Through his problematizing of the boundaries between traditional hegemonic and Other, human and alien codes, and his emphasis on the importance of non-hierarchical and inclusive co-existence, Ness proposes a receptive, expansive, and egalitarian paradigm of masculinity.     

“Murder Me…Become a Man”: Establishing the Masculine Care Circle in Young Adult Dystopia

Young adult (YA) dystopia, a genre which is led almost exclusively by young female protagonists, has gained much scholarly attention in recent years. While most of the academic discussions focus, rightly, on portrayals of female characters and gender performance, portrayals of masculinity have failed to elicit the same scholarly response. This article argues that YA dystopia has begun to model a more inclusive, broader approach to masculine behavior by portraying male characters in nurturing positions and forming care relationships with other characters in the narrative. These relationships form a “care circle” of dependent characters, which guides how male characters approach the performance of masculinity.     

Watching Aggressive, Attractive, Female Protagonists Shapes Gender Roles for Women Among Male and Female Undergraduate Viewers

The impact of exposure to media representations of aggressive, attractive, female protagonists on audiences?? gender role expectations for women was explored through a laboratory experiment with 122 undergraduates from a large university on the west coast of the United States. Participants viewed a segment of a major Hollywood motion picture that featured a female protagonist who was either highly attractive or less attractive and either highly aggressive or not aggressive. Viewing clips featuring a female protagonist who was both aggressive and stereotypically attractive led to greater endorsement of stereotypically feminine and stereotypically masculine gender role expectations for women. The effect on endorsement of stereotypically masculine expectations was partially mediated by the perception that the protagonist was a good role model for women. Although women endorsed both feminine and masculine gender role expectations for women more strongly than men, the effects of exposure to aggressive, attractive, female protagonists were similar for both male and female participants. Results are discussed in terms of gender stereotype activation and superwoman expectations for women.     

Masculinity and Cognitive Age Perception: An Examination of their Relationship and Implications for Advertising Persuasion

This paper explores whether gender and sex role orientation, in terms of masculinity and femininity, may be associated with older cognitive age among young people. It predicts that masculinity should be associated with an older cognitive age. Two surveys (N?=?254 respondents aged 18–22 years and N?=?327 respondents aged 18–55 years), conducted in Taiwan, generally support this prediction. Moreover, this study predicts that masculinity influences people’s responses to media information that contains age cues, such as ads featuring models of various ages. The findings of another experiment (N?=?141 respondents) in Taiwan show that young participants who are more masculine like relatively older models to a greater degree, and the degree to which they like the model influences their attitudes toward the advertised brand.     

Sex-role identity and male and female homosexuality

The incidences of sex-role outcome within homosexual and heterosexual male and female young adult samples were compared using a fourfold typology (both masculine and feminine, masculine, feminine, neither masculine nor feminine). Sex-role identity disparities between the female groups were more clear-cut; the most striking difference was the high incidence of masculinity (60%) within the homosexual female group. No significant differences for males were found, although a trend was noted toward higher incidence of femininity and lower incidence of masculinity in homosexuals. The second purpose of the study was to search for possible developmental antecedents to heterosexual deficit in unselected college samples. The same key pattern of psychometric indices was identified for males and females. Low heterosexuality and the closest approximation to the modal sex-role identity among homosexuals of their sex were found in females primarily identified with masculine fathers and low in role consistency and in males primarily identified with feminine mothers and low in role consistency.     

What Threatens,Defines: Tracing the Symbolic Boundaries of Contemporary Masculinity

A robust literature ties emasculation to a range of compensatory behaviors. The present study shifts focus away from the effects of masculinity threat toward an understanding of young adult men’s experiences of emasculation in their own words. Drawing on 42 in-depth interviews with undergraduate men attending a selective U.S. university, we examine the behaviors, situations, and narratives—both experienced and hypothetical—that privileged young men perceive as threatening. We use these data not only to contribute to the empirical literature on masculinity threat, but also as a novel approach for theorizing about the meaning and structure of masculinity more broadly. This is an important task given recent social and economic changes that may have altered contemporary definitions of masculinity. Emasculation accounts provide unique analytical leverage for revealing men’s often unspoken understandings of acceptable masculine behavior. We find that, while many interviewees superficially espoused egalitarian and anti-homophobic beliefs, their emasculation narratives implicitly call for the subordination of women and other men. These performances consequently obscure and maintain traditional, hegemonic power relations. We discuss the implications of our finding for scholars, practitioners, and individual men who desire a more equitable gender structure.     

Voices from the margins: Islam,queer identity,and female agency in Rayda Jacobs’s Confessions of a Gambler

This article foregrounds the intersection between queer Islamic masculinity and Islamic female identity in Rayda Jacobs’s Confessions of a Gambler, and shows how these two identity categories are subjugated in light of dominant expressions of Islamic masculinity. The novel’s action takes place within a traditional Cape Muslim community and employs, among other literary strategies, the main protagonist’s vice of gambling and her son’s sexuality as tools to illuminate the interstitial and perilous social space occupied by women and gay men in South African Muslim society. The research dissects the poignant picture that Jacobs paints of marginal identities as they exist at the intersection of religion, gender identity and sexual identity, and ultimately exhibits that homophobia and gender inequalities are not necessarily intrinsic to Islam. The article adopts a cultural studies style literary analysis. In light of this theoretical approach, this article evaluates Jacobs’s novel in a manner that goes beyond its literariness and shows how it also acts as a form of social commentary. This article also shows how the novel problematises hegemonic representations of gender and sexuality within Islam by giving voice to women and gay men: identity categories which remain largely voiceless in the dominant representations of Islam.     

The perception of face gender: The role of stimulus structure in recognition and classification

The perception of face gender was examined in the context of extending “face space” models of human face representations to include the perceptual categories defined by male and female faces. We collected data on the recognizability, gender classifiability (reaction time to classify a face as male/female), attractiveness, and masculinity/femininity of individual male and female faces. Factor analyses applied separately to the data for male and female faces yielded the following results. First, for both male and female faces, the recognizability and gender classifiability of faces were independent—a result inconsistent with the hypothesis that both recognizability and gender classifiability depend on a face’s “distance” from the subcategory gender prototype. Instead, caricatured aspects of gender (femininity/masculinity ratings) related to the gender classifiability of the faces. Second, facial attractiveness related inversely to face recognizability for male, but not for female, faces—a result that resolves inconsistencies in previous studies. Third, attractiveness and femininity for female faces were nearly equivalent, but attractiveness and masculinity for male faces were not equivalent. Finally, we applied principal component analysis to the pixel-coded face images with the aim of extracting measures related to the gender classifiability and recognizability of individual faces. We incorporated these model-derived measures into the factor analysis with the human rating and performance measures.     

How can a heterosexual man remove his body hair and retain his masculinity? Mapping stories of male body hair depilation

ABSTRACT

This study explores the gendered body hair removal norm and the meanings of male body hair by examining young people’s sense-making around male body hair removal. The novel technique of story completion was used to collect data from 102 psychology undergraduates. They were presented with a story “stem” featuring a young man (David) deciding to start body hair removal and asked to complete the stem. David was most often portrayed as a young heterosexual man who was excessively hairy, in the “wrong” places, was often subject to teasing and bullying, and was concerned about his diminished sexual capital. Hair removal did not always end “happily ever after” for David. While in some stories he “got the girl,” he was punished for his vanity and foolishness in others. These different endings arguably reflect currently ambivalent meanings around male body hair depilation. The production of a hairless, or less hairy, male body is both desirable and a potential threat to masculinity. The data spoke strongly to the power of social norms surrounding body hair practices and suggest that story completion provides a useful tool in interrogating the discourses that sustain these norms.     

How the interplay of imagined contact and first-person narratives improves attitudes toward stigmatized immigrants: A conditional process model

This article assesses the mechanisms whereby first-person narratives featuring stigmatized immigrants improve outgroup attitudes and encourage intergroup contact among prejudiced individuals. We rely on a 2 (imagined contact vs. control) × 2 (similar vs. dissimilar message protagonist) experiment on a systematic sample of native British adults. Results show that encouraging imagined contact prior to reading a short testimonial featuring an immigrant protagonist who is similar to the recipients in terms of social identity enhances identification with the protagonist, thereby improving outgroup attitudes and encouraging intergroup contact, and especially strongly among those who are prejudiced toward immigrants (i.e., high on modern racism). Theoretical and practical implications of the findings for the work on imagined contact, narrative persuasion, and identification, as well as for public communication campaigns, are discussed.     

The role of action-initiation in young children's causal explanations of action

Four studies examined preschoolers' use of the cue of action initiation to infer another's desired goal. In two studies, children watched as one protagonist self-initiated movement to a target while a second person was propelled there by an external force. Older 3-year-olds (M = 3;10) and 5-year-olds consistently judged only the self-initiated actor's movement as desire based. In the second study, however, younger 3-year-olds (M = 3;3 also participated, and they were equally likely to say that either movement was goal directed, even when the passive mover appeared to resist movement toward the goal. A third study, featuring only one protagonist, yielded no improvement among younger 3-year-olds. A fourth study emphasizing the single protagonist's persistence in approaching a target via repeated self-initiated movements revealed some improvement among younger 3-year-olds; older 3-year-olds were near ceiling performance. Altogether, these results suggest that differences in action initiation play an increasingly important role in 3-year-olds' mentalistic explanations of action. This development may be related to other critical changes occurring in 3-year-olds' developing theory of mind.     

Why are there sex differences in risky driving? the relationship between sex and gender‐role on aggressive driving,traffic offences,and accident involvement among young turkish drivers

The aim of this study was to investigate how sex (male and female) and gender‐role (masculinity and femininity) and their interaction were associated with risky driving behaviors, traffic offences, and accident involvement among young Turkish drivers. Three‐hundred and fifty‐four young drivers (221 males and 133 females) filled in a form including the short form of Bem Sex‐Role Inventory (BSRI), the Driver Behaviour Questionnaire (DBQ), questions about a driver's accident history, and background information. The effects were tested on outcome variables by using hierarchical regression analysis. It was found that sex (being male) predicted only the ordinary violations. While masculinity score predicted positively the number of offences, and aggressive and ordinary (highway code) violations, femininity score predicted negatively the number of accidents and offences, aggressive and ordinary violations, and errors. The effect of interaction between masculinity and femininity was only found on the number of accidents and aggressive violations among young drivers. There was no significant interaction effect between sex and gender roles on criterion variables. Aggr. Behav. 00:1–12, 2005. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Consumer Masculinity Behavior Among College Students and Its Relationship to Self Esteem and Media Significance

The purpose of the study was to investigate male college students in the southeastern United States to identify factors associated with consumer masculinity behavior. The variables of self-esteem and media significance were tested as possible predictors of consumer masculinity behavior. A total of 219 surveys were used as the sample for this study. Pearson correlation analysis tested relationships among the variables, and linear regression was used to further test the nature of the relationships identified. Results indicated that media significance and appearance-related self-esteem were significant predictors of consumer masculinity behavior. Limitations and implications are discussed.     

Psychological androgyny and college students' judgments of mental health

College students' perceptions of the mental health of men and women were examined in comparison to an adult health standard. Two hundred forty male and female undergraduates were asked to describe a socially competent healthy adult man, healthy adult woman, or a healthy adult (sex unspecified) using the Bem Sex-Role Inventory, which provides a measurement of androgyny as well as masculinity and femininity. In accordance with the Broverman, Broverman, Clarkson, Rosenkrantz, and Vogel (1970) study of clinicians' perceptions, the healthy man was described as similar to the adult standard, while the healthy woman was not. Unlike the Broverman et al. (1970) study, the male but not the female subjects perceived the healthy woman as different, suggesting that college women may be less likely to endorse sex-linked conceptions of mental health than their male counterparts.     

'Oh, I'm just, you know, a little bit weak because I'm going to the doctor's': young men's talk of self-referral to primary healthcare services

Young men visit their general practitioner (GP) less frequently than young women and tend to utilise primary healthcare services reluctantly. This research aimed to explore the ways young men used their talk to make sense of their own masculinity in the context of their healthcare visits, and to explore the ways they used their talk to make sense of those visits in terms of multiple masculinities and gendered behaviours. This was an important area for research as previous work has not focused on young men. Interviews, lasting approximately 1?h, were conducted by a male researcher with seven men aged 22-33. Questions related to visiting the GP, attention to healthcare and help-seeking behaviours. These were analysed, using an eclectic approach informed by Foucauldian discourse analysis and discursive psychology. Participants subscribed to a hegemonic masculinity that constructed men as strong, stoical and reluctant to seek help. However, at times, these men negotiated and disengaged from such discourses. Women were constructed as immediately responding to symptoms and seeking help for minor illnesses. In contrast to traditional masculinity, the young men drew upon discourses of vulnerability and embarrassment. These results are discussed in relation to their implications for Health Psychology.     

Masculinity unraveled: the roots of male gender identity and the shifting of male ego ideals throughout life

A model of masculine gender identity development is presented that demonstrates how a male's sense of his masculinity and the ambiguities of his gender are being reworked throughout his life. Of factors shaping the boy's sense of masculinity early on, particular emphasis is placed on the role of the involved father, the nature of the parental relationship, and the mother's recognition and affirmation of her son's maleness. While healthy masculine gender identity is founded predominantly on the boy's unique struggles in separating from his mother, it does not result from what has been traditionally viewed as the boy's disidentification from her (and from the feminine more generally). Indeed, boys who need to violently repudiate their identifications with their mother are more susceptible to a fragile, rigid masculine identity and narcissistic psychopathology. A case example of a young adult man illustrates the impact of identifications with both parents. The interplay of early masculine identity development and later life challenges confronting the adult male is briefly noted. "Masculine" ego ideals shift across developmental junctions until, ultimately, a more mature sense of masculinity emerges: the phallic wish to deny differentiation and maintain unlimited possibility is renounced and mourned and certain real limits concerning sex, gender, and generational differences are accepted. This reshaping of the "masculine" ego ideal consequently involves the transformation of a man's previously adaptive "phallicism" into more realistic, "genital" ego ideals-an achievement involving interplay between masculine and feminine identifications and the integration of antithetical elements no longer so unconsciously gendered.     

The relationship between masculinity and the Type A behavior pattern: the moderating effects of femininity

The purpose of the study was to examine whether a high level of masculinity is associated with the Type A behavior pattern, and whether the level of femininity moderates any main effect for masculinity. The subjects were 743 male and 560 female undergraduate students. In the statistical analysis, we found evidence of the masculinity effect on every Type A score, and a moderating effect of femininity on the “speed‐power” subscale score. We discuss the validity of four models of the functions of masculinity and femininity, and consider the moderating effect of femininity in the light of the interactive androgyny model.