Читать книгу Violent Manhood - J. E. Sumerau - Страница 8

Building on the insights and patterns noted above, this book examines processes whereby people who identify as men may utilize violence as a compensatory manhood act. Specifically, I utilize the statements of my interview respondents, alongside examples from my own life and existing men and masculinities literatures, to note the ways men learn to conceptualize violence as part of what it means to be a man and as a way to re-establish claims to manhood in the face of perceived challenges or threats to their masculinity. In so doing, I argue that an important part of combatting violence in society involves revising contemporary societal definitions of what it means to be a man and the element of violence embedded in such definitions. To this end, I utilize examples in which people who identify as men make sense of violence, manhood, and current gender issues in U.S. political debates. In so doing, I demonstrate how their own notions of violence and manhood fuel reactions to attempts by others to challenge existing gendered, racial, and sexual inequalities in the United States.

At the same time, this study furthers existing work on men, masculinities, and manhood acts by explicitly connecting such work to criminological and other research concerning violence in the United States. I do this by combining examinations of what it means to be a man with analyses of the ways people who identify as men respond to specific issues concerning violence in society at present.^[31] Specifically, my work here provides an illustration of the ways people who identify as men make sense of and respond to pressing societal issues, including movements for racial, women’s, and LGBT rights; gun violence and mass shootings; domestic violence and sexual assault; and what it means to be a given type of gender in the first place. As such, this work represents a synthesis of prominent topics in gender studies, criminological studies, and current political and policy debates at the intersection of these fields. It is my hope that it will serve as a model for integrating research, advocacy, and discussion on these issues in the future. Even more so, however, I hope readers will take the opportunity to consider what my respondents’ examples say about violence and what it means to be a man in contemporary U.S. society with the goal of facilitating discussions and possibilities for change in the nation.

To this end, I utilize autoethnographic data from my own life and an original in-depth interview study, which contains interviews with 50 people who identify as white, cisgender, heterosexual, middle- or upper-class men.^[32] My work here offers a rare, in-depth interview study with this population concerning aspects of violence and movements for minority rights in contemporary U.S. society and further provides one of the first occasions wherein contemporary U.S. men react to and make sense of current #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and Transgender Rights movements that challenge core aspects of their own identities. I thus utilize patterns in these data to capture a portrait of what it means to be a man by people who both identify as men and occupy other socially privileged identity groups and what role violence plays in such meanings as an element of responding to perceived threats to manhood itself.

I focus specifically on men who also occupy privileged racial, class, and sexual social locations to facilitate future discussion and consideration of three interrelated aspects of U.S. society and relationships between violence and manhood. First, I seek to direct attention to the ways that even men who would theoretically be most likely to fit the hegemonic ideal may enact compensatory manhood acts as a result of any occasion where they experience perceived marginalization in society (even if these instances are temporary). Next, I seek to outline the ways that, rather than an exception, violence is defined as an essential element for people who seek to identify as men and be seen as men by others. Finally, I offer a demonstration of the ways these patterns play out in both religious and non-religious^[33] men’s interpretations of what it means to be a man and what violence has to do with manhood itself.