ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book originated out of a curiosity to determine whether the obser- vations I had read in a great deal of feminist scholarship concerning men and their desires—observations made largely, although in no way exclusively, by women—were true. My curiosity turned to frustration when I realized that if I couldn’t determine whether the observations were true about me, then there wasn’t any hope for determining their veracity for men in general. I nevertheless continued interrogating sit- uations in which I or others I knew (not all of whom, by the way, were men) did or did not evince the particular features deemed characteristic of masculinity. Thus was born a hypothesis of masculine hysteria, which, if it didn’t yet have the clinical or theoretical backing, neverthe- less had the particular advantage that it just felt right. Fortunately for me, a great number of people were willing to put up with the hysteria. It is often the case that one’s closest friends are not one’s best readers. Emotional or a√ective proximity sometimes seems to oppose critical distance. My friends, however, have been only too happy to tell me when I don’t make any sense; my students seemed to consider it their duty, and those in ‘‘Contemporary French Thought,’’ ‘‘Constructions of Masculinity,’’ and ‘‘Freud and Lacan’’ helped shape significant portions of this book. Friends and colleagues at the University of Rochester in the Depart- ment of Modern Languages and Cultures and the Department of En- glish, as well as in the interdepartmental programs in Visual and Cul- tural Studies and the Susan B. Anthony Institute collaborate in producing a lively intellectual climate, and a great deal of this book grew out of our discussions and debates. I am also indebted to specific people for their special help. In particular I thank Sue Gustafson, Cilas Kemed- Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/607916/9780822383949-vii.pdf by UNIV CA IRVINE, [email protected] on 02 March 2020 jio, Trevor Hope, Joel Morales, Noreen Javornik, Tim Walters, Kien Ket Lim, Michael Holly, Douglas Crimp, Claudia Schaefer, Darby English, Eva Geulen, Babacar Camara, Beth Newman, Kathleen Parthé, and Mohammed Bamyeh (who did me the added favor of making me real- ize I needed a much bigger house). To Pat Gill, who is sometimes me, there is no need to express thanks, because she’ll finish this sentence for me anyway. Randall Halle valiantly defended my defense of the phallus, and John Michael let me get away with nothing, which requires more energy than anyone should have to expend. Thanks also to Richard Estell, who showed me that you actually can learn how to see, and to Sharon Willis, who over the years has done me the tremendous favor of reading me especially well. I thank Rajani Sudan for her theo- retical insights, and also and especially for asking di≈cult questions totally in the dark. I thank Je√ Hilyard for still hearing the saxophone music after so many years. viii Acknowledgments Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/607916/9780822383949-vii.pdf by UNIV CA IRVINE, [email protected] on 02 March 2020 INTRODUCTION: BELIEVING IS SEEING I object to a strategy which situates men in such a way that the only speaking positions available to them are those of tame feminist or wild antifemi- nist. —K. K. Ruthven, Feminist Literary Studies S ometime during the early 1990s, the dead white male, that extraor- dinarily prolific author who wrote most of the books featured in high-school and college curricula across the United States, died. An- other white male took his place, but this one wasn’t dead—he was angry. Suddenly angry white men were popping up everywhere, and what they were mad at, at least according to the dozens of newspaper and maga- zine articles reporting the phenomenon, was the decline in their value, both cultural and economic, to the general population. From the front pages of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, feature stories in Time and Newsweek, and from discussion groups on the Internet, we have learned that angry white men resent the imposition of a≈rmative action and the so-called reverse discrimination it produces. They de- plore the competing definitions of family, history, and politics that arise along with increasingly diverse—and increasingly vocal—minority pop- ulations. Perhaps most of all, however, they rage against the mutating definition of white masculinity itself as it responds to shifting social, political, and economic tides. There is really nothing new about white men being angry, however. In fact, anger seems to be constitutive of the identity. Even if we go as far back in time as Homer’s Iliad, what we see is that white men—or at least men belonging to those cultures that would later be identified as white—are not only angry, but confused about who they are supposed to be as well. ‘‘Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus,’’ the Iliad opens, and that perhaps first of angry white men must later decide whether revenge or a burgeoning form of compassion should be what Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/607918/9780822383949-001.pdf by UNIV CA IRVINE, [email protected] on 02 March 2020 characterizes his culture’s heroic male. But Achilleus is hardly an iso- lated example: Ariosto’s sixteenth-century Orlando Furioso was pretty mad, and we cannot forget Peter Finch’s character Howard Beale (he was ‘‘mad as hell,’’ we recall) in Sidney Lumet’s Network, or Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo.∞ Moving to real life, the wrath of individuals such as terrorists Timothy McVeigh and Unabomber Ted Kazinski correlates the fury of the KKK, the more recent rural militiamen, and the angry young high school boys who began shooting their classmates and their parents in the 1990s, with perhaps the most spectacular and gruesome scene occurring at Columbine High School in Colorado during the spring of 1999. By all accounts, at least according to the popular press, angry white males are fuming over the cultural changes that conspire to eject them from the social order’s defining center. The features that have tradi- tionally not only characterized but distinguished the white male seem no longer important. Possessing physical strength, heading a house- hold, working outside the home, and having sole access to the most respected and profitable arenas of culture are all features that either no longer pertain exclusively to white males or that are no longer par- ticularly valued. Consequently, the white male appears no longer to be the focus of identification, and it seems increasingly true that such a focus no longer exists. But if the center can no longer hold, it’s not necessarily the case that things fall apart: the same categories that main- tained the white male in the culture’s identificatory focus certainly con- tinue both to endow and constrain people with identities today, but as we have seen most notably in the realm of virtual reality, people seem to be developing the ability to assume di√erent and even multiple or con- flicting identities. What we are currently experiencing in the anger of the white male, then, might be the contradiction caused by the endur- ing historical weight of an identity no longer invested with the preemi- nence it once enjoyed, and the contemporary push toward opening up new raced, gendered, and sexual identities that do not take the white male as their normative ground. If that isn’t enough to anger those who feel cheated out of occupying a center stage, it just might be enough to make them hysterical: as I will show, in fact, the identity ‘‘white male’’ is about nothing if not a form of hysteria.≤ In this book, I take a close look at the complex nature of the white male identity, with particular emphasis on white masculinity as a re- 2 White Men Aren’t Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/607918/9780822383949-001.pdf by UNIV CA IRVINE, [email protected] on 02 March 2020 sponse to specific cultural phenomena.≥ While white masculinity con- stitutes a hegemonic force in contemporary social, political, and eco- nomic domains, we need to analyze it as a symptomatic reply to cultural demands, not as a self-generating ahistorical entity somehow able end- lessly to reproduce itself.∂ We need to be careful, in other words, not to construct white masculinity as an apodictic force with no exterior. We must take care not to conflate a hegemonic force in culture with the source or prime motivator in that culture—simply put, the identity in question cannot perform the taxonomically impossible task of defining itself. Finally, we need to take care, at the most fundamental level, not to equate an identity, which is the product of cultural activity, with that activity itself. In contradistinction to a great many studies of mascu- linity, then, I insist not only on the cultural conditions inhering in the production of specific strains of masculinity—in this case, white masculinity—but also on the cultural work that white masculinity con- tinually performs in order to retain its hegemony. There are, conse- quently, two extremes of white masculinity, neither of which is for any practical purposes readily available to us: on the one hand is the figure of hegemonic stability to which all other forms of identity are explicitly or implicitly compared; and on the other hand there is the identity as it is lived by real human beings. It is precisely because these two so rarely match up that white males are so often angry: sustaining the contradic- tion between how the culture defines them and how they experience their lives, white males are often frustrated by their inability to live up to cultural ideals. Indeed, studies in the 1940s and 1950s indicated that over-identification with cultural ideals of masculinity produced anti- social, even criminal behavior.∑ It seems likely, in fact, that no one is really supposed to live up to the ideals our culture constructs for white men. If we take a look at models of masculinity suggested in psychoanalysis or popular culture, for ex- ample, it seems fairly obvious that the figures that men are enjoined to emulate are models of impossible identification. Throughout the psy- choanalytic writings of Sigmund Freud, for example, the male child is continually frustrated by his inability to possess what his father has. The principal conflict that psychoanalysis describes—the Oedipus complex, which will come under close scrutiny in chapter 1—produces a situation in which the young male child is required to be simultaneously like and unlike the father: Freud maintains that the superego tells the young Introduction 3 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/607918/9780822383949-001.pdf by UNIV CA IRVINE, [email protected] on 02 March 2020 male, ‘‘‘You ought to be like this (like your father).’ It also comprises the prohibition: ‘You may not be like this (like your father)—that is, you may not do all that he does; some things are his prerogative.’’’∏ If inhabiting masculinity involves disentangling the threads of conflicting cultural values, it also involves recognizing how those values are incarnated in the male body.π Little Hans, Freud’s famous five-year-old analysand with a morbid fear of horses, feared that his own penis would never measure up to his father’s.∫ But conflicting cultural signals concerning what a man is supposed to be are not limited in psychoanalysis to the young male child. Freud tells us that the little girl passing through her society’s civilizing processes learns that ‘‘a husband is . . . never any- thing but a proxy, never the right man; the first claim upon the feeling of love in a woman belongs to someone else, in typical cases to her father; the husband is at best a second’’.Ω For both the little boy and the little girl, it seems, the father is an unattainable ideal, a too-perfect model that sets them up for failure. The basic premise informing my excavation of the white male iden- tity is that the principal poles of identification—whiteness, maleness— are impossible ones, since according to the cultural logic that has de- fined them, no one could ever be completely white and/or completely male.∞≠ The ideal white male figure, in other words, is not simply a fiction, like the father in psychoanalysis’s heuristic tales, but a fiction constructed to prohibit comprehensive identification. Throughout the course of this book I will examine the manner in which ideal white and male figures are constructed, with an eye toward understanding pre- cisely how and why they are impossible ones. To analyze the social construction of the white male I will often be using models drawn from psychoanalysis, principally because I believe that the processes through which we adopt or reject the models of identity our cultures put forth operate on a largely unconscious level, but a level that nevertheless informs our most fundamental ways of signifying and knowing, and hence the ways we live our social, economic, and political lives. But placing stock in the operations of unconscious thought processes need not imply a wholesale acceptance of specific models of psychoanalysis: one of the aims of this book is to understand the cultural prejudices in- hering in both Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis and the blind spots those prejudices produce. As I interrogate the construction of the white male identity, beginning roughly at the end of the seventeenth 4 White Men Aren’t Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/607918/9780822383949-001.pdf by UNIV CA IRVINE, [email protected] on 02 March 2020 century, I will be simultaneously investigating some of the conse- quences that ensue from the presuppositions informing psychoanaly- sis and its theories of gender. It may be interesting to note that many of the earliest studies of masculinity came not from the perspective of psychoanalysis, but from that of sociology. The work of Victor Seidler, David Morgan, Andy Met- calf, Martin Humphries, R. W. Connell, and Harry Brod come to mind immediately as part of a new generation of scholars working in the field of gender studies and directing their attentions nearly exclusively to masculinity.∞∞ Rather than present a list of what I consider to be the most notable studies on masculinity from the past twenty or so years, I will cite what I consider to be the most influential works in the field at moments in my argument more appropriate to the subject matters at hand. Likewise, the scholarship on race, and what is especially germane here, whiteness studies, has increased dramatically just in the past few years, and in order to avoid an overwhelming list of titles at this junc- ture, I will include discussion of many of the signal works at relevant moments. As I hope will become clear, however, this book is not simply the conjunction or intersection of ‘‘race’’ and ‘‘gender,’’ as if the two were simply ingredients one could unproblematically add in a recipe of human identity. The whiteness and masculinity I will be looking at here are not only mutually dependent; they are overdetermined and articu- lated in such a way that each becomes more complex by association with the other. White Men Aren’t looks at the white male identity in several di√erent moments of history. It is not intended to present a seamless narrative of the origins of that identity and its subsequent development throughout history, primarily because such a history would leave out or conflate as much as it included. Instead, I have chosen times and places that seem significant for the development of white masculine hegemony, fully recognizing, of course, that explanatory narratives often produce ex- actly what they’re trying to describe. Indeed, I will argue in chapter 1 that such a phenomenon is precisely what lies behind Freud’s produc- tion of the Oedipus complex, particularly as that complex involves the active obfuscation of forms of identity that do not pertain to gender.∞≤ Psychoanalysis has traditionally taken gender to be the fundamental di√erence informing the production of subjectivity. Indeed, the Freud- ian reading of Oedipus typifies most other interpretations of the classic Introduction 5 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/607918/9780822383949-001.pdf by UNIV CA IRVINE, [email protected] on 02 March 2020 tragedy—including the more traditional literary ones—in its active ob- fuscation of forms of di√erence the work quite explicitly underscores. Form mirrors function in such readings of Oedipus in that the work that goes into not seeing ethnic, civic, and other kinds of di√erence operat- ing in Sophocles’ tragedy correlates modern productions of whiteness as an invisible or empty marker of identity. In chapters 2 and 3 I look at the uneasy relationship western Euro- pean travelers, anthropologists, and naturalists maintained with people they considered to be radically unlike themselves—for the most part Africans and, to a lesser extent, Asians and Americans—and ask how and why they identified specific morphological features as enough un- like their own to consider these people fundamentally di√erent. In other words, how do we recognize similarity and how do we identify di√erence, particularly when the terrain on which we are operating is by and large new? What caused Europeans to focus on skin color, particu- lar facial features, or hair when trying to determine whether a specific cultural group was principally like or unlike them? Why did they see di√erence, and not sameness? What metaphors, necessarily grounded in their own cultural systems of meaning, informed the manner in which they saw and understood other peoples?∞≥ How do we locate di√erence, and what does it mean when we (think we) find it?∞∂ Finally, how and why do we marshal specific features based on the contin- gencies of our own cultural classificatory systems into the engulfing and presumably trans-human taxonomic systems we call ‘‘race’’ and ‘‘gender’’? Chapter 4 is devoted to the Lacanian phallus, that organ that seems to bear an uneasy and ambivalent relationship to an anatomical marker of di√erence—in fact, to what is normally taken to be the anatomical marker of di√erence: the penis. Extrapolating from my reading of Oedi- pus the King, I will argue that to conflate phallus and penis is to perform two simultaneous and related operations: on the one hand such a con- flation casts all forms of di√erence in terms of sexual di√erence, and in the process masks a host of di√erent social identifiers; and on the other hand the conflation of signifier of di√erence with male anatomy re- produces a form of masculine hegemony that figures masculinity ei- ther as seamless and integral, or as something that needs to be exposed or dismantled. I will show that to fail to consider the phallus as a signifier operating in any (and potentially every) domain of di√erence is 6 White Men Aren’t Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/607918/9780822383949-001.pdf by UNIV CA IRVINE, [email protected] on 02 March 2020 to obfuscate the crucial operations that invest bodies with signification, and hence to naturalize the very forms of domination that critiques aimed at aligning the phallus with the penis have sought to expose. Such critiques ironically end up defending the very form of phallic power they generally seek to repudiate. Finally, in chapter 5 I will more fully address what I call the hysteria of white masculinity. Begin- ning with nineteenth-century fears and anxieties over what constitutes whiteness and whether the ‘‘white race’’ might be contaminated by nonwhite blood, I will address the more sophisticated manifestations of those concerns prevalent in contemporary culture: the African Ameri- can or Latino conscripted to tell the white man who or what the latter is, and to know more about his identity than he himself apparently does. White Men Aren’t begins with the simple premise that the systems of classification that we take to be fundamental—the mantra of gender, race, and class that we have heard so much about of late—not only mean something di√erent in di√erent historical and cultural contexts, but that they might have no meaning at all for the specific social groups they are meant to characterize. Whether by casting all di√erence as rep- resentable through a specific set of cultural metaphors—indeed, by cast- ing di√erence as representable at all—or by imposing labels through brute force, white masculinity ascends to a position of power and cul- tural predominance. The power that this identity assumes—and it is important to remember that like all identities white masculinity is not so much a thing as it is a complex encoded response to cultural phenomena—derives in large part from the fact that in most areas of Western culture a single unit or measure of value gives expression to many others. White masculinity’s hegemony arises because it causes di√erent kinds of subjectivity to become expressions of the central posi- tion that it represents; manifestations of di√erence get subsumed into terms not only designed to represent the central position, but restricted to such use, in much the same way, for example, that a film can be expressed in terms of its narrative but at the cost of its filmic specificity. In other words, white masculinity assumes what we might call the least common denominator of subjective identity, since part of its mythology has long been that it is an identity in which expressions of other identi- ties are crystallized. It seems crucial, if not by now almost gratuitous, to stress that the issue here is not biological, even if for several hundred years natural- Introduction 7 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/607918/9780822383949-001.pdf by UNIV CA IRVINE, [email protected] on 02 March 2020 ists, anthropologists, philosophers, and jurists tried to demonstrate that it is, as I will discuss in chapters 2 and 3. Rather, the issue is a cultural one and it is a subjective one, by which I mean it pertains to how people think themselves and their relationships to their communities and to the world. But scientific explanations quite often lend legitimacy to the most outrageous ideological propaganda, since the things that appear to be natural or empirically observable generally also seem to be with- out political content. For example, the nineteenth-century anthropolo- gist Arthur de Gobineau deployed the discourses of science and equal- ity predominant in his time to ‘‘prove’’ that white people were the most beautiful. ‘‘Taking the white race as the standard of beauty,’’ he writes, ‘‘we perceive all others more or less receding from that model. There is, then, an inequality in point of beauty among the various races of men, and that inequality is permanent and indelible.’’∞∑ One of the questions we need to formulate, then, concerns the extent to which empirical observations are themselves already steeped in the politics of what their ostensible objectivity is called on to prove. Simon LeVay, a neurobiolo- gist investigating the ‘‘cause’’ of homosexuality, perhaps unwittingly demonstrates the manner in which scientific discourse blinds itself to its own workings when he writes that ‘‘it is not unrealistic to expect a gene or genes influencing sexual orientation to be identified within the next few years, since there are at least three laboratories in the United States alone that are working on the topic.’’∞∏ What this kind of sci- ence thinks it will find is determined in advance by the epistemological frameworks that themselves give rise to investigation in the first place.∞π But scientific investigation into the nature of human identity, be it race, gender, or sexuality, is only a symptom, and not a cause, of the phenomenon I am investigating. We need to determine the manner in which the abstractions we produce to describe the material world around us are necessarily already inflected by that world. Furthermore, we must understand how the world is a√ected by our abstractions. As Margaret Homans puts it, ‘‘The discourses of race and of gender in this country have historically been characterized by debates about the body: about the ontological status as well as the interpretability of biological di√erence.’’∞∫ As the above citations from Gobineau and LeVay indicate, the material and the ideal—which also turn out to be the two fundamen- tal and completely imbricated components of signification in the forms best known as signifier and signified, a point to which I will return 8 White Men Aren’t Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/607918/9780822383949-001.pdf by UNIV CA IRVINE, [email protected] on 02 March 2020