Analysis of Viagra
I maintain that all of these requirements for building the American man are undergirded by an unstated sixth requirement: “Be healthy.” Illness threatens the fulfillment of everyone of the preceding requirements, so good health becorbes a mandatory component in the performance of hegemonic masculinity. ! To better account for cultural performances of masculinity, Robert Conilell developed a four-pronged approach to describe relationships among Western masculinities.t? He is clear in his acknowledgment that these divisions arel not everywhere fixed but contingent. He labels these divisions hegemonic, chmplicit, subordinate, and mar;ginalized. Hegemonic masculinity refers to a culture’s preferred performance of masculinity. By “preferred,” mean rewarlied or held up as the model to be emulated. According to Ernesto Laclau, hegemony defines the terrain of political relations. In the United States that terrain is occupied by a corporate display of masculinity epitomized by big business and political influence.
Complicit masculinity is that which upholds notions of hegemonic masculinity. Connell falls just short of referring to complicit performances as “slacker” versions of hegemony, but instead teases out the complexities of a group that i realizes a dividend (i.e., male privilege) without the risk. Hegemony relies on complicity’s silence to maintain its illusory standards of normalcy anld acceptance. Subordinate masculinities might include gay and bisexual men but, more specifically, refer to masculinities that are, from a hegemonic rerspective, aligned with femininity. As such, they are abject masculinities. Oyertly emotional men, male ballet dancers, male nurses, or men who teach elementary school are, in certain circles, considered subordinate.tTo the categories hegemonic, complicit, and subordinate, Connell offers that of marginalized masculinities, an admittedly unsatisfactory distinction that adds the effects of race and class to those divisions previously mentioned.
All thesd examples, in turn, point out how gendered stereotypes are reinscribed even’by those intent on de constructing them. In the index to Michael Messner’s Politics of Masculinity, for example, “aggression” is listed along with a page number, while under “crying” the reader is directed to “see emotions,” as if aggression were not an emotion, too. To theorize masculinity is to, at times, reinscribe admitted stereotypes. If Connell does not position “physical disability” in his! framework, although Kathy Charmaz suggests that a chronic illness-like imporence-ewill marginalize a particular masculinity among masculinities.l4! Perceptions of physical ability-whether marginalized, subordinated, or are produced situationally. As there are “masculinities,” there are corresponding performances of them-social performances, institutional performances, relational performances, and sexual performances. Judith Butler’s concept of performativity suggests that we perform gender through a stylized repetition of acts. Furthermore, she argues, gender is most often framed an a hierarchy (with the masculine superior to the feminine), as a binary (with masculine defined as what is not feminine), and as “compulsory heterosexuality” (with transgressions and subversions carrying punishments and penalties). For Butler, the most important corrective is to recognize that gendef-masculinity and femininity-is a cultural performance and not something “natural.”
In “Social Construction of Sexuality,” anthropologist Carole Vance points out how “identical sexual acts may have varying social significance and subjective meaning” depending upon spatially and temporally bound cultural definitions. IS Sexuality, like gender, is situational. In other wqrds, culture plays a significant role in how sexual behavior and attitudes about that behavior are produced and maintained. In our society, according to Vance, reproductive heterosexual intercourse is served as the “meat and potatoes” on the Euro-American sexual menu, while variations-oral sex, anal sex, and S/M, whether homosexual or heterosexual-are labeled appetizers, side dishes, and desserts. For Vance, the possibilities for a culture are expanded Jhen the natural, biological, and essentialist status of sexuality is questioned.!
Sexuality necessarily involves power and its production. In Fhis analysis, the construction of erections constitutes an effort to sustain a specific male sexuality and the power that that sexuality preserves. In Disciplin4 and Punish, Michel Foucault examines how power and resistance are organized through the body.!ยป Here, Foucault argues, power is produced and normalized discursively; he theorizes that localized terminology, interpretation schemes, and classificatory systems goad human behavior and physical experience.!” A sexual “act” between two men in ancient Rome, for example, was irherpreted as something much different than the same act would be today, when the behavior becomes the determining factor in how an identity is kssessed and interpreted.ts In the analysis of generic viagra, what becomes particularly important in approaching sexuality is the social construction of desire. Through the societal control of a gender binary and through codes and regulations about sexual practices, desire itself is created, distributed, and policed; what is enjoyable as “sex” is given to discursive formations of privilege’, adherence, and taboo. In the West, erections are inextricably linked to desire.
