The masculine—feminine dichotomy (grounded in the male—female divide) is a potent
metaphorical source for the creation of difference in a context like the village I have
studied. It is not, in and of itself, neither more nor less essencialistic than any other
principle of distinction if one accepts that both the sexed body and the gendered
individual are the result of processes of historical and cultural construction. That is why
I do not use notions such as (sexual or gender) ‘role’: these do not seem to have
explanatory value since they imply a false dichotomy between body and individual, sex
and gender. The conflation between ‘male’, ‘men’ and ‘masculinity’ — which is one of
the premises for the use of those notions — should not be taken for granted but
analysed.
Masculinity and femininity are not juxtaposable to men and women respectively:
they are metaphors of power and capacity for action and agency, therefore accessible to
both men and women. If it were not so, one could not possibly talk about several
masculinities or transformations in gender relations. The moving and contingent
character of the relation between masculinity, men and power becomes clear when one
analyses ethnographies that pay particular attention to dialogue and conflict between
hegemonic masculinities and subordinate ones; to individual variability in masculine
identity; or to changes that take place in a single individual’s masculine identity along
the life cycle or according to situations of interaction.
Cornwall and Lindisfarne (1994) say that anthropology has ignored the contexts
and criteria according to which men are differentiated among them. I have tried to do
the contrary in my research, through analysis of the hierarchy at work, social inequality,
strategies of interaction in sociability, and the dilemmas of emotions and their
enunciation. Originally I wanted to understand how the central model of masculinity —
hegemonic masculinity — was reproduced, considering that the experiences and
identities of specific men seemed to point toward the existence of several masculinities.
Hegemonic masculinity is rather like a lived consensus. Subordinate masculinities are
not excluded versions. They exist because they are contained in hegemony itself; they
are like perverse after-effects of it. A good example of this would be the homosexual
‘threat’ implied in homosociability, or the ‘absent presence’ of femininity in all-male
environments.
One point needs to be clarified from the onset. It is one thing to talk about
masculinity in the above mentioned sense (independently of men and women) and quite
another to talk about the ‘masculinity of men’. When I use the latter term, I do it
precisely in order to analyse the complex relation between specific men and
masculinity. My starting point is not far from Foucault’s notion that masculinity is a
discursive phenomenon — of discourse as practice (Foucault 1972). It constitutes a field
of dispute for moral values in which the distance between what is said and what is done
is great. That is why in the field I have opted for a strategy of inclusion in a group of
men in situations of sociability — a strategy that clearly privileged aspects of
homosociability in detriment of relations between the sexes.