The epilogue

We’re about to take a look at the last section of the abstract. This is by far the most complicated part of the text and it took me quite a while to figure out what exactly was the author trying to say. The swamp monster tried to use confuse… it’s super affective!

The paper unpacks the affects, economies and surfaces of “carbon fibre masculinity” and discusses Pistorius’ use of carbon fibre, homosociality and misogyny as forms of protest masculinity through which he unconsciously attempted to recuperate his gendered identity from emasculating discourses of disability.

After an hour or so of scratching my head trying to connect dots and put them in the right context I believe I’ve produced a reasonably sensible translation of this section:

Men engage in homosociality (friendly relationships with other men) and misogyny (hatred of women) to “embody the claim to power (typical of regional hegemonic masculinities in Western countries) despite their (his) lack of economic resources and institutional authority”. Through this claim they are unconsciously attempting to heal their emasculated identity from the discourses on the topic of his disabilities.

Even after simplifying the section and correcting the syntax errors in the source I was still literally going around in circles trying to figure out the meaning behind it. Why would men be friendly towards other men and hate women to achieve power in our society, and what are these disabilities she keeps mentioning? Luckily for me, my partner was there to ask for some first hand help. She is a young woman that grew up poor in a very religious and socially backward country that still holds to these negative tribal rituals where men are overly dependent on their masculinity in order to feel worthy. This is a country in which you are required to develop drug or alcohol addiction in order to be accepted in society and any notion of intellectualism and diversity is shunned and often threatened with violence in many social circles. I think this makes her qualified enough to give her opinion about gender issues.

She interpreted the writers expression ‘masculine disabilities’ as fears of rejection from your gender group and internalized repression of personality. Men fear they are going to be rejected by other men because they display feminine characteristics and this leads them to repress these discriminated characteristics. So “emasculating discourses of disability” are either conversations about the internalized individual repression of femininity or social rejection on the basis of secondary sexual characteristics. These conversations would make men emasculated as they would feel inferior or ‘less of a man’ because of their already mentioned social non-conformity. In signs of retaliation they would then search “for compensation either in aggression or its opposite passivity”. To put it more simply, his developing hatred for women would arise from his perpetual hatred of self.

Not even carbon fibres can stand in the way of true love!

Though all of this on the surface makes apparent sense and I can agree with it to a a minute extent the fact is that it’s not at all accurate. There are different ways men react to gender coloured social pressure, also not all men are the same. Feminine secondary sexual characteristics in men are not a dominant feature of our sex, it’s a bit far off to call it an anomaly but it’s certainly not common. This means that men who fit into the accepted spectre of masculine diversity are not affected with the problem of being emasculated by the discourse of their disabilities, because they do not have these disabilities. Those that do are still not guaranteed to become woman haters and go on a killing spree. Some will embrace their femininity and experience spiritual unity, other might become passive reactionists and suffer from depression.

Dear writer; Not everything is as simple as you portrait it to be with this article. For someone who obviously advocates for feminism you have a very rigid and ‘carbon-like’ world view. For someone who follows an ideology that proclaims it celebrates diversity, you sure approach gender studies with absolutism. You display a very binary mentality where masculinity and everything connected with it is the oppressing aspect and femininity is the oppressed aspect. I am looking forward to read the whole article, although if it’s anywhere near complicated, incorrect and devoid of logic you can expect more intellectual criticism and literary deconstruction. Link to the notorious article can be found here.