Hegemonic Masculinity

This study traces James W. Messerschmidt’s concept of hegemonic masculinity in two post-9/11 novels, The Submission (2011) by Amy Waldman and Sons and Other Flammable Objects (2008) by Porochista Khakpour. Messerschmidt’s Structured Action Theory considers hegemonic masculinities as surreptitiously omnipresent or social constructs whose main purpose is rendering unequal gender relations possible. We believe that this theory can help us better understand the transformations the masculinities of these novels undergo after the 9/11 attacks. In analyzing the novels, we argue that characters who manifest pre-9/11 ideals of American hegemonic masculinity and who are symbolically disempowered by the attacks endeavor to regain their hegemonic status by establishing the hyphenated Middle Eastern and South Asian masculinities as their racial Other and subordinating them in the post-9/11 landscape. In other words, we will focus on the former group’s symbolic emasculation and their subsequent remasculinization in light of the 9/11 attacks and the impact of this transformation on immigrant men in the United States. Moreover, by applying the Structured Action Theory to the aforementioned novels, we aim to show how American hegemonic masculinities, previously defined as strong, untouchable, and invincible, are reconstructed, after the 9/11 attacks, around the ideals of revenge; besides, we explore the responses of the Middle Eastern and South Asian men to their unequal position. Ultimately, we analyze the varying intersections of gender, religion, nationality, race, class, and age which are at work to reconstruct such identities.

Objective: Marital life is the cause of the development of social relations and provides a ground for the exercise of power, from domination to hegemony. The purpose of this study is to investigate the methods of persuasion used by women in the experience of everyday life among married people in Guilan province, Iran.Methods: This research used a qualitative approach with semi-structured interviews and purposive sampling among 45 married men and women in Guilan province. Thematic analysis was employed to analyze the data obtained from the interviews.Results: The data analysis revealed 15 basic themes, 7 organizing themes, and 2 global themes. The findings indicate that, in the past, men used social, economic, and psychological dominance against women, in addition to physical dominance. However, in the new society, with women's resistance, such dominance has become negative and illegitimate. Women now accept men's superiority not by force but through internal desire and persuasion. Therefore, today, the exercise of men's power against women has shifted from a state of dominance and asymmetry to a more symmetrical but hegemonic state.Conclusion: In the past, men used more dominance but less authority against women, but today's men use less dominance and more authority. New men's exercise of power is more persuasive, hidden, and corresponding to Rutherford's new masculinity, Connell's hegemonic masculinity, and Bourdieu's symbolic violence.

Masculinity, unlike femininity, have long been left understudied by the scholars. This originated from the essentialist idea that men and masculinity are natural, and subsequently had been taken for granted. They were, not required to be studied. Men, were deemed as the agents who gazed and studied. However with the advent of structuralist and poststructuralist ideas in humanities and specially in social theory, masculinity attracted attentions. No longer was masculinity considered natural, God-given. Now the new theories regarded masculinity as a constructed phenomenon subject to cultural, structural, discursive, and material forces. Therefore it was inevitably subject to change, It was no longer seen as an essential entity. These theoretical inventions spread, though belatedly, into the realm of literary studies. Literary works, especially fiction, provides a very rich material to explore the dynamics and nuances of theory. The present article sets to apply the theories in the field of masculinity studies from social theory to a novel by the British-Syrian writer Robin Yassin Kassab. The Road from Damascus could be useful text to investigate how masculinity produced and reproduced, how it constructed and changed as men experience different social structures. The novel, successfully, takes masculinity as a sign whose significance alters as it moves from one structure to another. A significant aspect of the novel is its focus on immigrant people in the cultural space of England. The article would investigate how the two “modalities” masculinity and immigration would invite new meanings into the previous studies done on the work.