Chris Brickell

Masculinities, Performativity, and Subversion A Sociological Reappraisal

The study of masculinities has not escaped the influence of Judith Butler’s writings on gender, performativity, and subversion. However, this article suggests that Butler’s formulations of performativity and subversion express a lack of clarity and engender a number of problems with respect to agency, action, interaction, and social change. This article argues for reformulating performativity and subversion in a more explicitly sociological frame to render the concepts more useful for examining agency and subjectivity in the study of masculinities. The writings of Erving Goffman suggest ways to reclaim the socially constructed agency of “performance” from the mire of “performativity,” with the latter’s apparent disappearance of subjective action. This article suggests reworking subversion away from parody and resignification toward a consideration of resources for subjectivity and challenges to prevailing social structures. In this way, performativity and subversion may be set more convincingly within a sociologically informed study of masculinity.

The Sociological Construction of Gender and Sexuality

This essay considers how we might come to understand social constructionism sociologically. It examines a number of related approaches to gender and sexuality that speak to sociological concerns and might be termed social constructionist: historicism, symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology and materialist feminism. By recognising that social constructionism is multifarious rather than unified, we find that each social constructionist approach offers particular strengths for analysing the complexities of gender and sexuality. Through closely analysing these approaches and some of the criticisms of them we can reassert sociologys specific contribution, and embrace social constructionist analyses which address the multilayered characteristics of the social in general and gender and sexuality in particular.

Whose `Special Treatment'? Heterosexism and the Problems with Liberalism

This article examines the circulation of heterosexist positions within several recent New Zealand media texts. It argues that a recent form of discourse engages liberal language and assumptions in ways that support the privileged position of heterosexuality and the marginalization of homosexuality. The examples given highlight not only the tenor of some recent representations of homosexuality, but also some problems within liberalism. Most notable of these are liberalisms individualism and its failure to recognize the systemic nature of hierarchical power relationships and the constituting of lesbian and gay subjectivities within these relationships. These problems allow liberalism to play an active part in processes of domination and subordination.

Sexology, the Homo/Hetero Binary, and the Complexities of Male Sexual History:

This article re-evaluates the emphasis on the ‘homo/hetero binary’, which appears in many discussions of sexuality since the late 19th century, by exploring several key European sexological texts and their classifications of sexual desire between men. It suggests that these writers offered not so much a nascent binary between ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’ individuals, but a complex and contradictory set of sexual ontologies that encoded liminality as well as notions of innate sexual perversion. A strand of sexual fluidity lived on through the 20th century, forming a counternarrative to the notion that individuals could be assigned to either a heterosexual or a homosexual subject position. Such a rereading of important sexological writings offers us one way to complicate current assumptions about the birth and subsequent influence of ‘the homosexual’ and the prevalence of the ‘homo/hetero binary’. This impels us to more closely investigate the spaces lying between and around the poles of this binary.

Sexuality, power and the sociology of the internet

The internet is an increasingly important enabler and mediator of sexual relations in society. It has begun to transform older modes of knowing, experiencing and organizing sexuality. In light of an emerging social science literature, this article considers internet-mediated sexuality and its consequences for theorizing power. It looks at three ideal-typical strands of power in relation to sexuality: the constitutive, the regulatory and the unequal. It considers empirically based discussions alongside broader theoretical concerns: Foucauldian work on discourse and subjectivity, an Althusserian account of interpellation, the symbolic interactionist focus on the presentation of self and feminist analyses of inequality. On the internet, the article suggests, the overlaps between different forms of sexual power are often complex and multi-directional.

Through the (New) Looking Glass Gendered bodies, fashion and resistance in postwar New Zealand

In 1947, French designer Christian Dior released the New Look, a style of women’s clothing characterized by long, stiffened skirts and wasp waistlines. For Dior, the fashion offered a glamorous, feminine look following many women’s more functional - and ostensibly masculine - wartime garb. The ‘Look’ arrived in New Zealand from Europe in mid-1948. The New Zealand debates around the fashion offer a useful ‘looking glass’ into contemporary cultural and political currents, as the female body adorned in ‘the Look’ can be understood as a site at which regimes of bodily discipline, debates over women’s work and discourses of ‘women’s emancipation’ converged. This article examines a range of New Zealand women’s responses to ‘the Look’ in order to critically interrogate these convergences and to reexamine intellectual debates over consumption, pleasure, domination and resistance. The New Look engendered a complex web of embraces and resistances and this suggests a more nuanced framing of conceptions of domination and resistance in consumption studies than has often been the case.

Sex, space and scripts: negotiating homoeroticism in history

There is now a rich literature on the ways sexuality is geographically situated, mediated and constituted. There is rather less on how sexual interactions are scripted within space and time. Drawing from symbolic interactionist literature on sexual scripts, this article investigates how some men negotiated sexual encounters in New Zealand during the nineteenth century, within particular spaces (streets, gardens, hotels and others) and in relation to a range of ideas about sex, masculinity, propriety and intimacy. These examples show how language, symbols and social interactions combine in the reflexive construction of sexualities in time and space. To acknowledge and critically explore these relationships, this article suggests, is to add another layer to existing approaches to sexuality and space.

A symbolic interactionist history of sexuality

Many historians of sexuality explore how sexual subjectivity has taken shape in recent centuries, while historical sociologists tend to focus upon the intimate and erotic aspects of emergent social institutions. Symbolic interactionist sociology can add a new dimension to the existing debates, shifting the primary focus from the history of sexuality to a theoretically informed analysis of sexuality in history. This essay applies symbolic interactionist writings on interaction, scripts and subjectivity to a reading of one particular case: that of a young man committed to New Zealands Seacliff Lunatic Asylum in 1891 following his ‘absurd infatuation’ for another man. I attempt to show how symbolic interactionist theory can further enrich historical studies by teasing out the intricacies of the processes through which sexual selves have emerged in the past. What results is not a teleological account of sexual change, but an awareness of the ways particular contexts enable the construction of accounts of sexual subjectivity.

Sex Instruction and the Construction of Homosexuality in New Zealand, 1920-1965

Historical analysis of sex education materials, as well as of the debates that surround them, can shed light upon the construction of sexuality in particular contexts. This article examines some of these materials and debates as a window into the construction of ‘homosexuality’ and ‘the homosexual’ in mid‐twentieth century New Zealand. It is argued that ‘the homosexual’ as a category was not clearly demarcated during this period, and that ‘heterosexuality’ per se did not appear in debates over ‘sex instruction’ until the 1950s. Earlier notions of self‐control were reasserted during the post‐war moral panic over young peoples sexuality, and homosexuality was sometimes regarded as a symptom of social rebellion and thus a universal potential as much as a characteristic of a fixed sexual minority. Contemporary psychology and responses to the war blurred the boundaries between ‘homosexuality’ and ‘normal’ sexuality, ensuring the ongoing instability of what has more recently been termed the ‘homo/hetero binary’.

Nature's good for you: Sir Truby King, Seacliff Asylum, and the greening of health care in New Zealand, 1889―1922

Sir Frederic Truby Kings work at Seacliff Asylum in New Zealand, between 1889 and 1922, illustrates a prominent role of agriculture in relationship to human health and the environment. King utilized farming practices, a rural setting, occupational therapy, dietary changes and moves towards self-sufficiency as examples of asylum management practices, but these also ensured patient health and well-being. In this article, we analyze Kings practices at Seacliff as a genealogical precursor to todays green care and care farming movements.