Deleuze and Masculinity by Anna Hickey-Moody

Author:Anna Hickey-Moody
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030017491
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Not only did this conversation between David and his mother change how I was able to understand his choice to be an outsider, it resonated through numerous future workshops. David’s story glowed. The image of David pointing his finger at his mother, saying ‘you, mummy’, stayed with me, as the child protesting the adult’s authority, and challenging the striations of religious life. Thinking through David’s identity work, I recognise the interplay of political and physical dynamics that Deleuze and Guattari refer to as striation and smoothing and the identity poles of molar and molecular. David’s parents were rigidly striating his identity: requiring him to be Christian. They also called him to undertake a very specific kind of identity work, as white same-sex parents choosing to create a black baby had established a specific identity agenda for David in which he was called to reconcile feelings of being an outsider. In later discussions with the mother, I realised she had always been the outsider in her family, as the only child to be sent to tax payer funded school in an otherwise upper-class English family. Escaping this comprehensive striation, David looked to smooth space, create a line of flight or way out, and occupy a place unmapped by his parents where he can belong as a minority body sex marked male. Yet, paradoxically, he also wants to prove that his masculinity is enough, adopting molar symbols of cars and practices of spatial control in his attempts to recuperate his seemingly marginalized identity. David becomes the Muslim race car driver, the once marginalised young man now moving forward in his own space: with the identity he created, not the identity his mother asked him to have. Thinking through the interplay of smoothing and striating, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that:What interests us in operations of striation and smoothing are precisely the passages or combinations: how the forces at work within space continually striate it, and how in the course of its striation it develops other forces and emits new smooth spaces. … Movements, speed and slowness, are sometimes enough to reconstruct a smooth space. Of course, smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory. But the struggle is changed or displaced in them, and life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new paces, switches adversaries. Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 500)

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