Masculinity, Power and Technology by Ulf Mellström

Author:Ulf Mellström [Mellström, Ulf]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781351919326
Goodreads: 34477253
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

Summarising ways of being a man

What I have shown in this chapter is that social maturity is of vital importance for being a man and generally for the masculine script as it is being carved out in daily life. Social maturity is about manhood being achieved through social institutions like marriage, family and work. As also has been discussed in this chapter and will continue to be discussed in the following chapters, social maturity of achieved manhood is contrasted to essentialised or naturalised masculinity, here exemplified by the ‘masculine’ traits of womanising, gambling and drinking. These essentialised traits in the local discourse represent hegemonic patterns of masculinity, withheld and legitimised by transforming social behaviour to nature. This ‘nature’ of men and hegemonic patterns of masculinity are practised within cultures of relatedness including family, kin and homosocial friendship. In these cultures of relatedness, patterns of more or less social symmetry vis-à-vis asymmetry guide ideas and practices of being a man. Friendship patterns are more often characterised by symmetrical relations than family relations are. Essentialised masculinity in the form of gambling and drinking is mostly practised in symmetrical relations outside the family sphere, womanising self-evidently so. Here, men enact homosociality by competing, teasing, rivalry, and showing loyalty both inside and outside the family bonds.

Within family ideology the crucial relationships are father-son, brother-brother and husband-wife. Out of these three, father-son and husband-wife have received most attention here. The father-son relationship is in the patriarchal family ideology, the one relationship that is articulated as the most important one. Nonetheless, in the emotional economy of the families observed in this study, the mother-son relationship is undoubtedly the one that stands out as the one with deep emotional significance for many men, while the relationship to the father often is characterised as emotionally distant and authoritative. However, many of the men are in the process of reworking their roles as fathers indicating that a less hierarchical family pattern may be seen in Chinese families in the future. This change may also include father-daughter relationships, although this has not been dealt with here.

In marriage, the idea of complementarity is no doubt the dominant one among the men and families. It concerns marital roles both within the stem and elementary families as well as the joint family. The complementariness of spouses is based on overriding loyalty to family and clan. As a consequence, this sometimes means that family and clan precede what may seem as rigid patterns of gender. It creates in itself a sort of functional two-sidedness combining gender flexibility with stereotypical gender rigidity. Gender roles within the family then carry a certain situatedness that is part of an adaptive family strategy to secure means for an uncertain next day and where the only way to overcome that is hard work. Following from this is the perception that hard work makes you and your personal character healthy. As will be discussed later on, this is formative to general ideas about the Chinese character and personality in history as well as in contemporary life in the Chinese communities of Penang.

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