Recreating Sexual Politics (Routledge Revivals) by Seidler Victor;

Author:Seidler, Victor;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2011-09-22T00:00:00+00:00

WORK AND MALE IDENTITY

Within capitalist society, work has always been an essential aspect of male identity. As men, we inherit an image of ourselves as ‘breadwinners’ looking after and providing for others in our family. Even if we have been encouraged to engage critically with this ‘role’ through the emergence of the women’s movement and women discovering a sense of their own independent identity, this conception, often unconsciously, still governs so much of our lives. We rediscover it in an abiding sense of responsibility, in the ease with which we can look after others but can barely look after ourselves. We find it in the ways we assume superiority over others, without even thinking about it.

This is an aspect of patriarchal power, which affects men in different ways depending upon our class and ethnic background and experience. Men’s sense of potency and superiority used to be strongly reinforced by work. It has been through work that men have traditionally validated themselves and have been able to sustain a positive psychological image of themselves. The tradition of skilled work within the working class allowed for a sense of pride and identity with the work done. This went along with a certain sense of male community that was built around work, especially around traditional industries—coal, steel, shipbuilding and others. Without work, men often experience themselves as worthless.

With the processes of deskilling which have affected all these industries in different ways, this sense of identity and identification has been undermined. But, as Cynthia Cockburn has pointed out in her investigation into the print industry in Brothers, deskilling and new technology do not inevitably challenge male élitism and power within the labour force because of the pervasiveness of established gender expectations at work. This was highlighted in the machinists’ strike at Ford in the mid- 1980s when it became clear that if men did the work, it would be classified as skilled, but because women did it, it was not.

At the same time, with rationalisation, men have experienced themselves as increasingly controlled and subordinated at work, divided off and against each other. Men’s sense of pride and identification has been challenged. This has created a ‘crisis of identity’ for an older generation of white workers who have been brought up to believe in a ‘fair day’s work for a fair day’s wage’. They believe in doing a ‘man’s job’ and expect to do ‘hard work’, so that it is a big insult to be thought of as a ‘slacker’ or as ‘work-shy’. In part, this structure of masculine identity makes possible the whole attempt to underpin the work ethic by labelling welfare recipients as ‘scroungers’.

At the same time, contradiction is opening up between feeling that ‘you should work hard and deserve every penny you make’ and a growing awareness of the meaninglessness of work with such a small component of skill. This goes along with a realisation that the management has organised work to get as much out of labour as it possibly can, while giving as little as it can in return.

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