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So, I'm talking to my ex-girlfriend about Robert Jensen's Gettining Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity, and I had a thought which is rather ill-formed and I'm not sure what to make of it.
It seems to me there is something almost inevitably heteronormative inherent in Dworkinist constructions of masculinity. (Re-visioned masculinity, I mean, so: reconstructions.) That they provide a chance to step outside one's maleness without actually having to examine one's heterosexuality in any real detail. This seems rather counterintuitive on one level (Dworkin was a lesbian, John Stoltenberg was a gay man, and apparently Jensen himself isn't straight either), but seems right to me on another that I can't articulate. Anybody have any thoughts? Able to help me theorize this out? Is it just that they're so deeply seeped in a 1970's-style second-wave aesthetic? Is it a result of positioning this reconceptualization as a primarily feminist move--which is to say making the moral criterion an essentially gynocentric one? (How strange is it to consider gynocentrism a potentially bad thing?) Or is it even that any constructive project is by its nature opposed to the very project of critical, and thus queer, theory? It is arguably implicitly futurist, and it'd be hard to argue that what is being done is (liberal) activism (whose job is to build) as opposed to (radical) theory (whose job is to critique). How much is any of this a problem? And how much of this is a problem inherent in Dworkinism itself as opposed to incidental to it?
ETA: Jensen discusses the move to abolish masculinity versus the move to redefine it, arguing for, as would I, the former. This puts forward a possibility: any attempt to reconstruct masculinity is essentially an attempt to keep it intact, to re-inscribe separate gender roles, and since all sexism is ultimately heterosexist (and vice versa), this is heteronormative. I don't think this is the whole story, though--especially since the premise of my original question assumed the project was being (or at least, could be) heteronormative while still being feminist (which would presumably be to say, not sexist).
It does raise the question, though: the two male feminists I know of who think that masculinity is something worthy of being discussed (instead of simply stipulating it as undesirable and then getting on with the feminist projects of radical critique and liberal activism) are both Dworkinists. Is this significant?
It seems to me there is something almost inevitably heteronormative inherent in Dworkinist constructions of masculinity. (Re-visioned masculinity, I mean, so: reconstructions.) That they provide a chance to step outside one's maleness without actually having to examine one's heterosexuality in any real detail. This seems rather counterintuitive on one level (Dworkin was a lesbian, John Stoltenberg was a gay man, and apparently Jensen himself isn't straight either), but seems right to me on another that I can't articulate. Anybody have any thoughts? Able to help me theorize this out? Is it just that they're so deeply seeped in a 1970's-style second-wave aesthetic? Is it a result of positioning this reconceptualization as a primarily feminist move--which is to say making the moral criterion an essentially gynocentric one? (How strange is it to consider gynocentrism a potentially bad thing?) Or is it even that any constructive project is by its nature opposed to the very project of critical, and thus queer, theory? It is arguably implicitly futurist, and it'd be hard to argue that what is being done is (liberal) activism (whose job is to build) as opposed to (radical) theory (whose job is to critique). How much is any of this a problem? And how much of this is a problem inherent in Dworkinism itself as opposed to incidental to it?
ETA: Jensen discusses the move to abolish masculinity versus the move to redefine it, arguing for, as would I, the former. This puts forward a possibility: any attempt to reconstruct masculinity is essentially an attempt to keep it intact, to re-inscribe separate gender roles, and since all sexism is ultimately heterosexist (and vice versa), this is heteronormative. I don't think this is the whole story, though--especially since the premise of my original question assumed the project was being (or at least, could be) heteronormative while still being feminist (which would presumably be to say, not sexist).
It does raise the question, though: the two male feminists I know of who think that masculinity is something worthy of being discussed (instead of simply stipulating it as undesirable and then getting on with the feminist projects of radical critique and liberal activism) are both Dworkinists. Is this significant?