This is the third part of the Critical Studies series edited by Jeff Hearn. The book has at its heart the relationship of men to feminism, and the difficulties that this throws up. Basically because feminism highlighted the agenda in the first place by problematising men.
This is not the easiest book to read. Morgan is a sociologist and his nine Chapters are spent proving it. His Chapters on Rereading Classics', Durkheim, Marx, etc., and 'Men and Methodologies' are straightforward men's studies pieces. He works through a lot of the familiar themes, rationality, family, knowledge, and more generally he looks at what 'doing sociology' means from a gendered perspective. He covers a lot of ground and the historical nature of much of the analysis is illuminating. But you need to know about Weber, Marx and Mill.
Sociology and Philosophy students only need apply.
Again part of a series edited this time by Vic Seidler. In Routledge's now standard sized, seven chaptered 200 page book, we are presented with an insightful and complex undertaking.
Rutherford attempts to place men's subjective being in a psychoanalytic framework, notably that of Winnicott and Klein using Wittgenstein's theory of language to better comprehend the nature of the pre-oedipal mother-son relationship and the consequent problems men face in their search for identity, which is crystallised in their silences. Got it? Right, Does it work?
Well this is important. To what extent do our mothers shape our being? How is love transmuted socially? If our fathers are jealous of it can they support it? Why though does it have to be written like an Amstrad instruction book. Complex concepts can be communicated accessibly.
I found this book difficult to read but ultimately rewarding. There is an attempt in the blurb to suggest that this is a book for everyone. I don't really think so. Are Routledge in danger of disappearing up their own masculinity?
Here, in six long and murky Chapters we are asked to examine the nature of men's relationship with their heroes, their hopes, their longings. Most of which we are told is subconscious. Writing consciously, Middleton suggests, is difficult, we need to get to grips with the hidden agendas.
Middleton looks at comics, poets and Freud amongst others in explaining that if men have a linguistic hegemony then the process of change is all the more problematic. Since there is a vested interest in maintaining control, it is the hidden agenda of fantasies and emotion that we have to examine.
The relationship to power and oppression is uncovered as being part of what is so difficult about the subjective itself, as identities become blurred and ungrounded.
In the final section he returns to Superman and the lost language of Krypton, his metaphor throughout for Men's Silences. There is a danger here of suffering a post-modernist haze, rather than an inward gaze. It's hard work, and very dense.
Reviews by Nigel Larcombe
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