Masculinity, Machismo, and Zero-Sum Power
What hasn't changed, even in emergent alternative models, is the one-up-one-down, zero-sum model of power. Indeed, informants explained the occurrence of domestic violence by saying that either the woman or the man “always needs to be on top,” “doesn't want to be the one on the bottom,” or “always wants to be in the right.” Explicit in these accounts is that if one is right, the other is wrong; if one is on top, the other is on the bottom.
These determinations are measured by concrete outcomes (rather than discrepant interpretations or perspectives), deriving directly from differential power, and frequently, brute force.Weighing in the double standard for female versus male fidelity, where male infidelity is seen as inevitable and expected and female infidelity is calamitous, it is clear that the balancing act enabling men to uphold their masculinity requires that the woman's position be perpetually insecure, off-balance and at risk. The difference, perhaps, lies in the fact that women's power is forcibly relativized by the inevitability of her partner's extra-conjugal sexual activities: Her task of negotiating power cannot be as absolute as “washing honor with blood,” and tends to fall more into “weapons of the weak” resistance strategies (Scott 1985).
Woortmann relates his assessment of symbolically castrated “roosters,” cited earlier, to the legacy of slavery and racism and resultant “social disorganization,” particularly as manifested in the prevailing matrifocal kinship patterns of the poorer socioeconomic classes where families are often dominated by mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters. In the under-employed socioeconomic stratum I studied, women may receive lesser remuneration for each labor-hour, but nonetheless often have more consistent earning power as domestic servants, washerwomen, and small-scale, informal market merchants.
Consequently, women often serve as primary sustainers of their families, which and implicitly underline their male partners' inadequacy as providers.The forms masculinity takes under such circumstances must further be considered in light of machismo as an overriding gender ideology. Lancaster's vision of machismo in Nicaragua is as an ideology, a “political economy of the body,” and a system of exchange
... between men in which women figure as intermediaries. To maintain one's masculinity, one must successfully come out on top of these exchanges. To lose in this ongoing exchange system entails a loss of face and thus a loss of masculinity. The threat is a total loss of status, whereby one descends to the zero point of the game and either literally or effectively becomes a cochon [queer] (1992: 237).
Here Nicaraguan masculinity, under the specific ideological shaping of machismo, becomes inherently perishable, high maintenance, and subject to challenge, attack, and siege. This model is applicable for Bahian men of all classes, but raises the question of how the difficult task of upholding masculinity is further aggravated by marginalizing economic, racist, and kinship organization factors.
My argument here differs from stigmatizing “culture of poverty” or “culture of violence” theories. Rather, it focuses on how individual men negotiate gendered identities, power and authority in the face of limited resources, both material and behavioral. The man disallowed from exercising control based on earning power, social prestige or status, or patriarchal authority in the family may rely more heavily on alternate power “resources,” of which violence is but one example.
Other ways of thinking might employ Peter Wilson's (1973) “respectability” and “reputation” as contrasting value complexes in the Anglo-Caribbean, or Roberto da Matta's (1991) contrasting casa (house) and rua (street) spheres for Brazil. These authors relate respectability and casa, respectively, to values associated with whiteness, affluence, and women on the one hand, and reputation and rua with the lower classes, blackness, and men on the other.
Reputation and rua valorize play over work, adventuresome virility as opposed to the overly domesticated “auntie man,” and roguery and rebellion over conformity and accommodation. (See also Besson (1993) for a critique of Wilson's tendency to ignore Caribbean women's radicalism, and Mintz (1971, 1981) for how Afro-Caribbean gender relations may afford women greater economic autonomy without threatening male partners than in non-Afro- Caribbean counterparts.)The intention here is emphatically not to suggest that violence actually occurs more frequently, or with greater severity, in poorer classes or in minority ethnic groups: there is no evidence for that. Rather, I want to consider the possibility that men whose disadvantaged social locations cast greater doubts upon their masculinity might rely more on violence as a positive resource in constructing male identity (positive in the Foucauldian sense of creating meaning/value). Clearly, class or ethnic distinctions are not overdetermining in this respect, yet it is reasonable to consider the influences they have for creating stress and insecurity and for how the tenacity of violence as a strategy might result.
This concern is defensible insofar as feminist and other activism against male violence may at times be working at cross-purposes. On the one hand, the feminist movement encourages questioning and rebelling against male domination and authoritarianism. The fruits of this questioning should come as no surprise: questioning it produces conflict and contestation.
The feminist movement is committed to the eradication of male violence against women, but yanking the crutch of violence out from under men without trying to understand what infirmities the crutch was supporting creates the risk of generating more insecurity, more conflict, and potentially, more violence. Moving beyond palliative measures in combating male violence entails distinguishing between conflict and violence: recognizing conflict's dynamic, transformative potential on the one hand, and seeking ways of dissolving an overdetermined, causal relationship between conflict and violence on the other.
The more we understand about what enables men to be secure as men, and the more we know about how instabilities create the “need” for men to call upon violence to continue being men, the closer we come to helping men break violent habits.References
Besson, Jean. (1993). Reputation and respectability reconsidered: A new perspective on Afro-Caribbean peasant women. In Women and Change in the Caribbean, edited by J. Momsen. London: J. Curry.
Lancaster, Roger N. (1992). Life is Hard: Machismo, Danger and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Matta, Roberto da. (1991). Carnivals, Rogues, and Heroes: An Interpretation of the Brazilian Dilemma. South Bend, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press.
Mintz, Sidney W. (1971). Men, women, and trade. Comparative Studies in Society and History 13: 247-269.
-----. (1981). Economic role and cultural tradition. In Black Women Cross- Culturally, edited by Filomina C. Steady. Cambridge: Schenkman.
Scott, James C. (1985). Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Wilson, Peter. (1973). Crab Antics: The Social Anthropology of English-Speaking Negro Societies in the Caribbean. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Woortmann, Klaas. (1987). A Familia das Mulheres. Rio de Janeiro: Tempo Bra- sileiro.