Reviews and Comments

Reading this ethnography I formed the hypothesis that misogyny is actually a secondary reaction formation to a fear of failure to fit or appease normative erotics of the body within homosocial spaces (i.e., what may actually constitute masculinity), rather than being a primary or foundational phenomena for masculinity. This would seem to be consistent with empirical evidence as well though I would have to look for the specific studies I'm thinking about again (namely ones that talk about the relationship between "emasculation" and misogyny).

Besides my having gained a firmer grasp of this insight through the book, the books merit is its use of intersectional and discourse analysis to demonstrate that the consolidation of masculine identity is not reducible to a reliance on homophobia in male-to-male relations, but is primarily about how bodies are highlighted and valued within a particular set of sexual norms. The homophobia is a downstream effect of this. It was fascinating to go through the case studies in the book as it showed, to me, the subtle ways in which the body "takes place" in these interactions, becomes present in discourse--in language--through its fragmentation, and that this fragmentation is what allows bodies to end up subsumed in a social world mired with contradictory or conflicting demands that it has to navigate. The strategic deployment of the different fragmenting abstractions regarding the body and their associated valuations or demands is the process by which senses of self are forged, and it is this process of strategic deployment that actually manages to produce individuals' social position even while no individual ever actually embodies any given abstraction (such as "machoness" or "manhood") fully. This process of identity consolidation is thus ongoing. It is for this reason that we can talk about "masculinities" rather than "masculinity." Yet, of course, it would be a mistake to just do away with the latter in social analyses, as it is precisely the latter that tracks the life of this "fragmenting abstraction" across discourses, and what thereby makes possible the many masculinities (the book covers black [cis]male masculinity v. white [cis]male masculinity as well as female masculinity). That the ethnography illustrates this so nicely made clear to me the relevance of Lacan's concept of the Symbolic register and made me consider with more clarity what the role of that register is in the process of "sexuation." I came to the realization that psychoanalysis--particularly, Lacanian psychoanalysis--can be very helpful in grounding and deepening our understanding of intersectionality, though it also renders problematic usual understandings of what "patriarchy" actually is or consists of (e.g., it would seem to make it more difficult to "point" to someone running the show here, although the hierarchies described by patriarchy are still quite clearly present--this is consistent with Foucault's view of power, although I am not totally committed to that view).

I did at certain points reading the book get a bit bored, but this is mostly due to a familiarity with some aspects of the experience of "boyhood" such that the plainer observations did not grab. I found myself identifying with the LGBTQIA+/queer students covered in the book, perhaps unsurprisingly--the feminine boys in particular, if only because that was the only experience of myself allowed to me growing up. Overall, I found the ethnography helped clarify, refine and solidify a few things for me. I find most of the policy prescriptions towards the end of the book to be well-advised, though I always like to see how things could be improved and I had to wonder if something was indeed missing. I think this feeling of something missing in the policy prescriptions came from my noting Pascoe's observation at an earlier point in the book of the stark contrast and division between the private, or one-to-one, social lives of boys and the public practices and social life of boys. It didn't seem to me any of the policies directly addressed this "splitting" of boyhood, though one can argue some of the suggested policies indirectly do so. My intuition is that this division is actually extremely crucial if one wants social change for men and boys.

The interaction between patriarchy and gender is incredibly complicated, and there is always a temptation to reduce gender to patriarchal machinations. However, doing so leaves a lot of issues either unresolved or unexplained. An easy example is the seemingly constructive relationship people may have in the parodic performance, or even authentic appreciation, of gender-stereotypical behavior they themselves exhibit. The most obvious example for women is that of the use and application of make-up, the willing, even enthusiastic, desire and idealization of marriage. A willing attachment that seems distinct from their own abstract appreciation of the ways that patriarchy grinds women's lives to burnout and even despair. More obvious is the way in which such things reassert themselves even in the cultural production of the marginalized, or in sub- or counter-cultural production (e.g., transformative works of fandom). If feminism is as easy as convincing women that their forms of life are the product of patriarchy, such that they opt out, then the overwhelming conclusion many feminists would feel compelled to draw would be misogynistic, or perhaps more precisely meta-misogynistic.

Another puzzle is that of the place of queer experience within feminism, particularly top/bottom dynamics and the possible intersections of queer sex with S&M/BDSM. The lazy attempts at accounting for this is to simply accuse such groups, queer or hetero but kinky, of "internalized misogyny" or simply misogyny, or other such things, or to project the function of such acts for their participants so that the purported causes of such acts--patriarchy--remains plausible. But while the internalization of misogyny is something that can plausibly happen regardless, the explanation does not account for or incorporate self-narratives about these activities and serves to deflect from the need to explain how it is that this internalization would manifest under the specific auspices of sexual dynamics or otherwise assert themselves in a way abstracted from the imposition of roles on particular human bodies (especially if one considers oneself a "materialist feminist"). As well: why internalization of anything at all would be a requirement for these manifestations.

To me, these are signs that gender is more primordial than patriarchy, and is simply a tool or technology that patriarchy has weaponized. Patriarchy has swept in to become another contributing factor, another op-ed writer, another lordship and vassal, of gender. Meanwhile gender, like any actual technology would, thereby remains ambivalent in its relationship to patriarchy. But acknowledging this requires understanding what gender involves beyond the particularities of patriarchy or historicized socioeconomic institutions. It also requires not taking for granted patriarchy or such institutions, naturalizing them, and then building understandings of gender that serve their very own assumptions. Instead, the question to ask is a transcendental one: What makes gender in specific possible? What are the conditions of possibility for gender?

After all, what makes gender itself possible must also be what allows institutions and hierarchies that are gendered to be possible. Ontologizing gender through a psychoanalytic framework seems to be the closest method for answering this, and this is exactly what this book does by extrapolating something universal from the cisfeminine and transfeminine experience, which confront similar obstacles and frustrations yet seem to come at them differently. The cisfeminine and transfemme experiences with patriarchy serves to render more obvious and explicit the role of desire in the structural relationship between identity and alterity, even as this role is not contingent upon patriarchy as such and in fact generalizes to men. Under this framework, from the point of view of gender, patriarchy could be analyzed as, beyond just a material inequality, a set of sociocultural strategies for disavowing gender as an interpersonal anxiety or intrapersonal insecurity by displacing it onto particular sets of bodies that are to bare that burden. The book does not go into this, but I think its a natural extension of the main thesis: that gender is the psychic operation of evacuating the self for the sake and use of alien forces, for the assimilation of the "objectified self," i.e. the self image.

Patriarchy is partly the male disavowal of themselves as selves whose sense of self is constituted from without, by the desires or desiring of others, desires that operate and exist independently of them and their own control. It is a steadfast resistance to being desired due to mysterious causes and for mysterious reasons, and to desires from outside conditioning how they move about the world. Certain branches of feminism fall into a similar trap in the process of resisting or combating patriarchy, which would explain certain social movement contradictions.

I think this is a good overview of the impacts of bullying, including not only quantitative data about those impacts into adulthood, but also interesting qualitative case studies regarding that impact. It's useful as a starting point for understanding some of the factors that have been found in the research to be relevant to victimization or perpetration in bullying as well as how such experiences affect relationships and social behavior in later life. I left the book interested in a more specific angle on bullying, relevant to myself as well, as some of the qualitative studies involved shifts from homosociality to heterosociality in bullying victims depending on the gendering and gendered experience of the bullying. Given that bullying occurs in childhood, it may coincide with critical periods in the formation of a gendered sense of self and engagement in sexual interest and exploration. It would be interesting to see how the bullying experience interacts with burgeoning psychic forces and drives during this period to influence developmental trajectory in these areas.

The book promotes a construct called Adult Post-Bullying Syndrome. While there does seem to be a cluster of common underlying symptoms for those who survived bullying in childhood, especially if not having exhibited post-traumatic growth, many of those traits overlap with symptomology for other conditions. It is not clear how, for example, abuse and bullying are all that different in their effects.

Perhaps the main difference is that of the notion of environmental control and mastery, such that bullying has an inherent normalizing function for what is to be expected in a social environment as such, rather than what is to be expected in particular types of relationships. For bullied children, social environments in general seem to lack a sense of control. That is, the cognition formed from bullying and that formed from abuse is slightly different, wherein social cognition as a result of the former involves a more global social expectation adjustment and a more context-indifferent undervaluation of agency. It is also the case that bullying has a tendency to be more prolonged than a single instance of relational abuse, and even in equivalent duration may be perceived as more inescapable than, for example, prolonged parental abuse. The prospects of greater freedom from parents in adulthood as opposed to greater freedom from peers or colleagues may make it more likely to sustain hope in one scenario compared to another. If there is a distinction to be made between bullying effects and more general abuse effects, there is nonetheless huge overlap and boundary fuzziness. This is despite definitions of bullying that exclude other kinds of abuse, but based not on their effect or etiology but other features like frequency or perpetrator.

Despite the books' fascinating statistics, it seems to me that not much of a case is made that APBS is enough of a unique or independent condition to deserve separate treatment from other diagnoses. Rather, the utility of something like APBS might be in prognosis or as a way into assessing and understanding other comorbidities, almost treating it as something which mediates those comorbidities due to the explicitness about the nature and shape of the traumatic event. Its utility for prognosis may make it useful in institutional contexts dealing with children, such as schools. At minimum, I can imagine an APBS diagnosis could itself validate and honor the true impact and seriousness of a patients' childhood bullying experience by making it explicit.

The most interesting parts of this book, perhaps simply because they have personal relevance, were the parts about the impact of bullying, especially prolonged bullying, on worldview, the polarities in defense mechanisms among victims of bullying, the impact on social participation and self-initiated formation of social units, the circulation of behavior and attachment from parents to peers to adult authority figures and back, and more specifically the impact of bullying on sexual and gender minorities. One theme that seemed to gently emerge from the text before quickly dissipating again like sand as I was reading was that of changes in homosociality v. heterosociality in the child's trajectory to adulthood impacted by bullying. It seemed also that the bullying of sexual minorities seemed to have some differential determination on the "temporality" of the development of sexual or gender identity. These aspects seemed to me to need more qualitative exploration and research.

As I had been reading this book, I thought it was perhaps no coincidence that Georges Bataille and Jacques Lacan were sort of around rather similar circles. I wonder now how the role of surplus or excess life that, under the auspices of psychological or cultural taboo, constitutes the erotic transmuted into the Lacanian concept of "surplus enjoyment," if it had at all. It may be coincidental, as Bataille was a materialist and Lacan, insofar as he conceptualizes the psyche in terms of a semiotic process, could be considered a kind of "materialist" (the psyche is precisely what can be "read"). However, Georges Bataille has a unique pull vis-a-vis Lacan due to the way he engages in interpretation of facts of biology and observations of anthropology in order to extract philosophical insight. I very much like this approach, though I find it would have been more rigorous in this case if at the time there had been a more systematic biosemiotics to provide a firmer foundation for such discussions.

This book has been a major influence on how I think of and approach metaphysical questions due to its transcendental critique of the principle of identity as used in logic, allowing for the possibility of taking the horizon of description, a phenomena both historically and culturally contingent, as foundational to systems of decideability rather than proceeding them. That is, an understanding of ontology allows us to understand the ways in which logic, in particular the principle of identity, is actually an artifact of a particular kind of entity with a particular relationship to Being. That is, the relevance and emergence of "logic," i.e. rule-based systems of decideability with epistemic relevance, is contingent on a given set of ontological conditions and structures. This poses problems for the attempt to treat logic as a kind of metaphysical arche/root, or as a system that is universally applicable. The implication of this is an implicitly "anti-Pythagorean" metaphysics.

The most interesting aspect of this, however, is how Heidegger's understanding here compares and contrast with Hegelian dialectics. Perhaps the existence of Hegelian dialectics, even as mere methodology, is a case in point even if Heidegger heavily criticizes it (I've still not fully worked out the contours of the critique). However, my reading of this work could be completely wrong, especially as Heidegger later goes on to talk about tékhnē (if I remember correctly), which would seem like a non-sequitor. However, I suspect this is because Heidegger links logic and tékhnē together. Who knows--Heidegger has always been cryptic. One wonders if this piece had an impact on someone like Gilles Deleuze, as, while he rejects Heidegger's insistence on a deconstruction of the history of metaphysics rather than a continuation of the metaphysical tradition, he seems to treat difference as something which precedes the formation or existence of identity. One may also wonder if Heidegger has had any historical influence among those who attempt to naturalize epistemology.