Toward Postmodern Masculinities

The question, What does it mean to be a Man? may be perennial but current sociocultural changes make exigent its critical reassessment. The twentieth century has witnessed not only the first hundred years of psychoanalysis but also profound sociocultural and intellectual transitions that presage the ending of an “episteme,” exposing the limits and conditions of a masterdiscourse that has governed Western reasoning since the medieval era (Reiss 1982, ). This “analytico-referential episteme,” characterizing the so-called “modern era,” encodes epistemological and ethical standards that entrench patriarchal oppression by casting the “otherness” of womanhood as the commodified “object” of masculinist principles of enunciation and exchange, the subordinated “other” in a powerful logic and rhetoric of domination (Barratt 1993). As this masterdiscourse exhausts itself (and there is evidence it is so doing), our sociocultural code permits, among many other eventuations, renewed openings for feminist theorizing and feminist praxis, a critique of the way in which patriarchal suppositions are deeply inscribed in the rules that govern our thinking, feeling, speaking, and acting. While these notes are not the place to reenter the entire debate over these fundamental “epistemic” transitions as the contemporaneity in which feminism blossoms, their consideration is nevertheless crucially relevant to any question concerning psychoanalysis as liberatory discourse, the critique of masculinist hegemonies in all our sociocultural practices, and the potentiality of “postmodern masculinities.”

Freud's psychology both stands as the apotheosis of modern reason, the heir to enlightenment values grounded in reflective-subjective and scientific-objective practices (as well as the successes of “technical rationality” or “instrumental reason”), and it stands as the harbinger of postmodern inspiration,