Melancholy Femininity and Obsessive—Compulsive Masculinity: Sex Differences in Melancholy Gender

Jay, Meg

doi:10.1080/15240650701225435

Cited by 10 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 23 publications

(25 reference statements)

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“…To Butler, this process represents a loss of possibilities that is generally unacknowledged in culture. Butler also suggests that heterosexual culture creates a dichotomy between male and female, and between masculinity and femininity, dictating that what one can 'be' and what one can 'have' are different (Jay 2007). Thus, a boy ought to desire the feminine and be the masculine; for him, gender identity rests on the foreclosure of desiring men.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 97%

A psychosocial approach to shame, embarrassment and melancholia amongst unemployed young men and their fathers

Jimenez

Walkerdine

2011

Gender and Education

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This paper uses a psychosocial approach to explore young unemployed men's resistance to work they describe as 'embarrassing' and 'feminine', in the context of the closure of a steelworks in a town in the South Wales valleys. In our psychosocial interview-based study, with young men as well as their mothers and (where possible) their fathers, we found a community riven with complex feelings about masculinity and femininity, projected on to the young men in such a way as to almost scapegoat them. The experience of the young men was marked by embarrassment and shame. They feel bullied and shamed by their families, peers and others in the community for not being able to find gender-appropriate work. IntroductionThis paper seeks to explore issues about shame, embarrassment, disillusionment, melancholy, traumatic loss, depressive anxieties, and their relative influence in the ways in which adult and young men cope with unemployment, the loss of manufacturing work and the ascendancy of service work, in the context of research carried out by the authors in an ex-steel community in South Wales. Our research started with a previous study on steel redundancies and its effects on worker identities (Walkerdine and Jimenez, forthcoming) in a town in the South Wales valleys, which lost its major employer, a steelworks, in 2002. This closure had a devastating effect upon the small town and while many young and older men managed to make the transition to other forms of work, some did not. In particular, some young unemployed men refused to take available work because it was considered embarrassing and feminine. Consequently, we received funding 1 to follow this up and conducted a second small psychosocial interview-based study of six young unemployed men (17-24) and their parents with the aim of further understanding the phenomenon we had encountered. For the young men and families we worked with, there was a great deal of pain and difficulty around this issue, with the problem well recognised by other members of the community. For example, stacking shelves in the local supermarket was considered too embarrassing to contemplate. These are young men who left school with no qualifications and therefore for whom no 'skilled' work is available. The range of unskilled work is very limited, but we were struck by the fact that the young men in our first

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 97%

A psychosocial approach to shame, embarrassment and melancholia amongst unemployed young men and their fathers

Jimenez

Walkerdine

2011

Gender and Education

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“…In other words, we began to see a disturbance in the fabric of the relational matrix of the community, in which its most vulnerable members were being scapegoated and made to hold the distress of those who could not bear the loss of masculinity and the accompanying shame. Given our psychosocial relational perspective , we paid close attention to the relations among male subjectivity, subjection and resistance, not only as manifest in language use but also in how it operates unconsciously (Jay, 2007) through what Layton (2002Layton ( , 2008 calls 'normative unconscious processes'. These are unconscious collusions between fathers and sons, especially in relation to the need to split off and project aspects of subjectivity.…”

Section: Shame and Embarrassmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Shameful work’: A psychosocial approach to father–son relations, young male unemployment and femininity in an ex-steel community

Jimenez

Walkerdine

2011

Psychoanal Cult Soc

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Using a psychosocial approach, this paper explores young unemployed men's resistance to work they describe as 'embarrassing' and 'feminine'. The context is the closure of a steelworks in a town in the South Wales valleys, in which their resistance is mediated by father-son relationships that dictate what counts as proper manly work. In this study, young men, as well as their mothers and (where possible) their fathers, were interviewed. The interviews reveal a community suffering the effects of intergenerational trauma and riven with complex feelings about masculinity and femininity. These feelings are projected onto the young men, who feel bullied and shamed by their families, peers and others in the community because they are unable to find gender-appropriate work. The implications of these findings for understandings of youth male unemployment are considered.

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“…For these boys, particularly when their fathers are emotionally or physically absent, phallic narcissism becomes psychically urgent. As evident in my clinical example that follows, the "narcissistically valorized" penis (Braunschweig and Fain 1978) is used defensively to stave off shame, indignity, and humiliation, often featuring obsessive-compulsive masculinity (Jay 2007) or perverse sexuality (Herzog 2004).…”

Section: The Paradoxical Relationship With the Omnipotent Mother: Helmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…males in general)" (Freud 1921, p. 105), comparable to the boy's heteroerotic desires for his mother-is inherently problematic because it generates unconscious incestuous anxieties that accelerate the repudiation of his homoerotic love for the father. Hence, in combination with cultural mores, the boy's same-sex object desire often tends to be preemptively foreclosed (Jay 2007; see also Butler 1995;Moss 2012).…”

Section: Boys and Their Fathers: Homoerotic Love And Melancholic Lossmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Elusiveness of Masculinity: Primordial Vulnerability, Lack, and The Challenges of Male Development

Diamond¹

2015

The Psychoanalytic Quarterly

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Reaching beyond the Oedipus prototype to address the unrepresentable vulnerability founded on the boy's infantile helplessness in contact with the mother's body, the author aims to identify the inherent tensions and enigmas of being male. He proposes that both the repudiation of femininity and the overvaluation of phallicity are unconsciously constructed to withstand the fundamental deficiency grounded in the asymmetry of the boy's prephallic relation with his primary object. This bodily based primordial vulnerability, marked by absence and lack, remains elusive-an unsymbolizable experience that provides the archaic matrix for adaptive and defensive phallicism, the oedipal complex, and genital progression. A clinical vignette is presented to illustrate these concepts.

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Melancholy Femininity and Obsessive—Compulsive Masculinity: Sex Differences in Melancholy Gender

Cited by 10 publications

References 23 publications

A psychosocial approach to shame, embarrassment and melancholia amongst unemployed young men and their fathers

A psychosocial approach to shame, embarrassment and melancholia amongst unemployed young men and their fathers

‘Shameful work’: A psychosocial approach to father–son relations, young male unemployment and femininity in an ex-steel community

The Elusiveness of Masculinity: Primordial Vulnerability, Lack, and The Challenges of Male Development

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