Western Masculinity and Anti-masculine Cant

I'm really struggling to find scholarly discussions of masculinity that don't deteriorate into some kind of boilerplate about the "need to dismantle patriarchy in all its forms" (Schut 103). As you can well imagine, that particular field of feminist criticism - overlapping with the discussion of the "liberated man" - is particularly vibrant for a range of (often crassly political) reasons and sifting through it to find something in any way reflective of masculinity as it is lived instead of a cartoon masculinity used as a political prop is tough work. Either the scholarship is explicitly anti-masculine polemic, or it is a kind of Gorillas in the Mist exploration of these wondrous, mysterious creatures called "men".

Some of the scholarship can just be filtered for this gender bias and appropriated for my own uses, which sometimes yields really useful sources (like Kevin Schut's "Desktop Conquistadors" in Gaming as Culture). And very rarely I'm delighted to find a constructive discussion of masculinity like Thomas Newkirk's Misreading Masculinity: Boys, Literacy, and Popular Culture that at least attempt to understand the internal coherence and value systems in masculine discourse without the pejorative political imperative projecting external values and language onto a system that doesn't work in those terms.

Otherwise, though, the scholarship is pretty insufferable. Not because of its explicit arguments it makes about masculinity, but because of the false premises it takes for granted and the false consensus it evidences in doing so. A few shibboleths from Derek Burrill's Die Tryin': Videogames, Masculinity, Culture illustrate my point.

In a brilliant and sweeping fashion, Haraway fuses the discourse of science to a particular masculinity - a "modest" masculinity - that defies the typically visible macho and hyperviolent masculinity in Western history and culture. (19)

In what sense is Western masculinity "hyperviolent"? Hyper implies "in excess" or "above", but in relation to what? Which cultural masculinity is the invisible (and presumably "acceptably violent" or "nonviolent") denominator in this binary? One could scale back the statement to one of "violent masculinity in Western history", but the problem would remain of the word "violent" implying a non-violent corollary to define it as violent.

All these kinds of questions are rhetorical of course. This bit of semiotic laziness boils down to a lazy deployment of cant and a reliance on a false consensus of "what we all believe" that isn't in evidence. It derives I believe - as most such bits of anti-masculine canon seem to - from a reliance on feminists to define how men see themselves (which is particularly galling considering the radical imperative of being able to be called by a name you choose for yourself). Such a stance relies on outside observation to discuss an identity that must be lived to be understood (another fact that shockingly eludes those relying on feminism to discuss the internal machinations of masculinity. Would we rely on men - or more pointedly, self-described patriarchs - to theorize for us about what it's like to be women?). It fails completely to appreciate the use value of strength and force in masculinity or to postulate theories of the utility of performative "violence" beyond the facile correlation of "violence" with "bad" and ruminations about Western patriarchy (hint: there's a reason why the increase in violent computer games correlates with a decrease in actual violence).

Take this bit for example:

Marx posed the issue starkly: does social being determine consciousness, or does consciousness determine social being? Male violence must either be seen as a question of original sin ... or as a social construction required by patriarchal society. (23)

Notice the wildly false dichotomy. Either male "violence" - that is, as described elsewhere in his book, a lionization of strength and any physical competition - is an original sin, or is a social construction of the sinister patriarchy. Men are either sinners, or they're puppets. No room is made for a positive, productive use value for masculine discourses of power. "Violence" is a moral evil from the start in this formulation, and the only question is how culpable the men are in their wickedness. This is the blindness I am seeing in a lot of the scholarship on masculinity as I prepare for this conference paper: the erasure of a basic question that I would assume academics were always asking themselves when discussing anything: what makes that value statement valid? Why is masculinity and its promotion of strength de facto a moral hazard? What makes "violence" less valuable than "nonviolence" (especially across contexts)?

Furthermore, why treat masculinity as a problem to be solved instead of trying to approach it on its own terms?

Final Fantasy XIII

... has sucked up a huge chunk of time recently, and it really shouldn't have. That time is completely wasted and I should have realized by now - after having played every Final Fantasy from 7 through 12 - that I would just have to start over and play it through once I got the Prima strategy guide. I know: I'm cheap. But I realize that's the kind of player I am and I want to get all the goodies along the way and not miss anything.

Plus, the sometimes intrusive Final Fantasy tutorial system neglected to mention that I shouldn't be crapping through all my Aegisol and Fortisol fighting random trash monsters because - surprise! - you won't be able to get any more of these incredibly valuable items later in the game... They were dropping like rain in the first couple chapters so I used them up assuming my time of plenty would never end. O, what a fool I.

Generally, Finaly Fantasy XIII is a mixed bag for me. I like the game enough to play it through again (the combat system is innovative and yet the game is familiar enough to let me play it as Final Fantasy). I can definitely say, though, that I'm not invested in most of the characters the way I was in XII, X, or VII, or even as much as in the comparatively weak characters in VIII (FFIX was a disaster so I don't really count that). Apart from Lightning and perhaps Vanille, the characters could all die in a train crash and I wouldn't miss them or care where their boring stories were going. I routinely skip any cutscene with Sazh, Fang, or Snow because Sazh and Snow are boring stock characters while Fang's personality fades into the background noise as "random ornery woman".

I generally expect there to be a character or two that is just garbage: I think there's a rule somewhere in Japan where you have to have a trash character in your anime-looking RPG, no matter what. It was true for FFVII (Cait Sith), Breath of Fire III (Momo), FFX (Waka), FFXII (Penelo)... For some reason there's always a character that is neither badass nor central nor useful in battle nor otherwise interesting. Yet the game forces you to use this character for a couple hours of time-sink for reasons beyond my ability to divine (I can only imagine that these trash characters have some other value in Japan that I don't grasp). XIII's problem lies in the fact that at least half of the cast is the "worthless trash character".

Finally, is there a rule at Square Enix that all your proper nouns have to be drawn from an internet word generator? For fully a third of the game I had no idea what was being referred to when someone said Pulse, l'cie, fal'cie, ci'eth, cocoon, and so forth. These are pretty important elements and the story lost my interest several times because there was zero explanation of how to decode the game's nomenclature. It didn't help that once I realized what these words meant I recognized how stupid the names were and they could have just as easily been replaced with something recognizable (for the record, the words above can roughly be translated Earth, demigod, god, demon, and space station).

...

Hmm, I guess I didn't like FFXIII as much as I imagined; at least not the story itself. It's a testament to how well the game is designed as a game, though, that I'm still planning on playing it through again, only skipping all the tedious cutscenes.

Dissertation Ideas and Other Esoterica

Is it ever too early to start thinking about my dissertation? I started my PhD last year immediately after finishing my MA, so it may be on the early side. But, then again, one can never bee too prepared I don't think as long as the path isn't set in stone at such an early date.

My main project - in all my scholarship, including my future dissertation - is to open up new media to serious literary investigation: specifically video games, but also some other marginal pieces of cultural production. I, quite frankly, reject the continued exaltation of the "book" as a class of special objects in the 21st century. For many centuries, the book has been incredibly important to the West as a vessel for knowledge, power, and culture, but even while I don't imagine the book is dead (as some maudlin Cassandras insist with every new internet site), I really don't see it having the impact in the next 100 years that it did in the last. Literature - especially the capital "L" literature that academics like to study - simply isn't the location of cultural power any longer.

But I digress...

* My first and probably favorite idea is one I'm calling "Mapping the Multiverse: Warhammer 40K and the Reading of Game Fiction". This possible project would involve an investigation of Warhammer 40,000 as a multi-modal project and how people interact with a single intellectual property in a range of media and modes including books, magazines, websites, comics, conventions, tabletop games, card games, RTS video games, online MMOs, virtual communities, fan groups and so forth. Specifically I think I'd focus heavily on Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War and Blood Ravens: The Dawn of War Omnibus because I think the crossover between book and video game really helps erase the barriers between literary text and video game as cultural product (Basically, Blood Ravens is a 3 part novel covering the events that happen in Dawn of War). After a chapter of work erasing I'd go into the cultural significances I see in Dawn of War, why I think the multi-modal consumption by the audience is important, and finally how to read Dawn of War as a video game fiction (as opposed to just stretching the book-critique rubric over the face of a video game). This would ultimately lead to a "going forward" discussion about reading video games, and especially ones involved in a multi-model intellectual property, as important innovations in how culture is produced as well as a possible source of solutions to problems (especially Postmodern ones) posed by print culture.

* I'm considering doing something similar with Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning since the Warhammer property has as many modes of interaction as Warhammer 40K, but if one appreciates the differences between W:AR and Dawn of War - not just as stories, but as games and interactive spaces - then one understands that the approach would be very different. The main difference lies in how the community interacts with the text. Dawn of War is an RTS game and a novel, but W:AR is an MMO. The dynamics for how an audience interacts with a Massively Multiplayer Online game are unique and touch on a range of other audience-studies issues. So if I did Warhammer, I'd still do the multi-modal inter-textual reading, but it would also necessarily focus more on audience receptions, interpretations, and interactions with the text and the meta-text (like forums, websites, conventions and so forth). It's definitely possible and probably valuable to tackle issues of audience in the MMO and how that relates to Convergence Culture, but it's just a much different project I think than dealing with Convergence itself and trying to read video games from that.

In fact, the MMO experience is different enough that I wonder if perhaps the MMO is somehow different in kind from other games because of the "massively multiplayer" aspect. The MMO facet practically forces one to discuss issues of audience and mass culture even if I really just want to do a close reading and search for internal meanings. I'm wary of any topic that tyrannically compels me to discuss something, which makes me wary of tackling WAR even though I enjoy it and making connections across the modes deployed by Warhammer.

* Finally there is the option of just doing a critically-informed reading of something like Warcraft III (or Dawn of War or anything really). This may seem like a trite fallback but a serious critical reading would do a lot of the things I need it to. First, it would afford me the opportunity to make the case for video games as serious cultural production that ought to be considered critically (even apart from the politically tedious meta-concerns like "is GTA making people violent" or whatever). Second, the fact that a game is being critiqued at all is a novelty that is worthy of exploration. As far as I know - and I've done a lot of searching, but I may be mistaken - there is nothing out there that critiques video games in a scholarly way except as generic media artifacts in larger discussions of culture. No one discusses Warcraft as a Postcolonial and Ecocritical critique of Western hegemony or Warhammer 40K as a post-scientific realist dystopia. There's a tiny bit of soft pop-philosophy about Final Fantasy, but nothing scholarly. Finally, it would still afford me the opportunity to discuss how to read a video game and the ways in which that is distinct from critiquing other kinds of culture (plus, of course, how that distinction is meaningful for whatever close reading I do).

As generic as it sounds, I think a basic close reading would still be innovative and meritorious just because of its novelty here.

More ideas to come I'm sure...