[PEN-L:8811] FWD: REVIEW: Vale de Almeida, THE HEGEMONIC MALE

["William S. Lear" <rael@xxxxxxxxxx>]

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Posted by Charles R. Menzies <menzies@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Cross-posted from H-SAE@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (June, 1999)

Miguel Vale de Almeida.  _The Hegemonic Male:  Masculinity in a
Portuguese Town_.  New Directions in Anthropology, Vol 4.
Providence, R.I. and Oxford, Eng.:  Berghahn Books, 1996.  186 pp.
Notes, bibliography, and index.  $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 1-57181-888-X;
$16.50 (paper), ISBN 1-57181-891-X.

Reviewed for H-SAE by Charles R. Menzies
<menzies@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, University of British Columbia

Miguel Vale de Almeida's _The Hegemonic Male_ examines the cultural
construction and performance of hegemonic masculinity--straight,
white, and patriarchal--in the context of the Alentejo region of
Portugal, a part of Europe notable in anthropological texts as the
epitome of "a male chauvinist culture, simultaneously with a strong
sexual division" (p. 11).  That such an ethnographic project is
possible is in no small part due to more than two decades of
critical feminist scholarship which is now producing young scholars
who conceive of gender as central to their work.  The artless
tacking on of a "women-chapter" or the subsumption of gender within
the family and/or reproduction is no longer standard practice.  Vale
de Almeida's ethnography is a powerful and insightful exploration of
what it means to be a man in a working class community in a field in
which there are few such studies (Tom Dunk's _It's a Working Man's
Town_, McGill/Queens University Press, 1991, is a notable
exception).  While it is easy to locate studies of non-industrial or
"alternative" masculinities, Vale de Almeida's contribution is all
the more significant for exploring the construction of hegemonic
masculinity.

Vale de Almeida sets as his goal to "show how hegemonic masculinity
is constituted and reproduced through a series of different social
relations and symbolic constructs" (p. 166; see also pp. 1, 3).  He
separates out six specific sets of relations and symbolic contexts
from which to examine the social construction of masculinity.  These
are notions of hierarchy, power, control, and conflict (Chapter
Two); relations at work between men (Chapter Three); forms of
sociability (Chapter Four); ritual and symbolic performance (pp.
113-24); and notions of personhood and emotion (Chapter Five).  Vale
de Almeida approaches the construction of masculinities not simply
"through relations of power but also through their interrelation
with the division of labour, and patterns of emotional attachment"
(p. 15).  This is a refreshing change from earlier gender studies
which too often posit a totalizing and universally repressive male
subjectivity against which other gender identities are necessarily
positioned.  Vale de Almedia does not, however, try to diminish nor
ignore the misogynist qualities of hegemonic masculinities.  In
fact, his treatment of male representations of women and andocentric
sexuality is the core strength of this ethnography.  This is a
nuanced and sensitive ethnography that highlights the cracks in the
edifice of hegemonic masculinity into which we may thrust crowbars
of change.

Vale de Almeida accomplishes his goals in eight clearly written
chapters.  Each chapter flows nicely one to another as the author's
argument is carefully constructed and advanced.  In Chapter One, "A
Home for a Stranger," we join with the author as he enters his field
site (see especially, pp. 14-18).  The chapter is effective in
describing both the region and the processes of entering the field
site.  Chapters Two through Five describe the various levels of
social identity--the contexts within which discourses and practices
of masculinity are expressed.  The final two chapters "provide a
systematisation of theoretical influences" and "synthesises and
intertwines the stronger arguments of the book" (p. 7).

For anthropological research, making that first meaningful contact
with people in one's field site can be a difficult and anxiety
ridden process.  It is easy to avoid the plunge by exploring all
manner of non-animate objects.  Vale de Almeida spent much of his
first few weeks in the field (when he wasn't trying to force his
sense of "structure" on the place)  listening to and speaking with
Sr. Altino, an "affable, generous and loving man" (p. 23), and
reading the memoirs of a catholic priest who had lived in Pardais
during the latter half of the nineteenth century:  "I was still
refusing to plunge into the world of the quarries, the cafes and
lively interaction with and among people.  I was letting myself be
seduced by history, by the old world of landless workers, large
estate owners, sharecroppers, rural foremen and the constant state
of unease and revolt involving state, church, and social classes"
(p. 24).  Sr. Altino's life history bridged for Vale de Almeida the
divide between the past that was seducing him and the present that
lay around him and led to his first encounter with working age men.

Vale de Almeida's first encounter with working age men opens Chapter
Two, "Blood, Sweat, and Semen."  He had gone to a dance at the local
Civic Centre, but found only a few people dancing and no one that he
knew.  So, Vale de Almeida retreated to the adjoining bar--a
socially defined male preserve (p. 33, see also pp. 53-54)--and sat
down beside an elderly godson of Sr. Altino.  The ethnographer
listened as his companion talked about the good old days when men
and women danced and sang late into the night.  But the conversation
was interrupted when an "obviously drunk heavily-built young man,
fell on the ground beside him" (p. 33).  Vale de Almeida helped
the young man up, bought him a bottle of water, and persuaded him to
drink it.  Through this act of kindness, Vale de Almeida was brought
into a circle of young working men from the community with whom he
spent much of his time from that night forward.  Though fortuitous,
this encounter is key in setting the stage for the more sustained
and theoretically informed discussion of the social construction of
gender Vale de Almeida develops in the rest of the book.  The two
most important themes of which are gendered space, and the
definition of women (by men) in terms of male sexuality.

As an anthropologist, it is difficult not to read Vale de Almeida's
discussion of the cafe as a male preserve without immediately
hearing echoes of earlier ethnographic accounts of the men's houses
in, for example, the Amazon Basin or Papua New Guinea (indeed, Vale
de Almeida himself makes use of this metaphor:  "the Melanesian
analogy is more than simply irony" [p. 88]).  The cafe is set off
from women, it is a space in which "the tired (male) body,
disciplined by hierarchy and tasks, gives way to open gestures,
banging on tables, excessive volume, reiteration, and narratives of
self-praise" (p. 53).  The family home, however, is seen as "female
territory, in which even the family men stay only for short periods
of time other than sleeping hours" (p. 48).  Whereas the "home is a
space of exchange and mutual visitation between women" (p. 48), for
men, the home engenders in them a sense of unease:  "to stay home is
_faz mal_ (is bad for you), _amolece_ (makes you soft)" (p. 53).
For men, the cafe is the "main stage of masculine sociability"  (p.
88) and the idiom of conversation is gender.

Safely ensconced in the "men's house" or cafe, men talk about women
through the lens of male sexuality.  Though other subjects do
intercede into the liquored sociability of the cafe, the primary
focus of the men's world are "mostly exaggerated stories about
sexual prowess and joking invitations to homosexual intercourse" (p.
53; see also pp. 90-92, 101).  We are left with an impression that
Vale de Almeida spent a good deal of time in the bars and cafes of
his field site.  Nonetheless, he is careful to also locate the
construction of straight white manhood within the social fields of
andocentric employment.

Male discussions of women within the idiom of male sexuality is not
an uncommon focal point of male-to-male conversation.  I have
documented a similar form of sexualized banter amongst all male
fishing crews in British Columbia (see Menzies "Obscenities and
Fishermen: The (Re)production of Gender in the Process of
Production," _Anthropology of Work Review_ Vol. 12(2):13-16).  A key
difference between our observations is that Vale de Almeida is
describing a form of andocentric conversation based in sites of
leisure.  The similar conversational patterns I have written about
occurred at the point in which value was being manifest--that is,
fish were being hauled onboard the vessel.  Here, the obscene and
suggestive banter was steeped in a gendered language of male sexual
gratification.  In contrast, at points of crisis the use of
obscenity shifted to a gender neutral form and served to punctuate
the severity of the moment, not celebrate the triumph of the catch.
Nonetheless, Vale de Almeida's observation that "masculinity is
always being constructed and confirmed, whereas femininity is seen
as a permanent essence, "naturally" reaffirmed by pregnancies and
births" (p. 54) resonates strongly with my own and others'
observations of male-centered work and leisure environments.  This
is a consistent feature of hegemonic masculinity, or, at the very
least a consistent theme of cultures with strong European roots such
as the settler states of the Americas, Australia, and Europe itself
(see also, Daniel Wight, _Workers Not Wasters: Masculine
Respectability, Consumption and Unemployment in Central Scotland_
[Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993];  Peter Knustson,
"Measuring Ourselves," _MAST: Maritime Anthropological Studies_
vol. 4[1]:73-90, 1991).

_The Hegemonic Male_ is an important addition to the literature of
gender studies.  Vale de Almeida refuses to assume a universal
maleness and, in so doing, he effectively describes and analyses how
masculinity is rooted in social processes of work and leisure.  This
is a book well worth reading.

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