Violent Manhood. J. E. Sumerau
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are and how they influence men’s reactions to their own and others’ actions throughout their lives. Recognizing the importance of this type of analysis, researchers began critically evaluating both men and varied definitions of masculinities more than 40 years ago. In so doing, such efforts have established a massive collection of the ways both men and masculinities are socially constructed and enforced in a wide variety of social settings, populations, locations, and ways over time.[18]
Although reviewing such a large collection of works is a project that itself takes up multiple complete books at present, it is useful here to explore some of the most significant findings that appear throughout this literature. First and foremost, researchers consistently note that what we currently refer to as manhood, or acting in ways that others will see as masculine or otherwise evidence of being a man, is not a physical or personality trait embedded in male bodies. Rather, manhood represents a collective form of practice, belief, and interaction that produces the subordination of women to men, some men to other men, and non-cisgender people (i.e., transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people) to cisgender women and men (especially to cisgender men). In fact, numerous studies have demonstrated how manhood also relies on and reproduces societal patterns of cissexism, endosexism, sexism, monosexism, heterosexism, classism, racism, ageism, nationalism, and religious privilege in the United States. Put simply, existing studies of men and masculinities demonstrate that understanding any large-scale system of inequality in the United States requires interrogating the social construction and enforcement of manhood in society.
To accomplish such interrogation, however, requires analyzing how men signify, or demonstrate to others and themselves, masculine selves (i.e., show that they are men). Following Erving Goffman,[19] this type of work involves the ways men establish and affirm that there is a thing called a man and that such a thing acts in certain ways. Since this type of work can be understood as a performance that people who wish to be seen as men do in order to be recognized as men, Douglas Schrock and Michael Schwalbe argue that we can call such efforts “manhood acts.” As they articulate the concept, “manhood acts” are “the identity work males do to claim membership” in the identity category men, “to maintain the social reality of” this category, “to elicit deference from others” within and beyond this category, and “to maintain privileges vis-à-vis women” and other gender groups.[20] Although the contents of a convincing or successful manhood act may vary widely historically, culturally, interpersonally, and locationally, they argue that all manhood acts aim to signify that one is a man by exerting control over others and by resisting being controlled by others throughout their ongoing lives.[21]
To understand which manhood acts will be seen as convincing or successful, however, requires also being aware of the ideal or most respected version of what it means to be a man in a given society, which researchers refer to as “hegemonic masculinity.”[22] Although very few people who identify as men will be able to enact the most honored or hegemonic version of manhood in a given space, time, or place, the ideal itself typically carries enough symbolic power to influence the entire culture and provide a yardstick by which all manhood acts may be judged by the performer of them and by others. Goffman, for example, noted:
In an important sense there is only one unblushing [man] in America: a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual, Protestant father of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight, and height, and a recent record in sports. Every American [man] tends to look out upon the world from this perspective.[23]
As such, whenever a person who seeks to be seen by others as a man falls short—even if they only believe they fall short—of this ideal, they will likely experience insecurity within their own belief that they have successfully become and are a man.
Building on these insights, researchers have demonstrated that people who identify as men often respond to situations—whether long term or temporary—when they feel like they have fallen short by seeking to compensate for their perceived failure in relation to the hegemonic ideal. At the same time, however, researchers have found many other ways men may feel their identities as men threatened, beyond those outlined by Goffman in the quote above.[24] Put simply, researchers have noted that what may be perceived as a slight or threat to manhood can be as simple as a lack of attention to or recognition of a man’s presence nearby and as complex as an ongoing pattern wherein said man’s efforts to achieve hegemonic ideals fall even only a little bit short again and again over time (e.g., the person has done well compared to others but feels they have not done well enough or as well as other “real” men). In fact, such patterns have led scholars to argue that every man, at some time and in some way, may need to engage in compensatory behaviors to maintain their sense of themselves as “real” men.
Historically, one way people who identify as men respond to perceived slights or failings in their manhood acts involves imitation of the hegemonic ideal. Since most cultural depictions of manhood are dominated by, identified with, and centered on the most honored way of being a man, this requires acting in ways that affirm the beliefs, values, characteristics, and practices of hegemonic masculinity even when doing so may not be in a given man’s best interests. Although this body of scholarship mostly focuses on people who identify as men who do not possess other identities necessary for achieving the hegemonic ideal (e.g., non-heterosexual, non-white), it demonstrates that those who both identify as men and feel unable to enact the hegemonic ideal may engage in “compensatory manhood acts” or attempts to emphasize or exaggerate the hegemonic ideal to signify to themselves and others that they are still men, even when they don’t measure up to the dominant version of what it means to be a man.[25]
Throughout this book, I build on this scholarship by examining how violence—whether the threat or enactment of it—may represent a compensatory manhood act, even for men who could enact the hegemonic ideal. Specifically, I outline how men who could theoretically enact the hegemonic ideal conceptualize violence as a way of demonstrating manhood in cases where they feel their manhood is questioned, threatened, or slighted in some way. To this end, I explicitly focus on the experiences of people who were assigned male, identify as men, and occupy other social locations (white, heterosexual, college educated, middle- and upper-class) necessary for signifying hegemonic manhood in their own lives. In this way, I argue that one part of combatting violence—and especially men’s violence—in society requires detaching violence from what it means to be a man, and in so doing, removing violence as a mechanism whereby men may compensate for perceived loss of status to reassert their own desires to be seen and treated as men by others.
Violence as a Compensatory Manhood Act
Although research on compensatory manhood acts typically focuses on people who identify as men who are also members of marginalized groups (e.g., racial or sexual minorities), or are often under the control of organizational or institutional authorities (e.g., treatment centers, prisons), such studies also reveal common factors that lead men to desire and enact compensatory strategies.[26] In the case of members of marginalized groups, for example, experiences with racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, or other inequalities related to their marginalized identities leads them to report feeling out of control or in need of asserting control or dominance in some other area of their lives. In the case of men in controlled settings, the absence of control over their own lives arises repeatedly in their emphasis on other “manly” behaviors and traits. As Schrock and Schwalbe[27] note in an extensive review of masculinities literatures, the key element of manhood in most cases involves control.
Expanding this observation beyond the cases of men in marginalized groups or controlled settings, it is not difficult to recognize that a large percentage of the situations that make up contemporary social life may leave people who identify as men feeling out of control or controlled by others.[28] If this is the fundamental cause of compensatory manhood acts, then it would not be surprising if men, no matter their standing vis-à-vis elements of the hegemonic ideal, will meet many scenarios wherein such strategies feel right, necessary, and important to their ongoing performance of manhood. This observation represents the central theoretical point of this book: All men will necessarily encounter situations where they are not in control and/or where