Academic literature on the topic 'Male-ness'

The article is devoted to the issue of a body and body-ness in the American film noir classics. It examines the stylistic role of body-ness implying substantivity and corporality of film images and explores the types of male and female human bodies in their specific semantic, structural and visual functions. The analysis is argued by references to different noirs.

Music has a strong effect on people's mental state and behaviour. This effect can be at a simple motor level, or it can be at a more complex level of arbitrary association or it can be at a much more complex cognitive and representational level. This latter case is of specific interest because it implies that, to some degree, music can be said to have a content that is not musical. Thus, when music is taken to depict a rough sea, then something in the music causes that: the music contains something that is being taken to signify roughness-of-sea. The existence of a large, natural yet arbitrary vocabulary (as is demonstrably the case for language) to relate musical expressions to non-musical events/objects seems implausible. In this paper, the possibility is explored that the vocabulary of musical expression concerns psychological aspects of people. Thus music, it is hypothesised, can express male/female-ness and good/evil-ness and happy/sad-ness and so on. Data obtained in a novel paradigm designed to test this hypothesis are described. Substantial support for the hypothesis is found: the implications of this are discussed.

This article proposes a comparison between Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country (UK, 2017) and Peter Sheridan’s Borstal Boy (Ireland, 2000) to examine the role that masculinities and sexual desire play in the construction, (re)configuration and (re)affirmation of nation-ness. These films depict bodies and their sensations as being able to break down and re-shape a strict and embodied notion of nationhood strongly tied by patriarchal norms. However, they also rely on rigid representations of masculinities and do not attempt to dissolve nation-ness as a corporeal entity, but to re-shape it and re-install it as a valid form of existence. Notions by Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain and Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages provide the theoretical approach to observe possible changes and continuities regarding the domestication of male bodies in twenty-first-century Irish and British cinema.

Effects of gender and place of residence on personality characteristics of children were studied. A total of 400 children were the sample of this study of which 200 were from urban and 200 from rural area. Results revealed that male children were more aggressive than female. There was no difference between urban and rural children in aggressiveness vs submissive‐ness. The effects of gender and residence on extroversion vs introversion were not significant. The male children were more relaxed than female children. The effect of residential status on relaxed vs tense was not significant. Dhaka Univ. J. Biol. Sci. 24(1): 59-64, 2015 (January)

Food-market speech is an under-researched area of third-wave variationist sociolinguistic studies. This study addresses the gap by exploring food-market speech styles and hawker personae. Combining descriptive auditory analysis and online questionnaire data, I demonstrate that situated discursive practices of prosodic variables construct both persuasive and aggressive speech styles, and they are stereotypically associated with female and male hawker personae. Furthermore, this paper also explores the ideological construal of hawking as authentic market-ness, further revealing the semiotic saliency and social significance of food-market hawking as not only the language of a speech community but the language of market.

University is characterized by a critical stage where students experience their sexuality, across a range of relationships. From these experiences, university students consolidate their personality and their sexual role. Factors such as age, sex, or traumatic experiences of violence or sexual abuse can affect their sexual role. The present study aims to analyze how the variables age, sex and having suffered abuse or violence may predict sexual satisfaction and inhibition. In addition, we analyze the mediating effect that sexual role plays on these relationships. For this purpose, Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI-12), Sociosexual Orientation Inventory (SOI-R), Inhibited Sexual Desire Test (ISD) and New Sexual Satisfaction Scale (NESS) were administered to 403 university students. The findings report that sex (β = −0.313), age (β = −0.116) and being a survivor of sexual assault (β = 0.413) are predictive of male role, but not from the female role. Also, people with more male features tend to have lower levels of commitment and inhibition than those who have more female ones.

This article examines the impact the category of ‘whiteness’ has on individual interpretations of the American Dream. Via twenty-five life-history interviews, this article presents how US military male Veterans have varying interpretations of the collective idea according to their ethnic and racial background. The evidence presented in this article shows that the idea of the American Dream has racial dimensions or aspects. It suggests that ‘whiteness’ is taken-for-granted in this symbolic idea. For most ethnic minority respondents, this association between American Dream and ‘whiteness’ places them in a position to straddle the boundaries of American-ness and Otherness. This has implications in their everyday lives and sense of belonging. This article highlights a wider question regarding the extent ‘race’ shapes the boundaries of American national identity.

To compare parental attitudes of alcoholics and nonalcoholics a parental attitude questionnaire (PARI-Q4) was administered to a stratified sample of alcoholic veterans in a VA alcohol treatment program and to nonalcoholic male veterans employed at the VAMC. The f-test was used to test equality between samples. Pearson's r was used to correlate for age on all scales. ANOVA methods were used to correlate race, social class, and fatherhood variables. Significant differences between the groups appeared on six scales, “Encouraging Verbalization,” “Avoiding Harsh Punishment,” “Encouraging Emotional Expression,” “Irresponsibility of Father,” “Inconsiderate-ness of Wife,” and “Tolerating Aggression.” No significant differences regarding fatherhood, race, age or social class were found. Since alcoholism was the only significant variable found in this study it points to the need for intervention through teaching parental skills to alcoholics to decrease the risk of their children becoming alcoholics.

This thesis is an exploration of ancestral narratives in the fiction of Thomas Keneally and Christopher Koch. Initially, ancestry in literature creates an historical relationship which articulates the link between the past and the present. In this sense ancestry functions as a type of cultural memory where various issues of inheritance can be negotiated. However, the real value of ancestral narratives lies in their power to aid in the construction of both personal and communal identities. They have the potential to transform these identities, to transgress “natural” boundaries and to reshape conventional identities in the light of historical experience. For Keneally, ancestral narratives depict national forbears who “narrate the nation” into being. His earlier fictions present ancestors of the nation within a mythic and symbolic framework to outline Australian national identity. This identity is static, oppositional, and characterized by the delineation of boundaries which set nations apart from one another. However, Keneally’s more recent work transforms this conventional construction of national identity. It depicts an Irish-Australian diasporic identity which is hyphenated and transgressive: it transcends the conventional notion of nations as separate entities pitted against one another. In this way Keneally’s ancestral narratives enact the potential for transforming identity through ancestral narrative. On the other hand, Koch’s work is primarily concerned with the intergenerational trauma causes by losing or forgetting one’s ancestral narrative. His novels are concerned with male gender identity and the fragmentation which characterizes a self-destructive idea of maleness. While Keneally’s characters recover their lost ancestries in an effort to reshape their idea of what it is to be Australian, Koch’s main protagonist lives in ignorance of his ancestor’s life. He is thus unable to take the opportunity to transform his masculinity due to the pervasive cultural amnesia surrounding his family history and its role in Tasmania’s past. While Keneally and Koch depict different outcomes in their fictional ancestral narratives they are both deeply concerned with the potential to transform national and gender identities through ancestry.

This thesis operates, unashamedly, from the premise that every act of criticism involves a self-reflexive gesture of one's own concerns and ideological imprintings. For this reason Chapter One establishes the writer's own involvement - both autobiographical and theoretical - in notions of male rage and the 'working through' of these concerns. Chapter Two conducts an overview of male rage and the extant systemic literature on the subject. It sets out the various positions on the subject and posits the importance of gender (over generation) in the praxis of therapy. Furthermore, it explores the possibility that the male is equally, but differently, troubled by the hegemonic forces of patriarchy as is the woman. Without diminishing the legitimacy of the woman's experience in the face of male rage, the argument is forwarded that the male is caught in a similar struggle but without the feminine articulatory resources. This chapter details the lack of male power in the face of his supposed muscular omnipotence. Seminal analytic approaches to the question of gender are raised in Chapter Three. Working through Freud, Klein, Lacan and Masters and Johnson an attempt is made to plot the 'evolution' of the feminine and the masculine. Central to this debate is the bi-polarization of gender relations within the same sex (biology/construction) and without (phallic/vaginal, clitoral, passive/active). What emerges is that femininity is bi-focal and that the woman has more resources at her disposal that hitherto acknowledged. While the woman is always double - as both clitoral and vaginal, as lover and mother- it appears that male sexuality is far more precarious than generally perceived. It is this dis-ease on the part of the male that translates itself into envy and, with it, the need to denigrate and belittle woman as the object of that envy. In Chapter 4 an attempt is made to overlap the seemingly divergent fields of analytic and systemic methodologies via the involvement of the therapist in the eco-system of analysis. The substantial role of the therapist -- and the coercive forces placed on him/her by the couple -- is used to modify Elkaim's model and to introduce the need for a telling of the particular stories that concentrate on the unique narratives of the warring couple rather than the patriarchal regime under which these stories are constrained. Before encountering these narratives an essay is made at establishing a methodology of sorts. Newton's scientific formulations are used in order to question the binary opposition that has been, historically, established between quantitative (male) and qualitative (female) methodologies. In the process of questioning this binary opposition it becomes clear that any form of objectifying approach constitutes a refuge from the messiness that is intrinsic to the therapeutic process. The experimental methodology that is posited is precisely one that engages in the narratives of male violence - four extracts are considered, each exposing different articulations of male violence. The question of female subjectivity (and the attendant power of the sorority) is returned to in light of these stories. Central to this section is the notion that male subjectivity is far more convoluted - perhaps more that the feminine counterpart - than initially conceived. The original identification with the (m)other forever displaces him in that the later identification with the father remains distant and contrived. For the purposes of maintaining the dialogic nature of this work, a feminist appraisal of the rage narratives concludes the thesis. Don Quixote is used, by way of an Epilogue, to offer three representations of male subjectivity and to look towards alternative subject positions for the male under patriarchy.
Psychology
D.Litt. et Phil. (Psychology)

Posthumanism in Young Adult Fiction: Finding Humanity in a Posthuman World, edited by Anita Tarr and Donna White, is a collection of twelve essays analyzing young adult science fiction and fantasy in terms of how representative contemporary YA books’ authors describe and their characters portray elements of posthumanist attitudes. The authors give a brief survey of theorists’ discussions of how posthumanism rejects—but does not entirely forsake—liberal humanist tenets. Primarily, posthumanism calls for embracing the Other, eliminating binaries that separate human and nonhuman, human and nature, organic and inorganic, stressing the process of always-becoming. Due to technological enhancements, we should recognize that our species is changing, as it always has, becoming more networked and communal, fluid and changeable. Posthumanism does not mandate cyborgs, cloning, genetic enhancement, animal-human hybrids, mutations, advanced prosthetics, and superhuman strengths—although all of these are discussed in the collected essays. Posthumanism generally upholds liberal humanist values of compassion, fairness, and ethical responsibility, but dismantles the core of anthropocentrism: the notion that humans are superior and dominant over all other species and have the right to control, exploit, destroy, or marginalize those who are not the ideal white, able-bodied male. The more we discover about humans, the more we question our exceptionality; that is, since we co-evolved with many other organisms, especially bacteria, there is no DNA genome that is uniquely human; since we share many traits with animals, there is no single trait that defines us as human or as not human (such as using tools, speaking language, having a soul, expressing emotions, being totally organic, having a sense of wonder). The twelve essayists do not propose that YA fiction should offer guidelines for negotiating posthumanist subjectivity—being fragmented and multiple, networked vulnerable—though many of the novels analyzed actually do this. Other novelists bring their adolescent characters to the brink, but do not allow them to move beyond the familiar structures of society, even if they are rebelling against those very structures. Indeed, adolescence and posthumanism share many elements, especially anxieties about future possibilities, embracing new ideas and new selves, and being in a liminal state of in-between-ness that does not resolve itself. In other words, young adult fiction is the ideal venue to explore how we are now or we might in the future maintain our humanity in a posthuman world.