ABSTRACT
Changes in public men, public masculinities, public patriarchies, and public domains are social, economic, political, cultural; they are also matters of the individual. This chapter considers the changing significance of public patriarchies in terms of the creation of persons, selves, psyches, and senses. What counts as a ‘person’ is not any kind of given entity, just as what counts as ‘personalities’ also varies greatly (Hirst & Woolley 1982). There are no essential ‘persons’, ‘selves’, ‘psyches’, ‘senses’—or indeed ‘biographies’ or ‘bodies’. Instead, these are all the products of definite conditions of formation, specific technologies of the ‘self’. As Gary Wickham (1990b) suggests: ‘…[t]he type of person formed in each instance of person formation is the type of person formed there, its conditions…are its conditions….’ Similarly, notions of ‘men’ as collectivities or as individuals are cultural constructions, aggregations of bits of lived material realities. There are no essential ‘individuals’ or ‘types of individuals’. Like ‘persons’ more generally, they are historically and culturally specific: the type of individual formed in each instance of individual formation is the type of individual formed there.
