ABSTRACT
Given the self-evident importance in ‘mental health’ environments of retaining a compassionate and affirmative attitude towards vulnerable men and maintaining an optimistic sense of the possibilities for change in men’s lives, a quite widespread tendency to pathologise masculinity, within both mainstream and critical discourse, constitutes another area of potential difficulty in the complex political matrix surrounding contemporary responses to men’s distress. Since our understandings of and orientations towards masculinity will inevitably inform, and may decisively shape, any work ‘we’ might do as men, on our selves or with each other, I begin this chapter by reviewing some relevant histories and debates. As already noted, various feminist and critical psyprofessionals have contributed influential analyses of the gendered and racialised nature of social violence within masculinist culture. Notwithstanding an understandable suspicion of therapeutic over-generosity towards physically abusive men, such accounts have often drawn upon the conceptual resources and discursive force of psychopathology, psychoanalysis and psychology in order to critique characteristic manifestations of masculine hegemony, such as the ‘madness’ of racism or ‘homophobia’. Although the rhetorical appeal of such a strategy may be understandable, attempts to appropriate and redirect disciplinary power in the service of social transformation can appear, at best, questionable when set against histories of psychiatric oppression. The following
discussion invites reconsideration of the pervasive influence of power-knowledge systems, and the interchange between ‘clinical’ and political discourse, in the context of potential exchanges between pro-feminism and ‘the politics of the madhouse’, and recognition that there may well be areas here where tensions between different interests and discourses defy formulaic resolution. In the context of what Bauman calls the pluralism of authority, purposive action that can no longer be substantiated monologically necessarily becomes subject to ethical dialogue (Bauman in Beilharz, 2001, p. 186).
