ABSTRACT
Male intervention in feminist criticism has to be about masculinity. Male critics see feminist criticism as an opportunity to exercise power. There’s no criticism, no interrogation of what masculinity means in terms of practice, in terms of discourse. It would be so interesting to problematize masculinity. Research questions that pay attention to the accomplishment of rule, of ruling, are a curiously neglected feature of contemporary social formations. There is a sense of resistance which is rarely mentioned in the extensive literature which valorizes ‘resistance’. This refers to the ways in which human beings resist transformation in established patterns of thought, orientation, and behaviour. By the time that masculinity is beginning to firm — as part of the struggle to be normal, to be acceptable in whichever interactional grouping is seen as primary (for the subjectivity involved) — it has a crucial double axis — acceptability to other men, orientation to women.
