ABSTRACT
Masculinity would seem to be all about the body. After all, one can hardly be a man without a male body. The problem here, however, is that masculinity does not pertain to male bodies alone and indeed male bodies are not necessarily very ‘masculine’. One only has to think of the bodies of young boys, disabled men and elderly or frail men to realise that any such equation is not so simple. Male body does not equal masculine. More problematically still, female bodies can be perceived as masculine or mannish, while a host of chromosomal differences from inter-sex conditions and hermaphroditism to other more social variations such as transvestism and transsexualism, render any simple or dualistic encoding of male-female as masculine-feminine almost nonsensical, even when that dualism appears to be embodied. Studying the body does indeed lead inevitably to an entire series of problematic dualisms: nature versus culture, male versus female, black versus white, active versus passive, mind versus body, to mention only some. Perhaps not surprisingly, it also leads to a variety of encounters with attempts to overcome such dualisms. More importantly, what is also opened up here is the importance of power and processes of normativity, status and the inscription of meaning: what—and who—passes muster in the hierarchy of appearances and physical capacities. Of course none of this necessarily tells us much about masculinities and it remains the task of this chapter to interrogate the connection of the male and the masculine with the physical and the corporeal.
