ABSTRACT
Perhaps the best place for me to start is at the beginning. This project emerged during, and as part of, a long and difficult process of coming to terms with a sequence of transformative life experiences, a process, moreover, that left me with a strong impulse to write something of myself into its pages. I was not surprised, therefore, to find that experiences of ill-health and loss frequently inspire autobiographical writings, not only because they radically disrupt the life-course, destroying and reconstituting familiar worlds and cherished assumptions, but also, no doubt, because they simultaneously expose us to the disciplinary demands of a medicalising gaze that incites us to redescribe and regulate ourselves as objects of scientific and administrative knowledge. From the outset I have grappled with this impulse, not least because of an uncomfortable and apparently ineradicable tension between a postmodern and pro-feminist sense of the importance of speaking personally, of locating the position from which I am writing, and of working, perhaps even therapeutically, to understand and change the ‘selves’ or subjectivities behind my various voices, and, on the other hand, a conflicting resistance against disclosure, motivated in part by a need to protect the scar-tissue at the site of
some slowly healing wounds; but mainly because I am currently living a described life, and have also wanted to protect my personal story by forestalling uninvited diagnostic curiosity, whether lay or professional. Because a parallel tension, reflected in the paired epigraphs above, arguably underscores political understandings of men’s ‘distress’ or ‘madness’, particularly where the quite postmodern process of self-advocacy is involved, there is an intimate connection between my recurrent personal dilemma and the primary project of the book-an exploration of the politics of male subjectivity in this most sensitive and particular context.1 The tension between reconstructive self-disclosure and strategic self-protection forms an animating thread amongst and between the book’s two major substantive sections, which focus respectively on a series of critical biographical studies, and on contemporary debates.
