Influence du tabagisme et des antioxydants sur la fertilité masculine

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

The Masculine State in Crisis: War Resistance in Apartheid South Africa

External and internal forces threatened the apartheid state in the 1980s. The refusal to perform compulsory military service by individual white men and the increasing number of white South Africans who criticized the role of the military and apartheid governance had the potential to destabilize the gendered binaries on which white social order and Nationalist rule rested. The state constituted itself as a heterosexual, masculine entity in crisis and deployed a number of gendered discourses in an effort to isolate and negate objectors to military service. The state articulated a nationalist discourse that defined the white community in virile, masculine, and heroic terms. Conversely, “feminine” weakness, cowardice, and compromise were scorned. Objectors, as “strangers” in the public realm, were most vulnerable to homophobic stigmatization from the state and its supporters

Resistance is futile: the borg, the hive, and corporate hegemony

The Borg, a collective of humanoid cyborgs linked together in a hive-mind and modeled on the earthly superorganisms of ant colonies and beehives, has been the most feared alien race in the Star Trek universe. The formidable success of the Borg in assimilating their foes corresponds to the astounding success of superorganisms in our own biosphere. Yet the Borg also serves as a metaphor for another collective of biological entities known as the corporation. In the Anthropocene epoch, corporations have become the most powerful force on the planet; their influence on the social world and the environment exceeds any government and may determine the continued sustainability of human life. Corporations have been described as people and as machines, but neither metaphor accurately describes their essence or contributes to an understanding that might resist their power. This paper reframes our understanding of the corporation by examining the metaphors that are used to describe it, and by suggesting an entirely new metaphor viewing the Borg and the corporation through the lens of sociobiology. I will argue that the corporation is a new form of superorganism that has become the dominant species on the planet and that the immense, intractable power of a globalized, corporate hive-mind has become the principal obstacle to addressing the planetary emergency of climate change. Reframing our metaphoric understanding of corporations as biological entities in the planetary biosphere may enable us to imagine ways to resist their increasing dominance and create a sustainable future. 

Searching for Masculine Capital: Experiences Leading to High Drive for Muscularity in Men

Studies on the drive for muscularity (DFM) have primarily been quantitative, focused on identifying correlates. Currently little is known about men’s experiences leading them to desire high levels of muscle and engage in behaviours to increase their masculine capital. Our purpose was to explore the stories of men with high DFM revealing the socio-cultural and personal factors leading to DFM and their search for masculine capital. In-depth life-history interviews and multiple in-the-field conversations were undertaken with twenty men (Mean age=28.45, SD=6.96, years) scoring ≥ 3 on the Drive for Muscularity Scale (Mean=4.30, SD=0.70). Men’s stories focused on a set of dysfunctional childhood and adolescent socio-cultural interactions, including forms of symbolic violence, between them and significant others. In these interactions men were exposed to dominant social narratives of masculinity, and through comparisons and reinforcement they identified discrepancies between themselves and these narratives. In late adolescence and early adulthood men came to believe that they lacked masculine capital. Men struggled to increase their masculine capital through engagement with other traditional masculine activities (e.g., sport) and driven by activating events, they compensated through DFM desires and behaviours. This study advances knowledge by revealing the socio-cultural and personal processes participants believed led to their high DFM. Findings disclose that men’s search for masculine capital may have led them to develop and maintain high levels of DFM.

The Role of Feminine and Masculine Norms in College Women's Alcohol Use

Current literature suggests not only that men and women can conform to both feminine and masculine norms, but that women who adhere to certain masculine norms may be at greater risk for problematic alcohol use. This study examined conformity to both masculine and feminine norms, and how conformity to distinct norms influenced heavy episodic drinking and alcohol-related problems among a sample of underage college women (N= 645). Results demonstrated that the masculine norms risk-taking and emotional control were associated with increased HED, while the masculine norm power over women was associated with a decrease in HED. Traditional feminine norms, including modesty and sexual fidelity, were associated with a decrease in HED and alcohol-related problems. The feminine norm relational was associated with increased HED, while the norms thinness and appearance were associated with increased alcohol-related problems. The study’s theoretical and clinical implications are discussed.

Contradictory male/masculine/men's "I"s: the unwriting of men, and the concept of sex

May I start with two observations? First, men’s relations to feminism are problematic—there is always a gap, a gap between men and feminism; second, the gendering of men and masculinities is now recognised. There are several challenges here. The gender challenge concerns how to move from the presumed “genderlessness” of men towards the gender-consciousness of being a man/men. Another challenge concerns the “public/private,” the disruption of dominant narratives of “I” of men and the masculine “I.” There is also a temporal challenge, of moving away from simple linearity of the “I.” Together, these challenges can be seen as moving away from taken-for-granted “gender power-coherence” towards gender power-consciousness. To address these kinds of question means interrogating the uneven non-equivalences of what it means to be male, a man, masculine. This is not easily reduced to sex or gender. Rather gender/sex, or simply gex, helps to speak of such blurrings.

Negotiating a masculine bloc: Jonathan Franzen's The corrections

Contemporary research on masculinities has focused on demonstrating how these are multiple, hierarchical, collective as well as individual, complex and contingent. In this article, I read Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections in the light of such recent theorizations. I propose to focus on the negotiation of what Demetriou has termed a masculine bloc, which is a space in which hegemonic and non-hegemonic masculinities coexist and, therefore, a strict duality between both categories is transcended. Next, I suggest focusing on the construction of masculinities as subject positions that are interwoven with different geographical levels. It is my contention that St. Jude, the fictional city for the Lamberts’ home in the Midwest, conforms the symbolic arena in which hegemonic masculinity is staged.

"Europe-as-hegemony" and discourses in Turkey after 1999: Dialogue with the Europeanisation literature

It is not a prophecy to say that one of the most common concepts that those working on "Europe" would encounter at various points in different capacities would be "Europeanisation". This buzzword has also been crucial in understanding and explaining for Turkey's European orientation path, which acquired a new dimension and has been carried to a more substantive and institutional level with the Helsinki European Council in December 1999 when Turkey was granted formal candidacy status in its application to join the EU. Especially after this date, the concept of "Europeanisation" and the literature attached to it have almost automatically been employed to assess the relationship between Turkey and different aspects of European integration. For this aim, firstly, I present a tri-fold picture of the European studies. According to this categorisation, the studies dealing with the notion of „Europe‟ could be categorised into three groups: the studies which takes "Europe" as a fixed concept ("Europe-as-fixity"), those which subscribe to a notion of "Europe" solely as a construct ("Europe-as-construct") and the studies which take "Europe" as a contestation ("Europe-as-contestation"). After critically locating the Europeanisation literature within this categorisation, I argue that there is both a historical and epistemological need for the Europeanisation literature to address to the conflictual nature of the notion by focusing on how the discourses on "Europe" hegemonised the Turkish political terrain after 1999 and I introduce the notion of "Europe-as-hegemony". The overall argument is that the hegemony of "Europe" does not originate from the automaticity of the relationship between the European and domestic level as stipulated by the Europeanisation literature, but rather from the power of discourses on "Europe" and their ability to hegemonise the political realm. In this respect, this paper offers a novel approach to the Europeanisation literature with a particular focus on the Turkish context where the political is not only given and constructed but is also reflexive and open to contestation and negotiation.

The Ultimate Secrecy: Feminist Readings of Masculine Trauma in Vietnam War Literature

It is a widely acknowledged and often unquestioned fact that patriarchy and its modes of behaviour and social organization favour the appearance of trauma on the weakest (and defenceless) members of society: women. In the last decades, trauma seems to have taken the baton of typically female maladies such as 19th c. hysteria or 20th c. madness. Feminists in the 20th c. have long worked to prove the connection between the latter affections (and their reflection in literary texts) and patriarchal oppression or expectations of feminine behaviour and accordance to roles and rules. With Trauma Studies on the rise, the approach to the idea of the untold as related to femininity is manifold: on the one hand, is not trauma, which precludes telling about one’s own experience and keeps it locked not only from the others, but also from ourselves, the ultimate secrecy? On the other hand, when analyzing works that reflect trauma, one is astounded by the high number of them with a female protagonist and an almost all-female cast: in this sense, a ‘feminist’ reading is almost compulsory, in the sense that it is usually the author’s assumption that patriarchal systems of exploitation and expectations favour traumatic events and their outcome (silence and secrets) on the powerless, usually women. Often, traumatic texts combine feminism with other analytical discourses (one of the topics proposed for this panel): Toni Morrison’s study of traumatic responses in The Bluest Eye and Beloved cannot be untangled from her critique of slavery; just as much of Chicana feminism and its representations of rape and abuse (two main agents of trauma) analyze the nexus of patriarchy, new forms of post-colonialism, and the dynamics of power and powerlessness in ethnic contexts. Within this tradition that establishes the secrecies of trauma as an almost exclusively feminine characteristic, one is however faced with texts which have traumatized males as protagonists: curiously enough, most of these characters have suffered trauma through a typically masculine experience: that of war and its aftermath. By analyzing novels dealing with war veterans from Vietnam or the Second World War, the astounding findings are the frequent mixture of masculine or even ‘macho’ values and the denial of any kind of ‘feminine’ characteristics, combined with a very strict set of rules of power and hierarchy that clearly establish who is empowered and who is powerless. It is our argument that this replication of patriarchal modes of domination, which place the lowest ranks of the army in a ‘feminine’ situation, blended with the compulsory ‘macho’ stance soldiers are forced to adopt as army men (as seen, for example, in Philip Caputo’s Indian Country, Larry Heinemann’s Paco’s Story or Ed Dodge’s DAU: A Novel of Vietnam) furthers the onset and seriousness of ulterior trauma. In this sense, we can also analyze this kind of writing from a ‘feminist’ point of view, since the dynamics of über-patriarchal power established at the front at war-time deny any display of elements traditionally viewed as ‘feminine’ (such as grief, guilt or emotions) in soldiers. If trauma is the result of a game of patriarchal empowerment, how can feminist works, not only theoretical, but also fictional, overthrow it? Are ‘feminine’ characteristics necessary to escape trauma, even in male victims? How can feminist readings of trauma enhance our understanding of its dynamics and help produce new modes of interaction that transcend power and gender division as the basis for the organization of society?

Étranger à soi-même. La mue de la voix masculine dans l'oeuvre de Pascal Quignard

L’oeuvre de Pascal Quignard présente dans son ensemble beaucoup d’étrangeté, par ses contours génériques flous et imprécis, par sa vaste érudition, et par les thèmes traités. Nous nous attachons ici à un motif précis : la mue de la voix masculine à l’adolescence. Cette transformation de la voix du jeune garçon, qui s’accompagne d’une inévitable transformation sexuelle, engendre chez certains un profond traumatisme. De La Leçon de musique à Tous les matins du monde, nous étudierons les conséquences de ce phénomène spontané chez les êtres naturellement doués pour le chant et la musique. Nous en suivrons par la suite les différents linéaments narratifs et poétiques. Finalement, nous découvrirons dans les méandres de l’oeuvre quignardienne quelques échos très personnels, relatifs à l’auteur.

Gender and the Australian parliament

This dissertation by publication which focuses on gender and the Australian federal parliament has resulted in the submission of three refereed journal articles. Data for the study were obtained from 30 semi-structured interviews undertaken in 2006 with fifteen (15) male and fifteen (15) female members of the Australian parliament. The first of the articles is methodological and has been accepted for publication in the Australian Journal of Political Science. The paper argues that feminist political science is guided by five important principles. These are placing gender at the centre of the research, giving emphasis to women’s voice, challenging the public/private divide, using research to transform society and taking a reflexive approach to positionality. It is the latter principle, that of the importance of taking a reflexive approach to research which I explore in the paper. Through drawing on my own experiences as a member of the House of Representatives (Forde 1987-1996) I reflexively investigate the intersections between my background and my identity as a researcher. The second of the articles views the data through the lens of Acker’s (1990) notion of the ‘gendered organization’ which posits that there are four dimensions by which organizations are gendered. These are via the division of labour, through symbols, images and ideologies, by workplace interactions and through the gendered components of individual identity. In this paper which has been submitted to the British Journal of Political Science, each of Acker’s (1990) dimensions is examined in terms of the data from interviews with male and female politicians. The central question investigated is thus to what extent does the Australian parliament conform to Acker’s (1990) concept of the ‘gendered organization’? The third of the papers focuses specifically on data from interviews with the 15 male politicians and investigates how they view gender equality and the Australian parliament. The article, which has been submitted to the European Journal of Political Science asks to what extent contemporary male politicians view the Australian parliament as gendered? Discourse analysis that is ‘ways of viewing’ (Bacchi, 1999, p. 40) is used as an approach to analyse the data. Three discursive frameworks by which male politicians view gender in the Australian parliament are identified. These are: that the parliament is gendered as masculine but this is unavoidable; that the parliament is gendered as feminine and women are actually advantaged; and that the parliament is gender neutral and gender is irrelevant. It is argued that collectively these framing devices operate to mask the many constraints which exist to marginalise women from political participation and undermine attempts to address women’s political disadvantage as political participants. The article concludes by highlighting the significance of the paper beyond the Australian context and calling for further research which names and critiques political men and their discourses on gender and parliamentary practices and processes.

Geek goddesses go to school : A study of female pre-service teachers in information technology courses

Various reasons have been proffered for female under-representation in tertiary information technology (IT) courses and the IT industry with most relating to cultural moirés. The 2006 Geek Goddess calendar was designed to alter IT’s “geeky image” and the term is used here to represent young women enrolled in pre-service IT teaching courses. Their special mix of IT and teaching draws on conflicting stereotypes and represents a micro-climate which is typically lost in studies of IT occupations because of the aggregation of all IT roles. This paper will report on a small-scale investigation of female students (N=25) at a university in Queensland (Australia) studying to become teachers of secondary IT subjects. They are entering the IT industry, gendered as a “male” occupation, through the safe space of teaching a discipline allied to feminine qualities of nurturing. They are “geek goddesses” who – perhaps to balance the masculine and feminine of these occupations - have decided to go to school rather than into corporations or government.