MiKE: I am a Macho Marxist

Ok, some somewhat serious academic stuff here, needs some contextualizing, if you don't understand, never mind... This post is more a personal brain dump. If you get what's going, great, please comment. I'd appreciate it.


In Curriculum as Gendered Text, Pinar (1998) discusses the oedipal conflict, and gives a re-interpretation of the reproduction-resistance dialectic in use by curricula theorists. In summary, his contention is that such theorizing is not substantively changing the political consequences of curriculum; changes are limited only to the content of curriculum. "The conversation of father may change but not his position at the dinner table". Some other choice quotes:

The over determination of the male ego makes the ambiguity of paternity intolerable. He compensates for its inferential character by claiming "first cause", the origin of creation. He further compensates with an excessive interest in kinship patterns (i.e. the lines of reproduction). In this sense, the recent interest on the left in reproductive theories of curriculum are patriarchal in nature [...] it is the nascent patriarchy of the aspiring son, not the mature and established patriarchy of the father. (p. 227)

Hocquenghem (1978) reminds us that the concept of homosexual did not exist prior to the 19th century. The capacity and desire to sleep with a same-sexed person was presumed to exist to lesser or greater extent in everyone, hence the scope and intensity of efforts to prohibit th expression of such desire. During the latter part of the 19th century, a medicalization of the socially deviant began to occur. That is, medical terms became employed to describe the culturally marginal and socially deviant. The medicalization of the social terrain served the political and economic interests of cultural homogeneity, which accompanied industrialization and bureaucratization. By assigning such labels as homosexual, which indicated illness, the medical and legal communities could identify, prosecute, and punish, under the guise of providing "helping services," whose whose lives were viewed as intolerably outside the mainstream. (p. 229)

The lie is that there is homosexual desire. Following Deleuze and Guattari (1977), Hocquenghem insists that there is only desire. The polymorphous perversity, as Freud would have it, of infancy, becomes codified into genital sexuality. The story of oedipus is in this regard the story of the production of "heterosexuals," and the eradication, however unsuccessful, of homosexuals. Adrienne Rich (1980) describes heterosexuality as "compulsory," and as such "needs to be recognized and studied as a political institution". Politically, it reinforces the position of the father and guarantees its reproduction. Contemporary forms of heterosexuality tend to be phallocentric. For the male, the phallus is the sign of his power as a man. Successfully socialized heterosexual women experience "penis envy" and desire its incorporation. Although the phallus is the occasion for a man's pride or shame, he does not sexualize it. It is as if that which a woman desires is unworthy to be desired by him. He scorns the homsexual's interest in fellatio and anal intercourse. In a phallocentric culture, few homosexuals escape the fascination with the phallus; they concretize the heterosexual's fascination with its abstraction: power. Both groups reify their existence; both fail to see how the existence of the each relies on the existence of the other.

Men's (and many women's fascination with the traditional masculine ideal (i.e. the macho man) is not without some merit. This ideal is comprised of several admirable traits, such as courage and strength. However, we must acknowledge that these qualities are the socially fortunate outcomes of oedipus; often as not the macho man utilizes his strength and courage to rob, rape, and kill. In both prototypes, these characteristics are not chosen but conditioned; they result from repressing the pre-oedipal identification with the mother and resisting semisuccessfully the authority of the father. His "manliness," that discernible way of being in his body, tends to come at the expense of being in his mind and heart. His maternal repression--the more macho he is the more complete the repression is--makes him clumsy interpersonally, primitive intellectually, and a Neanderthal emotionally.

For his more civilized variations, the physical is abstracted onto the social and intellectual. Boots and jeans are traded for three-piece suits (at least during the day), and his manliness is determined not by his muscle and phallus size, but bu the size of his bank account, stock portfolio, and corporate position. He trades physical strength for acumen and shrewdness, and the macho man's narcissistic experience of himself as body is now mediated through the bodies of the women with whom he sleeps. These characterological prototypes are crude but common. Perhaps less common and less crude are academic variations, including one version we might call, not entirely for mischief's sake, the macho Marxist. Hos body and probably his bank account have been exchanged for a long list of publications, physical strength and corporate shrewdness for tough logic, witty asides, and a virtuoso knowledge of Marx, Gramsci, and Bourdieu. He vanquishes his oedipal foe not with his fists or by outpositioning him corporately, but via skillful argumentation and cogent denunciations of revisionist and obscurantist tendencies in opponents' positions. The macho Marxist substitutes dialectical materialism for the crass kind, the terminal smile of the young executive "on the make" for the suffering frown and angry scorn of the wounded but resisting activist. The content of the personality and of the social relations that express and sustain it differs for each version of man. However, the structure of the personality and its social relations (competitiveness, aggressiveness, exhibitionism) does not. Each is interested in the phallus, his own and/or others; rather, each is interested in its abstracted social form: power. Each aggrandizes his own while diminishing his opponents; after the battle all tend to retreat to the nurse and lover for solace or celebration.




Pinar, W. F. (1998). Understanding curriculum as gender text : Notes on reproduction, resistance, and male-male relations. In Pinar, W. F. (Ed.), Queer theory in education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.