In my intro to women’s studies class, we read Michael Kimmel in the first week. We read Full Frontal Feminism (because ugh) and the first chapter we were assigned was “Boys Do Cry.” Right now I’m in this intro to the sociology of sex and gender class (because ugh) and our first readings are Messner’s “Becoming 100% Straight” and C.J. Pascoe’s “Dude, You’re a Fag.” This is different and better.

I like Michael Messner, I will defend Michael Messner. Messner’s work, unlike that of Michael Kimmel and Jackson Katz (and other unmentionable pseudo-intellectual male feminists), approaches masculinity without defending its borders. Michael Messner does not outline “good” masculinities. Michael Messner does not talk about “good” men. [Probably because he is a sociologist and not an overpaid talking head douchebag but whatever.] Michael Messner examines how masculine violence is socialized into men without positing that men are the ultimate victims of socialization. Michael Messner writes about how homophobia is used to police masculinity without trying to ultimately normalize a strong, “comfortable,” straight masculinity. Michael Messner, in studying the experiences of men with masculinity, occasionally, somehow, talks to queer men.

Michael Messner, to the best of my knowledge, has never seriously applied the term “crisis in masculinity.”

Mostly I like Michael Messner because I like sports theory and am glad to get to use it without having to take classes in our (really good) sports history department that are full of scary History Major Bros.

For what it’s worth, I’ve read “Becoming 100% Straight” at least twice but this was the first time I realized that it’s a really, really good introduction to a feminist sociological methodology. I think it would be worth parsing the difference between positioning yourself as a scholar-activist (half-assedly self-styled in a Du Bois tradition, maybe) and actually applying a feminist methodology to situate yourself in relation to your work as a means to demystify and decentralize yourself as a subject (a la Dorothy Smith). [Feminist] sociologists cannot/should not be objective, but I think people like Michael Kimmel are kind of abusing that tradition in order to talk about themselves and maintain a masculine subject.

That people are still arguing that boys who grow up with single mothers will have damaged masculinities and thus be more likely to be abusers or homophobes or rapists? Did you know that people are still making this principled argument?

Aside from the fact that it’s misogynistic as fuck and essentialist bullshit, like: a) if we accept the fact that masculine socializing processes are the problem, shouldn’t it be the fault of fathers? b) have you met anyone without a dad who wasn’t better off without a dad? I haven’t.

#stab yr dad #dead daddies don’t rape

katewadkins:

Finally.

After footnote fudge-ups, six superfluous copies made and fifty excess dollars spent…

IT. IS. FINALLY. DONE.

I really want to read this.  I have been listening to The Papas nonstop lately (of course), and I made a joke about how I want to write a thesis on constructions of queer punk masculinities in Spoonboy songs and then I was like, “wait!  isn’t that was Kate Wadkins wrote her dissertation on?” which is kind of the case.

The Papas is such a sophisticated album.  David always has been so good at balancing the ubiquitous anarchist heavy-handedness and molding it into really nuanced, shadowy songs.  My favorite Spoonboy song is “When You Were Sweet,” which is a song about waning anarchist politics dressed up [dressed down] as an almost-breakup song.  It’s effortless.  On “Stab Yer Dad” (a song which I just can’t believe isn’t everyone’s favorite song in the world), one of The Papas’s songs about the socialization of masculinity, he uses really classic anarcho no gods-style rhetoric to talk about how Christianity is patriarchal not in the capitalist sense, necessarily, but in the way that it creates a narrative of gendered power that we all learn (who bends down?  who plays god?).  It’s so great because it isn’t just about anti-authoritarianism, and it isn’t just about paternalism and patriarchy, but it’s also about using the tropes of his genre to address the patriarchal patterns that exist within a so-called anti-authoritarian scene.  It is The Best Song.

I’ve been thinking about how the comments on Combs’ Punknews piece aren’t just a bunch of punkbrahs calling him a fag (though there’s a lot of that), but there’s quite a few folks commenting on his voice—annoying, or feminine, or whiny, or whatever.  It’s bizarre to me not only to see a man’s voice policed in a way that we usually only police womens’ voices, but a man’s voice policed even though his voice is…like, the punk standard.  I mean, Ben Weasel and Mark Hoppus didn’t get called fags because they had whiny voices, you know?  And it just miiiight have something to do with the fact that Ben Weasel and Mark Hoppus didn’t write really great essays calling dudes out on their shit.  (This is a thing I am writing in my epic love letter to Spoonboy.)

I am thinking about Lansing.  You know, East Lansing and Lansing have, like, the shittiest scenes in this state.  I swear to God.  There aren’t even any good frat bands in East Lansing!  It’s straight up all sensibro-y sub-Bon Iver acoustic bullshit sitting about three quarters of an inch out of Baribeau’s shadow.  It’s bad. 

I’ve been thinking about how Lansing used to be, as you know, a way important punk hub.  One of the most important punk hubs in America.  Of all the major hardcore spots—New York, DC, LA/Socal, Austin, whatever—it might have been the very most masculinist and homophobic.  I mean, y’all’ve read Touch and Go, right?  These guys were some uncomfortable sexist dudes, for real. 

I’ve been thinking about how Matty Pop Chart (Matt Tobey) is from the Lansing area.  I’ve been thinking about him growing up back and forth between Bloomington and under Tesco Vee’s image in Ingham County and how it’s impossible not to see a reaction to that in his songs and the imprint of that in Abe Froman and Good Luck’s stuff.  You can take the queers away from Touch and Go but you can’t take the Touch and Go away from the queers, you know?  Or maybe it’s the other way around. 

If there’s anything that Plan-It-X has been (whether Chris and everyone else would point to this or not), it’s been a space for a bunch of queers and kind of queers to deal with their hardcore histories in a safe (?) way.  Or maybe they weren’t trying to do that, but you can see it all over their faces.

I Never Said I Wanted to Be a Man:  The Jack White Navigates His Masculinity, Publicly, Project
A White Stripes Gender Studies Primer, 1999-2004

My growing up was a Jack White growing up at least as much as it was a pop-punk growing up.  Where Screeching Weasel songs taught me (and reinforced over and over again) how I was supposed to look and act as a Girl Punk, it was Jack White’s parabolic posturing that stretched those threads of socialization until they tore open.  Until I could see could see all its stuffing.  I don’t want to make Mr. Gillis out to be any more of an omniscient prophet/pedagogue than he would already give himself credit for, but I will say that a poor little punk girl, Biggest White Stripes Fan of the Midwest 2001-2004, learned a whole lot of things about gender from the White Stripes.  And I will also say that when we look at these broken seams of gender construction in White Stripes songs, I’m not sure that we’re looking at the calculated mythos we’re used to talking about when we talk about Jack White.  Instead, I think we’re looking at his tool marks in the process of constructing that mythos.

I would argue that Jack White used blues standards and early country tracks much in the same way that Emily and I are using Billie Joe Armstrong and Ben Weasel tracks when we cover them to play at co-op bro parties.  He sought to re-contextualize and reconcile those pieces that formed his concept of music and of himself, and mostly his conception of masculinity.  The White Stripes project, maybe more than anything else, was the Jack White Explores What It Means to Be a Man project.

Jack White loved and covered blues tracks in which violence—toward women especially—was neither glorified nor condemned.  It was just part of masculinity.  The Robert Johnson/McTell tradition is strong in so much of Jack’s songwriting, tracks like “Broken Bricks” are ultimately just re-envisioned Blind Willie fables set in a post-big-three Detroit.  But while Jack White was covering “Your Southern Can is Mine” (look here woman, don’t get hard, gettin’ me a brick out of my back yard) and beating Jason Stollsteimer’s face in (according to one of my friends who was there, the fight was over Marcie, but that’s irrelevant except in perpetuating the Jack White Violent Chivalry Myth as witnessed in “Hand Springs”), he was also dropping weakly moralizing reflections on City Violence and Who Will Think of the Kids, like in “Candy Cane Children.” 

What I mean is that Jack White’s masculinities of violence in those first three  years were less a segment of his design and more an artifact of his process.  The man who was playing marriage-tease Marlene and divorcée-libéré Loretta and housewife-besieged Dolly without a hetero-flinch, was a year or two later back in the Robert Johnson woman-beating role.  (Compare the sexualized brutality of Johnson’s “Stop Breakin’ Down,” the stuff I got’ll bust your brains out to “Ball and Biscuit’s” my strength is ten-fold, girl, I’ll let you see it if you want to before you go.)  The juxtaposition of these venerated Delta-masculinities and  auto-masculinities—especially in conjunction with the ambiguous sexualities and characterizations of girls and women—are a kind of a sneaking peak at this man’s process.  It’s a testament to his own attempt to figure it out.

Jack’s assumption of women’s voices was sometimes an assertive act, I’m sure.  For him to airily sing about envying other men, or being desired by other men, or even the proposition in “Pretty Good Looking” that boy-girl attraction isn’t necessarily the only attraction, was an act that allowed him to extend his sexual mystique (and the conversation about his relationship with Meg) in a way that reinforced his control and his comfort with his masculinity. 
“Jolene” is such a compelling conversation between masculinities and femininities, in some ways an infinite subversion of subversions of the gaze.  It’s a song about women tearing each other apart, even though the pivot point is, obviously, a man.  When Jack re-inserts that male voice, it’s both appropriative and reflective.  But for pre-teen me, a mostly-straight rock star man singing about his man, and that “us women don’t have a chance,” was, like, a huge deal.  To even bring up the question.  To expand the terms.

You cannot discuss Jack White’s mythologies without discussing Jack White’s furtive/fervent Catholicism—he who allegedly kissed the ground every year on the last day of school like the pope himself, he who almost went to seminary.  (The latter, at least, is only part of his own mythology—we have no reason not to believe him when he claims that he turned down the seminary for a new amp, but I think the fact that White recounts its as important to his origin story is relevant enough).  There is no Jack White masculinity without folkloric, catholic and superstitious conceptions of gender.  In “Red Death at 6:14”:

Was that her dad with the magic marker writing little angel on her head?
She must be dead if the only sound I hear are the devils by her bed.

Jack’s Catholic-cum-Welles Motor City mythologies reinforce his masculinities.  In “Ball and Biscuit,” maybe most notably, he uses his own power/piety to squelch a worldly feminine sexuality: it’s quite possible that I’m your third man, but it’s a fact that I’m the seventh son.  “The Union Forever,” an entry in the “Jack White States Pretty Clearly What a Man Is” canon, he draws from Citizen Kane.  Remember, Orson Welles himself was raised Catholic—a tradition of overwrought, superstitious, patterned symbolism to which both men belong.

In “Broken Bricks,” just like in “The Big Three Killed My Baby,” the ruins of the auto-industry become the site for reflecting on the roots of Detroit manliness as well as a site for transformative spiritualities (the potential connotations of the auto-trinity were never lost on Jack White).  “Broken Bricks,” in my view, is almost a magnum opus of synthesized understandings of gender:  it’s basically a story about a girl’s exploration of a soon-to-be-demolished plant and how she uncovers the histories of the men in her life through interacting with the remnants of their material realities.  And, not surprisingly, what she discovers is violence and working-class men’s quotidians.  In some ways, placing the girl in the site of experience is another form of Jack White’s play with gendered subjectivity, but it’s also a reinforcement of the almost-religious, embodied-domestic means that gender is learned and understood in Jack White’s world.

In “The Air Near My Fingers,” “A Boy’s Best Friend,” and “I’m Finding It Harder to Be a Gentleman,” he more explicitly tears into what it means to be a man, but the site for these explorations is the maternal and domestic.  Both of the former discuss how Jack’s understanding of himself as a man are rooted in a love of/learning from his mother.  In “Air,” all that day-to-day gendering is laid bare:

Don’t you remember? 
You told me in December that a boy is not a man until he makes a stand.
Well, I’m not a genius but maybe you’ll remember this,
I never said I wanted to be a man.

Again, in “I’m Finding It Harder,” we watch him learn and negotiate his masculinity, looking for it in his socialization (presumably all those manners that he’d been taught came to him from his mother), and finding it in a stoic paternalism which he learned from his father:

Well I never said I wouldn’t throw my jacket in the mud for you
But my father gave it to me so maybe I should carry you.

I decided to stop at 2004 for two reasons.  The first is that I pretty much have a fully accessible brain-encyclopedia of absolutely everything there is to know about the White Stripes through approximately 2004.  After Elephant is where I fizzled out as a fan, but I’m sure that this conversation could be continued on the last two albums.  Second, though, I might argue that after Elephant, even as the stylized, tight grip on White Stripes Mythology loosened, the complexity of the Jack White mythos expanded a lot.  On those last two albums I think there is a much heavier awareness of the Jack White myth but at the same time there is a much wider and more complex application of it, and it is much more difficult to discuss his works in such easy categories.

In the end, this mix covers a lot of themes: violent masculinities, dead and dying girls, ambiguous sexualities, working-class paternalism, possession, the maternal mark, Jack Sings Songs About Women’s Sexualities, Jack Covers Blues Standards About Beating People Up, Jack Covers Blues Standards About Beating Women Up, Jack Models That Behavior, Jack Tells Us What It Means and Doesn’t Mean to Be A Man.  I could easily also make a companion mix called _______ Killed My Baby:  the Jack White Sings Songs About Dead and Dying Girls Project or Every Single Girl Needs Help Climbing Up Her Tree:  The Jack White Saves Ladies, Because Ladies Need a Lot of Things, or Sometimes He Doesn’t Save Them and They Die Project, or the Nobody Knows How to Talk to Children About Gun Violence and Sexual Maturation Except Jack White Project.  But this is a good start, no?

         Pt. I,  Angels/Sex/Girls/Dead

1. “Red Death at 6:14”
   (Sympathetic Sounds of Detroit, 2001)
2. “Rated X”
   (Loretta Lynn cover, live at the Hotel Yorba, from the Hotel Yorba single, 2001)
3. “You’ve Got Her In Your Pocket”
   (Elephant, 2004)
4. “Look Me Over Closely”
   (Marlene Dietrich cover, b-side to “Let’s Shake Hands,” 2001)
5. “Jolene”
   (Dolly Parton cover, b-side to “Hello Operator, 2000)
6. “You’re Pretty Good Looking (For a Girl)”
   (De Stijl, 2000)
7. “Lord, Send Me an Angel”
   (Blind Willie McTell cover, 2000)
8. “Expecting”
   (White Blood Cells, 2001)
   
   Pt. 2, A Man/A Certain Man/You’ll Feel My Hand
9. “I’m Finding It Harder to Be a Gentleman”
   (White Blood Cells, 2001)
10. “Hand Springs”
    (originally a 1999 split with the Dirtbombs, then released on the Japanese release of  White Blood Cells in 2001)
11. “The Air Near My Fingers”
    (Elephant, 2003)
12. “The Union Forever”
    (White Blood Cells, 2001)
13. “Stop Breaking Down”
    (Robert Johnson cover, The White Stripes, 1999)
14. “A Boy’s Best Friend”
    (De Stijl, 2000)
15. “Broken Bricks”
    (The White Stripes, 1999)
16. “Your Southern Can Is Mine”
    (Blind Willie McTell cover, De Stijl, 2000)
17. “Ball & Biscuit”
    (Elephant, 2003)

I know, I know, tl;dr.  Fine: 
[Download it here]
(photo via)