filamentosmovimentos

"...masculinity is simultaneously a place in gender relations, the practices through which men and women engage that place in gender, and the effects of these practices on bodily experience, personality and culture; it is also the effects of the collective embodiment of those practices on individuals, relationships, institutional structures, and global relations of domination” (Connel, 2000). 

"From this definition, we can summarize masculinity as having three components. First, it is social location that individuals, regardless of gender, can move into through practice. Second, it is a set of practices and characteristics understood to be “masculine”. Third, when these practices are embodied especially by men, but also by women, they have widespread cultural and social effects. There are individual effects-occupying the masculine position and performing it affects the way individuals experience their sense of self, how they project_relate that self to others, and how they experience their bodies."

(...)

" *masculinity is always defined through its difference from femininity 
(but what femininity? emphasized femininity is a false femininity*)  however Butler places the relationship of difference more centrally in her conceptualization of gender. For Judith Butler, heterosexual desire, as a defining feature for both women and men, is what binds the masculine and feminine in a binary, hierarchical relationship. In contemporary Western societies, heterosexual desire is defined as an erotic attachment to difference, and as such, it does the hegemonic work of fusing masculinity and femininity together as complementary opposites. Thus, it is assumed that men have a natural attraction to women because of their differences and women have a natural attraction to men. While there is far more to the content of masculinity and femininity than erotic desire, the construction of hetero-desire as the ontological essence of gender difference establishes the meaning of the relationship between masculinity and femininity. 

Regardless of one’s sex category, the possession of erotic desire for the feminine object is constructed as masculine and being the object of masculine desire is feminine. 

Heterosexual desire is defined as the basis of masculinity as others have argued (Anderson, 2002; Connell, 1987; Dowsett, 1993; Fejes, 2000; Garlick, 2003; Kimmel et al., 2005), but it is also, and importantly, the basis of the difference between and complementarity of femininity and masculinity."

* (Connell and others who theorize and research masculinities acknowledge that)
** added by Catarina

"Although heterosexual desire marks both difference and complementarity in Western societies, the cultural construction of embodied sexual relations, along with other features of masculinity and femininity, defines a naturalized masculine sexuality as physically dominant in relation to femininity. For example, despite women embracing and expressing sexual agency at different historical times and in different cultural settings, contemporary, Western constructions of heterosexual sex still reduce it to penetrating and being penetrated and that relation is consistently constructed as one of intrusion, “taking”, dominating (Segal, 1994)."
(...)
"(but) Lynne Segal (1994) suggests that the symbolic construction of penetration as domination might in fact be an ideological move to mask the real relations of power: the erotic content of the relationship between masculinity and femininity serves the hegemonic function of masking women’s sexual power."


"If gender hegemony is produced through the relationship between femininity and masculinity, our efforts to identify (**act_relate with) multiple and hierarchical configurations of masculinities and femininities must also focus on this relationship."

excerpts from "Recovering the feminine other: masculinity, femininity and gender hegemony" 

photography by Christopher Raynaud, choreography "Tragedie" by Olivier Dubois 

**added by Catarina