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Monday, September 20, 2010

The Masculine Heart - Multiplicity & Fluidity in Masculine Identity Development

Over at The Masculine Heart, my other blog, I have posting a series of meditations on masculine identity development. Yesterday afternoon, I posted the most complete examination of my model so far, pulling from Robert Kegan's developmental model, Kenneth Gergen's social constructionist psychology, and Chris Blazina's recent article on multiple masculinities.

Here are a couple of excerpts from "Thoughts Toward a Developmental Model of Masculine Identity, Part Nine: Multiplicity & Fluidity in Masculine Identity Development"

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Here is the main point of Blazina's article from 2001, which gets explored and expanded in his contribution to An International Psychology of Men:
In this model, the concept of the masculine self is explored. It is suggested that a man's masculine self is separate but related to his overall sense of self. The masculine self, just as the overall sense of self, is built upon developmental experiences such as emotional attunement that facilitate its growth. This model draws heavily upon analytic psychology, especially self-psychology as a model, in that young men can develop a cohesive sense of masculine self through self-object experiences that include merging with an idealized other, being mirrored by a significant other, and developing a sense of twinship. It is also suggested that just as the overall self can be fragmented through lack of good self-object experiences, so can the masculine self experience fragmentation in the same way. (p. 50)
In his new essay from the book, Blazina gives a detailed account of how the Self-Other-Masculinity-Schema (SOMS) get internalized (based on the idea of internalized objects from Object Relations and Self Psychology). He offers the following definition:
This model stresses how individuals internalize important experiences/people and then apply them to issues of masculinity. These exchanges result in the development of SOMS which: (1) are defined as intrapsychic structures developed from the self-other images; (2) consist of emotions and cognitions; and (3) form a template that has the potential for guiding behavior. (Blazina, 2010, p. 106)
After laying out some of the evidence for this perspective, he then demonstrates how the SOMS are enacted from the perspective of the self-image, which is separate from but related to masculine gender identity. Although I am in general agreement, I might revise the general mechanisms slightly in light of my own bias toward the various parts theories - ego states (Watkins & Watkins), subpersonalities (Stone & Stone), Internal Family Systems (Schwartz), or Dialogic Self Theory (Hermans).

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And this brings me to one of my primary arguments, one that is only expressed indirectly in Blazina's essay - we are multiple selves, and those selves are situational and embodied. I want to rely here on Ciaran Benson's Cultural Psychology of the Self (Routledge, 2001), in which he offers this definition:
In a sentence, cultural psychology examines how people, working together, using a vast range of tools, both physical and symbolic – tools which have been developed over time and which carry with them the intelligence that solved specific problems – make meaningful the world they find, make meaningful worlds and, in the course of doing all these things, construct themselves as types of person and self who inhabit these worlds. (p. 11)
After reading his book, and then going to some of his sources (Jerome Bruner, Rom Harre, George Lackoff, Antonio Damasio, William James, and many others), my own definition of the self, and of consciousness in general, is as follows: a body-mind embedded in temporal space, interpersonal space, cultural context, and physical environment.

[A note on the term "body-mind" is useful here: In my view, the "mind" is the brain and the rest of the body in multi-directional communication, including the central nervous system (brain and spinal cord), the peripheral nervous system, and the enteric nervous system (which is actually part of the peripheral nervous system, but deserves its own recognition).]


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So far what has been presented is a multiplicity model of masculine identity as seen from a social constructionist perspective - i.e., we each contain many masculine selves that have been created as a result of our interpersonal and cultural experiences. For the majority of people, these selves and their perspectives (their unique way of viewing the world) remain mostly or completely unconscious.

According to Robert Kegan, perhaps the leading theorist in adult development, there are five basic orders of consciousness. Kegan's model is a constructive-developmental subject/object approach based in the work of Piaget, but making it more interactive than a strict structural model. Of primary importance is the subject/object split - this is the source of all personal transformation.

Self as subject is the 'I' of awareness, our proximate sense of self, an invisible entity with which our subjectivity is fused. Self as object is the 'me' of awareness, the distal sense of self, that which we can describe as an object of awareness (which generally puts it slightly behind the proximate self in its development). According to Kegan: "We have object; we are subject" (1994, p.32).


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Stage 3: Primary Exposure. For the first time there is a conscious recognition that some men enact their masculinity in ways different than I do. Exposure comes from family members, community, culture, and media, to name a few sources. While the person may not embrace these roles, they are seen for the first time as different ways that men are in the world, and that the variations among male expression of "transgressive" masculinity does not make them “other” or “evil” as it might in the previous stage.

Stage 4a: Entrenchment. Primary exposure may challenge the person enough that he becomes entrenched in his biological sex role. This person is essentially a "closed system," and he is not open to accepting alternative ways of being masculine. This is a transitional space between 2nd Order and 3rd Order Consciousness – the person may not hate all “gays,” but he also has no desire to befriend a gay man.

OR . . . following secondary exposure . . .

Stage 4b: Differentiation. On the other hand, this person is an open system, willing to allow that there is more than one way to be masculine. The person begins to think about what it is that constitutes masculinity or being a man, not from a simple biological level, but in terms of values and behaviors. A person at this stage may also come out as gay or bisexual. This is the 3rd Order Consciousness and Kegan’s model. There is some understand that being gay, which often results in being beat up, denied jobs, and so on, is not a “lifestyle choice” and is, in fact, biologically determined.

Stage 5a: Conscious Traditional Masculinity. A man at this point accepts the dominant hegemonic masculine model as his gender identity. However, he accepts that others do it differently than he does - different but equal. Some men at this stage will see feminism as either harmful to women or destructive to men. Different cultures will embrace their own unique definition of what traditional masculinity looks like to them.

At this stage a man is pretty comfortable with 3rd Order Consciousness and has no real desire to be anything other than what he is, and most liberal, educated American men are near this position.

OR . . . following further exposure . . .

Stage 5b: Gender Styles: "I am a man, but I can be masculine, feminine, androgynous, or something else." Men at this stage can try out different styles until they find the one that fits for them. They may begin to read about masculinities, accepting that there are many ways to enact masculinity. Men at this stage may see feminist studies and/or queer studies as tools toward exploring their own identity.


For the first time, we see men entering the realm of Self-authoring, as Kegan termed it, the ability to make some choices about who we are as human beings and how we want to identify ourselves or shape our experiences. This is 4th Order Consciousness, or at least the transition into the stage.

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It's a long article, and the theory is still in development, but I feel I am getting closer to where I want to end up with this model.


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