| abstract |
This dissertation seeks to introduce a new approach to the analysis of men's violence and masculinities in the context of the United States. I focus on the concept of control—understood here as a spectrum of interrelated modes of violence that assert mastery over the self and others—in an effort to interrogate the role of power and violence in the historical enactment of masculine identities. Tracing what Caribbean anticolonial theorist Sylvia Wynter names "the politics of being," I examine significant moments in the theological, philosophical, and cultural production of the human subject in order to demonstrate how the violence of control becomes essential to a dominant understanding of what it means to be human. Particular attention is payed to the gendered, racial, and economic categorization of the human that first enabled and continues to serve the ongoing global devastation of colonialism upon which the "progress" of so-called Modernity was built.
This account of control and its functions in the production of a dominant understanding of what it means to be human tasks the examination of men's violence and masculinities with a deeper and more historically attentive mode of analysis than the therapeutic assessment of "healthy" and "harmful" masculinities. It accomplishes this by revealing the power and violence inherent in the ideological and material production of the Western humanist vision of the individual subject—a vision that has always been explicitly masculinized. A challenge is thus presented to the theorization of masculinities that invites us to reckon with the philosophical, theological, racial, political, and economic logics of masculine inviolability and mastery that come to be essential to the legible performance of humanity in the wake of Modernity.
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