Masculinities and Sexual Violence: A Study of the Hybrid Masculine Hegemonic Bloc During the #MeToo Era

This thesis is a feminist theoretical intervention where I, as a feminist researcher, attempt to have a “power-sensitive dialogue” (Haraway, 1988, p. 590) with the case studies of Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey and R. Kelly, to test and explore feminist and critical masculinity studies theoretical perspectives. This thesis addresses the following questions: How are hegemonic masculinities reconstructed in response to high profile allegations of sexual violence? How do case study analyses of Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey and R. Kelly expose dominant social constructions of gender and sexual violence? How do these dominant social constructions reproduce or challenge racialized heteronormative constructions of hegemonic masculinity? This work is interdisciplinary, as I use scholarship from women’s studies, masculinity studies, cultural studies and critical race theory to make sense of the case studies I analyse and build on feminist theorizations of sexual violence and media. I use the case studies of Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey and R. Kelly to test and explore feminist and critical masculinity studies theoretical perspectives. I have used these case studies to understand, draw upon and reformulate existing theoretical framework, and to interrogate, analyse, and develop theorisations of masculinities. I start by testing out Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity (1995, 2015) and Demetriou’s conceptualization of the hybrid hegemonic bloc (2001) to expose the strategic and defensive contradictions of men and masculinities during and post-#MeToo. I argue that structures of work and sex leave women and other marginalized genders vulnerable to sexual violence, and that men and masculinities can re-assert their power through co-opting and recycling feminist critiques of gender dominance and non-hegemonic gender practice. Considering the negotiations of the survivors in situations of victimization, I draw on Kelly’s theorization of sexual violence as a continuum (1988) which I argue is a path forward to dismantling what Gavey calls the “cultural scaffolding of rape” that normalizes rape and sexual assault in Western society (2005). Additionally, I argue for a feminist, abolitionist and socialist politic that seeks to dismantle the conditions that allow the existence of rape, sexual assault and the continuum of sexual violence that is key to women’s subjugation. In my view, the tendencies of hegemonic masculinity to hybridize (Demetriou, 2001) in a postfeminist cultural landscape as articulated by McRobbie (2004, 2008) indicate that we are stuck in the logic of white supremacist patriarchal capitalism (hooks, 1982). The only way out is the abolition of the current structures of oppression and a radical re-imagining of what the world could be.