Male Confessions: Intimate Revelations and the Religious Imagination
312
Male Confessions: Intimate Revelations and the Religious Imagination
312Hardcover
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804768993 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/03/2009 |
| Pages: | 312 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d) |
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Male Confessions
INTIMATE REVELATIONS AND THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATIONBy Björn Krondorfer
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6900-6
Chapter One
Introduction Male Confessions
"I have become a problem to myself," writes Saint Augustine in the fourth century. "I shall nevertheless confess to you my shame, since it is for your praise."
"I have made the first and most painful step in the dark and slimy maze of my confessions," writes Jean-Jacques Rousseau at the beginning of modernity. "It is not crimes that cost me to speak, but what is ridiculous and shameful."
"I am disconcerted by an irritating tendency to blush," writes modernist Michel Leiris in the twentieth century.
"Finally I want to tell You what is meant only for Your ears," writes Calel Perechodnik, a Jewish ghetto policeman, to his wife already killed by Germans. "I have deceived You."
"The moment of transformation filled me with an ardent love," writes Oswald Pohl after his conversion to Catholicism and shortly before he is hanged as a Nazi war criminal.
"I no doubt wanted the sperm of Jesus, the mark of his unfailing affection, to cover me and save me just as his holy blood did," writes Donald Boisvert in the twenty-first century.
* * *
Voices of men from different centuries and different historical situations, men struggling to give testimony to themselves: they confess. They do so in writing, and they search for an audience. They confess their sins, their shame, their shortcomings, their deceptions, their desires. They confess because they imagine a dialogical "you": God, a wife, the public, other men. They confess because they feel an urge to share with us their intimate selves, because they have sinned, because they have experienced a transformative moment, because they want to be forgiven, or because they are self-absorbed and self-interested. This book is about these and other men trying to give a truthful account of themselves.
The field of associations evoked by the amorphous title Male Confessions reaches from questions of faith to pornography, from voluntary admissions of sins preceding a religious conversion to coercive techniques of police interrogations. The citations at the beginning of the chapter echo such ambiguity: Augustine seems to speak from within a framework of faith, whereas Boisvert seems to pursue an ecstatic fantasy. Pohl seems to tell of a successful conversion of his old sinful self, whereas Perechodnik seems driven by a guilt for which he wants to atone. The religious imagination plays an important role in these confessions. And where the religious imagination seems absent-as in the case of men like Rousseau and Leiris, who adopt a decidedly antireligious stance-we can learn something about the modernist loss of religious perspective, bringing into sharper profile the kind of questions pursued in this book.
If this book about confessions neither refers, in any narrow sense, to statements of faith nor to pornographic eavesdropping (after all, "male confessions" might be the title of a gay porn movie), what is it about? It is about confessions as a mode of self-examination. It is also about men. It is about men opening their intimate lives and thoughts to the public through the form of confessional writing. As public documents, these writings tell us something about the interior struggle that men are willing to share with a larger audience during particular personal circumstances and in particular moments of history. As texts, they speak to the sincere attempts of men to lay bare aspects of themselves that would otherwise have remained hidden.
A Gendered Reading
No study, so far, has undertaken the task of examining confessions by men as a particular style of gendered writing and of subjecting the latter to a reading that pays attention to issues of religiosity and masculinity. Male Confessions makes a first foray into this complex territory. The terrain is difficult to negotiate because I am bringing together four areas-men, religion, gender, confessions-which are, each for its own reasons, complicated and highly contested. I do not seek, however, to clarify the various theoretical and methodological claims on definitional authority for any of these four areas. Rather, Male Confessions is more humble in scope and ambition while, at the same time, no less daring in the complexity of its arguments. I wish to demonstrate that men are able to talk about themselves intimately, but I also want to examine critically the limits of such intimate male talk. On the one hand, I want to take seriously the vulnerability exposed in male self-disclosures and learn from those who dared to walk down this path. On the other hand, I offer a critique of the religious and gendered rhetoric employed in such discourse.
The religious imagination, I will argue, allows men to talk about their intimate selves, their flawed and sinful selves, without having to condemn themselves entirely or to fear self-erasure. When I refer to the "religious imagination" in the context of male confessions, I have in mind how men, given their personal religiosity in a given historical circumstance, imagine religion and how they call upon the "religious" to articulate themselves in a self-examining mode. By foregrounding the religious imagination rather than other forms of religious sentiment and practice (such as liturgy, worship, devotion, or doctrine), I am not evaluating these men's spiritual understandings against a perceived religious orthodoxy. Instead, I ask whether the religious imagination facilitates (or obstructs) intimate self-disclosure. These men do not have to be doctrinally correct in order to play with the religious imaginary in their attempts to take account of themselves. Calling upon, and resorting to, religious language offers them escapes from the confining circularity of male self-absorption. Believing in the possibility of a transcendental Other and harboring hopes for redemption, both of which widen the imaginary horizon, enable men to self-examine and to grant others a look into their hearts. In view of something grander than one's own mortal being, some men feel sufficiently secure to expose a vulnerable self. Religion may not be the only venue that enables men to open their souls to the eyes and ears of an Other, but in the history of Christianity, and its subsequent developments of practices of the self in the Western world, the religious imagination has played a crucial role.
To say that men are gendered beings is tautological, yet I need to restate it right at the beginning of this book since this simple insight gets so easily overlooked and forgotten. Men are not naturally destined to be norm- setting creatures but are people caught within their own rules of learned behaviors and acquired attitudes. At stake is that unacknowledged male gender perspectives within religious discourse have all too often been claimed as normative. Once authorized as norm, religion has legitimated and enforced privileges of certain men in the name of universal truth. To counter such universalizing assumptions, I propose to read texts produced by men from a critical and consciously male-gendered perspective. Almost paradoxically, this is an exercise in simultaneously confirming a shared ground of "male" experience (however unstable and shifting it might be) while disentangling notions of normative masculinity from the variety of men's lives. In other words, a consciously male-gendered reading is a critique of hegemonic masculinity and heteronormativity (and the concomitant social privileges bestowed upon men of certain classes) without giving up the category of "men" altogether. It is at once an acknowledgment of difference (and we always need to ask, "difference from whom?") as well as an awareness that such differences may not exist in any essential or natural sense but are constituted by way of articulating oneself in contradistinction to (often fictionalized) others.
A critical and consciously male-gendered reading, then, assumes a male difference without claiming that men constitute a homogeneous whole. Put simply, but no less thorny in its implications: men are men, but not all men are equal; men become men by articulating their distinctiveness from women; men become "straight" by distinguishing themselves from "deviant" male behavior; men become heteronormative by mistaking sameness of discrete groups of men as universal; men become "real men" by reiterating the fictions they have helped to construe about the other. Male confessional writings, as we shall see, do not only render men vulnerable but also reinforce and strengthen their identities. They function, so to speak, as articulations of male subjectivity, creating a "new" man in response to a crisis, to a realization of wrong-directedness, or to a transformative moment or conversion.
Confessional writings do not, however, constitute a mere continuous remaking of the male self. They are more than a series of reiterative performances. Confessional writings also open up the possibility of questioning what is perceived as normative masculinity, creating alternative spaces for men to reveal something about the variety of their intimate lives, of the complexity of motives, and of the embarrassments of clandestine deeds and thoughts.
Dominant ideals of manliness and masculinity can be undone by critical and self-reflective investigations, and the confessional genre, in which men demonstrate their willingness to remove their public masks in order to reveal a hitherto unknown intimate self, seems to be one cultural instance in which such "undoing" of gendered assumptions might be possible. Confessional writings, thus understood, can constitute a transformative "moral space" for men orienting themselves anew. The religious imagination plays an important role in creating occasions for men exposing their intimate vulnerabilities, occasions on which men can name themselves into being beyond normative masculinity.
Male Confessions in the Context of Men's Studies in Religion
With this book, I wish to contribute also to the nascent field of men's studies in religion. This field can be described as a subdiscipline within the larger body of transdisciplinary gender studies. Its organizational home has been primarily at the American Academy of Religion, particularly the "Gay Men's Issues in Religion" group (founded in 1988) and the "Men's Studies in Religion" group founded two years later. In 2004, "men's studies in religion" made its debut entry into the archive of encyclopedic knowledge:
MEN'S STUDIES IN RELIGION is part of the unfolding concern within religion to address the effects of gender and sexuality upon religious faith and practice. As a new field of scholarly inquiry, it reflects upon and analyzes the complex connections between men and religion, building upon gender studies, feminist theory and criticism, the men's movement, and the increasing number of subdisciplines in the academic study of religion. Methodologically, men's studies in religion is an open field; its object of inquiry is "men" as gendered beings in relation to religion.... The task of men's studies in religion is to bring gender consciousness to the interpretation and analysis of men in relation to any aspect of religion. (Krondorfer and Culbertson 2004, 5861)
This description, by and large, still holds true, but I would now call this field of inquiry critical men's studies in religion. This subtle shift indicates that this project is not about a positivist and heteronormative reading of men's presence in religious traditions but, instead, a critical reading of the privileged performances of male gender within those traditions.
"The writing of a religious man," Culbertson and I write in the entry for the Encyclopedia of Religion, "is not the same as the scholarly study of a male author's gendered text and context" (2004, 5862). When this insight is applied to confessional texts created by men, it should be apparent why a study of male confessions cannot remain gender neutral and why it refrains from excising from such texts ontological and universal insights. The confessional texts I examine are all written by men, but it takes a critical approach to point to-and, in some cases, to unearth-the genderedness of the writing subject and the genderedness of the narrative protagonist and the consumers of such texts.
Culbertson and I identify male confessional writings as one of the literary subgenres of religious discourse worthy of further exploration.
The religious traditions have accumulated a wealth of spiritual journals and autobiographies, mystical journeys, and confessional testimonies written by men. They constitute a vast source for examining individual as well as collective presentations of the male self. Bringing a gender-conscious perspective to these texts yields critical insights into the male psyche and forms of male embodiment, intimacy, and sexualities. The literature reflecting on men's spiritual and autobiographical voices often blends scholarly analysis with a more personal and existential style. The borders between critical analysis and an envisioned spiritual renewal are intentionally porous. Areas of concern in the Jewish and Christian traditions are issues of embodiment, sexual theologies, and the deconstruction of traditional masculine roles.... Another aspect of men's studies in religion is to reflect critically on confessional modes of male discourses on religion. Still an underutilized approach, most of this work is located within the Christian tradition, largely due to the lasting influence of Augustine's (254-430 CE) Confessions and the thought of the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) ... [who] mapped out an influential theory about the Christian monastic roots of the modern concern over sexual practices, desires, and politics.... A Foucaultian framework helps analyze religious men's desire for intimate self-revelations; at the same time it can be used to investigate both subjugated and liberating knowledge of male sexualities as revealed in confessional, spiritual, and autobiographical writings. (Krondorfer and Culbertson 2004, 5863)
This book picks up the threads sketched in this entry. It examines select confessional writings as "individual presentations of the male self," which-because of their meta-individual implications-also constitute a collective response to a need particularly felt by men. Battles with male identity, embodiment, relationality, and intimacy speak through these writings. They show that men are endowed with styles of expression that speak to their specific perceptions of the world, conveying differently gendered experiences of growing up, of social roles and affective expressivity, of bodily metaphors and incarnated knowledge. A confessional text offers a window into male interiority, into a man's way of perceiving himself within the constraints and possibilities of his environment.
Confessional writing, I suggest, is a gendered activity. First, writing itself-that is, the ability to articulate a self and the access to means of preserving the written word-is a privilege based on education, social status, and felt entitlement to a public hearing. For a long time, it was primarily available only to men. Second, disclosing one's intimate self in written form is attractive to men because it differs from actual face-to-face encounters with intimate others. In real encounters, the outcome is less predictable and more difficult to shape and control. Third, the act of confessional writing appeals to men because it is pervaded by a tinge of adventure. It is a titillating activity. It fills the writer with the invigorating sense of being suspended between risk and control. "Control," because the writer, in and through the process of creating a text, also creates a distancing from himself, others, and events in the past. He remains largely in command of the story he wants to tell about himself. "Risk," because writing for an audience exposes men to public ridicule and censure. Male confessants relinquish the protection offered either by the privacy of direct conversations or by the secrecy of the religious confessional and therapeutic spaces.
Male Confessions, then, neither is a religious and cultural history of confessions in Western Christianity nor does it seek to clarify the debate on how best to define confessional narratives as a literary genre. Rather, this study-informed by the relevant literature of multiple disciplines and attentive to the context of each work examined-relies on three interwoven approaches: an empathetic hearing, intertextuality, and critical-discursive analysis. It does so without claiming to present a comprehensive survey of confessional works relevant to such a study (colleagues can easily point to many more samples); it does not even claim to offer an exhaustive interpretation of the texts selected. Rather, the book follows up on some signals and traces that confessional texts have left for us as contemporary readers. It wants to draw attention to what some men in their confessional writings have said or have failed to say. It creates linkages between seemingly unrelated texts in order to suggest similarities across space and time. It aims at stimulating our interest in and curiosity about fresh questions about normative and resistant behavior among men. And it will indicate a few conceptual trajectories for a reading that aims at understanding men through their self-representations and show how both the religious imaginary and gendered rhetoric affect these representations.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Male Confessions by Björn Krondorfer Copyright © 2010 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments....................ix1 Introduction: Male Confessions....................1
INTERLUDE On Mirrors....................29
2 The Confines of Male Confessions: On Ancient Vainglory and the Postmodern Gaze....................34
INTERLUDE On Testimony....................72
3 Non-absent Bodies and Moral Agency: Confessions of an African Bishop and a Jewish Ghetto Policeman....................74
4 A Perpetrator and His Hagiographer: Oswald Pohl's Confession....................100
INTERLUDE On Tears....................132
5 Sons of Tears: Displacing the Intimate (Female) Other....................135
6 Not from My Lips: From Annihilation to Nation Building....................161
7 On Spirit and Sperm: Eroticizing God, Sanctifying the Body....................190
8 Outlook: The Power to Name Oneself into Being....................231
Notes....................239
References....................269
Index....................287