This essay - written for an Honours Course in Femininst literary theory - examines Marabou Stork Nightmares by Irvine Welsh as a genealogy of the construction of violent masculinity. I explore the method by which the narrative is framed, arguing that the structure posits a hierarchy of consciousness and a distinction between the “internal” and “external” world.This leads to questions of innate or learned sexual disposition, and a discussion of the homosocial matrix that regulates the socialization of the individual. The place of women within the novel’s social economy is discussed with particular focus on the forces behind Roy’s rapes. I then return to the question of mind and body, and explore questions of the “gaze” within the novel, and argue finally that the text concludes by collapsing the mind-body distinction into a single, fragile construct.
I – Being Inside Roy Strang
Roy Strang initially presents himself as the sort of subject posited by early psychoanalysts. The novel proceeds not according to the logic of realism, but rather by the operations of the dream that Freud outlines – Condensation, Displacement, Representation and Symbolism[1]. Roy Strang, therefore, is not merely the narrator of the novel; he is also its setting. Roy’s mind is discursively constructed as vertical and the narrative moves “higher” and “lower” within his conscious levels. The Stork-Quest sequences are posited at the lowest level of his character (he arrives there by going “deeper/deeper/deeper”) – it is his “subconscious” world, analogous to what Freud would have called his “preconscious”, but presented in the sustained logic of a particular literary genre that would be impossible in the barely accessible preconscious of the human subject. On the highest level is the present (the word here indicating both temporal immediacy and embodied presence). Memory, according to the prepositions that define the narrative space, is the intermediate level between the “reality” and the “dream”. I will talk loosely about the three levels being the world/reality, the memory and the dream – although all three levels are primarily literary, and mediated by an unreliable narrative voice.
In the hospital scenes, Roy is the vulnerable body that Judith Butler describes in “Beside Oneself”, but in these scenes he is a mute object. In his memory and in his dream, he is a talking subject; he is Roy Strang, although the very construction of his subjectivity relies implicitly on the objectification of others; of “undoing” others (women, homosexuals, other men) by taking advantage of the vulnerability of their human bodies.
"All I have is the data I get. I don’t care whether it’s produced by my senses or my memory or my imagination. Where it comes from is less important than the fact that it is. The only reality is the images and texts" (p. 16)Roy constructs the frame of the narrative so that his narrative voice is seen as an “internal” position, disconnected from his physical body that lies on the hospital bed. Therefore, our analysis of the text should proceed from a theoretic position that analyses “interiority”; but the best paradigm is not a foray into the argument between essentialism and determinism, but rather the question of power suggested in Butler’s comment:
The critical question is not how did that identity become internalized? as if internalization were a process or a mechanism that might be descriptively reconstructed. Rather, the question is: From what strategic position in public discourse and for what reasons has the trope of interiority and the disjunctive binary of inner/outer taken hold? In what language is “inner space” figured? … How does a body figure on its surface the very invisibility of its hidden depth?”(1990: 183)
With the question of performativity and the “interior space” in our mind, let us turn to the question of Roy’s sexuality.
II – The Closet-Case
(Almost exactly) halfway through the novel, Bernard describes Roy as a “mercenary wee closet rent-boy” (p. 127). Indeed, in Roy’s dream-world there are numerous suggestions of homosexuality, which are rapidly suppressed. For instance, Roy says to Sandy “ – Maybe we should take our clothes off and go for a little dip”, and then immediately moves out of the dream-world with a repetition of “naw naw that wisnae it” (p. 84). Roy’s only homosexual encounter in the “real” world is his molestation, which in the beginning are a source of pleasure for him (“I felt a sense of power, a sense of attractiveness, a sense of affirmation that I hadn’t previously experienced”, pp. 71-72). It may be that Roy’s (ultimately false) sense of power is akin to that felt by the women in the novel who attempt to access phallic power by accepting a role as sexual objects for men (such as Kim, as will be discussed in section IV), but it must be acknowledged nonetheless that Roy’s homophobia is largely a learned response.
Roy comes to be homophobic as he becomes aware of the punitive power of social masculinity. Shortly after their return from South Africa, there is an incident when the Strangs learn of Bernard’s early experiments in homosexual behaviour, and they threaten him with castration as punishment (p. 88). This incident shocks Roy deeply, and his castration-anxiety becomes associated with homosexuality[2]. As she threatens Bernard, Roy’s conception of his mother alters:
I had always thought of my Ma as young and beautiful. Now she seemed to me to look like a twisted, haggard old witch, staring out at me from behind a smudged mask of eyeliner. I noted the strands of silver in her long black hair" (p. 89)
his extract indicates that the fear of castration irrevocably alters Roy’s perception not only of homosexuality, but of women too, who as “castrated” or “castrating” become crone-like and a source of anxiety. The Freudian reading could be extended further into the extract. Freud (cited in Butler, 1990: 78-88) argued that gender is a form of melancholia, whereby a lost love-object is incorporated into the self so that it may be psychically preserved. Roy, who is taught that he must forsake homosexual love or suffer castration (that is, one can only love a man if one is a woman, and therefore castrated) begins to embody what he believes is the essence of masculinity in order to replace the lost love-object. Although this reading is a quite a far departure from the text, it usefully offers an explanation for the tension between Roy’s homosexuality in his dream-world and his “real”-world homophobia and misogyny. Freud’s framework even predicts that suicide often results from the ambivalence generated by melancholia[3] - in this case, it could be argued that Roy’s phallogocentric society causes him to incorporate or imitate an abstract masculinity, which he both loves (because it affords him power) and hates (because there is a pre-existing aspect of his ego that reviles the incorporated object, in this case the self-critical aspect of Roy), and this tension becomes irreconcilable and causes his life to become unliveable.
Catherine MacKinnon (1987) offers a useful perspective on what this “heterosexual matrix” (what I have been calling the “masculine signifying economy”) achieves. She claims that “Gender emerges as the congealed form of the sexualisation of inequality between men and women” (p. 6-7). The masculine identity therefore secures not biological reproduction (which is never a concern for Roy, and is in fact revealed to be a source of disgust when he dreams of a deformed foetus that has his facial features on p. 159), but rather social power.
III – The Law of the Father
Marabou Stork Nightmares, if it suggests a repressed homosexuality underlying certain kinds of aggressive heterosexuality, does not present an argument for inherent sexual behaviour. What is expressed in Roy Strang’s unconscious world as homosexuality, takes the form in the “real” world as homosociality; labelled by Lacan “the Law of the Father” and by Irigiray “hommo-sexuality” (both cited in Butler, 1990: 55), and it seems impossible to determine which is “primary” and gives rise to the other[4].
Roy’s attempts to become a fully-realised subject (portrayed in the Bildungsroman narrative thread) centre around his acquisition of the rules of masculine culture; his attempts to become an active subject, paradoxically, by submitting himself to the discursive “Law” that dominates his society. Initially Roy finds many aspects of this culture distasteful (or so he claims) but gradually internalises them as protection against the punishment he undergoes when he fails to do so. For instance, as a young boy Roy is forced by his father to fight against his half-brother Bernard (p. 29), as the vessel of his father’s hatred for homosexuality (in these exchanges, Roy thinks to himself “TAKE THAT YA FUCKIN SAPPY BIG POOF”), for being cuckolded (John tells Roy that he must win because Bernard is a “bastard son”[5]) and for being weak or “sappy”. Roy learns from these exchanges that if he is not the more violent, he is forced to “beat a humiliating retreat, overwhelmed by pain and frustration” (p. 30)[6]. In Roy’s world, one is either a winner or a loser (the title of chapter fourteen reasserts this), and although he envies a position in which one can escape the system entirely, he sees the only possibility for doing so in the figure of his brother Elgin, who is autistic (“Perhaps Elgin had the right idea; perhaps it was all just psychic defence”, p. 30).
Football, like boxing, is an institution by which masculine identity is regulated. Roy initially professes to dislike football (p. 101, 117), but gradually comes to incorporate its symbolic power, when he learns that football is a way to delineate alliances and hierarchies between men. For instance, when Roy is harassed by Hamilton and his gang, he is asked what football team he supports, to which Roy replies “Hibs”, thinking that although he has no personal interest in football, “Dad and Tony were Hibs fans and so were most of my mates in the scheme” (p. 101). The particularism of football, which specifically enforces nationalist xenophobia, naturally becomes the site of some of Roy’s most intense expressions of violence when he joins the Casuals. It is ironic, then, that Sandy claims that the attraction of football lies in “the camaraderie of the whole thing” (p. 191). But there is indeed a camaraderie in the violent system, because although it creates antagonism amongst men, it at least defines them as “men” in contrast with those whom the system effaces.
This system of male aggression does not merely position women at the bottom of a hierarchy (as the least physically able to defend themselves) but excludes them from participating in the system of exchange entirely. Butler (1990) discusses Levi-Strauss’s (1969) thesis that in patriarchal societies women act as an object of exchange that consolidates the relationships between men[7], claiming that within his paradigm heterosexual relationships with women are insincere, for their object is not women at all, but other men, and that this is “a repressed and, hence, disparaged sexuality, a relationship between men which is, finally, about the bonds of men, but which takes place through the heterosexual exchange of women” (Butler, 1990: 55). It is not always necessary for women to be present at all for them to be used as commodities; sometimes their symbolic or discursive existence is sufficient. Freud (cited in Doring, 2002: 129) suggests that men often joke with each other about women in a sexually aggressive manner in order to consolidate their homosocial bonds, much like Roy jokes with his uncle Benny that a certain girl has a “[f]anny like the Mersey Tunnel” (p. 139). Sexual aggression as a means to reinforce male bonds takes its most troubling incarnation in the gang rape, in which Kirsty is effaced as a subject, which leads to the impression of the rapists having sex with each other, as though Kirsty was acting merely as a mediating object so that the homosexuality of the act can be denied. During the rape there is a moment when,
Dempsy and Lexo were up her cunt and arse at the same time, their balls pushed together. – Ah kin feel your cock, Lexo, Dempsy gasped" (p. 190)
There is thus a clear tension within the masculine signifying economy of Marabou Stork Nightmares between the desire to exclude women entirely and the necessity of heterosexuality as ego-defensive. Roy asserts the first desire in his “dream” sequence, which is modelled on a genre he calls Boys Own Adventures, in which he childishly (which is perhaps, honestly) tells the women who attempt to engage him and Sandy sexually to leave, yelling that they are “spoiling our adventure … spoiling our fun! It’s just boys! Boys only, boys only, boys only!” (p. 123), and without women to mediate male friendship the system collapses into homosexuality, as we have seen in section I above.
IV – Worthless Women
Within an economy of masculine exchange as all-encompassing as that of Marabou Stork Nightmares, the woman’s place is that of a commodity. Her psychic existence is unacknowledged, and her physicality (the way she is vulnerable to men, and the way she is accessed by them) is consistently reasserted. Roy’s heterosexuality is a product of his homosocial anxiety – he must have sex with women in order to earn the respect of other men. When Hamilton harasses the teenage Roy, he embarrasses him by insinuating that Roy is a virgin (“- Ivir hud yir hole? Hamilton sneered. Gilchrist laughed”, p. 100). Women in this exchange are non-beings, anonymous “holes”, defined by their physical ability to incorporate a man’s penis. Hamilton and Gilchrist parade their girlfriends as signs of their social superiority. When Roy subsequently assaults Caroline Carson, Gilchrist’s girlfriend, it is a way to reassert his status as a man, and the incident coincides with his first attempts at building a gang. Shortly after this event, he properly loses his virginity, and even though he does not really enjoy the sex itself, his immediate thought is that he feels “equals with Tony; both men of the world” (p. 111). His heterosexuality involves talking about his sexual encounters with other men, specifically his brother,
I’d talk to Tony about getting my hole; bullshitting about the number of shags I’d had and the things I’d done. I think he knew I was making most of it up, and I knew that he knew, but he let me go on and said nothing …" (p. 111-112)
Both men are aware that Roy’s stories are a performance; his truthfulness is less important than his ability to participate in one of the rituals of masculinity.[8]
The way in which this commodifying discourse around women (or rather, this commodifying discourse that constructs “women” as a discursive entity) is transformed into physical violence is a genealogy clearly outlined in Marabou Stork Nightmares. The Scots vernacular through which Roy first learns to mediate his experience is presaged on the use of “woman” to denote inferiority. Men who speak in the vernacular constantly label each other female when they are denigrating each other; consistently, “other” men (men not included in the immediate discursive group) are called “cunts”, “tits” or “pussies” (which reinforces not only the concept of female as inferior, but also the concept of female as anatomical) or “wide-o’s” [9] and “punters”[10]. The terms of denigration are specifically applied to homosexual men (on page 22 Roy states matter-of-factly that “Bernard was a girl.”), who are in turn absorbed into the discursive system of pejoratives so that men also aggressively call each other “queer-faced” or “poofs” to indicate that they are lower in the masculine hierarchy. Numerous theorists have suggested that the anxiety created around these words ironically demonstrates the fragility of the masculine norm. In the words of Simone de Beauvoir, “In spite of the inferior role which men assign to them, women are the privileged objects of their aggression” (cited in Kaufman, 1994: 23). Within this system, women and homosexual men are a source of anxiety, as they represent alternatives to the masculine ideal, which must be self-destructively suppressed in order to maintain it.
An ironic awareness of the fragility of Roy’s masculinity, and its continual constructedness, pervades the text. After Sandy and Roy, in the “dream-world”, tell the beautiful women to leave them to their “boys only” mission, the women “drop their disguise” and are revealed to be giant preying mantises with “blonde and auburn wigs, lipstick smeared on those deadly pincher-like insect jaws” (p. 124). Roy’s fear of women (as the threat to his masculinity), which has been cloaked in his desire for them, is revealed to be a façade, and immediately he and Sandy grab baseball bats in self-defence. This could be an allegory for Roy’s violence against the women he is initially attracted to; he fears them and so must destroy the source of his fear (and, indeed, the women become “ugly” after he assaults them, and the source of his anxiety is nullified). Roy’s awareness of gender as “masquerade” (in the words of Joan Riviere) is often un-self-conscious. He defends himself against John’s accusation that the Cashies are “posers” concerned not with football (which in this discourse designates authentic masculinity) but with wearing “fuckin designer labels” (p. 136), but Roy later admits that he does in fact spend almost all of his money on new clothes. He similarly expresses confusion when Martine Fenwick “was intae letting me tongue her in public, but when she sussed I was trying to get her away, she knocked me back” (p. 180).
Although there is the sense of “faked” gender running through the text, what Roy represents as gender’s falseness is one of the most powerfully harmful factors in the plot. Roy’s involvement in Kirsty’s rape, he initially claims, was “faked” (p. 184), and even though it is later revealed that he was the main instigator and most physically violent perpetrator, there is a sense in which this too is a performance, an act that masks his anxiety. The performances of gender, even if Roy claims them to be “inauthentic” with his insistent claims of “it wisnae really like that”, are real because it is the performance rather than the intention that harms or does not harm other subjects. Therefore, even though Kirsty and Roy both agree that the courtroom where her trial takes place is “[a] theatre to humiliate and brutalize [Kirsty] all over again” (p. 223), it is a symbolic rape that causes her even more pain than the initial physical rape.
The women who are charged by Roy as being the most “inauthentic” are those he labels “lesbians”. He never mentions actual homosexual behaviour by these women (and, in fact, he at one stage finds himself kissing Martine Fenwick, who is one of the women he had labelled a “dyke”). “Lesbians” are the women who actively subvert the masculine hierarchy that Roy is psychically defending with such vehemence, for instance, the women who overpower him (usually economically) or who resist their status as commodities amongst men. The first such woman he encounters is his schoolteacher, “Lesbo Gray”, who subverts the expectations of the gender (masculine) paradigm by disciplining her male students with a belt, that is, physically overpowering them. Their act of defiance involves breaking into her office and beating each other with the belt “much harder than when Lesbo Gray … did it” (p. 102-103), thereby reappropriating physical violence as a masculine ability. They claim that she has no breasts, thereby defining her as not female, and then defecate in her drawer, as a way to assert that as not-female, she is therefore disgusting, insignificant and expellable as “shit”. This resonates strongly with Butler’s claim in Undoing Gender (2004b) that to be denied definition within discourse is to be denied personhood – Gray, by being denied status as a woman, is defined as inhuman faeces.
After completing school, Roy begins working at a company called “Scottish Spinsters”, which being a “spinster” economy (one does not recognise the masculinity that is Roy’s paradigm) is one in which he is insignificant[11]. Here, Roy is judged by his economic status, by which he is judged poor, and his ability to obey the politeness code of the office environment, in which he fails. Within this differently-regulated economy a woman, Jane Hathaway, is his superior. Like “Dykey Gray”, Jane Hathaway is described in unfeminine terms, overweight, wearing glasses that remind him of his father’s. Roy speculates that she is having a relationship with Martine Fenwick, has “no tits whatsoever” (p. 114), and is derisive of the fact that the women “go all girlish” when they speak to each other. In this context, too, Roy asserts his ability to decide who – within “masculine” discourse – can judge that a woman sufficiently fulfils her femininity, in order to reclaim power in a situation where he is judged as a failure.
Women, in this system, must choose between being dehumanized (called non-persons or “dykes”) or commodified (called “whores”). Bernard’s “fag-hags” are a third category, although by apparently denying their heterosexuality by choosing to befriend homosexual men, they are labelled asexual “hags”, and therefore nearly fall into the first category. Roy calls them “pathetic” and claims that “there was something incomplete about them” (p. 251). When Roy rapes Caroline and then Kirsty, it is because he believes that they are denying him sexually (although it is later revealed that both were in fact attracted to him). And yet the dichotomy within Roy’s discursive system between “hags” and “whores” is unstable; Kirsty is raped because she is sexually unavailable (a “hag”) and is immediately labelled a “whore slut” (p. 178) once she is raped. These pejoratives therefore do not apply to the dispositions of these women, but rather their acts, their performances. Even the apparent hatred of lesbianism is not stable, as can be seen in the interval of Kirsty’s rape, when Ozzy suggests to a homeless woman that she should accompany her back to the rape-scene and “[g]it some lesbo stuff set up” (p. 187), as bizarre as this paradox seems, it could be read as an attempt to subsume the object of threat (female homosexuality) into a performance by two heterosexual women for the pleasure of men.
There are many women in Marabou Stork Nightmares who are shown in various attempts to escape the rigidness of the discourse that designates them commodities. Some women attempt to find success in the system by fulfilling what they perceive to be expected from them. Kim is a good example of this, who is consistently “used” by men and then “abandoned”, and who becomes the sexual partner even of her own half-brother who is described as entirely sexually indiscriminate. Similarly, the nurse Patricia projects fantasies onto Roy about what a caring man he must be, even though she has never spoken with him and has only heard rumours of his misdeeds, and when her experience as a sexual commodity has been similar to Kim’s: “One he got what he wanted he was off … and there I was, left alone, again. Left with nothing” (p. 31). Like the women who testify against Kirsty at the rape trial, there are many instances of women characters who reinforce the masculine paradigm, who attempt to access phallic power by participating in the “Law of the father”. Even though they find themselves bankrupt within the masculine signifying economy, “left with nothing” as Patricia says, their acquiescence is unsurprising in light of the punishment that transgressive women are shown to undergo.
V - Pornography and the Severed Head
The analysis of the gaze has been an important one for feminist theory. For Sartre, the gaze is symmetrical; although to be looked at is to be made an object, it is only by being thus objectified that we become aware of our own unique position to gaze, and to be a subject (1948). Foucault (1977) extends this to the theory of asymmetric gaze; that is, gaze that regulates hierarchies. For Foucault, the gazed-upon (signified) object is not always able to return the gaze and is thereby denied subjectivity (the ability to signify) [12]. Irigiray (1981) contests the very paradigm of the binary between signifying-subject and signified-object, by stating that the paradigm of Woman as Other to Man is an aspect of the “masculine signifying economy” (1981: 266) and that women are not represented in it at all. She continues to argue that the gaze itself, as it is visual[13], is masculine by nature, and that the eroticization of the visual form of the woman is a mechanism by which she is subsumed into an erotic discourse that renders her passive.
The destructive force of the visual objectification of women is evident in numerous episodes in Marabou Stork Nightmares. One of Roy’s first sexualised acts is the purchase of pornography, when he says he “never liked the ones where the genitals were exposed in too much detail; they were like raw, open wounds, totally at odds with the smiling, inviting faces of the models” (p. 111). This is reminiscent of the “double movement of exhibition and chaste retreat” described by Irigiray (1981: 263), which reveals the inability of the “masculine signifying economy” – as it posits the phallus as the only sexual organ – to represent the female; her genitals are a lack, the wound that remains of the castrated penis. When he sexually assaults[14] Caroline Carson, Roy achieves his domination by forcing her to expose her pubic hair to him. He looks at her in order to shame her, and yet displaces his gaze onto her pubic hair rather than onto her actual genitalia. Roy’s interest in pornography is implicated with his desire to subjugate, and he describes that the comic book depictions of women “being kidnapped and restrained were the biggest turn-ons” (p. 34). During his assault of Caroline Carson he is conscious that his actions are imitative of this socially-condoned media, and verbally denigrates her, “talking like they did in the wankmags” (p. 107). This is taken a step further in the rape of Kirsty, when the rapists watch television whilst raping her, subsuming her into the broader economy of male visual entertainment (p. 189). Interestingly, following the act of visually subjugating both Caroline and Kirsty, they become ugly to him and lose their sexual appeal[15]. Roy himself claims that this is because the women lose their “sense of self” (p. 190); that is, their subjectivity, and all that remains is the body – the metaphorically “beheaded”, or entirely objectified body, which is a repulsive thing.
During Roy’s rapes, he describes the eyes of his victims as failing or dead. Caroline covers her eyes with her hands (p. 107), Kirsty’s face becomes “frozen, her eyes dead” (p. 182). When this rape is re-presented in the “dream” world, it is in the image of a young boy who has been murdered: his genitals mutilated and his eyes gouged out (p. 203). The image used to describe the expression on Kirsty’s face as she is first penetrated is compared to that of an animal being beheaded:
"The expression on her face was … I remember seeing a documentary about some animal being eaten from behind while its face seemed to register disbelief, fear, and self-hate at its own impotence. That was what she reminded me of "(p. 183).
Beheadings litter the metaphorical landscape of the novel: beginning with the beheadings of Winston II[16], the recurring image of the Stork holding the severed head of a flamingo, scenes in the Casuals’ violence that involve “Ghostie … trying to sever [a “Weedgie’s”] meaty heid oaf wi a broken glass” (p. 193), and finally Roy’s symbolic self-beheading by suffocation with a plastic bag (which re-enacts Winston II’s murder). The image of a beheading is the image of a mind and a body severed from each other; the option of subjectivity (seeing eyes) being permanently denied to the object (the body). Roy’s enacting of the fallacy of the mind-body divide seems to be an effort to consolidate a fragile construction that constitutes the female as embodied and vulnerable[17], while the male is a person, and primarily a mind or identity[18].
The fragility of this construction is revealed in the climax of the book, where Roy’s passive vulnerability is exploited as he is physically mutilated. As Kirsty mutilates him, she cuts off his eyelids, so that he is forced to watch her as she actively destroys his body, much as Roy used a mirror during the rape to force Kirsty to watch him as he raped her. She reiterates both “I want to see you, Roy” and “I want you to see … me” (p. 159), which could be read as an attempt to reinstate the symmetry of the gaze that Sartre suggests (1948).
Conclusion
As a reader, finding truth in Marabou Stork Nightmares is like watching a shadow-puppet play. The images we are presented with, being constructions of Roy Strang’s mind, consistently hint at truth, and present its outlines, but those images are shifting and unstable, and cast very different shapes when the narrative perspective, the “light” in my metaphorical conceit, is shifted. Roy presents his text as being a representation of different layers of himself, but in the end the boundaries between these levels disappear. Roy constructs a masculine subjectivity that presents itself as incorporeal, and he enacts it to the degree that he abandons his body to absolute passivity in order that he can be “liberated” to roam his mind. But the mind-body distinction collapses as the book reaches its climax. Kirsty actively takes her revenge in a way that demonstrates to Roy that he is a physically vulnerable body-self as much as a woman is, and that the entire paradigm that would pardon him from that vulnerability is a fragile construct. The lesson to be learnt is one that Judith Butler outlines in Undoing Gender (2004b); the body is a discursive entity, but also the site by which human beings are able to “undo” each other, both in love and in hatred.
References
Butler, Judith (1990). Gender Trouble. Routledge, New York & London.
Butler, Judith (2004a). “Introduction: Acting in Concert””, in Undoing Gender. Routledge, New York & London.
Butler, Judith (2004b). “Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy”, in Undoing Gender. Routledge, New York & London.Doring, Tobias (2002). “Freud About Laughter, Laughter About Freud” in Manfred Pfister (ed.) A History of English Laugher. Rodopi, London: 121-136.
Foucault, Michel (1977). Discipline and Punish, tr. A. Sheridan. Vintage Books, New York.
Freud, Sigmund (1900). Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams). Originally published in German by Franz Deuticke Publishers, Liepzig & Vienna.
Irigiray, Luce (1981). “This Sex Which Is Not One” in E. Marks and I. de Courtivron (eds.) New French Feminisms, tr. C. Reeder. New York: 99-106.
Kaufman, Michael (1994). Theorizing Masculinities. Sage Publications, Calif.
Levi-Strauss, Claude (1969). The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Beacon Books, Boston.
MacKinnon, Catherine (1987). Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law. Harvard University Press, Cambridge.
Riviere, Joan (1929). “Womanliness as Masquerade”, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 10.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1948, originally 1939). Being and Nothingness, tr. H. Barnes. Philosophical Library, New York.
Welsh, Irvine (1995). Marabou Stork Nightmares. Vintage Books, London.
Notes
[1] As presented by Sigmund Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams/Die Traumdeutung (1900).
[2] It is made clear that Roy was not originally anxious about homosexuality. In fact, he claims that he originally believed that all sex was anal, after so often hearing Tony saying of women that he would “shag the fuckin erse oafay that” (p. 111).
[3] Ambivalence refers to cathexic tension that is generated in the love-hate relationship between the ego and the incorporated love-object.
[4] Various psychoanalytic theorists (for instance, Freud and – to a lesser extent – Lacan) suggest that the success of homosociality requires the suppression of an innate bi-/homosexuality, however, the sociological work (although it is now outdated) of Levi-Strauss indicate that it is the evolutionary drive towards heterosexual reproduction that necessitates a homosocial system. This seems to be a chicken-or-the-egg debate; for the purposes of this discussion it is enough to recognize that both systems exist, and are symbiotic.
[5] John tells Roy that he is “fightin fir the Strang name”; the etymology of this surname is a Scots word for “strong”, underlining the ideal which the father embodies. This is not to suggest that the ideal of masculinity which is enforced by John is one which John himself successfully achieves, John is in fact described as a rather pathetic figure, who attempts to find a place in an idealistic discourse that he can never, as a working-class Scotsman, achieve true status in. He mimes an Englishness (in his obsession with Winston Churchill) as well as an intellectualism (as evidenced in the corrective letter he writes to the BBC).
[6] Interestingly, in this exchange Roy is urged to poke Bernard’s eye out. The significance of blindness and beheadings is discussed in section V of this essay.
[7] Levi-Strauss (1969) suggests that this is the reason for the incest-taboo that pervades all patriarchal societies; incest renders a woman “worthless” in the economy of male exchange, as the system requires exogamy. Tony and Kim’s sexual relationship is a reminder of the fragility of the exogamous Law, which is therefore suggestive of the fragility of the Law of the Father as a whole.
[8] Another example of the fact that the sexuality of women becomes a discursive site around which men reassert their masculinity, is the scene in which the Casuals harass the group of “winos” in an interlude during Kirsty’s rape. Ozzy says to a woman, Yvonne, “- Bet you’re a good ride, eh”, and the response comes not from her, but from her male companion who “wrinkled his eyes and puckered his lips, sucking in air, and smiled … - Coorse, he grinned” (p. 187). This extract will be discussed in more depth below.
[9] A “wide-o” refers to a vagina, and the specific implications of the metaphor are interesting: the “o” is visually mimetic of a “hole” or a lack (as Irigiray, 1981, argues is the common representation of female genitalia in male discourse); the wide suggests a vagina that has been extensively used by men, or is particularly available for penetration.
[10] A “punter” is also an interesting word, as it suggests both economic and sexual inferiority. A “punter”, according to numerous online slang-dictionaries, refers to a “member of the paying public” and specifically “the customer of a prostitute”. The connotation of a football player, one who “punts” a ball, should not be overlooked within the context of football’s symbolic role of Marabou Stork Nightmares.
[11] Proof of this is the fact that a man who Roy understands as fulfilling all of the requirements for successful masculinity, Derek Holt who is an “ordinary guy; married with two kids, liked a pint at lunchtime, good at his job, … intae fitba …” (p. 114), is seen as a “caveman” (p. 115).
[12] Foucault’s “panopticon” – the prison in which the prisoner is constantly under surveillance, but whose captors are hidden from sight – is therefore the paragon of powerlessness (1977).
[13] Irigiray problematically assumes that “masculinity” is visual, while “femininity” is tactile. It is thorny, and archaic within Feminist discourse, to posit inherent qualities of the “masculine” or “feminine” in themselves; however, we can accept Irigiray’s proposition by allowing for a genealogy whereby the visual is signified as masculine within language. Indeed, prepositionally, sight is often given the semantic property of being penetrative, for instance, “I’ll look into it” or “Look into my eyes”.
[14] The terminology is, of course, negotiable. It could be argued that Roy rapes Caroline Carson.
[15] Of Caroline, he says “To think I’d wanked over that” (p. 107); and of Kirsty, “She looked repulsive already” (p. 183).
[16] This theme begins with Roy’s confessed desire to behead Winston II and use his head as a football (p. 116), is actualized first in his indirect mutilation of the dog’s face (p. 154), and culminates in the dog’s murder, after which “[i]t was like Winson Two had no head at all; just a large, black, charred cinder in a wrap-round piece of melting plastic” (p. 167).
[17] The concept of embodied vulnerability is discussed by Butler, 2004b.
[18] Butler (1990) discusses the fallacious nature of this belief, which she describes as the de Bouvoir-ian notion that the “association of the body with the female works along magical relations of reciprocity whereby the female sex becomes restricted to its body, and the male body, fully disavowed, becomes, paradoxically, the incorporeal instrument of an ostensibly radical freedom (1990: 16).
