Katherine Bode’s book represents an important departure for feminist criticism and especially for Australian literary criticism. While understanding how images of women work was a revelation for the women’s movement and formed the basis of many university ‘women in literature’ courses, Bode’s work addresses the representation of male bodies in literature, thus foregrounding the ways in which men are also embodied. This seems like a critical step in unpicking our epistemological inheritance of equating women with their bodies and men with their intellect. Coming after the establishment of masculinity studies, Damaged Men/Desiring Women is firmly interdisciplinary and yet remains uncompromisingly feminist. Masculinity studies have partially hinged on the identification of a cultural ‘crisis of masculinity’ in the West, which is often attributed to the feminist movement changing women’s expectations of men. Bode has chosen to engage with representations of men’s bodies as damaged or suffering, identifying some of the ideological supports that enable the victimisation of (usually) otherwise straight white men. In addition, the texts with which she has chosen to engage are all contemporary ones published in Australia between 1998 and 2002, and written by women. The other feature of this extraordinary collection of texts is that every one includes a woman character who is consumed with looking, vision, visibility or blindness; indeed, these texts indicate a collective fascination with the visual relations between women and men. The texts include The Blind Eye by Georgia Blain, Transplanted by Sarah Myles, Last of the Sane Days by Fiona Capp, The Architect by Jillian Watkinson, Machines for Feelings by Mireille Juchau, and Miranda by Wendy Scarfe. Other texts are evoked, but these six are given unstinting analysis. Bode suggests that they indicate ‘an increasing trend in Australian women’s fiction, while the lack of academic attention the male characters’ bodies in these works have received perhaps implies a critical difficulty with identifying and discussing women representing men’ (7). This may well be true.
The chapters are divided not by their primary texts but by thematic preoccupations. The first chapter traverses the last three decades of psychoanalytic visual theory with dexterity, suggesting that the novels take up these theories that are now in general circulation in various forms, and that they contribute to extending the limited but groundbreaking work of Laura Mulvey. The medical gaze, abjection and visualisation of male embodiment are discussed as fictional strategies that disrupt patriarchal viewing relations and which mark the so-called masculinity crisis. Consideration of race and class also imbues the discussion of embodiment and masculinity. The next chapter takes up the idea of the female gaze through a discussion of how women characters objectify and desire male bodies in the absence of any formal viewing relations in patriarchy. This is articulated through a model of gender reversal, but not in any simplistic fashion, and intersecting with medical, sculptural, aesthetic and aerial/military modes of looking that often reinstall traditional patriarchal relations. Despite their revision and criticism since original publication, Mulvey’s theories of the gaze are found to be still important in theorising the modes of looking that are available in these novels.
Chapter 3 marks the beginning of a different strategy by Bode to distinguish potential new models of gender relations that operate outside of (although cognisant with) the visual economy of the chosen texts. Homeopathy and psychic abilities in The Blind Eye and The Architect are discussed in this chapter as posing alternative modes of embodied, situated knowledge, and yet these are found to be utilised essentially conservatively, reproducing and reinforcing patriarchal relations. Chapter 4 examines the strategy of using idealised heterosexual love as potentially redemptive in Machines for Feeling, Transplanted, The Blind Eye, and The Last of the Sane Days. The positive force of this ideal for healing damaged men is written through tropes of reciprocal touch and visual exchange, but is only ever temporary in the novels examined, suggesting its limitation or, by extension, impossibility. Chapter 5 then does a quite extraordinary reading of the novel Miranda. Bode suggests that this novel deflects those conventions identified in previous chapters to posit a postmodern feminist construction of male bodies through multiple sensory and artistic modes of looking/textualising, without the complicating relations of heterosexual love. The positioning of Mulvey’s spectator theories as modernist proves helpful in this chapter, and brings an alternative perspective to theories of visuality that are prompted by this novel, and to which Bode’s argument has been building. The critical constraints of postmodern nihilism are carefully outlined, but the critique of patriarchy and the agency given to feminist subjectivity in the novel is shown to provide a way of countering such apolitical turns.
Bode’s analysis of the fiction and her theoretical literacy is superbly summarised in the conclusion which, like the entire work, is articulate and thoroughly interesting—and which directly confronts popular social attitudes to masculinity crises. Having just watched the maniac doctor in the television series House this work also resonates for me with popular representations of male genius in television and film, as well as the other literary areas mentioned for potential development in the conclusion. This book is beautifully written, theoretically complex and yet not overstated. It is both thoughtful and sophisticated in structure, refusing the simplified one-book = one-chapter format to bring the texts together in dialogic relation to advance and develop Bode’s argument around patriarchal viewing relations.
Alison Bartlett is Director of the Centre for Women’s Studies at the University of Western Australia. Her publications include Breastwork: Breastfeeding, Bodies in Postmodernity; Postgraduate Research Supervision: Transformative R/Elations (with Gina Mercer); Australian Literature and the Public Sphere, ed Robert Dixon and Christopher Lee, and Jamming the Machinery: Contemporary Australian Women’s Writing.