Conrad and Masculinity

Gender and the Disciplined Body 111
and discipline of the inegalitarian sort. The absence of formally
identifiable disciplinarians and of a public schedule of sanctions
only disguises the extent to which the imperative to be ‘feminine’
serves the interest of domination. 27
A seemingly paradoxical implication of this is, I would suggest, that
Foucault also neglects masculinity as a disciplinary practice, even
while he analyses some of the institutions that produce it. This is an
example of a general effect in which the sort of masculinist discourse
that simply takes as universal what is in fact specifically male is blind
to the specificity of masculinity as a social construction. Neglecting
the issue of gender, Foucault analyses (for example) the army or prison
as disciplines producing a certain form of docile body, but does not
look at the implications of these as institutions which have operated
through and upon males, so that he does not consider elements peculiar
to masculinity in the forms of embodiment which he describes.
This is not to claim that male forms of embodiment are equally
subjected, not a manoeuvre to undermine Bartky’s feminist point.
Indeed, an advantage of Foucault’s idea of a ‘microphysics of power’,
dispersed and acting through those subjected to it, is that it offers, as
I have suggested, a way out of the dilemma implicit in Klein’s reading
of Nostromo: how do we reconcile an awareness of the relative empowerment
of men with an awareness of the subjection of many men to
economic and political oppression? In arguing that power is not
possessed by groups, Foucault does not, I take it, mean to deny that
some groups have much greater power. The discipline that constructs
masculinity is still a form of subjection, though one which accords
relatively greater autonomy, while also promoting forms of aggressive
and violent behaviour. We thus arrive at a reading of the masculine
body in the novel: masculinity as a discipline or technology of
normalization. Stereotypes are in one sense only exaggerated versions
of such a technology: parodic accounts of how individual bodies in a
(proto-)modern state are self-disciplining. Here, as elsewhere,
Conrad’s work seems more radical in its view of masculinity than in
its view of femininity. I agree with Klein that Nostromo is patronizing
to women; yet the vision of normative masculinity in the novel
approaches that of masquerade or parody. If Gould and Nostromo at
times seem like stereotypes, this reveals the way in which masculinity
itself is a form of stereotype. Yet the narrative seems complicit with
the stereotyping of women, rather as Conrad is often conservative and
indeed reactionary in his view of radical politics, yet subversive in his