Kierkegaard and the Construction of Masculinities

Feminist readers of Søren Kierkegaard’s corpus may be all too familiar with Judge William’s troublesome view of his wife in Either/Or Part II. As readers, we may be able to find refuge in the fact that Judge William is a pseudonym whose very worldview Kierkegaard seeks to undermine, but what are readers to do when they find similar words about marriage and domesticity under Kierkegaard’s own name in For Self-Examination? In this paper, I compare Kierkegaard and his pseudonym Judge William’s view on women, their relationship to men, and the implications this has on femininity and masculinity. It is not the goal of this paper to exonerate Kierkegaard’s view of women. Rather, it is the goal to discern the similarities and differences between the two views and ‘judge for ourselves’ what wisdom, if any, we may take from Kierkegaard’s words on women and their relationship to men and masculinity.

This paper will explore how disability, or more specifically depression, informs selfhood in dialogue with the individual’s relation to gender in “Guilty?/Not Guilty” from Stages on Life’s Way. This imaginary psychological construction offers a first-personal account of the narrator’s inability to fulfil his own, and society’s, expectations, describing the fact that his depressed nature prevents him from taking up the roles that befall a man—to become a husband—but also his complex relation to outward performance of gender norms through masking. Behind the stereotypical depictions of masculinity, however, lies a deeper concern: a concern with the possibility of being and making oneself understood, and of the possibilities for true connectedness and sympathy. Through a dialectics of negativity, the text offers an intricate understanding of the interplay between the inner and the outer, and the ways in which gender and selfhood are constructed through public presentation and social interaction.

This paper explores constructive possibilities in Kierkegaard for masculinity in theology. In *Sickness Unto Death,* masculine despair arises from self-assertion and remove from total devotion to a deserving object. Feminine despair comes from total devotion to the object, without genuine selfhood. Ironically, ‘feminine despair’ applies well to current conversations around toxic masculinity and how to solve it, since many are arguing for a reformed masculinity only so men will benefit others in society. Instead, the Socratic approach to masculinity would do better: asking, what masculinity is (rather than what masculinity is good for) accepts a risk that one is not manly and must find out what manliness is for oneself. This search parallels the development of selfhood into faithful reliance on God. As Kierkegaard contends, risk is the condition for faith, and faith is the condition for selfhood. I will conclude that the same applies for constructive accounts of masculinity.

How are we to use Kierkegaard’s 19th century views to inform a current discussion on the construction of masculinity and more specifically the normativity en-gendered therein? I will try to read the construction of masculinity as a specific form of despair. That is to say a form of willing to be oneself and of the willing to not be oneself Kierkegaard describes in the Sickness unto Death. This societal form of despair ascribes specific acts to “real” men and invalidates the existence of others. The “alpha” male seen as hyperbolic masculinity creates an exclusion of more feminine, exuberant masculinities such as the camp male (Sontag, 1963; Newton, 1979).

However, both of these masculinities reveal themselves, within a context of theatrical ontology of social life (Goffman, 1956), as performances given to convince others of one’s adequation to a given social norm. The difference resides within the consciousness of the performance. The camp individual as conscious of his performative nature is conscious of his despair and therefore on the road to overcoming it.