USA: "Male Studies" vorwiegend von Frauen belegt

In den letzten Tagen habe ich das Buch The Victim’s Revolution. The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind des schwulen amerikanischen Journalisten Bruce Bawer gelesen. Bawer setzt sich darin mit den immer neuen Studiengängen im Bereich der Geisteswissenschaften auseinander, die sich bestimmten Minderheiten widmen. Das wären neben den Women's Studies/Gender Studies, mit denen das Buch beginnt, unter anderem Black Studies, Queer Studies, Chicana/o Studies, Fat Studies (widmet sich der Diskriminierung von Übergewichtigen) und Disability Studies (mit Fragestellungen wie: "Sind Behinderungen nicht nur sozial konstruiert?" und "Wenn wir ein taubes Kind heilen, üben wir damit nicht einen Angriff auf die Kultur der Gehörlosen aus?")

Bawer sieht diese Studiengänge bzw. die Art und Weise, wie sie durchgeführt werden, kritisch, weil er darin zunehmend nicht das Betreiben einer echten Wissenschaft erkennt, sondern eine eigentümliche Mixtur aus der Verbreitung von Ideologie, einer Gruppentherapie und Performance ("Guckt mal, wie toll antidiskriminierend ich sein kann!"), die in der Regel aus dem Nachplappern eines bestimmten Jargons statt echter Forschung besteht. (Der Mangel solcher Fächer an Wissenschaftlichkeit wurde letztes Jahr ja auch an einem deutschen Beispiel diskutiert.) Vor allem hat Bawer den Eindruck, dass all diese Pseudostudiengänge nicht einmal den Gruppen wirklich helfen, denen sie zu helfen vorgeben. Dabei ist sein Buch weder eine Satire noch eine Polemik, sondern im wesentlichen eine Reportage: Bawer besucht Kurse der verschiedenen Studiengänge in den USA und Deutschland, berichtet darüber und flicht hin und wieder eine kritische Bemerkung ein.

Es gibt zwei bzw. drei der von Bawer vorgestellten Studiengänge, die gegenüber den anderen aus der Reihe tanzen. Der erste ist Whiteness Studies; hier verdeutlicht Bawer den Unterschied zu den anderen Fächern mit dem zugespitzten Statement "Black studies celebrates blackness, Chicano studies celebrates Chicanos, women's studies celebrates women and white studies attacks white people as evil." Die beiden anderen sind "Men's Studies" bzw. "Male Studies". Wer in dem Thema ein bisschen drin ist, kennt bereits den Unterschied: "Men's Studies", der deutlich ältere Fachbereich mit Vertretern wie Michael Kimmel, untersucht Männer auf der ideologischen Grundlage des radikalen Feminismus, widmet sich also vor allem der Frage, warum Männer so entsetzlich sind und durch welche Maßnahmen man das ändern könne. "Male Studies" möchte dem einen nicht-diskriminierenden Blick entgegensetzen. Dabei hat letzeres Fach deutlich schlechtere Chancen, Forschungsgelder zu erhalten; schließlich sind (weiße heterosexuelle) Männer im akademischen Bereich derzeit vor allem als Feindbild vorgesehen.

Der Einblick, den Bawer in den Betrieb der nicht-sexistischen "Male Studies" und den feministisch geprägten "Men's Studies" gibt, ist durchaus aufschlussreich. Zunächst zu einem Kurs, der den "Male Studies" nahekommt:

(David Clemens) put together the course because courses on literature by and about women abounded in American universities, but nobody, he says, was teaching about literature and men. (...) One issue that comes up in the classroom is misandry, or hostility towards men, which is, of course, alive and well in today's academy and which also shapes a good deal of contemporary film and literature (...). One interesting detail: several of the students in his men's lit course are females who signed up at least in part because they feel their fathers have been denigrated by society.

Im folgenden erklärt Bawer das Wesentliche zu den "Men's Studies":

There is, in fact, a whole discipline called Men's studies, which has taken root at about a hundred North American colleges and universities. (...) Robert Heasley, president of the American Men's Studies Association, states unapologetically that "Men's Studies came out of feminist analysis of gender." (Clemens puts it this way: "Men's studies is a "camouflage version of Women's Studies" in which the "operative question" is "Why are men so awful?") It's founding father and "presiding guru" – to borrow a term of Miles Groth, a sometime key player in the discipline – was Australian sociologist Robert W. Connell, whose 1995 book "Masculinities" is the main text in the field. Connell coined the term "hegemonic masculinity", which refers to the supposed fact that society teaches men to dominate women and one another; the concept – which, Connell has acknowledged, derives from "feminist theories of patriarchy" – is at the very heart of Men's Studies.

Give that Connell helped establish an academic discipline the entire point of which is that men are authoritarian bullies, it's not irrelevant that he is now a she: in 2008, it was revealed that Connell had undergone a sex-change operation and was now a woman named Raewyn Connell. Connell's colleagues accepted this change in politically correct fashion, but one must be permitted to ask: what does it mean that the male founder of a discipline called Men's Studies turns out to have been, all along, a transsexual – a person, whose self-image was that of a woman trapped in a man's body, and who viewed that body as alien and abhorrent? Groth, who is chair of the Psychology Department at Wagner College on Staten Island, points out that, astonishing though Connell's transformation is, it "has never been adressed by the Men's Studies group".

(Hierzulande versucht mancher, diesen Aspekt zu tabuisieren, indem er dessen Erwähnung als "transphob" brandmarkt; im deutschen Sprachraum tritt Connell gemeinsam mit Leuten wie Thomas Gesterkamp auf.)

Groth was active in the American Men's Studies Association for two years and edited two Men's Studies journals – one about men's health, the other about "boyhood studies". But he lost both editorships when he became involved in a new academic discipline that offers an alternative to Men's Studies. It is called Male Studies, and its leading figure is a psychiatrist, Edward M. Stephens, who established the Foundation for Male Studies in 2010 at a conference at Wagner hosted by Groth. (...) The (...) hostile comments about Male Studies by Women's Studies professors make it clear that, in their view, the idea of a nonfeminist approach to the study of maleness is sheer heresy.

(...) Groth characterizes the goal of Male Studies as follows: Having "recognized the spread of misandry in culture," he and his colleagues "are ardent about restoring balance in areas where men are now in a precarious situation" – everything from schooling and child custody to the criminal justice system and media images. (...) He rejects the whole concept of patriarchy, "a shibboleth for blaming all men for the behavior of a few, who have harmed women and most males." And he finds Women's Studies "fundamentally misandric. My course is among only a few in the country that have successfully run the gauntlet of academic affairs committees to find a place among courses offered for credit. Academe has systematically turned down proposals for such courses for more than thirty years, even while adding more courses in Women's Studies."

At this writing Groth is teaching a course on "The Psychology of Men" in which he and his students examine "theories of male psychological change, the myth of male aggressiveness, masculinities, male sexuality, homoeriticism and male homosexuality, males' relationships with parents, women and children, and male narcissism, spirituality and psychopathology," explore stereotypes about men's "alleged promiscuity and emotional superficiality" and "the illusion of male power in society," and study "manhood in a variety of cultures" and "the mythological elements of masculinity". (...) He started teaching the course in 2003, and every time he's taught it most of his students have been women. Why do they take it? "Because they want to understand men's experience, about which we know next to nothing. Men's behavior has been documented and has dominated the history books. But apart from a few standard explanations – testosterone, an irrational desire to dominate women sexually, hunger for power – the deeper story of what motivates men remains untold." As for "the few men who take the course," they tend to "sit quietly. They're glad to see that there's an interest in their lives." He describes them as "struggling to save their self-respect" in a society riddled with male-bashing – such as the every-man-a-potential-rapist-rhetoric to which almost all of them are subjected at "date rape seminars" during freshman orientation.

Bawers Darstellung nach kann man sich für die "Male Studies" im großen und ganzen drei verschiedene Zukunftsszenarien vorstellen: Das Fach könnte finanziell ausgehungert werden. Oder es könnte sich zu einem weiteren pseudowissenschaftlichen Fachbereich entwickeln, in dem es vor allem darum geht, sich mittels vorgestanzter Formulierungen selbst zu bemitleiden bzw. zu bestätigen, dass man okay ist, obwohl man ein Mann ist. Oder aber man gewinnt immer mehr Studenten und Unterstützer, indem man sich dadurch positiv abhebt, dass man echte Wissenschaft betreibt.