Dissertation Information for Tim Hodgdon NAME: - Tim Hodgdon
DEGREE:
- Ph.D.
DISCIPLINE:
- History
SCHOOL:
- Arizona State University (USA) (2002)
ADVISORS: - Vicki L. Ruiz
COMMITTEE MEMBERS: - Edward J. Escobar - Susan E. Gray
MPACT Status: Fully Complete
Title: Manhood in the age of Aquarius: Masculinity in two countercultural communities, 1965--1983
Abstract: In the 1960s and 1970s, those hippies most committed to cultural radicalism believed that Western civilization had repressed the instinctive core of human nature in the service of "progress." They pursued a politics of liberation to restore human relations to their "natural" state. As part of this politics, and partly in response to the postwar cultural debate on the "crisis of masculinity," they invented new, unsanctioned forms of manly behavior and belief.
Hippies differed sharply among themselves regarding appropriate ends and means toward liberation, creating competing forms of countercultural masculinity. Two main schools of hip cultural politics emerged in the Haight-Ashbury in 1966, and with them, the two contrasting forms of hip masculinity studied here. The Diggers (later Free Families) advocated an utopian anarchism that stressed the absolute sovereignty of the individual, rejecting private property, the state, marital fidelity, monogamy, and sexual modesty as unwarranted restraints on human freedom. Identifying strongly with marginal men, they created an "outlaw" manhood grounded in a critique of the emasculation of bourgeois men. The members of the Free Families commune at Black Bear Ranch adapted this "outlaw" approach to life in wilderness circumstances, 1968-74.
Stephen Gaskin's followers, who left the Haight-Ashbury to found The Farm commune in 1971, exemplified the mystical school of hippie cultural politics. Gaskin preached a syncretic Buddhist-Christian faith in which husband and wife figured as the manifestations of yang and yin . Humankind's estrangement from nature had encouraged hypermasculinity in men and passivity in women. The "Farmies" sought to correct this imbalance by sacralizing women's fertility, embracing monogamy, and rejecting the "sexual revolution." In contrast to the Diggers, the Farmies created a chivalrous, "knightly" form of hip manhood.
These divergent forms of hip masculinity constituted an emphatic rejection of the mid-century consumerist masculinity that had developed in response to American modernity. Hip manhood, however, remained the cultural "property" of hippies for only a short time. The mass-culture apparatus diffused countercultural forms, while filtering out much of the radicalism that shaped their invention. Thus, hip manhood's legacy is today everywhere visible, yet its original meanings remain marginal to popular discourse.
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calculated 2008-04-06 20:16:54
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