The male gaze
UNIVERSITY of Nottingham Malaysia (UNM) professor emeritus Malachi Edwin Vethamani and I started the Men Matters Online Journal in the last quarter of 2020. The world was in the grip of the Covid-19 pandemic. Professor Vethamani had just retired from teaching, and I was returning to the Philippines after working at UNM for three years. I served as the head of School-English and full professor at the Malaysian satellite school of the world-class UNM.The MMOJ is a literary journal devoted to topics concerning men, masculinity, gender, culture, politics, sexuality and challenging men's roles in the traditional patriarchal society. It is interested in writings that examine what it means to be a man in contemporary society, as fathers, sons, brothers, husbands, partners and lovers in all their various forms and welcome. We publish works that focus on the social, emotional and psychological dimensions of the 21st-century man.Our latest issue of Men Matters Online Journal deals with the gaze.The gaze is usually associated with the male, whose patriarchal look turns women into objects and not subjects. But in this issue, the gaze goes beyond the male. It can also be done by females, or even directed at childhood memories, or even the vagaries of politics. Thus, the gaze begins to have a social and even a political dimension beyond the framework of gender relations.Manual E. Arguilla was the pre-World War II master of the Filipino short story and his iconic story, "How My Brother Leon Brought Home a Wife," deals with the male gaze. The newly married Maria goes to the Ilocos in northern Philippines with her young husband Leon. She is immediately subjected to the male gaze, first by Badong, Leon's brother, and by extension, the father of Leon, who is like a panopticon surveying Maria.Chua Guat Eng is one of Malaysia's finest fiction writers. Her story, "The Life Unlived," deals with a Malaysian writer who meets what seems like a doppelganger when she goes on a writing retreat overseas. Slowly, the narrator takes a painful gaze at her past composed of what Langston Hughes called "a dream deferred."The same inward gaze is shown in "The Weight" by Eviano George. It says: "The travails of the body were not and could never be a precise science." And then this philosophical story delves deeper, arriving at this insight: "But the mind is capable of prodigious feats ... as he dredged up from his psyche ... people striving against enormous weights..."The past is also another country visited in the story, "The Tremor in Canada," where the earthquake is not just physical but also psychical — the disruption caused by moving from one country to another and the trauma of a person losing his faculties. The gaze of memory is pitiless: "In his ancestral village in Purulia, the Mahua fruits exuded an inebriating scent. The intoxication of nostalgia filled his nostrils." The fever dreams of fantasy, schizophrenia and trauma burn in these pages.Jaziri Alkaf Abdillah Suffian has a story that deals with the male gaze called "The Devil and the Dam." This charming tale is written in the form of a folk story, where events happen in a cyclical fashion. One layer of the story builds upon the next in a seeming act of perpetual storytelling, culminating in a surprising ending.Al Simon's "Do You Want the Short Answer" also deals with time and gender relations. Melvin wants Felicia to be "number one in my life." But Felicia stoutly claims, "I am the table... I can take care of my daughter. I don't need a man to help me." Then swift an intake of breath, the story moves fast forward to a future that is not destined to be.Sexual politics and gender relations also lie at the heart of Geeta Dhirajal's story, "Sunday Morning." Lavish with details and sensuous descriptions of food and an abode filled with a large family, this is part of a work-in-progress. Slumber insulates the lazy husband, Balrajbhai, from the multitude of sensations and images in his life, which he runs with a tight fist.On the other hand, time seems frozen in the story "Job #14." The cold catalog that serves as the title captures the world of Matt. Originally from Paxton, Alabama, and not from sunny Florida, he works a dead-end job stacking stuff on the "brightly lit" supermarket shelves. He works with "strange and boastful workmates ... the only truth he knows is in the break rooms, the truth of time" away from shelves filled with goods grazed by the consumers' gaze.And time, in all its complex glory, sits front and center in Mark Barazaitis' story, "Back." It begins as a "cautionary tale" about a Time Travel Tonic, which the narrator imbibes so he can return to a time and place of youthful loss. But a woman whom he meets online unwittingly sums it up with this ironic one-liner: "It's the perfect revenge fable."Time — and history — form part of the concentric circles in "Rings," the story of John Jeffire set in an Italian American community before the Second World War. The ghosts of Mussolini, of racism, of conservative Catholicism fill the vivid pages of this story. And we will not tell you its surprising — and well-earned — ending centered on the good-looking and talented son, Christopher Frainteso.The editors also contributed stories to this volume. "The Girl Who Loved the Beatles" by Danton Remoto deals with a woman who, all her life, has been the subject of the male and societal gaze in a Catholic country. Finally, with her father (the patriarchy) gone and buried, she could "now hold her life in the palms of her hands."The hands of time seem to pull the strings in Malachi Edwin Vethamani's story, "Dastardly Twins." The narrator is haunted by "the sight of old people. God forbid that I grow old. The very word itself gave him a feeling of distaste." The story is an ironic send-up of Oscar Wilde's novel, "The Picture of Dorian Gray," where we meet Death and its twin — Decay — in this story of mirrors.Mirrors, then, whether framed by gender, society, politics, history or the great arbiter that is Time, fill the pages of the fiction offerings for this issue. May you enjoy the reflection — and the refractions — that bounce back from these wonderful stories.To read the journal, please go to https://menmattersonlinejournal.com.