The Body in Tears: Seeing Through the Eye of Man.

This paper is concerned with the relationships that hold between male bodies, masculinities, and ways of knowing. I focus in particular upon the eye, perhaps the least sexually differentiated part of the body, and ask after its role in producing the male, or the properly masculine body. After discussing the place of the body within contemporary theorizing on masculinities, with particular reference to R.W. Connell's work, I draw upon Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri's notion of the Body without Organs and place it into a productive correspondence with Jacques Derrida's figure of the blind man. In this way, I aim to question the opposition between the biological and the social that tends to underpin gender theory, and to consider what possibilities this may open up for rethinking male bodies in relation to masculinities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]