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Chapter 5
man”—providing a taxonomy will not be adequate and will not qualify as the introduction of masculinity studies to the postcommunist region. As I show in this chapter, Eastern and Southern European masculinities are elusive, almost fictional, because of their shared register of hyperperformativity. I argue in the previous chapter that local nationalisms have historically tried to compensate for their permanent cultural, political, and geographic instability by sustaining especially strict and conservative regimes of gender. Nationalism has not only rendered gendered and sexualized minorities virtually invisible but has also placed the entire burden of representing the nation on men, a burden men could only fail to carry. Sociological data show, again and again, the abhorrent health statistics, life expectancy, record-high suicide rate, and alcoholism of Eastern European men. These statistical data are rarely analyzed beyond excessive pork and alcohol consumption. The self-destructive consequences of the impossible national expectations of manly performance would be very hard to understand within the traditional boundaries of the social sciences alone. At the same time, the mission to provide the patriarchal backbone for the nation has also lent at least some men tremendous privilege—those who are chosen, or appoint themselves, to carry the traditional Romantic banner of national culture. Until recently, national artists and intellectuals have had an unparalleled representational playing field, in which they could perform a range of femininities and masculinities, as well as ethnic and racialized personas. Let me unfold this dense summary step by step. First, I trace the elusive, performative masculinity of the national artist to the Romantic origins of cultural nationalism in Eastern Europe. I pay particular attention to the way in which poetry has traditionally cleared and secured a space for the identity games of national intellectuals and artists. I explain how this space-clearing intensified in the communist period and has shifted into various mediated forms of crisis-management in the postcommunist era. The discussion lingers on these past two decades and on a set of representative films, which signal a crisis of masculinity and nationalism in locally specific ways: in the playful poetic sensibilities of Hungarian postmodern culture, in the ultraviolent performances of manhood in carnivalistic post-Yugoslav films and post-Soviet films from Russia, and in a set of aesthetically hybrid films from the Czech Republic, Romania and Hungary that focus on the conjunction between consumption and the gendered body in all its grotesque material functions.