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Handbook of Studies onMENMASCULINITIES

&

Michael S. Kimmel Jeff Hearn R. W. ConnellEditors

State University of New York at Stony Brook

Swedish School of Economics, Helsinki

University of Sydney

Copyright © 2005 by Sage Publications, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronicor mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, withoutpermission in writing from the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Handbook of studies on men and masculinities / edited by Michael S. Kimmel,Jeff Hearn, and R.W. Connell.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0-7619-2369-1 (cloth)

1. Men—Social conditions. 2. Masculinity. 3. Sex role. I. Kimmel, Michael S.II. Hearn, Jeff, 1947- III. Connell, R. W. HQ1090.H33 2004305.31—dc22 2004003826

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

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Acquisitions Editor: Jerry WestbyEditorial Assistant: Vonessa VonderaProduction Editor: Denise SantoyoCopy Editors: Katherine Chilton

A. J. SobczakTypesetter: C&M Digitals (P) Ltd.Indexer: Pamela Van HussCover Designer: Michelle Lee Kenny

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1. Introduction 1R. W. Connell, Jeff Hearn, and Michael S. Kimmel

PART I. THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES 13

2. Social Theories for Researching Men and Masculinities:Direct Gender Hierarchy and Structural Inequality 15

Øystein Gullvåg Holter

3. Men, Masculinities, and Feminist Theory 35Judith Kegan Gardiner

4. Queering the Pitch? Gay Masculinities 51Tim Edwards

PART II. GLOBAL AND REGIONAL PATTERNS 69

5. Globalization, Imperialism, and Masculinities 71R. W. Connell

6. Men in the Third World: Postcolonial Perspectives on Masculinity 90Robert Morrell and Sandra Swart

7. Masculinities in Latin America 114Matthew C. Gutmann and Mara Viveros Vigoya

8. East Asian Masculinities 129Futoshi Taga

9. Men, Masculinities, and “Europe” 141Critical Research on Men in Europe (CROME)

PART III. STRUCTURES, INSTITUTIONS, AND PROCESSES 163

10. Class and Masculinity 165David Morgan

11. Male Sexualities 178Ken Plummer

12. Men, Masculinities, and Crime 196James W. Messerschmidt

CONTENTS

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13. Masculinities in Education 213Jon Swain

14. Boys and Men in Families: The Domestic Productionof Gender, Power, and Privilege 230

Michele Adams and Scott Coltrane

15. Fatherhood and Masculinities 249William Marsiglio and Joseph H. Pleck

16. “Gentlemen, the Lunchbox Has Landed”: Representations ofMasculinities and Men’s Bodies in the Popular Media 270

Jim McKay, Janine Mikosza, and Brett Hutchins

17. Men and Masculinities in Work, Organizations, and Management 289David L. Collinson and Jeff Hearn

PART IV. BODIES, SELVES, DISCOURSES 311

18. Still a Man’s World? Studying Masculinities and Sport 313Michael A. Messner

19. The Study of Masculinities and Men’s Health: An Overview 326Don Sabo

20. Masculinities and Interpersonal Violence 353Walter S. DeKeseredy and Martin D. Schwartz

21. Masculinity and Degrees of Bodily Normativity in Western Culture 367Thomas J. Gerschick

22. Transgendering, Men, and Masculinities 379Richard Ekins and Dave King

PART V. POLITICS 395

23. Nation 397Joane Nagel

24. Globalization and Its Mal(e)contents: The Gendered Moral andPolitical Economy of Terrorism 414

Michael S. Kimmel

25. War, Militarism, and Masculinities 432Paul Higate and John Hopton

26. Islamist Masculinity and Muslim Masculinities 448Shahin Gerami

27. Men’s Collective Struggles for Gender Justice: The Case of Antiviolence Activism 458Michael Flood

Index 467

About the Editors 499

About the Contributors 501

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1INTRODUCTION

R. W. CONNELL

JEFF HEARN

MICHAEL S. KIMMEL

1

In recent decades, the study of gender hasexpanded rapidly and with it, studies ofgender issues about men and masculinities.

Interest in these questions has developed acrossthe social sciences, the humanities, the bio-logical sciences, and (to some extent) in otherfields. This research interest reflects a growingpublic interest in men’s and boys’ identities,conduct, and problems, ranging from men’sviolence to boys’ difficulties in school.

The field of gender research has mainlyaddressed questions about women and hasmainly been developed by women. The impulseto develop gender studies has come mainlyfrom contemporary feminism, and womenhave therefore mainly been the ones to makegender visible in contemporary scholarship andin public forums.

Revealing the dynamics of gender, however,also makes masculinity visible and prob-lematizes the position of men. Both womenand men have addressed this problem. Wheremen’s outlooks and culturally defined charac-teristics were formerly the unexamined norm forscience, citizenship, and religion, the specificity

of different masculinities is now recognized,and their origins, structures, and dynamics areinvestigated. This investigation has now beenactive for more than 20 years and has produceda large and interesting body of research.

Monographs on masculinities appear inevery social and behavioral science disciplineand in every field of the humanities. As indica-tors of the active growth of this field, there arenow several scholarly journals specificallydevoted to it. The scholarly journal Men andMasculinities, published by Sage, is now in itsseventh volume year. Other journals includeInternational Journal of Men’s Health, Journalof Men’s Studies, Psychology of Men andMasculinity, Working With Men, and the nowdefunct Masculinities and IASOM Bulletin.Several publishers have launched book seriesdevoted to studies of men and masculinities,including Beacon, Routledge, Unwin Hyman,and Zed. One of the first, and perhaps the mostsuccessful, series has been the Sage Series onMen and Masculinities, which included 15 inde-pendently edited thematic volumes publishedfrom 1992 to 2002. There are also a number of

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Web-based and other bibliographic resourcesavailable, including The Men’s Bibliography,constructed by Flood (2003), now in its 11thedition.

The global growth of research is shown bythe fact that in the last 7 years, not just individ-ual research reports but whole collections ofresearch have been published in Australia(Tomsen & Donaldson, 2003), Brazil (Arilha,Unbehaum Ridenti, & Medrado, 1998), France(Welzer-Lang, 2000), the former Soviet coun-tries (Novikova & Kambourov, 2003), Germany(Multioptionale Männlichkeiten?, 1998, Bosse& King, 2000), Japan (Louie & Low, 2003),Latin America as a whole (Olavarría & Moletto,2002), the Middle East (Ghoussoub & Sinclair-Webb, 2000), New Zealand (Law, Campbell, &Dolan, 1999), the Nordic regions (Ervø &Johansson, 2003a, 2003b), the postcolonialworld (Ouzgane & Coleman, 1998), andSouthern Africa (Morrell, 2001a), in addition tothe work published beginning in the late 1980sin the United Kingdom (Hearn & Morgan,1990), Canada (Haddad, 1993; Kaufman, 1987),and the United States (Brod, 1987; Kimmel,1987). In addition, several works have appearedon global perspectives more generally, in aseries called Global Masculinities (Cleaver,2002; Pease & Pringle, 2002). There are alsoa number of collective publications from the10-country European Union (EU)–fundedEuropean Research Network on Men in Europe(see Chapter 9). The global perspective onresearch on men and masculinities is discussedin more detail below.

The research debate is closely paralleledby the global policy debate. Following theworld conferences on women that began in1975, there has been an increasing global debateon the implications of gender issues for men.Paragraph 3 of the Platform for Action, adoptedat the 1995 Fourth World Conference onWomen, said, “The Platform for Action empha-sises that women share common concernsthat can be addressed only by working togetherand in partnership with men towards the com-mon goal of gender equality around the world”(United Nations, 2001, p. 17).

These issues are increasingly being takenup in the United Nations (UN), its various agen-cies, and other transgovernmental organizationsand policy discussions. For example, the UN’sDivision for the Advancement of Women (2003)

recently organized an online discussion forumand expert group meeting on “the role of menand boys in achieving gender equality” as partof its preparation for the 48th session of theCommission on the Status of Women, with thefollowing comments:

Over the last decade, there has been a growinginterest in the role of men in promoting genderequality, in particular as the achievement ofgender equality is now clearly seen as a societalresponsibility that concerns and should fullyengage men as well as women. The global com-mitment to gender equality in the Beijing Platformfor Action and other major international confer-ences and summits, and in the existing interna-tional legal framework, including the Conventionon the Elimination of All Forms of Discriminationagainst Women and ILO Conventions, haveencouraged and accelerated efforts in this regard.To further develop efforts in this area, the UnitedNations Commission on the Status of Women(CSW) will consider the role of men and boysin achieving gender equality at its forty-eighthsession in March 2004.

We believe this is a propitious moment tostand back from this developing field, summa-rize where we have got to, and think about futuredirections for the field. These are the tasks of thishandbook. We hope to make current scholarshipavailable to a new generation of researchers andstudents and to a wider audience concerned withpolicy and with practical or cultural issues aboutmen, boys, and gender.

The authors of these chapters are amongthe best-known experts in their particular fieldstoday. Many have themselves undertaken thepath-breaking research that defined and ener-gized a particular line of enquiry. Their com-mand of the field and their ability to convey itin an accessible manner make each chapter bothan authoritative review of current knowledgeand a stimulus to further enquiry.

We have named the subject matter of thebook “studies of men and masculinities.” Thereis some debate about what to call this fieldof knowledge. Some scholars have called thefield “men’s studies” by analogy with (orreaction against) “women’s studies,” and thiscertainly reflects the origins of the field. Otherscholars consider the symmetrical nomen-clature misleading because of the asymmetry ofgender relations that made the creation of“women’s studies” a project of self-knowledge

2 • HANDBOOK OF STUDIES ON MEN AND MASCULINITIES


by a subordinated group. The editors of thisvolume fall into this latter camp and considerterms such as “studies of men and masculinities”and “critical studies on men” to more accuratelyreflect the nature of contemporary work, whichis inspired by, but not simply parallel to, feministresearch on women.

SOCIAL SCIENCE APPROACHES TO

MEN AND MASCULINITIES

Although focused scholarship on men andmasculinities has expanded in the humanitiesand to some extent in some of the natural andtechnological sciences, it is the social sciencesthat have produced the greatest amount ofresearch on men and masculinities. Similarly,in this handbook, the contributions and almostall of the contributors can be located primarilywithin the social sciences, even though thereare important debates from the humanities and,to a lesser extent, from the natural sciences thatare taken up in some of the chapters. In partic-ular, there is now a substantial development ofstudies on men and masculinities in literature,visual art, dance, music, and other cultural andaesthetic fields.

The view of social science here in the hand-book is a broad one. It necessarily draws on anumber of traditions. Although not wishing toplay down debates and differences betweentraditions, this broad approach to men andmasculinities in the handbook can be character-ized in a number of ways:

• By a specific, rather than an implicit orincidental, focus on the topic of men andmasculinities

• By taking account of feminist, gay, and othercritical gender scholarship

• By recognizing men and masculinities asexplicitly gendered rather than nongendered

• By understanding men and masculinities associally constructed, produced, and reproducedrather than as somehow just “naturally” oneway or another

• By seeing men and masculinities as variableand changing across time (history) and space(culture), within societies, and through lifecourses and biographies

• By emphasizing men’s relations, albeit differ-entially, to gendered power

• By spanning both the material and the discursivein analysis

• By interrogating the intersecting of the genderwith other social divisions in the constructionof men and masculinities.

This last point may need a little moreexplanation. Although men and masculinitiesare the explicit focus and are understood asexplicitly gendered, men and masculinitiesare not formed by gender alone. Men are notsimply men or simply about gender, and thesame applies to masculinities. Men and mas-culinities are shaped by differences of age, byclass situation, by ethnicity and racialization,and so on. The gendering of men only existsin the intersections with other social divisionsand social differences. Indeed, paradoxically, itmight be argued that as studies of men and mas-culinities continue to deconstruct the genderingof men and masculinities and assumptions aboutthem, other social divisions, such as age, class,and disability, come more to the fore and areseen as more important. In this sense, part ofthe long-term trajectory of gendered studies ofmen could, paradoxically, be the deconstructionof gender (Lorber, 1994, 2000).

The social science approaches to menand masculinities, both in this handbook and inthe field more generally, are certainly diverse.They vary and range across different disciplines,theoretical perspectives, methodologies, con-ceptualizations, and positionings. These varia-tions are thus relevant here in at least threeways: in terms of the varied and uneven devel-opment of the field of studies on men andmasculinities, the range of material reviewedin the individual chapters of the handbook, andthe range of authors and authorships of thechapters. We will now discuss these variationsin a little more detail.

In the recent development of studies on menand masculinities, there have been significantdevelopments in almost all the principal socialscience disciplines. Accordingly, the disciplinesrepresented in this handbook include most ofthe social sciences: sociology, social psychology,political science, cultural studies, education, andsocial policy, as well as women’s studies, genderstudies, gay studies, and postcolonial studies.There are also major debates from psychologyand history that are important influences in somechapters. In addition, significant subdisciplines

Introduction • 3


include criminology; family studies; violencestudies; studies of ethnicity, race, and (anti-)racism; and military studies. Many—perhapsmost—of the contributions are multidisciplinaryor interdisciplinary, but the most fully repre-sented disciplinary approach in this handbookis sociological. Two major disciplines that aresomewhat underrepresented here are economicsand law, although economic and legal issues arediscussed in some chapters. Of the largest andinstitutionally most developed social sciencedisciplines, economics has probably been themost reluctant to contribute to studies on menand masculinities, even though economy andeconomic considerations are absolutely fun-damental aspects of gender relations and thegendering of men and masculinities.

There are as many theoretical social scienceperspectives on men and masculinities as thereare theoretical perspectives in the social sciencesmore generally. These include positivism, cul-tural relativism, psychoanalysis, interpretivism,critical theory, neomarxism, feminism (of vari-ous forms and kinds), poststructuralism, post-modernism, and postcolonialism. All of theseand other theoretical perspectives have beeninfluential in the development of studies on menand masculinities and are represented to varyingdegrees in the contributions here. Indeed, itcould be argued that social theory questionshave been rather prominent throughout thedevelopments of the last 20 years or so (Brod &Kaufman, 1994; Hearn & Morgan, 1990). Addi-tionally, nongendered traditions that are com-mon within mainstream social theory need to beboth drawn on and critiqued in terms of theirimplicit and explicit conceptualizations ofgender, women, and men.

Similarly, we recognize the variety ofmethods and methodologies in studying menand masculinities. These include social surveys;statistical analyses; ethnographies; interviews;and qualitative, discursive, and deconstructiveapproaches. Furthermore, an explicitly genderedfocus on men and masculinities can lead to therethinking of how particular research methodsare to be done. For example, Schwalbe andWolkomir (2002) have recently set out someof the key issues to be borne in mind whenconducting research interviews with men.

Another key issue has been the state ofconceptualization. The concept of masculinitieshas been extremely important over the last

20 years in widening the analysis of men andmasculinities within the gender order (Brod,1987; Carrigan, Connell, & Lee, 1985; Connell,1995). It has succeeded the concept of the “malesex role” and is generally preferred to, for exam-ple, manhood or manliness (we will return tothis development in a little more detail in thenext section). There is also a growing debateand critique around the concepts of masculinitiesand hegemonic masculinity from a variety ofmethodological positions, including the histori-cal (MacInnes, 1998), materialist (Donaldson,1993; Hearn, 1996, 2004; McMahon, 1993), andpoststructuralist (Whitehead, 2002) perspectives.

Another very important source of variationis the positioning of the author in relation tothe topic of men. This can be understood as apersonal, epistemological, and geopoliticalrelation. Researchers and analysts, men andwomen, may position themselves discursively inrelation to the object of research, the topic ofmen and masculinities, in a variety of ways—forexample, in treating the topic nonproblemati-cally (through taking for granted its absenceor presence), through sympathetic alliance withthose men studied or the contrary subversionof men, or with ambivalence, in terms of alterity(the recognition of various forms of othernessbetween and among men) or through a criticalrelation to men (Hearn, 1998). This is partly amatter of individual political choices anddecisions in positioning, but increasingly theimportance of the more structural, geopoliticalpositioning of commentators is being recog-nized. Postcolonial theory has shown that itmatters whether the analysis of men is beingconducted from within the West, the globalSouth, the former Soviet territories, the MiddleEast, or elsewhere. In that way, history, geogra-phy, and global politics matter in epistemologiesand ontologies in studying men.

Accordingly, it is to this increasingly globalnature of the field of study of men and mas-culinities that we now turn in more substantivedetail.

THE GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT OF MEN

AND MASCULINITIES AS A RESEARCH FIELD

All human cultures have ways of accountingfor the positions of women and men in societyand have different ways of picturing the nature



of men and the patterns of practice we callmasculinities. Central Australian Aboriginalcommunities, for instance, have Dreamingstories of legendary heroes crossing, and creat-ing, the land. Through these narratives, therights and obligations of groups of men (andthe different rights and obligations of groupsof women) are taught and located in a specificlandscape that is part of the web of obligations(Sutton, 1988). Neo-Confucian clan rules in lateQing-dynasty China also defined the obligationsof men, but not in relation to landscapes. Rather,they offered abstract moral exhortation, adviceabout occupations (devaluing the military), amodel of social hierarchy and personal char-acter for men (emphasising restraint), and anidealized description of family life (Liu, 1975).

The distinctive combination of empiricaldescription and secular explanation that we callsocial science took shape during the later 19thcentury, at the high tide of European impe-rialism. Gender issues were among its mainconcerns, and it is not surprising that its ideasof gender were influenced by imperialism.Stories from the colonial frontier were a majorsource of data for European and North Americansocial scientists writing about sexuality, thefamily, and the social position of women andmen. The very idea of “race,” which becamea key concept in Western culture at this time,embedded sexuality and gender relations. Theemancipation of women was seen by manysocial scientists as a measure of social progress,and the supposed “backwardness” of the colo-nized became a public justification of colonialrule. There was, then, a global dimension inthe Western social science of gender from itsearliest stage (Connell, 2002).

However, the evolutionary framework wasdiscarded in the early 20th century. The firststeps toward the modern analysis of masculinityare found in the depth psychology pioneeredin Austria by Freud and Adler. Psychoanalysisdemonstrated that adult character was not pre-determined by the body but was constructed,through emotional attachments to others, in aturbulent process of growth (see Connell, 1994).In the next generation, anthropologists such asMalinowski and Mead emphasised cultural dif-ferences in these processes and the importanceof social structures and norms. By the mid-20thcentury, these ideas had crystallized into theconcept of “sex roles.”

Masculinity was then understood in psychology,sociology, and anthropology as an internalizedrole or identity, reflecting a particular (in prac-tice often meaning United States or Western)culture’s norms or values, acquired by sociallearning from agents of socialization such asfamily, school, and mass media.

Under the influence of women’s liberationand gay liberation, the “male role” was subjectto sharp criticism as oppressive and limiting(Pleck & Sawyer, 1974). The “question of men”was a significant item on feminist agendas(e.g., Friedman & Sarah, 1982). Hanmer (1990)lists 53 feminist publications “providing theideas, the changed consciousness of women’slives and their relationship to men—all availableby 1975” (pp. 39-41). Recent feminist initiativeshave suggested various analyses of men andways forward for men (see, e.g., Gardiner,2001). In the United States, the idea of “men’sstudies” as an academic field emerged out ofdebates sparked by this critique (MassachussetsInstitute of Technology, 1979).

In the social sciences, the concept of a “malesex role” has become obsolete, rejected for itsethnocentrism, lack of power perspective, andincipient positivism (Brittan, 1989; Eichler,1980; Kimmel, 1987). In its place, a broadersocial constructionist perspective that highlightsissues of social power has emerged (Carriganet al., 1985; Kaufman, 1987). In Anglophonesocial science, life history and ethnographicresearch provided close descriptions of multipleand internally complex masculinities (Mac anGhaill, 1994; Messner, 1992; Segal, 1997). InEuropean social science, pioneering surveyresearch (Holter, 1989; Metz-Göckel & Müller,1985) showed the diversity of men’s life patternswithin a persisting gender system. Conceptualwork emphasised social structure as the con-text for the formation of particular masculini-ties (Connell, 1987; Hearn, 1987; Holter, 1997),with some recent authors emphasizing thatmasculinities are constructed within specificdiscourses (Petersen, 1998).

Historical research has traced the emergenceof new masculinities and the institutions inwhich they arise. These have included bothdominant (e.g., Davidoff & Hall, 1990; Hall,1992; Hearn, 1992; Kimmel, 1997; Tosh, 1999;Tosh & Roper, 1991) and resistant (e.g.,Kimmel & Mosmiller, 1992; Strauss, 1982)forms of masculinity at home, in work, and in

Introduction • 5


political and cultural activities. Particularlyimportant and interesting historical work hasbeen done from gay history (Mort, 2000; Weeks,1990) and from colonies of settlement such asNew Zealand and Natal on schools and militaryforces (Morrell, 2001b; Phillips, 1987).

Research, however, is only one dimension ofthe new discussions of men and masculinities.In the rich countries, including Japan, Germany,and the United States, and in some less wealthycountries, including Mexico and Brazil, thelate 1980s and 1990s saw rising media interestand public debate about boys and men. Mainlyfocused on social problems such as unemploy-ment, educational failure, domestic violence,and family breakdown, but also discussingmen’s changing identities, these debates havedifferent local emphases. In Australia, thestrongest focus has been on problems of boys’education (Lingard & Douglas, 1999). In theUnited States, more attention has been givento interpersonal relationships and to ethnicdifferences (Kimmel & Messner, 2001). InJapan, there has been a specific challenge to the“salaryman” model of middle-class masculinity(see Chapter 8). In Scandinavia, there has beenmore focus on gender equity policies and men’sresponses to the changing position of women(Lundberg, 2001). In Latin America, especiallyin Mexico, public debate has addressed thebroad cultural definition of masculinity in a long-standing discussion of “machismo,” its roots incolonialism, and its effects on development(Adolph, 1971; see also Chapter 7).

In most of the developing world, thesedebates have not emerged, or have emergedonly intermittently. In the context of masspoverty, the problems of economic and socialdevelopment have had priority. However, ques-tions about men and masculinities emergedin development studies in the 1990s, as feministconcerns about women in development ledto discussion of “gender and development” andthe specific economic and political interests ofmen (White, 2000). These debates also havedifferent emphases in different regions. In LatinAmerica, particular concerns arose about theeffects of economic restructuring and withmen’s sexual behavior and role in reproduction,in the context of population control policiesand sexual health issues, including HIV/AIDSprevention (Valdés & Olavarría, 1998; ViverosVigoya, 1997). In Southern Africa, regional

history has led debates on men and masculinitiesto have a distinctive focus on race relationsand on violence, both domestic and communal(Morrell, 2001a). In the Eastern Mediterraneanand Southwest Asia, the cultural analysis ofmasculinity has particularly concerned modern-ization and Islam, the legacy of colonialism, andthe region’s relationship with contemporaryWestern power (Ghoussoub & Sinclair-Webb,2000).

By the late 1990s, the question of men andmasculinity was also emerging in internationalforums, such as diplomacy and internationalrelations (Zalewski & Parpart, 1998), the peace-keeping operations of the United Nations(Breines, Connell, & Eide, 2000), and inter-national business (Hooper, 2000). Equallyimportant, there is research and debate about theimpact of globalization on local gender patterns:men’s employment, definitions of masculinity,and men’s sexuality (Altman, 2001).

The analysis of masculinities, men, andmen’s place in the gender order has thus becomea worldwide undertaking, with many localdifferences of emphasis. Although most of theempirical research is still produced within thedeveloped countries and is especially rich inthe United States, global perspectives arenow possible. New conceptual approaches areaffecting the field, including poststructur-alism from Europe (Wetherell & Edley, 1999)and postcolonial perspectives from the globalSouth (Ouzgane & Coleman, 1998). It thereforeseemed timely, two decades after the first state-ments of social constructionist perspectiveson masculinity, to undertake an internationalsurvey of the field. Hence this handbook: anattempt to order the knowledge that has beenproduced, compare different regions of theworld, and address emerging themes and arenas.

OVERVIEW OF THE BOOK

This book is divided into five sections. Thesesections help organize both the global and thelocal studies of men and masculinities. Theycenter on several different themes that togethercompose the current understandings of men andmasculinities and place the critical inquiriesoffered here in a more unified and coherentcontext.



We explore the construction of masculinitiesin four different frames: (a) the social organi-zation of masculinities in their global andregional iterations; (b) the institutional repro-duction and articulation of masculinities; (c) theways in which masculinities are organized andpracticed within a context of gender relations—that is, the ways in which interactions with othermen and with women express, challenge, andreproduce gender inequalities; and (d) the waysin which individual men express and understandtheir gendered identities.

In organizing this book, we move from thelarger global and institutional articulations ofmasculinities to the more intimate and personalexpressions. We do this because, as sociologists,we believe that these institutional arenas andprocesses form the framework in which masculin-ities are experienced and expressed. Gender iden-tity is more than a simple psychological propertybelonging to a person, something one “has” as aresult of socialization and that one consequentlyinserts into all interactions. Gender identity isa constant process, always being reinvented andrearticulated in every setting, micro or macro.Gender identity is the codified aggregation ofgendered interactions; its coherence depends onour understanding of those interactions.

Locating gender identity does not, however,make it a simple derivative of gendered insti-tutions and gendered processes. Gender rela-tions are constantly shifting; gender identitiesare always in motion, always dynamic. Suchmovement creates the seams by which politicaltransformations may take place.

In the first part, “Theoretical Perspectives,”the authors ground contemporary inquiries inthe study of men and masculinities in thethree theoretical traditions that seem to informmost social scientific thinking on the subject.Øystein Gullvåg Holter locates the socialscientific inquiry at the intersection of severalproblematic concepts raised in the studies ofsocial stratification and inequality: domination,patriarchy, and sexism. He focuses on the rela-tionship between male dominance and patriar-chal structures in society. Judith Kegan Gardinerand Tim Edwards anchor these inquiries tothe theoretical perspectives most cognizant ofgender, gender relations, the gender order, andthe social construction of gender identity:feminist theory and queer theory. The formerproblematizes the dynamics of gender, as well

as the relationships between women and men,institutionally; the latter approaches the genderorder through the problematization of sexualityand specifically, in this context, relationshipsamong men.

Gardiner shows that feminist theories overthe last 40 years have taken varied approaches togender equality that are intertwined with theirvaried perspectives on men and masculinity:They endorse some aspects of traditional mas-culinity, critique some, and ignore others.Edwards explores and critiques the relationshipbetween masculinity and homosexuality boththeoretically, in the light of sexual politicsand the rise of postructural theory, and morepolitically.

The next part explores the shiftingdynamic of global and local as the nationalsettings in which masculinities are constructed.R. W. Connell explores the ways in whichcertain dominant versions of masculinities arerearticulated in the global arena as part of thelarger project of globalization. The next fourchapters detail the ways in which regional artic-ulations in the constructions of masculinitiesrely on local cultural formations as well as onthe collision of those local cultures with othernational cultures or with larger transnationalinstitutions, such as the global market. RobertMorrell and Sandra Swart examine how menin postcolonial contexts construct their mas-culinities. They note the salience of povertyand underscore, more broadly, the signifi-cance of context, as well as identifying somenew approaches to understanding postcolonialmasculinity. The chapter by Matthew Gutmannand Mara Viveros Vigoya and that by FutoshiTaga survey the variety of studies of men andmasculinities in Latin America and East Asia,respectively, tracing the origins of the field,analyzing its accomplishments, and indicatingareas for future research.

Finally, the chapter by the collaborators inthe European Union’s Social Problem of Menresearch project (Critical Research on Men inEurope [CROME]) indicates an effort to gener-ate a comparative framework for understand-ing masculinities in the new Europe, one thatremains sensitive to cultural differences amongthe many countries of that continent and tothe ways in which all nations of the EuropeanCommunity are, to some extent, developingconvergent definitions of gender.

Introduction • 7


The chapters in Part III explore inter-sectionality—the intersection of gender with thestructural and institutional. David Morganexplains how different classes exhibit differentforms of masculinities and the ways in whichthese both challenge and reproduce gender rela-tions among men and between women and men.Ken Plummer poses similar questions aroundsexuality, and James Messerschmidt examineshow the gendered practices of men and boysmay result in crime. He outlines initial approa-ches to masculinities and crime in the early 1990sand critically scrutinizes several new directionsin the criminological literature.

Masculinities do not exist in social andcultural vacuums but rather are constructedwithin specific institutional settings. Gender,in this sense, is as much a structure of relation-ships within institutions as it is a property ofindividual identity. Several other chapters inthis section examine how masculinities shape,and are shaped by, the major institutionsof modern society: the workplace (DavidCollinson and Jeff Hearn), the media (JimMcKay, Janine Mikosza, and Brett Hutchins),and education (Jon Swain).

Two additional chapters explore the con-struction of masculinities in families. WilliamMarsiglio and Joseph Pleck explore a wide rangeof fatherhood scholarship from a gendered andcritical perspective. They consider both how thestyle of men’s fathering contributes to genderedsocial inequalities within and outside familiesand how men’s participation in systems ofgendered social relations—both between andwithin genders—shapes their fathering opportu-nities, attitudes, and behavior. Michele Adamsand Scott Coltrane examine the intersection offamily dynamics, paid work and housework,and child care.

The chapters in Part IV explore the ways inwhich men’s practices shape masculinities, aswell as assessing the impact of that constructionon ourselves and others. Michael Messner tracesthe development of scholarship on men, mas-culinities, and sport. His chapter describes thecontributions that this scholarship has made tothe more general scholarly work on masculini-ties and bodies, health, and violence and closesby outlining new directions in work on men andsport—particularly studies that examine sport asan institutional and cultural context for relationsbetween women and men and between various

groups of boys and men. Don Sabo outlines allthe different epidemiological issues that certainconstructions of masculinities provoke. He dis-cusses the history and development of men’shealth studies, key theoretical models, and someof men’s gender-specific health issues. Severalmale groups with unique health needs are iden-tified and, finally, some global frameworks forunderstanding men’s health are presented.Walter DeKeseredy and Martin Schwartz reviewand critique the sociological literature on therelationship between masculinities and varia-tions in interpersonal violence across differentsocial classes and racial or ethnic backgrounds.They pay special attention to violence againstwomen in heterosexual relationships, homicide,and youth gang violence.

Among the most exciting developing areas ingender studies is the exploration of the makingof the gendered body as a material object andthe making of its cultural representations. In hischapter, Tom Gerschick examines the ways inwhich men with disabilities repair and restorepotentially “damaged” masculinities and inthe process create new sources of resistance toembodied notions of masculinity. He offers acritical review of the extant biographical, empir-ical, and theoretical literature on masculinitiesand the body, with particular attention to dis-ability. The chapter summarizes and analyzeskey questions, themes, and debates in this liter-ature and concludes with suggestions for futureresearch. Richard Ekins and Dave King take thisone step further, examining the ways in whichtransgendered people throw open the questionof how and whether gender identity inheres ina corporeal body, and, if it does, what happensto that identity when that body is transformed.They consider the interrelations between trans-genderedness, masculinity, and femininity interms of transgendering as a social processwithin which males “renounce” or “suspend”the masculinity that is expected of them andfemales (unexpectedly) embrace it. The chaptertakes a historical and chronological approach,focuses on four very influential perspectiveson the topic, and discusses their conceptions ofand implications for masculinity (and usually ofand for femininity, as well).

Finally, the chapters in Part V address thepoliticization of masculinity and the masculinityof politics. Joane Nagel examines the social,historical, and cultural spaces coinhabited by



men and nations, by manhoods and nationhoods,and by masculinities and nationalisms. MichaelKimmel uses this gendered framework to explorethe reactions and resistance among the groupsof men who are the “losers” in the globalizationproject, specifically among the downwardlymobile lower middle classes of small farmers,artisans, and small shopkeepers. Paul Higateand John Hopton explore the intersectionsof war and the military with constructionsof masculinity and the “gendered” nature ofpolitical and military institutions.

Shahin Gerami argues that a core componentof the Islamic Revolution’s ideology was refor-mulation of gender discourse around an Islamichypermasculinity. This hypermasculinity pro-moted three ideals of manhood: mullahs, whoare the interpreters of the Qur’an and Shari’at;martyrs, the young men who bide the dictatesof the mullahs and sacrifice themselves for therepublic; and ordinary men, who are perceivedto have benefited from this hypermasculinity.Economic hardship and sociopolitical pressureassail all men. Additionally, they all pay forgender discrimination against women in generaland women of their social group in particular.

Finally, Michael Flood provides a usefulbrief reminder that scholarly inquiries intogender are always in dialogue with politicalmovements for gender equality.

THE FUTURE OF THE FIELD

It is impossible to predict the future of a researchfield accurately—if we could do that, theresearch would not need to be done. It may, how-ever, be possible to identify emerging problemsand approaches that are likely to be fruitful.

There is, first, the task of filling in the pictureon a world scale. The social scientific record, asrevealed even in the consciously internationalperspective of this handbook, is very uneven;research on men and masculinities is stillmainly a First World enterprise. There is farmore research in the United States than in anyother country. There are major regions of theworld where research even partly relevant tothese questions is scarce—among them China,the Indian subcontinent, and Central and WestAfrica. To respond to this scarcity is not a matterof sending First World researchers out withexisting paradigms. That has happened all too

often in the past, and it reproduces, in the realmof knowledge, the very relations of dominanceand subordination that are part of the problem.It is a question of finding forms of coopera-tive research that use international resources(including existing knowledge) to generate newknowledge of local relevance.

Next, there are issues that seem to be grow-ing in significance. The most obviously impor-tant is the relation of masculinities to thoseemerging dominant powers in the global capi-talist economy, the transnational corporations.Organization research has already developedmethods for studying men and masculinitiesin corporations (Collinson & Hearn, 1996;Ogasawara, 1998). It is not difficult to see howthis approach could be applied to transnationaloperations, although again, it will call for somecreative international cooperation.

There are other problems of which the signif-icance has been known for some time but thathave remained undeveloped. A notable exampleis the development of masculinities in the courseof growing up. How children were “socialized”into gender was a major theme of “sex role” dis-cussions, and when the male role literature wentinto a decline, this problem seems to have stag-nated with it. All the sound and fury about boys’education has produced very little originalresearch and no new developmental theorizing.However, a variety of approaches to developmentand social learning exist (ethnographic, psycho-analytic, cognitive) along with excellent modelsof fieldwork (e.g., Thorne, 1993).

Finally, there are new or underdevelopedperspectives that may give new insight eveninto well-researched issues. The possibilitiesof poststructuralist theory are now well dis-cussed, although there are doubtless new appli-cations to be found. However, the possibilitiesin postcolonial theory are still little explored(see Chapter 6), and they seem very relevantto the transformation of a research field his-torically centred in the First World. Economicanalysis is also seriously underdeveloped. Mostdiscussions of men and gender acknowledge theimportance of power and also the importanceof the world of work but do not carry them for-ward into analysis of a gendered economy. AsGodenzi (2000) points out, economic inequalityis crucial to understanding the link betweenmasculinity and violence, and the same may beargued for other issues about masculinity.

Introduction • 9


A research agenda on these issues wouldcertainly move our understanding of men andmasculinities a long way forward. Nevertheless,understanding is mainly worth having if wecan do something with it. Therefore the usesof knowledge, and the relationship betweenresearch and practice, must be key issues for thedevelopment of this field.

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PART I

THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES



2SOCIAL THEORIES

FOR RESEARCHING


Direct Gender Hierarchyand Structural Inequality

ØYSTEIN GULLVÅG HOLTER

While men are frequently the agents of the oppression of women, and in many sensesbenefit from it, their interests in the gender order are not pregiven but constructed byand within it. Since in many ways men’s human needs and capacities are not met withinthe gender orders of modern societies, they also have a latent “emancipatory interest”in their transformation.

—Caroline New (2001)

Men are encountering the shamefulness of being a man as such and at all. . . . I suggestthat, where shame tends nowadays to be seen as a moral emotion, and to be discussedas an ethical problem, its reach is larger than this. I argue that shame is not only to bethought of as a moral prop or provocation, but as a condition of being, a life-form, even.

—S. Connor (2001)

15

This chapter addresses the implicationsof social theories used in researchingmen and masculinities. In particular, I

focus on two types of social theories: what I willcall direct gender hierarchy theories thatemphasize the social primacy of male domi-nance, and structural inequality theories thatare more concerned with the social structural

relations of gender inequality. In the viewsand traditions described here, many of today’sresearchers would probably describe themselvesas “social constructivists,” or at least give a nodin this direction. Current direct gender hierarchytheories emphasizing the social primacy of maledominance differ from the sociobiologicalassumptions 20 years ago, and the same is the


case with structural inequality theories. Therehas been a similar type of movement in bothtraditions, away from sex-gender toward gen-der as a more purely social creation, includingeconomic patterns, social sanctions, culture,psychology, and so on. However, structural gen-der equality theories have usually been furtherdeveloped, and are more socially and sociologi-cally insistent, with a wider and more historicalview of social constructions.

Societal theories of gender and inequalitycan often be seen as “poststructuralist,”although such a term is of questionable utilitytoday. Good gender research and theory creationgo beyond a static structure-actor division.Connecting society and the individual has beena major point for feminist research developmentas a whole. This has been especially evidentin developments of relational feminism (inthe Nordic region, see, e.g., Haavind, 1984,1994)—an attempt to move from “statisticalsex-related difference” to “everyday relation-ships.” However, the common trend towardrelational emphasis in the 1980s was inter-preted in quite different ways, as can be seenin debates concerning the meaning of “sister-hood” (e.g., in France and the United States)or the “women-friendly welfare state” (Nordicregion). Interpreted as women’s micropolitics,relational emphasis had different and ofteninconsistent meanings in macro terms. Thesedebates showed the dilemmas between a “mar-ket class” definition of women and the needto improve all women’s rights.

Current gender equality theories retainelements of 1970s critical theory and power-patriarchy analysis, 1980s postmodernism,renewed social actor orientation, and otherperspectives. Research on gender does not justchallenge the division between masculine andfeminine, it challenges the division betweenneutral and gendered. This is a major theoreticalpoint, creating a need to extend gender researchinto wider areas of society and focus on indirectforms of structural inequality.

International work with emerging studies ofmen and masculinities confirms the importanceof the social context for the kinds of views thatare developed in research. As the editor of theNewsletter of the International Association forStudies of Men (IASOM) from 1993 to 2000, Ireceived quite different contributions from dif-ferent countries and regions. In some regions,

the process that Jalna Hanmer (1990) and DavidCollinson and Jeff Hearn (1994) have called“naming men as men” is still in a very earlystage and is a controversial venture. The greaterthe research possibility—especially, the free-dom for research to investigate the wider groundof patriarchy and inequality, rather than justthe figure of gender—the further genderresearch is brought along from simply recogniz-ing direct gender hierarchy to understandingstructural inequality in society. In other words,the stronger the framework of equality, allowingresearch not just into gender and women but,even more controversially, men as genderedpersons and the wider role of societal institu-tions, the better the chance of grounded theoryin a positive sense. This includes importantdevelopments in studies on gender and men,such as going from a belief in fairly statictypes of men to understanding changes andnew practices. Even in regions that are fairlyadvanced in terms of both economic develop-ment and gender equality politics (such as theNordic region), however, patriarchal-criticalviews may be controversial, as they implicatenot just “problem men” but also the problemsof the powerful institutions of society.

In this chapter, I focus specifically on twosocial theory perspectives and their implicationsfor research on men and masculinities: (a) astructural equality-inequality view of men andmasculinities and (b) its relationship to a directgender hierarchy or direct male dominanceview. In Nordic research, these are often calledpatriarchy (i.e., society and social structures ofoppression) and male dominance (i.e., men’suse of power, also called gender-power), but asthis contrast is not common in the English-language debate, I use the terms indirect anddirect gender hierarchy here. Are these differentterms for the same issues? Or do they in factrepresent quite different perspectives, leadingto different research priorities and concepts ofchange? If this is so, what are the connectionsbetween structural gender inequalities or patri-archal structures and direct gender hierarchy(usually meaning male dominance)?

My main point is to introduce some of thecentral elements in a structural inequalityperspective and examine how they relate tothe direct gender hierarchy approach. Theseelements include notions of gender inequalityor patriarchal structure, gender reification and a

16 • THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES


dual-sphere economic analysis, concepts ofpatriarchalization and genderization, and modelsof change suggested by recent research. I alsodraw attention to Nordic region studies in whichgender in/equality research traditions have beendeveloped.

Before going further, it is necessary to notethat the direct and indirect gender hierarchyviews I describe are broad paradigmaticapproaches, and elements of both may thus befound within the work of the particular theoristsand researchers. There is an ambivalence, onemight say, that characterizes the field as awhole. Although each perspective often impliesthe other, they also often point in quite differentdirections regarding the main problems andthe main ways to solve them. The direct viewhighlights men’s dominance and the implica-tions of masculinities, whereas the indirect viewis more concerned with men as part of societyand the implications of societal change.

The remainder of the chapter is organizedin the following manner: first, outlines are givenof the direct gender hierarchy perspectiveand the indirect gender hierarchy perspectiveor structural inequality perspective, as I shallrefer to it here; the direct gender hierarchyperspective is then critiqued; some applicationsof the structural inequality perspective areconsidered; and finally, implications of thisperspective are provided, followed by someconcluding remarks.

THE DIRECT GENDER

HIERARCHY PERSPECTIVE

Current Research

In current research, the direct gender hierar-chy model view is the most well-known andwidespread perspective, typically emphasizingmale dominance or men’s dominance. The struc-tural inequality perspective, or patriarchy-criticalview, is far less well known. For example, theworld’s largest database of social scienceabstracts listed, as of 1995, 3,516 papers con-cerning gender, many of them discussing maledominance—but only 107 papers concerningpatriarchy (Holter, 1998).

Scholarship on men and masculinities,especially critical scholarship, has beenstrongly influenced by notions of direct gender

hierarchy, which usually invoke some notion ofmale dominance. The direct gender hierarchyperspective emphasizes the consequences ofmen’s superior social position. It looks at theeffects of gender discrimination with a viewto the immediate causes, which can often besummarized as “men” or “male dominance.”(A more general cause could be masculinityin men and women, but this is a social psy-chological area that lacks research today.) Inthe European context, this kind of theorizinghas in turn led to a focus on the analysis ofmen and masculinities through the frameworkof gender equality and gender inequalities.Indeed, male or men’s dominance clearly sug-gests a variety of forms of structural genderinequality. Similarly, the frame of structuralgender inequality usually implies some notionof male (or men’s, or some men’s) dominance.Yet the links between the two are not wellknown in current research.

Is direct gender hierarchy a universal fact ora varying pattern? Is being a man the same asbeing in a powerful position? At the outset, thisissue should be understood in its social andhistorical context. The direct gender hierarchyview has been a primary reaction to the“neutralizing” or “malestream” type of socialscience in which issues of gender and powerhave been ignored. It has often appeared as aspontaneous interpretation in areas like violenceagainst women, where gender and power seemto be very closely linked.

The direct gender hierarchy view certainlyhas some empirical support in many areas,yet it is often more of an implicit notion than an explicit model or a systematic theory. Itis implicit in that it corresponds to widely heldsocial norms, cultural images, and behavioralpatterns. The notion that men are the dominantones does not need to be argued at length. Itstendency, when the larger silence of the main- ormalestream is broken, is to picture women andmen in a relationship between equal-women andunequal-men. The portrait of men and womenoften resembles Max Weber’s notion of marketclass (Brudner & White, 1997, p. 162; Wright,2000, p. 21). Men and women are competinggroups with different chances in the market.Most researchers know that the picture is morecomplex, yet this form of appearance is under-standable, given a historical period of increasedgender equality. This is how the problem

Social Theories for Research • 17


emerges—as a problem of men; men at large;and now, also, men circumscribed by women.The “woman question” turns around into a “manquestion.” For example, “women are seen as‘parents’ while men are seen as ‘fathers’”(Bekkengen, 1999).

Even if power and masculinity are nowoften seen as “relational constructions” in maledominance or direct gender hierarchy research,there is a tendency to make masculinity staticand solid. This is often connected to a view inwhich power stems from the “inner” workingsof masculinity (or male nature, in traditionalterms). “Masculine power is largely exercisedthrough self-regulation and self-discipline—a process of ‘identity work,’” it is argued ina recent masculinities theory overview(Whitehead & Barrett, 2001, p. 17). Men’sprivilege is a consequence of this self-discipline.By acting “in ways consistent with gendernorms . . . they reproduce male dominationand power differentials.” This view is presentedin general terms—men are “inculcated withdominant discourses.” Masculinity is “unlikelyever to disappear” (p. 18). Or, as stated else-where in this volume, even if “‘being a man’appears to be flexible and varied, it is thenwrong to assume that this variation under-mines male dominantion” (Brittan, 2001, p. 54).A view that holds true in some situationsbecomes the abstract rule. Social institutionsand variation tend to disappear. This tendencycan be found in applied areas also: for example,in violence research and the issue of whetherall men are potentially violent (discussed later).Arguably, the link between masculinity andpride or shame rests on this overall equationof masculinity and power.

THE STRUCTURAL

INEQUALITY PERSPECTIVE

An Underexplored Tradition

Notions of direct gender hierarchy, male(or men’s) dominance, and structural genderequality and inequalities can thus be seen asinterconnected. In this chapter, I focus primarilyon the latter frame of reference; first, becausethis approach is still relatively rarely exploredin an explicit way as a theoretical tradition inscholarship on men and masculinities; second,

because the gender equality and inequalitiesperspective has been especially significant inEuropean contexts, especially German, Nordic,and United Kingdom contexts. In the Nordiccase, it could be argued that this significancehas been facilitated to some extent by the devel-opment of state politics concerning genderequality. This is particularly in terms of publicgovernmental commitment to gender equality,even though a variety of gender inequalitiescontinue, such as the gender wage gap, men’sdomination of business management, and men’sviolence toward women. On the other hand, itcould be argued that state gender equalitypolitics have tended to emphasize a liberal andlimited view of gender equality.

The main theme in the structural equalityperspective is overall discrimination or inequal-ity in society and their causes, rather than directgender hierarchy as such. This research can becritical in situations, positions, and institutionsin a society or culture that hinders gender equal-ity, whether the context is overtly “gendered”or not. It extends a view that was advancedin Nordic feminist sociology in the 1970s,in which gender was analyzed both as socialdifferentiation and as social stratification andthe use of class models was criticized (Holter,1970, pp. 18, 225).

From a gender equality point of view, theinternational developments discussed here illus-trate how the debate and research tend to startwith the “figure” of direct gender hierarchy ratherthan the “ground” of structural inequality. Thestructures of structural inequality are often com-paratively hidden and difficult to recognize, espe-cially as they often appear to be gender neutral,although they are by no means neutral in theireffects. The problems of the direct gender hierar-chy approach can be summarized as a takeover ofthe traditional patriarchal view of men. Men areseen as the more important, more socially respon-sible persons, compared to women. Only now isthis grand picture of men being seen as a negativerather than a positive factor.

In structural inequality research and studiesof patriarchal societies, more complex theorieshave developed. Here, the discrimination ofwoman has been seen as a matter of society andof men’s role in society, not of men as such(see, e.g., Holter, 1997, pp. 273-303). However,there are problems with these approaches also.Traditional views of society are likely to be taken



on board, along with a tendency to downplaythe existence of direct gender hierarchy patternsthat cannot so easily be explained by genderinequality structures. There is a tendency for thestructural background to become all and for theaction-related figure to disappear.

Clearly, gender equalities and inequalitieswork in complex and contradictory ways. Theycan, indeed, even in a patriarchal and male-dominated society, at times work against theinterests of men, individually and collectively,although at the same time the overriding patternof structural inequality works in favor of menand against women.

Gender Equality Research

Let us turn to the societal developments andemerging traditions arising from gender equalityresearch. In the next sections, I present someresearch examples and discuss the use of termssuch as patriarchy. What is the new view of gen-der, when one starts from the equality-inequalitydimension? I outline some patterns that haveemerged in research, especially dual-sphereimbalance and gender reification connected to“horizontal” gender discrimination.

Some examples of gender-equal-status–oriented research and gender equality theory inthe Nordic region can illustrate this develop-ment. In a study extending a relational viewof gender, Harriet Holter, Hanne Haavind, andother authors (H. Holter, 1984) showed howpatriarchal social patterns are reorganized andare changing over time. Anna Jonasdóttir (1991)contextualized structural inequality in economicterms, describing women as “love power” aswell as “labor power” in the labor market. InSylvia Walby’s (1990) theory of patriarchy, thepublic phase of patriarchy is distinguished fromthe private. This theory has been influentialin Nordic research, as elsewhere. (Walby’s per-spective has been further developed in studiesof men, especially in the context of the UnitedKingdom; see Hearn, 1992). Øystein GullvågHolter and Helene Aarseth (1993) dividedmodern forms of patriarchy into three mainframeworks and periods: paternalistic power, or“paternate,” in early modernity; masculinisticpower, or “masculinate,” in the industrial age(much like Walby’s two phases), and a third“androgynatic” form in a period with decreasingdiscrimination. Using literary sources, Jørgen

Lorentzen (1996) showed how masculinitieschanged in the onset of modernity and howcaring was marginalized in the men’s world.Claes Ekenstam (1993) discussed the embodi-ment of modern masculinity and the restrictionsin men’s emotional expressivity. Jorun Solheim(1998) developed relational analysis in a symbolicdirection, focusing on the home as an extensionof the feminine.

Structural Inequality and Patriarchy

As mentioned, the term patriarchy is rarelyused in today’s research; gender is the morefrequently used term. The phrases genderequality and gender inequality are also moreperipheral than one would expect. The lack ofawareness surrounding patriarchy is not sur-prising. There are many reasons why genderis visible, or even supervisible or “hyperreal”(Baudrillard, 1993, p. 171), and patriarchy isobscure.

Formal or open patriarchy has been weak-ened and dissolved over the last centuries.There is some truth to the idea that it is nolonger there. Its effects are still often there,however, so we should not take this too far. Forexample, the levels of gendered violence andrape remain higher than one would expect in agender equality–oriented society. They displaya deep gender-power connection.

Systematic gender-related discriminationstill appears in many areas, whether we call itpatriarchy, direct gender hierarchy, or inequality.The wording is not the main issue but ratherthe acknowledgment that all of society (andculture) is involved, not just some special “gen-dered zones.” Research needs better conceptsof gender discrimination.

Many operative patriarchal structures aredifficult to perceive directly, although we wit-ness their effects. Sometimes the tracks disap-pear. Examples include wage-work restructuringthat devalues women and social competenceand labor market regulations that work to thesame effect (Hoel & Sørhaug, 1999; Holter,Karlsen, & Salomon, 1998). They usually haveno explicit gendered message or reference, yetthey dictate new conditions for men and women.

The key links of patriarchal structure stilloften seem to be covered by a veil of secrecy,an untouchable neutral and yet mostly malezone. Conversely, in areas where the effects of



patriarchy seem fairly visible, such as with thepersistent social problems of rape or battering,it is not so easy to tell the societal and culturalcauses and the effects on society in general.

The term patriarchy is perhaps best droppedin favor of the phrase structural gender inequal-ity. Yet we need a term that pinpoints the struc-tural character of inequality and a recognitionthat structural gender inequality has survived,even if patriarchy in the literal sense (father-power) has not. Patriarchal structures may bereproduced through fatherhood or through othersocial institutions and patterns. What is specificto the terms patriarchy and patriarchal society,as distinct from an egalitarian society or froma society with some male power (“proto-patriarchy” has been used among historians,e.g., Bin-Nun, 1975), is the fairly systematic,general character of the oppression of womenand the linked oppression of nonprivileged menwithin a given society and culture. A patriarchalsociety is one that displays two interlinkedpower structures, between and across the gen-ders (Holter, 1997). Men and women are easyto distinguish. Patriarchal structures are com-paratively hidden. They do not walk aroundwith a sign saying “Hit me.” Critical genderdiscourses need more awareness at this point.

A CRITIQUE OF THE DIRECT

GENDER HIERARCHY PERSPECTIVE

Gender as a Compromise Formation

One way to align the two perspectives—directgender hierarchy and structural inequality—goes back to early feminist sex role sociology,in which gender was seen as a mixed pattern,containing social differentiation as well associal stratification. True, gender differentiationis strongly influenced by stratification, but itcannot simply be reduced to stratification orthe power dimension. Rather, the gender systemis a framework of meaning, containing relationswithin which the sex of the person is madesocially relevant. This framework concernspower but also many other issues. It is oftenmore of an adaptation to power than it is poweror powerlessness by itself. A gender system,in this view, is a response to a more or lesspatriarchal structure, and the two must be care-fully distinguished. Gender is a compromise

formation; it is formed by power structures butalso by other forces, such as the need for socialrecognition. In modern society, gender is asocial psychological link between the individualand the collective.

From a sociological and historical per-spective, the wider implications of the directgender hierarchy view are often problematic.Obviously, notions of direct gender hierarchyare important in gender equality theory. Yet theycannot be treated as universals. Rather, it is theform of society—the existence of historical,changing forms of patriarchy or gender-unequalsocietal structures—that creates certain types ofmasculinities and the ways that power becomeslinked to them. The reverse is not true. There isno abstraction called “men” that always shapessociety and history. Still, there is evidence thatis quite wide-ranging and robust of direct gen-der hierarchy that must be taken into account inany societal or historical argument regardinggender equality.

Concepts such as compensation and emula-tion are relevant in this area. Many studies haveshown the importance of compensatory formsof masculinity. We can imagine a society inwhich only a minor section of men actuallyprofit from patriarchal privileges, and yet manymen participate in direct gender hierarchy.This is likely especially in contexts wherein thegender division is emphasized as a universaldivision, a matter of all individuals in society—as is the case in the modern age. In fact, the menat the top of the social hierarchy may use mainlygender-neutral ways to achieve their aims. Forexample, they may use their economic or politi-cal influence, and the men below will use whatthey have—namely, their gender. In other cases,nonprivileged men may emulate the genderedbehavior of the dominant men. These themeshave been central in masculinities theories,linked to the breadwinner type of gendercontract. A third important approach concernsgender as reification, experienced as somethingpregiven, even before gender as performance.This is discussed further later on.

In these ways, we may explain the existenceof direct gender hierarchy patterns even amongmen who objectively have little to gain bysupporting patriarchal structures. We may alsobetter understand why many revolts againsttraditional patriarchal structures have beenaccompanied by renewed “fratriarchy,” or direct



gender hierarchy. For example, the history ofsocialism (as well as the earlier history ofbourgeois revolutions) has been full of com-radely forms of neopatriarchal power, up tothe “geriatric patriarchy” that came to dominatethe former Eastern Bloc.

The idea that gender is a system of meaningthat is distinguishable from patriarchy as astructure of power can be used to outline a cri-tique of the current view of gender and powerthat is quite different from the usual complaintthat it attacks men. On the contrary, it can beargued that the “attack” on men is taken toofar only when society is left out of the picture.More precisely, structural inequality mecha-nisms that are not overtly gendered (not clearlya matter of direct gender hierarchy) tend todisappear from view.

Many of the current studies on masculinitiesconcern areas where we find both explicitlygendered frameworks of meaning and structuralpatriarchal relations. Here, patriarchal domi-nance, defined as relations that objectivelyweaken women’s position and create relatedforms of discrimination, is associated withsubjective gendered meaning. In this perspec-tive, patriarchal inequality and direct genderhierarchy may seem to be two terms for thesame thing.

In this approach, however, other areas areeasily overlooked or misinterpreted. The mostserious case concerns an area of social patternsthat objectively recreate gender inequality—yetnot with much direct reference to sex or gender.It can be argued that this area represents a majorblind spot in current gender studies—or at least,in the gender studies that take the reference togender as their point of departure. Becausepatriarchy is not announced, it is assumed thatit is not there. A major example, discussed later,is the relationship between “production” and“reproduction” in society. Economic or politicalforces that objectively place producers (mainly,men) ahead of reproducers (mainly, women)appear as gender neutral and are not adequatelyaddressed.

Another mistake concerns the existence ofgender as social differentiation, which tends tobe interpreted as if social stratification (power)were also automatically of importance. But thismay not be the case. Representative surveys onmen and gender equality carried out in theNordic region and elsewhere (e.g., Holter, 1989;

Jalmert, 1984; Zulehner & Volz, 1998) arewarning lights in this respect. We should be verycareful with arguments going directly from themeaning of gender or the form of masculinityin a given context to the actual power rela-tions, including the degree of discrimination ofwomen (and nonpowerful men), in that con-text. Gender and masculinity forms do have arelation to the degree (and form) of genderdiscrimination, but the relation tends to be morecomplex, thus supporting the compromise view.

At this point, the dynamic role of the gendersystem comes into view. Why do women—ornonprivileged men—often emphasize gender,even beyond the compensatory mechanismsdiscussed earlier? The historical dimension isimportant here. The modern gender system wascreated partly “from below,” as a response toolder patriarchal structures. True, it may recre-ate these structures, but it also has more demo-cratic and dynamic elements. Therefore, womenand nonprivileged men may emphasize gen-der as part of a way of overcoming traditionalconstrictions. Gender may become a means ofself-realization (O. Holter, 1983). Through thegender system, gender meaning becomesembodied. Bodies become “sexed,” with sex as“the sign on the body” (Søndergaard, 1996).This is obviously a field of tension; genderingis a process that occurs for a variety of reasons.One cannot simply assume that all cases ofgender are cases of gender-power.

Two Dimensions

Distinguishing between gender as a systemof meaning and patriarchy as a structure ofpower is still often a new idea in internationalresearch. Researchers are much more used tothinking in terms of a gender-power order. Thearrangement can have various names, such asdirect gender hierarchy or gender-power, but itis commonly seen as one unified system.

In the gender equality view presented here,instead, there are two quite different dimen-sions: equal status on the one hand and genderon the other. Gender relations, or the gendersystem, are seen as a partially independent anddynamic framework of meaning. It is slanted sothat it seems to relate especially to women,children, and reproduction, but it concerns menand the sphere of production as much as womenand the sphere of reproduction.



All societies have some element of genderorganization, work division between the gen-ders, and gender-linked norms and behaviors.This does not mean that all societies have thesame major sphere divisioning, such as in thecontemporary economy. It is more like a ten-dency in this direction—a bit of Talcott Parsons’s(1964, pp. 130-133) complementary sex relation,but not the whole package; not the nuclearfamily, not the breadwinner contract, not themodern-democratic definition of the individual,not wage labor versus free time, and so on. Whenthis minimal “sexed organization” overlaps withthe organization of power and exploitation,more specific and expansive gender systemsare created, such as the modern one (Holter,1997; Holter & Aarseth, 1993).

The specificity and independent role ofgender have varied. In some circumstances,gender is a fairly egalitarian differentiationsystem, and emerging direct gender hierarchyor protopatriarchy turns to age and seniorityrelations, rather than sex, to legitimize newconditions (as in early historical societies). Inother contexts, gender divisions are important insociety but still play a secondary role to patri-archy (e.g., the late Middle Ages). In a third typeof setting, patriarchy has been partly disman-tled, there is some gender equality development,and gender becomes a more independent socialsystem. This characterizes modern society. Gen-der becomes more distinct from the patriar-chal concept of the person, a more democraticventure and a more horizontal (but also wider)socioeconomic division.

In this situation, the gender system is notsimply an echo of the structures of inequality. Itdevelops its own dynamics, sometimes actingon its own, often with tension and conflict-filledrelations to patriarchal structures. For example,“protest masculinity” is not just one of severalmasculinity forms. Protest, in some form, isa common element in modern masculinities,brought out in different ways. This type ofmodel implies a mixed and conflict-filledgender-patriarchy relationship. Against thisbackground, men’s and women’s gender positionsand gender identities can be described as com-promise formations, attempts to balance “lifeneeds” and “power needs.” Gender is mainlyan adaptation to power, even if it has, in turn,power consequences and emerges as “gender-power” (Holter, 1997, pp. 195-241). The core

idea of the model is to distinguish betweenpatriarchal structure and gender system devel-opments and then to look at the changingconnections between the two.

The Gender-Power Dilemma

If all gender is power, if gender and structuralinequality are mainly one and the same pattern,then the existence of gender warrants the conclu-sion that power is there too. If gender as poweris “virtually universal” (Kimmel, 2000a, p. 53),we may assume, for example, that workplacediscrimination is generally good for men (p. 190),or that men’s violence against women “is restora-tive, a means to reclaim the power that he believesis rightfully his” (p. 262).

Yet the research often tells a differentstory. First, it discloses variation within as wellas between the genders. Second, it shows aninterplay between gender and power that theresearchers do not yet fully understand. Onecannot say that this dilemma is solved in anyof the traditions and views presented here.

Let us first look at variation within thegenders, especially among men. It has long beenargued that direct gender hierarchy is primarilyassociated with the powerful positions amongmen. This has traditionally been a main threadof argument in direct gender hierarchy studiesand also in the emerging field of studies ofmen or men’s studies. It has roots in women’sstudies and in feminist portraits of patriarchy asa system of suppression of women and nondom-inant men. It can be found in the structuralinequality tradition as well.

Yet some empirical material, some of itfrom key zones of evidence such as violenceagainst women or prostitution, has made someresearchers formulate the opposite rule, namely,that power over women is associated with lackof power in relation to other men. For example,men who buy women for sex have been seenas “losers in the male role” (Prieur & Taksdal,1989). Patterns where masculinity could be seenas compensatory had already been identified bysex role theorists in the 1960s and earlier, partlybased on psychodynamic theory. The “lack ofpower” kind of rule often rings true to research-ers who have studied social stratification orpower systems in other areas.

Although problems may be generated at thetop of a power structure or hierarchy (or by the



hierarchy as a whole, linked to circumstancesat the top), they often become larger, or at leastmore negatively visible, further down (“bewareof the little man” is folk wisdom at this point).Further, advanced power regimes usually havebuilt-in mechanisms to minimize the cost ofpower by shifting it downward (Holter, 1997,pp. 396-404). The further down in the hierarchy,the higher may be the emphasis on the possi-bility to be “in on the deal” by using forcedownward. This can be seen as a main, tradi-tional, patriarchal principle—“submit to yourmaster, and you yourself will be a master”(Holter, 1989, p. 31). In the modern world, itis partly hidden by the market and democraticinstitutions. Yet authoritarian structures per-severe through elements like bullying andvictimization.

For such reasons, we might expect thatlower status men are more involved in genderdiscrimination than upper status men. Thisis sometimes the case. For example, a 1988Norwegian survey (Holter, 1989) of men andgender equality showed a higher level of domes-tic violence in the family of origin of workingclass men compared with other men (that is, inworking class families in the 1950s and 1960scompared with other families). However, violencein the home seems more related across classto authoritarianism, according to qualitativeresearch (e.g., Lundgren, 1985) as well as aGerman survey (Zulehner & Volz, 1998).

Based on democracy and work research, athird type of model comes into view. Here, itis not the top or bottom but the middle layersthat face the biggest problems, precisely due tothe problematical character of the contact andoverall character of the system.

Together, the three models suggest a mixedpicture. The empirical results confirm this. Intime-use studies (e.g., Vaage, 2002) and in opin-ion surveys regarding gender equality, there isno consistent pattern that oppression of womenis larger in one class or status group than inothers. A “from the top” tendency can be found,but it is often counteracted by other tendencies.

Several gender equality surveys and manyqualitative studies in the Nordic region make itpossible to give some empirically based evalua-tion of these models. Education seems to have aslight positive effect on gender equality orienta-tion and practices, with emphasis on orientation.There is an “in principle” gap (Jalmert, 1984)

between words and actions to which we shallreturn. Money, however, has no clear, consistenteffect. Perhaps there is an “A curve,” with someproblems most typical in the mid- to high-income group, as if gender-power were a petitbourgeois syndrome, but this trend is neitherstrong nor clear. Other problems tend to heap upat the bottom, such as violence, although someof this is a reporting effect. Typically, differentmeasures show different results, without a cleardemarcation of “one type of man” in terms ofclass, social status, or job factors. Note thatmoney does have an effect on men’s wish torecreate a breadwinner type of gender contract,according to “marriage market” research. The(male) money–(female) beauty connection isstill in force, even in proclaimed egalitariancircumstances (Holter, 1990b).

The mixed empirical picture shows thateven if theories of masculinities (e.g., Carrigan,Connell, & Lee, 1985; Connell, 1995) areimportant for understanding the dynamics ofthe gender system, the link between the typeof masculinity and the degree of inequality isless direct than is sometimes suggested. Thisstrengthens the point made earlier, that genderand patriarchy are different (only partiallyoverlapping) dimensions. Indeed, empiricalfindings have often led feminist researchers inthe opposite direction, namely, that the meninvolved in problem areas such as prostitutionor violence against women are simply “normal”men. They come from all groups or forms ofmasculinity.

In this view, it is “Mr. Typical” who beatsor buys. The selection of the typical man mayvary with country and culture, but the maintrend is global. We are led back to the directgender hierarchy model, where all men partici-pate in the discrimination against women.

Still, this argument is often based on status-or class-related evidence, using indicators suchas income or education, which is not the mostrelevant at this point. In fact, bringing it incan be seen as an example of how gender isunconsciously made into class. One argues asif gender could be derived from status or class.Yet the argument concerns gender, not class. Wedo not know whether the men involved in prob-lem behaviors have been exposed to higher thannormal levels of structural inequality—definedthrough measures such as the object status ofwomen, victimization and bullying, aggression,



violence, self-sacrifice, reification, and so on.From qualitative research, it seems likely (Holter,1989). As these examples show, the gender-power dilemma is often a gender-power-classdilemma. Social status or class is a third party tothe debate.

Locating Inequality Patterns

Some researchers have argued that repro-duction of children is the core of the genderorder (for a recent example, see Connell, 2002,pp. 38, 54). In the 1970s debate, the familywas often seen as the core arena of patriarchy.I think this is a mistake of figure and ground, asconcerns today’s society. We know that repro-duction often appears as the main zone ofgender-power. But that, by no means, securesits position as a key element in structuralinequality or patriarchy. We cannot judge bygender meaning or visibility but must look forthe actual, objective effects. For example, wemust analyze whether a wage policy actuallyincreases the wage gap between men andwomen, and this question is quite distinct fromthe question of whether the process, negotia-tions, motives, and so on were gendered or not.

Gender equality and “genderedness” are twodifferent dimensions. In much research, theyhave been confused. Therefore we should beextra careful with the empirical evidence.Mostly, we do not know which is which. A lot ofeconomic and work research evidence speaksagainst the “family and children” version ofpatriarchy. Instead, research tells of familieslosing out in the adaptation to work life, ofproduction sphere dominance and horizontaldiscrimination creating a major foundation forgender discrimination and gendered violencein the home as well as the job. Families andchildren are no longer the main context of patri-archy, even if male dominance and violenceare still major problems in the domestic sphere.The institutions in this sphere are changing,with more mixed power regimes today. Familiesand children often come second, after the jobshave had their say. Work and family studies(Borchgrevink & Holter, 1995; Holter, 1990a)show that “being able to talk about job prob-lems” is one important issue in modern familylife. “Being able to use my competence” is amain job satisfaction item. Family life is used tocorrect—and recreate—labor market imbalance.

“Greedy” wage work and production dominancein the domestic sphere tend to recreate socialproblems.

All this confirms Sylvia Walby’s theory of ashift toward public patriarchy and Holter andAarseth’s (1993) analysis of the “late mas-culinate.” A man today becomes a man through“the public eye” more than through his familystatus or particularistic relations (Hearn, 1992).Patriarchy has turned public and economic.Gender, to some extent, is a “functional equiv-alent” of patriarchy, to use Robert Merton’s(1957, p. 52) term, yet it is more independentand dynamic and can also be an oppositionalforce. Reproduction and households remaintwo of the main contexts of inequality. Yet pro-duction may weigh more in the total picture.And the main point may be precisely the con-nections between work and family, masculineand feminine, neutral and gendered—not eachon its own. A relational view is once morerelevant. It seems that inequality or patriarchy isnot mainly one type of structure, or a set ofstructures, but relations between structures.This, and not a specific zone or work area, isthe “core.”

APPLICATIONS OF THE

STRUCTURAL INEQUALITY PERSPECTIVE

The Case of Caregiving Men

Men’s position in female-associated workor in domestic labor is often interpreted dif-ferently in the two perspectives. In the directgender hierarchy view, the same overall patternof dominance can be found in these areas ascan be found in others. This is shown, forexample, by men’s access to “glass escalator”mechanisms in female-typed jobs that lead menupward in the work hierarchy while the womenstay below (Williams, 2000). In the structuralinequality view, the changing societal posi-tioning of men and women is the main matter.The positions in each concrete arena may differfrom the overall rule; all the more so, if they arelinked to societal imbalances.

The secondary status of women’s activityfields (mainly in the sphere of reproduction)does not always imply women’s secondarystatus within these fields. On the contrary, recentstudies show the importance of “hegemonic



femininity” in an interplay with patriarchaltradition in, for example, studies of nursing(Bakken, 2001). Women often actively creategender segregation (Krøjer, 2003). Researchshows Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s (1977) minoritylogic coming into play when men are the smallminority in gendered activity or work areas.The men are easily turned into stereotypicalrepresentatives of the “others,” token contrasttypes, and they easily take on this behavior.Compensatory masculinity can be relevant inthis terrain.

One study of an experiment with an all-men group of employees in a kindergarten,initiated by the woman leader of the kinder-garten, found greater variance and role freedomamong the men, that they more easily couldtake on “homely” activities, show feelings, andso on. Yet it also demonstrated that men in thissituation distanced themselves from femininestandards, as if a symbolic mother were con-stantly looking over their shoulder (Bredesen,2000). It has been argued that men in kinder-gartens experience a “centrifugal” process thatleads them away from the caregiving, “femi-nine” core of the work (Baagøe Nielsen, 2003).

Men may be in a weak position in female-associated fields of work not because society hasnow reached a state of gender equality butbecause of persistent inequality that positionsthese fields below others and makes them intopredominantly feminine domains. Therefore,men in caregiving roles or other female-associatedareas may experience particular forms of genderdiscrimination (Forsèn, Gislason, Holter, &Rongevær, 2000; Holter, 2003).

In this perspective, the link between discrim-ination against women and discriminationagainst some men is emphasized. Inequality isseen as a varying relationship rather than a uni-versal dividing line that creates two classlikegender categories. Like the burdens, the benefitsof inequality are diverse and shifting. Althoughmen benefit on the overall level, closer analysesshow huge variation among men in regard toinequality. Women, also, are not always disad-vantaged by gender segregation and inequality.Patterns that sustain segregation, or converselypromote equality and integration, can be foundamong both genders.

Direct gender hierarchy analyses mainlyconcern the power and benefits of an ongoingsystem of direct gender hierarchy comparable to

an informal or latent “brotherhood.” The maincategories are men and women. Gender equalityanalysis, on the other hand, emphasizes the roleof society and the position of both men andwomen in ways that decrease or increase genderequality. Here, the tendency is to place peopleinto more or less gender-equal categories, withmore women at the equal end of the scale, moremen at the patriarchal end, and much mixtureall along.

In this perspective, gender discriminationhas a major element of positional discrimina-tion. It hits people in specific positions, regard-less of their gender. This may seem like a nicelydetached sociological perspective. But some-thing is missing. Can we really compare discrimi-nation against some men in caregiving positionsto the general discrimination against women? Theproblem is that gender discrimination seemsto follow the person, or the sex of the person,regardless of situations or positions—and thatthis appearance becomes what Durkheim calleda social fact, acting by itself (see Lukes, 1988,p. 14). Why does that happen? At that point, thenotion of gender as a meaning system becomestoo thin. It does not explain why these meaningsare so closely connected to power. Instead,modern gender as a system of reificationcomes into view—a framework of a quite specificeconomic type, characteristically conceived asa universal fact. Women’s and gender studieshave discussed this in terms of alienation andsex objectification (see, e.g., Foreman, 1977;MacKinnon, 1983). It is probably often seen asa peripheral or irrelevant Marxist concept. Yet Ithink it is a key term for understanding moderngender. It creates a kind of absolutistic beingthat goes before “gender as performance”(Butler, 1990, 1998) and before various notionsof gender as situated subjectivity. It is relatedto the dual sphere view of gender oppression(described later).

The Preference System

In the structural inequality view, currentgender inequality can be described as a societalpreference system that involves both genders.This system has economic, social, cultural,and psychological elements. It is linked to thebreadwinner type of gender contract, that is,the man’s primary provider position vis-à-visthe woman. Yet the preference system also



appears in politics, law, and many other areas,generally pulling men and women in two differ-ent directions, rewarding gender segregation. Soa preference system may seem “profitable” alsofor women, in the short run and the concretesituation, even if it sustains inequality in thelonger run and works to the detriment of womenin society as a whole (Holter, 2003).

In this case, as in others, inequality is seenas a pattern that partly runs across the genderdivision, not just between the genders. Even ifmen are more likely to be on the privileged side,there is significant variation. As mentioned, theprincipal analytical unit in this type of approachis not men or women as such but, rather, equaland unequal tendencies. Each tendency can befound within persons of each gender, in varyingstrengths, forms, and interrelations, dependingon the wider social context. It is not surprisingthat context becomes a key word in this typeof approach.

The Case of Violence

Men’s violence against women is one impor-tant issue. If we use the conventional directgender hierarchy view, in which gender andpower are closely linked, we would expect thatthe type of man or the form of masculinity isa good predictor of the chance of violence.Because masculinity is deeply entangled withpower, the relation should be a strong one. Yet thatdoes not seem to hold true. Although there is anempirical connection, it does not seem very strong(as far as can be judged from representative sur-veys such as “Men in Norway 1988” [Holter,1989] and “The Norwegian Man 1998” [Haugen,Hammer, & Helle, 1998]). The case is perhapsstronger in Germany, as reported by Zulehner andVolz (1998), but this may be a reporting or designeffect. Qualitative researchers, therapists, andothers give a mixed picture and often tell about“feminine” as well as “masculine” men who useviolence. I mentioned the tendency in feministresearch, which can be found in violence researchalso, to go the other way, toward argumentsthat any man can be violent, that violent men areof all types and come from all socioeconomiccategories (Lundgren, Heimer, Westerstrand, &Kalliokoski, 2001).

This is not surprising, if gender is in fact moreindirectly related to power than the mixed modelassumes. So let us use the two-dimensional

model instead. Here we would expect that thedegree of inequality is a strong predictor ofviolence, but gender should be moderately orweakly related (expressing mixed relationsand adaptations). The chance of male violenceagainst women should be higher in imbalancedrelationships and households than in morebalanced ones. There is increasing empiricalsupport for this, although the evidence has notbeen systematized. Household balance has apositive impact, reducing the level of violenceagainst women (Walby, 2002). Qualitativestudies indicate that the chance of violence ishigher in contexts where the woman has fewresources compared with the man.

Structural Discrimination

Gender equality research shows that genderdiscrimination is more than a personal, direct,or active relationship, such as a man’s violentrelation to a woman. There is also a more indi-rect component, which can be called passivegender discrimination (a term used in, e.g., theEU Amsterdam treaty) or collective discrimina-tion. It clearly involves social circumstances,not just the relation or unit at hand (e.g., “badfamily”). It consists of the wider, social causesof the discrimination.

The wage gap between men and women isan example of this sort of structure. It canchange over time; structures are not fixed orstatic but are often slow moving. Here and now,the wage gap contributes to the social pref-erence system, in which a man’s time appearsto be more valuable than a woman’s. The gapin ownership, property, leading capital posi-tions, and so on works the same way. Theeconomy tells us that men have more valuethan women, even if politics says they shouldcount for the same.

Premodern patriarchy was mainly a socio-political structure, underpinned by religion andthe military. Modern patriarchy emerged througha “problem period” during which the emergingfactory system attracted women before men. Thenuclear family may not have been a majorchange in terms of household size, but it was anew type of organization, mainly structured onthe need to provide new “producers of humanpersonality” (Parsons, 1988, p. 126). This wasprincipally different from both the aristocratichouseholds of older Europe and the gender



relations among working people, small farmers,and artisans. The institutions of the moderngender system, with a nuclear or breadwinnerfamily system creating new “marriage market”arenas, evolved in the 20th century along with anew view of sexuality (Holter, 1983).

Most or all current gender equality theoriesshare a critique of traditional wage-work-onlydefinitions of work. Much research in the late1970s and the 1980s showed how the wage-onlyview crashed with realities. This was shown bytime-use studies and a lot of qualitative evi-dence. Wider, more realistic, and more relationalconcepts of work were needed.

Dual-sphere theory was one answer. It seemsto have originated among many researchers, inslightly different terms and versions, around thistime. The framework could also be called “workand family,” with family and household seenas a workplace on its own. Studies (e.g., Berk,1985) claimed that household work forms genderidentity. The two spheres could be described asproduction sphere and reproduction sphere,production meaning the creation of things ornonhuman resources and reproduction thecreation of human resources. The needs in thishuman-oriented work process, somewhat defen-sively called reproduction, could be described interms of an “emancipatory minimum” (Fürst,1994). Many studies showed that reproductivework was relational in tendency, having a social-ization effect. One works one’s way to gender.

Before we go on, a rather dramatic impli-cation of this kind of analysis should be noted.In principle, if all producers work for a wageand the reproducers work for the producers(wage workers), the class of producers will“own” the class of reproducers. The reproducerswill be individually dependent on the producersfor their livelihood. It is no wonder that, fromthis perspective, the producer becomes sociallyenlarged and, in gender terms, that everythingmay seem to rest on “the man” or “male domi-nance.” This extreme system has never fullyexisted (despite breadwinner ideology). Thepoint, however, is that it exists as a backgroundeconomic pattern strong enough to sustain agender-power system. Even if women make theirown wages, through paid reproduction work,their payments are deducted from the money(seemingly) brought in solely by the productionsphere. Production is the place of profits.Reproduction is the place of costs. With this

economic regime, the older patriarchal-politicalorder became redundant (Holter, 1982).

Reification and theDeconstruction of Gender

This brings us to reification as a key issueof the modern gender system. We saw that, inthe gender equality view, gender systems areformed and transformed according to shiftingequality and to discrimination patterns in societyand culture as a whole. In this sense, onecan say that power frames our whole pictureof gender difference (Kimmel, 2000a). Yet thisis not just the power of men, or even mainlygender-power. Gender-power is after the fact.It is what happens if certain social conditionsare at work. We need to know these widerconditions.

One approach in this direction starts with akey performance area and realization of gender;that is, the transactions and exchanges betweentwo potential partners seeking a relationship ormarriage, traditionally leading to the formationof a gender dyad or couple. In this gender mar-ket analysis, the gender market is defined asthe nonmonetary exchange of future rights toa relationship or household partner. Each par-ticipant “offers” and “asks” for offers. Althoughthe economic patterns are muted in terms ofmoney—or precisely for that reason—they areclearly gendered, much more clearly than, forexample, in the labor market (Holter, 1983).

Two levels of exchange are distinguished inthis analysis. One level is individual—a levelof exchange between men and women. Here, theexchange form varies between giving, sharing,and simple exchange. There is no consistentdifference between women and men (in empiri-cal terms, friends are often described as part ofthis category). On another level, however, theexchange is much more abstract. It is a gender-making relation, not just a playing out of some-thing already there. It is a potential producerand reproducer who meet each other, creatingthe key gender relation through their meeting.A major point of the analysis is that the sex ofthe persons does not determine the outcome.Instead, it is the social form of the exchange—the way that the two main spheres of societyare connected, through individual links—thatmakes the participants appear as if gender wasalready at hand. This creates the fetishism



(ideological image of reification) in which itseems obvious that gender is always alreadythere. It is not sex, or some combination ofbiology and early socialization, that creates a“she” that is body and beauty and a “he” as amore neutral and universal person. Rather, thisis the outcome of the relationship betweentwo spheres of society, expressed in a particularindividualized form (Ø. Holter, 1984).

Studies of the gender market that use fairlyopenly gender-commercial arenas (such ascontact advertising and public meeting places)as indicators of the wider social pattern showthat the man is in a situation of “having” some-thing in this relation, compared with the woman’s“being” something. The relation does not workout in the same sense for him as for her; it doesnot mainly concern something embodied in himas a person. He “is” not; he “has.” For example,she thinks of him as person who exhibits socialcontrol. This social control appears as some-thing the man has, by making it; it is “self-made,” in the market ideology. The woman, whois in the position of equivalent at this level ofthe exchange, functions as sex object and beautysubject. Her presence becomes strangelymoney-like (related to extended and total formsof exchange), as it functions not only as thescale of measurement of individual men’s offersbut also as the key investment capital to get anew reproduction-production unit going.

My own research on the gender market(mainly in the 1980s) was later criticized forbeing too “economistic” (Fürst, 1994) and alsotoo victimizing of women. I did not accept thepicture of women and use value (so-called “softvalues”) neatly divided from the harsh worldof men and value (“hard values”). I find evenless reason to do so today. The gender marketturns our expectation around in regard to whois an economic object and who is not. Thisis related to the second critique, with whichI mainly agree. Placing women in a passivevictim status was a typical tendency in researchfrom this period. If women are victimized asobject beauty and body capital, they are also, foronce, the leading market investors. Women’supward class mobility through marriage ispart of this picture. At the abstract gender level,the woman comes into a social position thatdoes not stem from her individuality or the indi-vidual level of the exchange and communica-tion; a position and relation that, undoubtedly,

shows that gender has an economic elementnot just in prostitution, but in normal dating-likecontact also (Holter, 1990b). Economic analysisof gender is still very much an underdevelopedfield.

Abstract masculinity is a term for the“man = person who has” element, as opposed to“woman = person who is.” In gender marketanalysis, if beauty is capital in women, thewage, and what it represents and can be con-verted to (means of reproduction), is capital inthe men’s world. In the market, it is the positionas producer and wage earner that is testedthrough the equivalent.

In this analysis, the social constructions ofmasculinity and femininity originate in specificpositions that have no direct relation to sex butare instead created by the sphere relationshipof production and reproduction. Gender appearsthrough reification as the individualized formof transaction between the two spheres.1 In thisperspective, it is not surprising that researchgenerally shows that the gender market is afairly gender-conservative place, where the suc-cessful breadwinner ideal is more operative thanelsewhere in society. “He” is the one with thearm on which to lean. “She” is the one wholeans. The phenomenology at this point is rich,as, for example, Erving Goffman (1977) noted.The market’s high level of polarization showsthat the logic of men being “not-women,” whichNancy Chodorow (1978) and others attributedto early socialization, may be more operativein certain key phases later in life. The gendermarket can be seen as the “prestation stage”(Mauss, 1989) of the production-reproductionrelationship, or it can be seen as the main gendercontract. It is a stage of segregation.

Why does gender segregation increase asmen and women negotiate private relationships?This seems to be caused partly by the dynamicsof the market itself, but it may be mainly dueto the connection between gender and classbrought out in the gender market in terms of gen-dered attractiveness. It is in every participant’sinterest in terms of upward mobility to definegender commercially. Thereby, even the gendermarket, a free-floating institution compared withearlier systems of marriage alliances, betrays itspartially patriarchal background. We do not haveto assume that men (or the market as an institu-tion) intend the actual result—women (and somemen) as sex objects. Instead, this is the way the



market works, due to the fact that it exists in acontext of partial gender equality rather thanpure free love. The inequality shows up in themarket in the form of abstract masculinity orwage-earning capacity, on the one hand, andmoney-like embodied beauty, on the other.

The gender market forms part of the condi-tions of reproduction and gender relationships;that is, the actual couples or families. As symbol-oriented feminist researchers have pointedout, beauty translates into cleanliness andreproduction, including the woman-motheras a symbolic food figure (Borchgrevink &Solheim, 1988). Yet increasing expectations ofgender equality have made the market patternsmore problematic, along with other breadwinner-related structures. Research has shown a changefrom “naturalistic” to more “individualistic”gender images (Holter, 1990b). Abstract mas-culinity is linked to patterns such as “job mag-netism” and the greater “social space” of theproducer vis-à-vis the caregiver or reproducer(Holter & Aarseth, 1993). Gender patternsoften express labor patterns and the rankingof labor in society. This is connected to the“meta-institutional” power of labor and capitalin modern society (Postone, 1993).

New Gender Forms

So what could a new, reconstructed view ofgender consist of?

Nordic research, especially in Sweden, hasshown the importance of social sanctions for theformation of masculinity, especially the impor-tance of “unmanliness” and the “fear of falling”(Ekenstam, Johansson, & Kuosmanen, 2001).This is connected to shame and authority, butthe more precise background is not clear. Fearof falling, in this context, seems similar toKimmel’s concept of market-related anxiety.Gender market studies tell of men’s fear ofpersonal ruin, expressed in loneliness.

Diversity is one main part of the new genderpicture. Sexuality, once seen as a historicalconstant, can now be approached as a modernform of intimacy, distinct from, for example, theeroticism of Antiquity or the Middle Ages,thanks to the research of Michel Foucault(1977), John Boswell (1980), and others. Men’semotional range and expressions that could beshown in public, such as crying, have variedmuch more than formerly believed.

The new or “diverse” gender is the genderthat is still there when social asymmetry—rank,status, power, exploitation—is left out of thepicture. It can scarcely help being somewhatideal, today, yet its contours are becomingclearer. New, more egalitarian and diversegender forms seem to be embodied and lifeoriented, rather than cognitive-rational andpower or work oriented. Equality-orientedpeople do not refuse to be a man or a woman—the logical conclusion, if power is all there isto gender—yet they do not presume that genderis an eternal and massive dividing line, either.They want individual flexibility, which willallow them to create gender from that basis,gender in a form of their own choosing.

Direct gender hierarchy does not disappear,but it appears in a new light. To decrease anddissolve direct gender hierarchy, the broaderstructures that support it must be addressed.Gender-equal cooperation must be a clear goalrather than an exception in working life, poli-tics, and the economy (Holter & Sørensen,2003). Now, more diverse masculinities have abetter chance. New cultural politics of mas-culinities need to be combined with structuralreforms; that is, measures to balance the labormarket, do away with breadwinner preferencesystems, and reduce overwork. This can beachieved by uniting different parties throughcommon, long-term democratization interests.

IMPLICATIONS OF THE

STRUCTURAL INEQUALITY PERSPECTIVE

Studies of Men

What do the discussion and examples givenhere say regarding research?

Although research developments in gender,women, and men’s studies have strengthenedsocial construction views of gender, biology is notnecessarily thrown out. It reappears in a diversegender that is more healthy and less apt to “soakup” patriarchal problems. A recent family studyfound that traditional gender roles are recreated inembodied forms in modern households. It is whenthe pressure of daily life rises that communica-tion fails, typically with the women eventuallyexpressing dissatisfaction (Lilleaas, 2003). This isnot so much a result of cognitive or power-relatedstrategies as of material fatigue.



Thirty years ago, as research into genderbegan, “sex” was the dominant concept.Biological sex was the factor that had to beweighed into the argument, usually in pro-nouncements like “gender is both biologicaland social.” Today, biology is approached indifferent terms. The social (including cultural,economic, psychological, etc.) side of genderhas been shown to be more varied and changingthan formerly believed. The social is more likea metacode, shifting according to circum-stances, not hard coded. By implication, it ismore advanced in its relation to biology, too, asshown in the earlier example.

Talcott Parsons’s (1964) notion of gendercomplementarity, formulated in the mid-20thcentury, is an example of the ideology of hard-coded gender. Parsons argued that men andwomen were best served in a “complementary”relationship, with the man as breadwinner andwoman as homemaker. He argued that this wasin keeping with their biological (sexual) natures.Later, Parsons’s theory was developed in, forexample, economy (Becker, 1981) but waslargely dismissed as unrealistic in sociology dueto rising democratic and feminist consciousness.

Today, many theorists would interpret Parsons’sargument mainly as a reflection of modern gen-der ideology. Yet gender complementarity was anongoing affair in society, a socially effectivearrangement. Norms really did seem to materi-alize. Parsons’s ideas were formed when the bread-winner ideal of the nuclear family ideal wasstill in its ascendancy. Later research found that,indeed, the provider pattern was (and still is) acore part of masculinity.

Parsons also, probably correctly, assumed atendency toward sex complementarity in humansocieties generally. But like most sociologistsof his time, he took the complementarity to behard coded, a sign of nature represented by thebody. We may note how gender as a relationalconcept emerged from older usage, in which itwas considered to be situated inside women(women as “the sex”), appearing in terms suchas “sex appeal” (Heath, 1982). Parsons thoughtthat a complementarity principle could straight-away be derived from the modern context.Thereby, the nuclear family and breadwinnerideal of the mid-20th century became paradig-matic of human development.

Here, as in many other cases, not least inthe vicinity of gender, the modern abstraction

turned out to be a poor guide to other periodsor societies, the larger ground of true socialscience generalization (Holter, 1997). Today,historians and social researchers are becomingmore aware that the modern “gender glasses” donot work well for understanding other societiesor for in-depth analysis of modern society.Human beings are more than the gender attrib-uted to them; they dynamically change genderand other parts of society and generally maketrouble for abstractist or categorical theory(Connell, 1987). Some feminists saw this earlyon. “Women are not trying to prove the innatesuperiority of one sex to another. That would berepeating the male mistake,” wrote GloriaSteinem (1974, p. 134).

The societal and cultural context is vitallyimportant. Gender is not an isolated subject.Gender discrimination does not exist in theworld alone, does not act as a social force inisolation, but mainly exists and is sociallyeffective through its connection to other mainforms of discrimination, including social statusand race.

DEMOCRACY AND DEPATRIARCHALIZATION

Studies of gender in wars and conflict inmodern society offer further proof, if we neededit, that modern society is still a partly patriarchalsociety. In wars, inequality structures oftenbecome sharp and clear, targeting nonprivilegedmen as well as women and children (Jones,2002).

From the two-dimensional gender-patriarchymodel, we would expect that the dynamics ofdepatriarchalization were connected to specificgendering processes, but in mixed and indirectways, sometimes in conflict. This is in line withsurveys and other studies from the research ofrecent decades. The model makes us expect thatpatriarchal forces often use gender systemmechanisms in attempts to hinder equal statusdevelopments. There is evidence of this in manyareas (e.g., in the use of gender stereotypes inthe media).

The changes among men needed tocreate gender equality differ from the changesamong women. In this respect, these changesare especially significant from a democrati-zation point of view. Changes among menare important for reducing and dissolving



authoritarian relations in society. Existing(but often hidden or subdued) power patternsand exploitative structures in family life, work-ing life, and other areas can be addressed andreduced.

Further, depatriarchalization—for example,in policies such as gender mainstreaming formen—means democratization in terms of socialclass. This has not been achieved by most of themovement on the women’s side—instead, theprocess has sometimes contributed to a popularstereotype of gender-equal status as a matter forcareer women only.

Democratization of class and status remainsimportant in today’s world, with its large eco-nomic differences. A more sharply differentiatedclass society created by globalization meansgreater social costs and problems unless counter-measures are applied. Depatriarchalization canbe seen as a new approach to this policy area. Itis different from a gender strategy of bringingmen in as gendered persons, naming men asmen, but also similar, as it has similar goals, suchas creating new public spaces where problemslike violence and rape are openly discussed. Itspecifically addresses men as “gender equalityresponsible” in their own right, as much aswomen, and sets cooperation between men andwomen as method as well as goal.

Because women’s movements toward gender-equal status (taking greater part in traditionalmen’s activities, etc.) have usually been upwardlymobile in social class terms, although men’shave not, we should expect gender-relatedsanctions to be different. In general, we shouldbe very careful with the idea that the two mainpositions in the gender system are mirror imagesof each other—polarized positions and similar.Asymmetry is a main part of the system, linkedto the way it is integrated, through partial equal-ity structures, with society at large. Althoughmen participate in the equality-patriarchy powerdimension as much as women, we should notassume that men are gendered in the same waysor even to the same extent that women aregendered. This is a matter of better study withclearer concepts.

CONCLUSION

In this chapter, I have discussed studies onmen and masculinities from the point of view of

gender equality analysis and historical researchon changing patriarchal societal structures.Without a compass, it is difficult to make a map,and using the result is apt to be misleading.Today’s gender research offers parts of a map,but it is not well oriented. I regard genderequality as similar to the compass. Without adistinct understanding of equality, one that fallsback into a patriarchal, reified gender discourse,the map will remain obscure. I describe a com-mon discourse in gender studies and debate,constructed on the basis of the “men = patri-archy” or “masculinity = power” line of imagi-nation, without any perceived need to considerthe equality dimension. The map is all, the com-pass nothing. However, too much compass—ortoo structural a view—can also be a problem.I have argued against approaches in whichdirect gender hierarchy becomes the principal,theoretical guideline. This does not amount toan argument that direct gender hierarchy doesnot exist. On the contrary, my point is thatmore context- and process-oriented approaches,based on better gender equality analyses, areneeded to better identify direct gender hierar-chies—not just their existence, but also theircauses, dynamics, and possibilities for reduc-tion. Thus, even if radical approaches to directgender hierarchy may seem most actionoriented in the short run, I think the oppositeis true in the longer run.

I have discussed masculinities as outcomesof gendering processes in conditions of unevenand partial gender-equal status. We cannotexpect “new men” as passive outcomes of morepostpatriarchal structures; men need to engagein these processes, and research must show theprofit for men as well as women. There is avery gradual and quite uneven developmenttoward increased equality. Men are increasinglyapparent as social actors in this development,often through a connection of caring andcaregiving. This is associated with children,women, and emerging diversity. These arethe main areas for new studies, methods, andtheory creation.

NOTE

1. The reification analysis builds on feministanalyses of alienation (e.g., Foreman, 1977); see fur-ther Holter (1997).



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3MEN, MASCULINITIES,AND FEMINIST THEORY

JUDITH KEGAN GARDINER

35

“Is it true . . . that women in your societyare treated exactly like men?” a doctor inUrsula LeGuin’s (1974) science fiction

novel, The Dispossessed, asks a visiting anar-chist. The anarchist replies with a laugh, “Thatwould be a waste of good equipment” (p. 16).Then he explains that in his society, “a personchooses work according to interest, talent,strength—what has the sex to do with that?”(p. 17). Published in 1974, at the height of the20th-century American movement for women’sliberation, LeGuin’s fantasy attempts to visualizegender equality as a society without differencesbased on one’s anatomical sex, but one, it turnsout, that primarily takes the form of allowingwomen the occupational choices and sexualfreedoms already common to men; men do a littlechild care and are otherwise unchanged. Feministtheories take a number of approaches to thisslippery goal of gender equality that are inter-twined with their varying perspectives on menand masculinity. They endorse some aspects oftraditional masculinity, critique some, and ignoreothers, as they ask who will be equal to whom, inwhat respects, and with what results for male andfemale individuals and their societies.

The most important accomplishment of20th-century feminist theory is the concept of

gender as a social construction; that is, the ideathat masculinity and femininity are looselydefined, historically variable, and interrelatedsocial ascriptions to persons with certain kindsof bodies—not the natural, necessary, or idealcharacteristics of people with similar genitals.This concept has altered long-standing assump-tions about the inherent characteristics of menand women and also about the very divisionof people into the categories of “men” and“women.” The traditional sexes are now seenas cultural groupings rather than as facts ofnature based on a static division between twodifferent kinds of people who have both opposedand complementary characteristics, desires, andinterests. By seeking to understand the causes,means, and results of gendered inequality, femi-nist theories hope to develop effective ways toimprove women’s conditions, sometimes bymaking women more similar to men as they arenow, sometimes by making men more similarto women as they are now, sometimes by vali-dating women’s traditional characteristics,sometimes by working toward the abolition orminimizing of the categories of gender alto-gether, but all simultaneously transformingideologies and institutions, including the family,religion, corporations, and the state.


Some women living prior to organizedmovements for women’s rights claimed thatthey were equal to men, as men describedthemselves; that men were not fully equal tothe ideal of masculinity they themselves putforward; and that men and masculinity placedwomen and femininity in a subordinate posi-tion. With the resurgence of a movement forwomen’s rights in the second half of the 20thcentury, varied theories developed to explainthe causes of male domination, to correcterroneous assumptions about both women andmen, and to imagine new kinds of men and ofwomen in new circumstances. These theoriescharged that cultural ideologies favored men,that social institutions reflected these ideolo-gies, and that men as a group benefited fromthe subordination of women as a group, despitethe great disparities that existed in the advan-tages accruing to individual men or subgroupsof men in relation to other men and to women.Thus men and masculinity play a crucial rolein feminist theory, the body of thought thatseeks to understand women’s social situationand to articulate justice from a woman-centeredperspective. Furthermore, feminist thinking hasbeen fundamental to the formation of contem-porary men’s and masculinity studies as intel-lectual endeavors, academic subjects, and socialmovements. This chapter briefly sketches howmen and masculinity figure in several strandsof feminist theory. It looks at what the treatmentof men and masculinity reveals about the gapsand assumptions in these theories. Focusingchiefly on a few key figures, it also indicatessome advantages and future directions that thesetheories pose for masculinity studies.

Misogyny created feminist theory, andfeminist theory has helped create masculinity.That is, cultural condemnation leveled againstwomen by religious writers, philosophers,and popular discourses across centuries andcultures produced rebuttals by women and men.The first feminist theories were primarilydefensive, and as they questioned men’s appro-priation to themselves of essential humanity,they charged that men, too, were embodied as aspecific gender defined according to culturalideals for people with similar bodies, character-ized by certain psychological dispositions,and shaping social institutions to serve theirinterests. As women sought to be included inthe rights and privileges of citizens, they

questioned the gendered meanings of suchideals as liberty, fraternity, and equality and soinitiated one continuing theme of feministtheorizing that has extended into masculinitystudies as well.

Men’s superiority to women is a tenet of theworld’s main monotheisms, although the majorreligions also include countervailing tenden-cies that value women’s spiritual capacities anddelimit male power and authority. The ancientGreek philosopher Aristotle portrayed womenas naturally men’s inferiors in terms of reason.In the long educational and philosophical tradi-tion that venerated his authority, masculinitywas thus rendered both invisible and normative:Masculinity was equated with the human ratio-nality of men, and women were marked by sex-uality, emotion, and their bodies. Champions ofwomen repeatedly asked, if God and nature hadmade women so clearly inferior to men, whywere such strong social inducements necessaryto retain their subjugation?

In reaction to claims that women wereirrational, weak, vicious, and sinful, the earlydefenders of women repeated a number ofstrategies. They claimed women were equalor superior to men, writing, for example, booksabout heroic, saintly, learned, and otherwiseexemplary women. In another common strat-egy, they asserted equality less by raising theimage of women than by lowering the imageof men. They thereby launched an inquiry intothe meaning of equality that continues tothe present. Idealistic depictions of men as theembodiments of reason and humanity, they said,flew in the face of the evils men did: Men, too,were as embodied, irrational, and vicious as themisogynists claimed women were. Furthermore,men tyrannize over women rather than lovingand protecting them as they claim to do. Sothe French medieval author Christine de Pizan(1405/1982) has her allegorical characterReason say “that these attacks on all women—when in fact there are so many excellent women—have never originated with me, Reason” but wereoccasioned rather by men’s own vices, jeal-ousies, and pride (p. 18). Margaret Cavendish(1985), a 17th-century English aristocrat, sug-gests that women rich enough not to depend onmen financially “were mad to live with Men,who make the Female sex their slaves” (p. 89).

In the democratizing ferment of the FrenchRevolution, Mary Wollstonecraft (1985) cried



out for recognition of the common humanity ofboth sexes. Her “Vindication of the Rights ofWoman” appealed to men to “generously snapour chains, and be content with rational fellow-ship instead of slavish obedience” (p. 431).When Abigail Adams (1994) wrote her husbandJohn Adams, one of the founders of theAmerican republic and later president of theUnited States, to “Remember the Ladies” inframing the new American state, she pleadedfor gender equality under Enlightenmentideals of freedom: “Do not put such unlimitedpower into the hands of the Husbands.Remember all Men would be tyrants if theycould” (p. 876). The pioneering Americanfeminists at the Seneca Falls Women’s RightsConvention of 1848 implicitly accepted theclaims of men to both a rational and religiousbasis for citizenship when they attempted toadd women to the language of the Declarationof Independence: “We hold these truths to beself-evident: that all men and women arecreated equal; that they are endowed by theirCreator with certain inalienable rights. . . .”However, their statement immediately accusedmen of failing to uphold their own ideals: “Thehistory of mankind is a history of repeatedinjuries and usurpations on the part of mantoward woman” (Stanton, 1994, p. 1946).Furthermore, they said, “man” has withheldfrom women “rights which are given to themost ignorant and degraded men—both nativesand foreigners” (p. 1947), a strategic attemptto divide the category of “man” by showingsome women superior to groups of men whomother men also held in disrespect. Thus feministefforts to achieve political and educationalequality with men argued that at least somewomen already possessed equality in the quali-ties necessary for these privileges—immortalsouls and educable human reason—but repeat-edly oscillated between imitating and critiquingmen. At least a few men agreed and even fur-thered these arguments. The liberal Englishphilosopher John Stuart Mill (Mill & Mill,1970), who developed his ideas about womenin dialogue with his wife, Harriet Taylor,contended that an equal education for bothsexes would disprove men’s claims to superiorintelligence.

Despite increasing numbers of womenintellectuals, men continued to think of human-ity as made in their image, according to French

philosopher Simone de Beauvoir (1949/1968).Although they knew themselves as subjectscapable of transcending their immediate experi-ences through reason and will, they treatedWoman as their Other—mystery, complement,object of desire, creature of body and change. DeBeauvoir’s path-breaking book The Second Sexdefended women’s claims to full personhoodand undercut men’s pretensions to fulfill theirown ideals. “It is clear that in dreaming ofhimself as donor, liberator, redeemer, man stilldesires the subjection of women,” she writes(p. 172). She attacks the myths of masculinesuperiority and confirms masculine dualitiesthat elevate mind over body by insisting thatmen, too, are creatures of bodily and sexualinfirmity rather than disembodied minds:“Indeed no one is more arrogant towardwomen, more aggressive or scornful, than theman who is anxious about his virility” (p. xxv).In a current version of this critique, RosiBraidotti (2002) alleges that “the price menpay for representing the universal is disem-bodiment, or loss of gendered specificity intothe abstraction of phallic masculinity,” and shesuggests that men need “to get real” by recog-nizing their embodiment (p. 355). Exactly whatthis means and how both men and women,including those with physical and sensory dis-abilities, experience their embodiment is a fruit-ful topic in current feminist and masculinitystudies (Hall, 2002).

Twentieth-century liberal feminism con-tinued the tradition of seeking for women theprivileges already enjoyed by men. BettyFriedan (1963) and the National Organi-zation for Women (founded in 1966) believedthat changing laws and educating people againsterroneous prejudices would remedy gender dis-crimination, giving women equal opportunitieswith men to exercise individual choices in life.They sought gender equity through changes inlaw and childhood socialization. They lobbiedfor equal treatment of boys and girls in schooland wrote children’s books featuring cooperativeboys as well as resourceful girls. They welcomedmen into their organizations and encouragedwomen to enter previously male-dominatedoccupations. In all these endeavors, their criticsalleged, they merely sought women’s inclusionin current, male-dominated institutions, accept-ing a restrictively narrow model of equalitywithout questioning the masculine norms that

Men, Masculinities, and Feminist Theory • 37


valorized abstract reason and law over thebodies and emotions they ruled. Current versionsof liberal feminist theories, however, are moresophisticated in their analyses and offer tomen’s studies models for inquiries into the gen-dering of the law, the media, the state, and theprofessions; civil rights organizations open tomale members with accessible goals for socialreform; and ideals such as androgyny for com-bining traditionally masculine and femininepersonality characteristics in individuals. Thereis still ample room for further studies in theseareas; for example, concerning what fosters boys’and girls’ best learning. Are girls still short-changed by schools, especially in math andscience, or are boys now suffering from a schoolsystem designed to keep good girls quiet andstudious? The questions about which genderwins or loses by which kind of setting or practiceare ripe for reframing while the idea of equalityis still in contention in numerous societal andinstitutional settings.

Psychologist Eleanor Maccoby (1998)represents a recent version of this liberal viewin encouraging individuality and freedom ofchoice for both sexes and allowing for a variedplay of masculine and feminine differenceacross the life cycle. She sees youth “growingup apart” in groups segregated by sex and adultsexperiencing “convergence” in sex and work(p. 189). She describes greater divergencewithin each gender than between the two, notescontradictory components of both masculinityand femininity, and emphasizes that “sex-linkedbehavior turns out to be a pervasive functionof the social context” more than of individualpersonality (p. 9). Other feminist theoristsalso seek to deflate gender dualism by viewinggender as developmental across the life course,so that, for example, masculinity might bedefined by boys’ development from childish-ness to maturity rather than by opposition toa denigrated femininity (Ehrenreich, 1983;Gardiner, 2002).

Another approach to disputing gender bina-ries and the equation of masculinity with humanrationality lies through the psychoanalytic theo-ries of Sigmund Freud and his French followerJacques Lacan. Freud and Lacan (Gardiner,1992) contradictorily asserted that all peoplewere governed by irrational unconscious desires,thus unseating male claims to superior reason,and that men but not women had a privileged

relationship to social power, which was visiblysymbolized in the male anatomical part thatmen feared losing and women envied. LuceIrigiray (1985) reversed what she called the“phallogocentric” Freudian concept of women’s“penis envy” as instead a defining characteristicof the masculine psyche: this alleged femaleenvy “soothes the anguish man feels, Freudfeels, about the coherence of his narcissisticconstruction and reassures him against whathe calls castration anxiety” (p. 51). ThusIrigiray follows one feminist strategy in definingmasculinity as a condition of lack, vulnerability,and weakness, in an ironic mirroring of Freudianversions of women’s lacking genital equipmentand defective moral development. Americantheorist Drucilla Cornell (1998) develops thisLacanian theory to argue that masculinity is nota transcendent human norm but is always imper-iled by unconscious castration fears. The “badnews for the little boy” who identifies with thepower of the idealized father, she says, is that“this fantasy leaves him in a constant state ofanxiety and terror that what makes him a mancan always be taken away from him” (p. 143).This insecurity then fuels men’s fantasies ofsuperiority to women but also provides them,she believes, with the motive for joining femi-nists in challenging the gender order and sofreeing themselves from impossible standardsof masculinity against which they will alwaysfail. As with all uses of psychoanalytic theory,Cornell and Irigiray’s feminist deploymentleaves open the question of how much theFreudian or Lacanian framework distorts orprejudges issues of gender, sexuality, andsexual difference, both in individual humanpsychology and in cultural representations. Per-haps these very schema encourage the over-estimation of the importance of sexual differencein psychic functioning, also minimizing thecomplexities of intrasexual relationships andof nonerotic bonds and antagonisms.

Rejecting psychoanalysis as the unscientificprojection of male fantasies, contemporaryfeminist scientists join the feminist tradition ofrationally disputing sexist claims that men aresuperior to women and different by nature aswell as the claim that science itself is genderneutral (Collins, 1999; Fausto-Sterling, 1992).Susan Bordo (1999) describes the prevailingpervasiveness of androcentrism in science andin men’s attitudes to nature: “The phallus stands,



not for the superior fitness of an individualmale over other men, but for generic malesuperiority—not only over females but alsoover other species” (p. 89). Although someconservative adaptations of evolutionary theoryreinforce traditional gender roles, for examplein explaining male aggression and promiscuity asoptimizing reproductive success and so as pre-dicted strategies for human survival, Darwinianfeminist theorists dispute such ahistoricalmythologizing. Instead, they emphasize thesocial construction of scientific categories,the reliance on gendered metaphors in sciencetexts, and the sexism within science (Fausto-Sterling, 1992). They draw attention to the vastvariety of primate as well as human societiesand manifestations of gender and to the impor-tance in the animal world of social systems overgenetic programming. For instance, BarbaraSmuts (1992) shows that female solidarityamong primates decreases the prevalence ofaggression by males against females. Thus awide variety of feminist theorists disputes alldefinitions of masculinity that claim the nat-ural superiority of men over women and othercreatures. Further work will be developingthe philosophy and sociology of science withrespect to the gendering of nature and ofcontemporary scientific practices.

If one strand of feminist theory critiquesthe supposed rationality of masculinity, anothercharacterizes masculinity as in itself harmful towomen and other men. These are the theoriesmost frequently characterized as male bashing,because they focus on male violence againstwomen and on men’s sexual objectification ofwomen as the very definitions of masculinity.These theories seek gender equality by abolish-ing or dramatically transforming men andmasculinity, although they may either extol orvilify the characteristics ascribed to traditionalfemininity.

Mocking male pretensions to power andauthority, theologian Mary Daly (1987) rejectedreligions dependent on a Father God and soughtto remake a new, nonpatriarchal language as astep toward defeating androcentricism. The punsand startling new word usages in her Wickedaryassociate masculinity not with power but withthe follies and failures of men as individuals andof male-dominated institutions. Thus, forinstance, she defines “male-function” as mean-ing “characteristically unreliable performance

of phallic equipment. Example: the explosionof the space shuttle Challenger” or as an“archetypically endless ceremony or gatheringof maledom. Examples: diplomatic functions,church functions, White House functions”(p. 209).

Legal theorist Catharine MacKinnon is thebest-known exponent of a radical feminist view-point. Her theory posits male oppression ofwomen as the first and most pervasive of alloppressions, the model for racism and classinjustice and the structuring principle of allestablished institutions. She begins one book,for example, with this grim invitation to afemale reader:

Imagine that for hundreds of years your most for-mative traumas, your daily suffering and pain, theabuse you live through, the terror you live with,are unspeakable—not the basis of literature. Yougrow up with your father holding you down andcovering your mouth so another man can make ahorrible searing pain between your legs. Whenyou are older, your husband ties you to the bedand drips hot wax on your nipples and brings inother men to watch and makes you smile throughit. Your doctor will not give you drugs he hasaddicted you to unless you suck his penis.(MacKinnon, 1993, p. 3)

This passage constructs everywoman aseternally a victim, despite its invisible, author-itative female narrator. Its version of men andmasculinity is horrifying, bizarre, and implic-itly culture specific: Men are represented bya father who facilitates the rape of his daughter,a husband who flaunts his sexual sadism, and adope-dealing doctor who forces fellatio on hispatients.

MacKinnon (1987) makes gender dependenton sex and sex dependent on male force. Suchsocial practices as pornography, rape, and pros-titution institutionalize “the sexuality of malesupremacy, which fuses the eroticization ofdominance and submission with the social con-struction of male and female. Gender is sexual.Pornography constitutes the meaning of thatsexuality” (p. 148). MacKinnon does not discussthe origin of this system, but her paradigmimplies that men have always had the rapistmentality to desire forced heterosexual sex aswell as the superior physical power to accom-plish it. For her, masculinity defines men, ratherthan the reverse. “By men I mean the status of



masculinity that is accorded to males,” butnot to those persons who are “defined as subor-dinated by force as women are” (p. 170). Menmust work constantly to keep this masculinecontrol and dominance in place, and the placeof subordinated men, including gay men, isrendered ambiguous in this account.

Although male domination is universal,MacKinnon (1987) believes, it is also shaped bycontemporary society: “women are the propertythat constitutes the personhood, the masculinity,of men under capitalism” (p. 159). Furthermore,in her view, the standards for all aspects ofculture are masculine: “masculinity, the malestandard for men” (p. 71), establishes patriar-chal law and relegates women to the “private,moral, valued, subjective”; men, on the otherhand, accrue to themselves the values of the“public, ethical, factual, objective” (p. 151). Sheclaims that every quality that distinguishes menfrom women is affirmatively compensated bysociety:

Men’s physiology defines most sports, their needsdefine auto and health insurance coverage, theirsocially designed biographies define workplaceexpectations and successful career paths, theirperspectives and concerns define quality in schol-arship, their experiences and obsessions definemerit, their objectification of life defines art, theirmilitary service defines citizenship, their presencedefines family, their inability to get along witheach other . . . defines history, their image definesGod, and their genitals define sex. (MacKinnon,1987, p. 36)

It is not merely the case that men maketheir behavior the norm for all people but thatthese norms are themselves harmful. Pornographyimpels male bodies to act, creating a total mind-body split that apparently constitutes masculinitybut not femininity. For MacKinnon, the mascu-line has always defined humanity, but the mas-culine is inhumane. The ultimate solution tothis grim paradox is the abolition of both mas-culinity and femininity; that is, the abolition ofgender, although feminist-inspired laws, likethose she and Andrea Dworkin proposed to out-law pornography and sexual harassment, mighthelp to identify and ameliorate such negativeconsequences of eroticized masculine domi-nance (MacKinnon, 1987, pp. 200-201).

Not only sexual violence but national andethnic violence, as manifest in torture and

war, provoke feminist theorizing about therelationship between masculinity and thesepredominantly male activities, with the goalof eliminating these horrors rather than ofmilitarizing women. Sociologist Nancy Chodorowexplores the links between masculinity,nationalism, and violence, attributing men’saggression more to cycles of humiliation anddomination among older and younger men than,like MacKinnon, to men’s sexual exploitation ofwomen. She rejects the Freudian theory that allpeople are innately aggressive and insteadsees aggression in both sexes as defending theself when it is endangered either by physicalforce or by humiliation and shame. However,she believes that men are more psychologicallyprone to respond to humiliation by violenceagainst others than women are (Chodorow,2002). Ecofeminist theorists also derive warfrom a “militarized ‘cult of masculinity’” inwhich man conquers nature and definesnational security as the protection of male priv-ilege (Seager, 1999, p. 168). This “environmen-tally destructive ethos includes a cultivation ofhypermasculinity, secrecy, fraternity, and aninflated sense of self-importance” (p. 169). Atits most extreme, Joni Seager alleges, the “cul-ture of nuclear destruction” is “a private men’sclub, within which masculinity is both anexplicit sexualized expression and an implicitlytaken-for-granted context” (p. 172). Thus, forecofeminists and for many global feminists, amasculinity that validates competition amongmen and domination over women alsoimperils the planet. For some of these theorists,masculine attempts to dominate nature contrastwith more feminist attitudes of attunementwith nature. This masculine arrogance, theybelieve, leads to the extinction of species, thedepletion of natural resources, war, and thedestruction of ecosystems necessary for humansurvival.

These radical feminist theories attackmasculinity rather than simply defendingagainst sexist charges about women’s inferior-ity. Their vision of masculinity can be violentand negative, void of any of the positive charac-teristics traditionally assigned to masculinity.Moreover, the superior force of disembodiedreason sometimes seems appropriated in themto that of the female spokesperson for the voice-less and oppressed category of other women.Nevertheless, some male theorists agree with



these radical feminist and ecofeminist positions.For John Stoltenberg (1989), the only ethicalposition for persons with penises is antimascu-line feminism. Thus he encourages other malehumans to join him in Refusing to Be a Man.Exaggerated as the claims of radical feminismmay sometimes seem, it succeeded in breakinglong-standing commonsense assumptions aboutthe naturalness of heterosexual predation andthe triviality of female complaints against maletreatment of women in streets and offices. Withits focus on the harms women experience, itarticulated sexual harassment as a crime andsexual objectification as a pervasive componentof gender inequality. Once stated, these perspec-tives made sense to some men as well, both withregard to relations with women and to relationsamong men. Men around the world work nowwith other men to reduce gendered violencethrough profeminist organizations such asthe Global Network of Men and Mentors onViolence Prevention, as well as in environmen-tal and peace organizations (Freedman, 2002,p. 287). Some men’s studies already addressmen’s bullying and harassment of other men inworkplaces and schools. A question that is stillopen is the usefulness to men’s theorizing of themodel of harm developed by radical feminists.Aída Hurtado (1999), among others, critiquesmasculinist men’s studies on the grounds thatalthough they trumpet men’s “wounds” fromchildhood, they leave white upper-class maleprivilege intact and unexamined. “The Westernmale intellectual tradition cannot theorize froma position of privilege,” she claims, but, rather,only one of a “victimhood” that “leaves the sta-tus quo untouched” (p. 126). However, accurateassessments of men’s self-perceptions and per-ceptions of others that avoid both justificationand blaming may well be necessary to thosedesigning psychological incentives for socialchange.

In contrast to radical feminist theories,many cultural feminist theories do not see maleaggression and other traditionally genderedattributes as innate but rather as developedwithin individual psychologies by mother-dominated child rearing and other widespreadsocial practices. Whereas sharply binary “domi-nance” theories such as MacKinnon’s seem indanger of positing a masculinity that obliteratesfemininity, these “difference,” “cultural femi-nist,” or woman-centered theories validate

women’s traditional characteristics. Suchtheories tend to portray masculinity and femi-ninity as complementary, with both containinggood as well as bad traits. Psychologist DorothyDinnerstein (1976) argues that the universalfemale control of early child rearing explainsboth male dominance and misogyny, because allinfants fear their mothers’ life-giving or with-holding powers and transfer these unconsciousassociations to other women. Chodorow (1978)also explains men’s and women’s disparatepersonality structures through psychologicaldispositions linked to female-dominated childrearing. Because boys, unlike girls, form theirmasculine gender identity not through directimitation of the same-sex parent but throughseparation and contrast from their mothers, shehypothesizes, they develop a sense of self thatis independent, autonomous, and individuated;conversely, girls’ selves are more interdependent,nurturant, and empathic.

Rather than accepting male dominance asnecessary to human society, Chodorow’s popu-lar theory of 1978 explains it through formsof child rearing that have been universal in thepast but that modern technologies and socialarrangements can now alter. Furthermore, shedescribes masculinity as so limiting for men’slives, rather than so enjoyably privileged, thatmen should also have incentives for change. Iffathers take equal responsibility with mothersfor early child care, she argues, gender inequal-ity would disappear, women would be relievedof the unfair burdens of caregiving, and menwould gain a satisfying intimacy with theirchildren, women, and each other. Chodorow(1978) thinks “equal parenting” could bring allpeople “the positive capacities” now restrictedto each sex separately, and both sexes wouldalso be more flexible in their choice of sexualobjects (p. 218). This optimistic theory aboutgender transformation requires dramatic changesin men’s lifestyles as they assume heavy child-care responsibilities to produce more egalitarianpersonality structures in the future; women,on the other hand, will continue their currentmultitasking of work and family obligations.Current empirical studies in parenting showsome changes in fathers’ and mothers’ tasksand commitments of time and emotion totheir children. The effects on the parents,the children, and society at large await futureinvestigation.




Unlike MacKinnon’s and other radicalfeminist theories that simply posit a dominatingmasculinity as the origin of gender inequality,Chodorow’s (1978) psychoanalytic theoryexplains masculinity as a defensive and com-pensatory formation in individual men’s devel-opment. Identifying with their individualmothers, women become mothers in turn, butmen become masculine by identifying withthe male roles in society. “Masculine identifi-cation,” she says, “is predominantly a genderrole identification. By contrast, feminineidentification is predominantly parental,” basedon a girl becoming like her mother, whereasbeing a father has been a minor part of mostmodern men’s identity (p. 176). Thus gender isdefined by men’s difference from women inthese theories but asymmetrically rather than ina relation of either simple opposition or negation.According to Chodorow, this leaves contempo-rary men confused about how to be masculine.She asserts that it is “crucial for everyone . . . tohave a stable sexual identity. But until masculineidentity does not depend on men’s proving them-selves, their doing will be a reaction to insecu-rity rather than a creative exercise of theirhumanity” (p. 44).

In her early discussions of masculineidentity formation based on feminist object-relations psychology, Chodorow (1978) claimedthat masculinity based on negation of themother is a defensive construction likely tobe rigid, formed on unrealistic stereotypesand narrow cultural norms, and disadvanta-geous to both the individual and the culture.However, her more recent defenses of hetero-sexuality as potentially as varied and excitingas the homosexualities lead her to embrace theview that all formations of unconscious desirehave defensive, possibly even perverse com-ponents (Chodorow, 1994, 1999). Thus, ifdefensive personality structures can be asflexible, complex, and exciting as nonde-fensive ones, there is no longer a theoreticalreason to polarize masculinity as formednegatively and defensively in contrast to amore positive femininity. Similarly, althoughfeminist assessments of moral reasoning and“women’s ways of knowing” initially appearedto polarize a rigid abstract masculinity againstinterdependent and interpersonal female styles,current theorists see these gendered styles asdependent on variable social contexts rather

than as stable characteristics of individualpersonality (Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, &Tarule, 1986; Gilligan, 1982; Maccoby, 1998,pp. 198-199). This is a rich field for futureresearch, especially in social contexts outsidethe college survey laboratory or therapist’sconsulting room.

Theories of gender complementarity basedon the psychological asymmetries of childrearing are subject to the criticisms that theyunderestimate the effects of social dominance,historical and cultural differences, and differ-ences among members of the same sex. However,their emphasis on the importance of fatheringhas found widespread acceptance among bothmasculinist and profeminist masculinity theo-rists (Gardiner, 2002). Profeminist scholarsMichael Kimmel and Michael Kaufman (1995),for example, argue that manhood is dangerouswhen formed in flight from femininity. Theycite Chodorow and Dinnerstein, among others,to claim that “men need to heal the motherwound, to close the gap between the mother whocared for us and the mother we have tried toleave behind” (p. 28). They contrast themselveswith the masculinist men’s movement of RobertBly (1990), which urges men to “cut our psychicumbilical cord” with women rather than sharingwith them in the labors of bringing up the nextgeneration (p. 27).

If radical feminist theories sharply dividemasculine power from feminine powerlessnessand cultural feminist theories focus especiallyon psychological differences between men andwomen, other theories are more attentive to themyriad differences that divide men from othermen and women from other women, as well asto the commonalities between the sexes andthe relationships among the various categoriesof social inequality (Lorber, 1994; Maccoby,1998). Feminists of color and many feministsinfluenced by Marxism emphasize the inter-connectedness of gender with other social hier-archies, including nationality, ethnicity, socialclass, racialized identities, and sexualities.African American feminist theorist Patricia HillCollins (1999) explains that the “construct ofintersectionality references two types of relation-ships: the interconnectedness of ideas and thesocial structures in which they occur, and theintersecting hierarchies” of social power; “view-ing gender within a logic of intersectionalityredefines it as a constellation of ideas and social


practices that are historically situated withinand that mutually construct multiple systemsof oppression” (p. 263). The categories thesetheorists describe are not additive but trans-formative, so that, for example, Chicano mas-culinities are not simply Anglo masculinitieswith a salsa beat or a dose of machismo butcomplex responses to Hispanic cultures, Catholicreligion, dominant American middle-class whitemasculine assumptions, and the internal dynam-ics of Latino families (González, 1996). Thesemultidimensional feminist theories allow formore theoretical nuance as well, as seen inHurtado’s (1999) “blasphemies,” addressed towhite feminism and positing, for example, whitemen’s differential treatments of white women,who are needed to reproduce white children,and women of color, who become used rather assexual and economic objects.

Black feminists have repeatedly sought tobalance understanding of the particular oppres-sions experienced by women of color withsympathy toward the vicissitudes of men in theircommunities. They critically examine the dif-ficulties that men of color face in achievingmainstream versions of masculinity and critiquethose forms of masculinity that depend onsexism and male supremacy. In addition, theyjoin male black intellectuals in indicting theprojections of endemic social problems suchas male violence against women or substanceabuse exclusively onto blacks. Both male andfemale theorists situate African Americangender characteristics within the commonhistory of U.S. racism and the legacy of slavery.In particular, they speak of the dispersal offamilies and cultures; the imposition of alienideologies, physical hardship, and degradingservitude; and the denial of education, opportu-nity, sexual choice, and occupational mobility.Chattel slavery was literally dehumanizing, inthat it did not recognize the human status ofslaves in law or practice (Williams, 1991,pp. 216-236); infantilizing, in that it did notrecognize the adult status of slaves but keptthem as wards and dependents judged incapableof citizenship; and sometimes also emasculat-ing, castration figuring prominently in the ter-rorist postbellum tortures of lynching (Ross,2002). These discussions affirm the strengthnecessary to survive such conditions and theresulting cross-sex unity of African Americancommunal experience, and at times they invoke

the West African origins of many AfricanAmerican people or the small-town Americanblack South as models for more ideal and harmo-nious societies than those of the contemporarycapitalist West.

In response to some second-wave whitefeminists who drew analogies between thedisadvantaged positions of women and AfricanAmericans, African American feminists pub-lished the pioneering text All the Women AreWhite, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some ofUs Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (Hull,Scott, & Smith, 1982). African Americanfeminist theorists repeatedly sought to balancesympathy and critique for African Americanmen. Michelle Wallace (1990) began her bookBlack Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman(originally published in 1978) with the premisethat African American men felt deprived ofmanhood by white supremacy, so that it wasa revolutionary claim for human dignity, nota tautology, when striking male garbageworkers mobilized by the Reverend MartinLuther King, Jr., wore signs saying, “I am aman” (p. 1). According to Wallace, AfricanAmerican men in the decade of the blackpower movement (1966-1977) came to believethat “manhood was essential to revolution” andthat authority over women was a primaryagenda for liberation (p. 17). Thus AfricanAmerican feminist discussions of masculinitywere also discussion of the relationshipsbetween men and women within AfricanAmerican communities and of the relationshipsbetween these communities and the dominantwhite culture.

One prominent African American feministtheorist who has returned to these issues repeat-edly over the decades is bell hooks. Writingin collaboration with minister and public intel-lectual Cornel West (1991), she bases herdiscussion and models her goal of an AfricanAmerican “beloved community” on “a visionof transformative redemptive love betweenBlack women and men” (see the dedication).Portraying the ideal bonding between AfricanAmerican men and women not through sexualmetaphors but as political friendship, hooks(1984) sees men as “comrades in struggle”(p. 67). She argues that the poor or workingclass man has been hurt—and sometimes hurtsothers—by being unable to live up to dominantdefinitions of masculinity



because he does not have the privilege or powersociety has taught him “real men” should possess.Alienated, frustrated, pissed off, he may attack,abuse, and oppress an individual woman orwomen, but he is not reaping positive benefitsfrom his support and perpetuation of sexistideology [and so is] not exercising privilege.(hooks, 1984, p. 73)

Looking back to her childhood, hooks(1992) describes a harmonious AfricanAmerican community where “there was nomonolithic standard of black masculinity” andmany men, despite their difficulties in attainingbreadwinner economic status, were “caring andgiving” (p. 88). In recent years, however, shebelieves that media distortions confuse menand women, white people and people of color,with their “stereotypical, fantastical repre-sentations of black masculinity,” and someAfrican American male celebrities augmentthese distortions with swaggering, self-centered“dick thing” masculinity (p.105). Althoughshe thinks African American men “receiverespect and admiration” from white as well asother African American men for flaunting theirostensible sexual prowess and domination ofwomen, she sees these new ideals as spuriousand harmful (p. 93). African American man-hood should once again connote providing andprotecting, she believes, rather than its currentemphasis on men’s “capacity to coerce, control,dominate” that has ruined relationshipsbetween sexes in the black community (p. 66).In contrast, hooks models a kind of feminismbuilt on cooperation between men and women.“Revolutionary feminism is not anti-male,” sheclaims, but rather seeks the full developmentof all individuals (p. 63). She thinks feminismcan help both men and women attainthe “capacity to be wholistic. . . . Rather thandefining manhood in relation to sexuality, wewould acknowledge it in relation to biology:boys become men, girls women, with theunderstanding that both categories are synony-mous with selfhood” (p. 69). African Americanmale theorists are responding to such feministcalls. Philip Brian Harper’s (1996) book Are WeNot Men? Masculine Anxiety and the Problemof African-American Identity, for example,addresses the varieties of African Americanmale experience and the relationships betweenAfrican American men and women. This is a

tense area in contemporary discourse but anessential one if there is to be research ratherthan mere rhetoric in the future.

Thus the theories of feminists of color expandthe categories of gender analysis beyond amasculine-feminine binary, often looking tolarger structures of oppression and social repre-sentations to explain tensions between AfricanAmerican men and women and inviting AfricanAmerican men to join in both theorizing andcommunity building. However, the disparity ofexplanatory schemes among these variousfeminist theories may help indicate some ofthe gaps in each. If some white men who havenot experienced racist oppression are sexistor violent toward women, this explanation isunlikely to be the whole story for AfricanAmerican men either. Conversely, if external eco-nomic and social pressures rather than innateaggression or gendered psychological identifica-tions influence the expressions of masculinity inAfrican American men, such causation is likelyto be operative for other men as well. Currently,many studies are segregated less by gender thanby academic discipline, whereas more inter-disciplinary analyses of the effects of racism andsexism on the lives of all people are warranted.

Other U.S. theorists of color and globalfeminists currently join African Americanfeminists in analyzing ways in which mas-culinity is constructed in specific historical andcultural contexts. For example, Anna MariaAlonso (1992) describes a Mexican construc-tion of masculinity in which the independentpeasant is fully masculine, in opposition to thewage worker, who is “both like a child andlike a woman because he relies on othersfor his sustenance” (p. 414). Chandra TalpadeMohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres(1991) show British imperial rule in Indiaoperating through “the ideological construc-tion and consolidation of white masculinity asnormative and the corresponding racializa-tion and sexualization of colonized peoples”(p.15). Chilla Bulbeck (1998), who describesglobal feminisms often overlooked by Anglofeminists, reports on changing categories ofsame-sex behavior and “third genders” aroundthe world (p.154). Evelyn Nakano Glenn(1999) traces the problematic effects of equatingmasculinity with independence in “the racial-ized gender construction of American citizen-ship” (p. 22), and Valentine Moghadam (1999)



investigates the interconnections among hugemilitary expenditures, deindustrialization, civilconflict, the rise of fundamentalist movements,and the consequent “reinstitutionalization ofpatriarchal gender relations” in the developingworld (p. 132). Typical of this postmillennialperspective is Cherríe L. Moraga’s (2002) inclu-sive definition of the concerns of women ofcolor in terms affecting both men and womenthroughout the restructuring globe: She includes“immigrant rights, indigenous peoples’ water andland rights, the prison industrial system, milita-rism, [and] reproductive rights.”

Because these global and multiculturalfeminists all seek to make an impact on mixed-gender communities defined in opposition tothe dominant white Western culture, they tendto adopt the position of collaborators in strug-gle with male colleagues from their consti-tuencies, adding their methodological toolsof intersectional analysis to antiracist andantiglobal organizing strategies. Their visionsof equality look to a more inclusive and fairerfuture for both sexes throughout the world. Ashooks (2000) wrote,

The only genuine hope of feminist liberation lieswith a vision of social change that takes intoconsideration the ways interlocking systems ofclassism, racism, and sexism work to keep womenexploited and oppressed [in relation to] a globalwhite supremacist patriarchy [that] enslavesand/or subordinates masses of Third Worldwomen. (p. 109)

The gendered work of global systems andof various human ecologies will be important tofuture research agendas, as will such areas asthe differential gendering and sexualization ofnew technologies.

As we have seen, many strands of feministtheory seek to make masculinity visible as agender, rather than allowing it to retain the pres-tige of being equated with human rationality orthe invisibility of being equated with economicor scientific law. Some of the feminist theoriesdiscussed here divide masculinity sharply fromeither a devalued traditional femininity ofpassivity and sexual objectification or from arevalued femininity of nurturance and empa-thy. Intersectional and multicultural feministtheories retain gender as a crucial element inthe complex, changing, and interrelated socialhierarchies they describe throughout the globe.

In contrast, some poststructuralist feministtheories, especially those claiming the rubric“queer,” interrogate the very concept of genderas tied to specific kinds of human bodies. Thatis, they question the foundational categoriesof men and women altogether and may wishto eliminate or proliferate gender beyond thecurrent male-female dichotomy.

Poststructuralist feminists tend to see gen-der as fluid, negotiable, and created throughrepeated performances rather than as fixed orinnate. They believe their view is more liber-ating than the ideas of either traditionalistsor other feminists. Although they do not claimthat androgyny or gender convergence hasalready been achieved, their theories forecasta multiplicity of gendered possibilities forpeople rather than only two opposed condi-tions. In her highly influential book GenderTrouble (Butler, 1990), philosopher JudithButler calls gender “a kind of persistent imper-sonation that passes as the real” (p. x). Hergoal is not to make it more genuine but toconvince others of its artificiality. “As a strat-egy to denaturalize and resignify bodily cate-gories” in a less polarized manner, sheproposes “a set of parodic practices based in aperformative theory of gender acts that disruptthe categories of the body, sex, gender, andsexuality and occasion their subversive resigni-fication and proliferation beyond the binaryframe” of masculinity and femininity (p. xii).She often repeats her belief that to “denatural-ize” is to rename in a way that is liberating andprogressive. Part of moving “beyond the binaryframe,” in Butler’s work, is her deemphasis onmasculinity and femininity in favor of “gen-der,” understood as potentially multiple andvariable. Neither “masculinity” nor “feminin-ity” appears in the index to Gender Trouble,although “bisexuality,” “feminism,” “phallogo-centrism,” and “sex/gender distinction” are allrepresented. Butler’s work thus continues thefeminist strategy of seeking liberation fromtraditional constraints by disputing the natural-ness of gender altogether, but its distinctivecontribution lies in the argument that institu-tionalized heterosexuality creates gender(Butler, 1997, p. 135). If it were not sociallyuseful for there to be two sexes to marry oneanother and divide work and kinship, sheclaims, people would not need to be dividedinto the categories of men and women at all.



Butler’s performative theory of gender hasbeen enormously productive for the developmentof queer theory as a field and for the advancementof an antihomophobic political agenda in alliancewith the movement for gay, lesbian, bigender,and transsexual rights (d’Emilio & Freedman,1997). Many male queer theorists have analyzedabject and alternative masculinities among menin relation to hegemonic masculinities (Bersani,1988; Thomas, 1996). Some female queer theo-rists, too, have focused specifically on alternativemasculinities, especially as they are representedin the media. For example, film theorist KajaSilverman (1992) argues for the progressivepotential of nonphallic masculinities that avoiddominant masculinity’s disavowal of powerless-ness and instead “embrace castration, alterity,and specularity” (p. 3). Even more radically,other queer theorists embrace masculinity whenits signs are manifest in female rather thanmale bodies. For example, sociologist GayleRubin (1992) argues that the lesbian categoriesof butch and femme compose an alternativegender system, not a simple imitation of thetwo conventional genders of male masculinityand female femininity. Although she admitsthat butch and femme are created within theenvironment of heterosexist society, she claimsthey refigure traditional gender in ways thatmay be either reactionary or liberating for theindividuals involved and for society as a whole.She says that “like lesbianism itself, butch andfemme are structured within dominant gendersystems” and may either resist or uphold thosesystems but never completely escape them(p. 479). Thus butch is specifically lesbianmasculinity, configured differently but alwaysin relation to heterosexual men’s masculinity,which is itself a complicated, changing, andsometimes self-contradictory social constel-lation. For some women, she says, feeling theyhad traits often ascribed to men, such as athleti-cism or aggression, seems to have impelledtheir butch identities; for others, sexual desirefor other women implied to them their ownmasculinity. For yet other women, the primaryimpulse toward a butch identity seems to havebeen the feeling that they were inwardly oressentially a man. Ways of achieving congruencewith that feeling include adopting men’s mascu-line signifiers, such as a necktie or moustache,or, these days, a surgically transformed body.

Queer theorist Judith Halberstam (1998)catalogues varieties of masculinity in femalebodies, what she calls “masculinity withoutmen,” including the androgyne, the tribade,the female husband, the stone butch, and thedrag king. She concludes that “we are alltranssexuals” and that “there are no transsexu-als”: Contemporary possibilities for surgicaltransformation of the body “threaten the bina-rism of homo/heterosexuality by performingand fictionalizing gender” (Halberstam, 1994,pp. 225-226). That is, with the categories ofmen and women unstable, people cannot becategorized by habitual sexual desire directedtoward one or the other of two categories.Halberstam (1998) seeks an end to “compulsorygender binarism” and its replacement by moreflexible, depathologized forms of “gender pref-erence” (p. 27). Nor are masculine women theonly ones with a vested interest in masculinities,as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1995) notes. “Asa woman, I am a consumer of masculinities,but I am not more so than men are; and, likemen, I as a woman am also a producer ofmasculinities and a performer of them” (p. 13).Furthermore, Sedgwick claims that masculinityand femininity are not opposite ends of thesame continuum but rather “orthogonal toeach other”; that is, independent variables in“perpendicular dimensions” so that a personcould be high or low in both scales at once(p.15). This arena looks particularly fruitful forpsychological studies in masculinity and queertheory as well as in feminist scholarship.

Although some contemporary feministswant to claim masculinity for women or multi-ply genders, other feminists strive to minimizegender polarization or to eliminate genderaltogether. Psychologist Sandra Lipsitz Bem(1993) explains that she found the conceptsof androgyny and of sexual orientation toolimiting to fit her own needs and so came tothink that “gender polarization, androcentrism,and biological essentialism” all reinforcedmale power and so distorted the possibilitiesfor gender equality (p. viii). Sociologist JudithLorber (1994) stresses the multiplicity of“gendered sexual statuses” that might be cate-gorized by genitalia, object choice, appearance,gender display, kinds of relationship, relevantgroup affiliation, sexual practices, and self-identifications (pp. 58-59). Her fundamental



goal is the abolition of gender by structuringequality so thoroughly into society that manyforms of sexuality are recognized as equallyvalid and gender no longer organizes social lifeat all. This view takes the abolition of gender asthe only way of eliminating gender inequalityand as a positive goal in itself: “When the infor-mation about genitalia is as irrelevant as thecolor of the child’s eyes . . . then and only thenwill women and men be socially interchange-able and really equal” (p. 302). Until then, ofcourse, research that documents actual changein attitudes, behaviors, and institutions will beof special value.

Poststructuralist feminist and queer theoriesencourage the flexibility and variability of bothidentity and desire and the decoupling of genderidentity and sexual preference. Although femaletheorists seem especially interested in female-embodied masculinities and sometimes warntheir male colleagues about exclusive attentionto male practices, queer theories generally areaccommodating to male practitioners anddisruptive of the heteronormativity that manyfeminists feel upholds male dominance. On theother hand, queer theorists pay little attentionto some of the central concerns of other kindsof feminist theorizing: to parenting, for example,or citizenship, or the gendered politics of work,although both male and female queer theoristsare now more frequently incorporating antiracist,global, and other multifactored perspectives intotheir analyses.

The movement for women’s equality has beenone of the most successful social movements ofthe past century, despite the varying oppressionsstill suffered by women around the globe.Feminist theories have been shaped by women’schanging place in contemporary societies, andthese theories have sometimes proved effective inchanging both men’s and women’s consciousnessand conditions. The widespread establishment ofwomen’s studies programs in colleges and uni-versities, especially in the United States, has cre-ated a pool of practitioners of feminist theory andinspired the establishment of men’s and mas-culinity studies as well (Boxer, 1998). Althoughmasculinist men’s movements sometimes decryfeminism, generally men’s studies treat feminismand feminist theory as scholarly big sisters,perhaps dull, dowdy, outmoded, or too restrictive,but nevertheless models to be followed and

bettered. Feminists ridicule masculinist men’sstudies and welcome profeminist efforts by men.American feminist journalist Gloria Steinem(1992) announces that “women want a men’smovement” if that means men will “becomemore nurturing toward children, more able to talkabout emotions,” and less violent and controlling(p. v). English psychologist Lynne Segal (1990)regrets the “slow motion” of men toward genderequality and muses that the literature of mas-culinity “uncannily mirrors” its feminist fore-bears: it “focuses upon men’s own experiences,generates evidence of men’s gender-specificsuffering and has given birth to a new field ofenquiry, ‘Men’s Studies’” (2000, p. 160). Atpresent, feminist theorists are citing masculinityscholars more frequently than previously, andvice versa. Feminist thinkers are benefiting fromthe theoretical insights and empirical findingsof masculinity studies that concern the complexasymmetries, changing histories, local conditions,and institutional variances of gender in a widevariety of specific settings.

Current textbooks in women’s and mas-culinity studies agree in their basic feministpremises, all describing hierarchies of domi-nance, relationally defined gender, and multipleand interactive axes of social oppression(Gardiner, 2003). In a rapidly changing worldmarked by contradictory forces of war, violence,disrupted ecologies and economies, fundamental-ist backlash, enhanced opportunities for women,the feminization of poverty, the casualizationof labor, the decline of traditional male wages,the objectification of male bodies, the recognitionof more diverse sexualities, the reconfiguration ofnationalities and ethnicities, the rise of liberatingsocial movements, and what Donna Haraway(1989) calls the “the paradoxical intensificationand erosion of gender itself ” (p. 191), feministtheories continue to develop in conversationwith men’s and masculinity studies and othermovements for social justice. They continue toseek an equality for men and women and forpeople around the globe at the highest levelof human imagination and aspiration rather thanthe lowest common denominator. As GloriaAnzaldúa (2002) comments, “in this millenniumwe are called to renew and birth a more inclusivefeminism, one committed to basic human rights,equality, respect for all people and creatures, andfor the earth” (p. xxxix).



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4QUEERING THE PITCH?

Gay Masculinities

TIM EDWARDS

51

On the face of it, gay masculinities area contradiction in terms: Gay negatesmasculine. The litany of terminology

associated with homosexuality over the pastcentury, let alone its representations (rangingfrom Quentin Crisp’s Naked Civil Servant toThe Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of theDesert, as well as a camp tradition of televisionstars from John Humphries in Are You BeingServed? to Graham Norton’s self-titled chatshow), provide ample demonstration of thenever-ending association of the homosexualwith the effeminate: limp-wristed, shirt-liftingpoofs, pansies, and queens.1 Nonetheless, thedefining feature of the gay man is that he lovesor simply eroticizes men as opposed to womenand therefore, in some sense, the masculineas opposed to the feminine. This factor wasstrongly reinforced in the 1970s when, in thewake of gay liberation, many gay men rejectedthe effeminate in favor of the hypermasculine,sexually driven machismo of “clone culture”(defined later). All of this leaves us with some-thing of a conundrum, for if gay men are notreal men at all, or if they are gender deviantswhose relationship to masculinity is essentiallyone of lack, then how does this square with their

attempts to reclaim the masculine, if onlythrough desire?

It would seem that at the crux of this contra-diction, and without necessarily invoking anyspecific psychoanalytic connotation, is thewider playing out of the relationship of desireand identification.2 Within the heterosexualframe, this is, at least stereotypically, quitesimple: The male, in identifying as masculine,learns to desire what he is not, on some level atleast; namely, the female and the feminine. Yet,within the frame of the homosexual, this rela-tionship is far more complex: The male, in pos-sibly still identifying as masculine, but stronglyundermined by stereotypes and attitudes to thecontrary, desires what he perhaps still is orwants to be, which is also masculine. Or, to putit more simply, in relation to homosexuality,desire and identification become, if not thesame, then certainly less distinct.

This sense of contradiction surrounding malehomosexuality and masculinity would alsoseem to work on several strongly interrelatedlevels: first, and most personally, in relation tohomosexual men themselves, who are caught upin still being men but also desiring them—which renders them somehow not men at all;


second, more socially, in relation to questionsof representation and attitudes that often see gaymen as either promiscuous perverts of somemonstrous masculine sexuality or as effeminatequeens whose only relationship to the masculineis a negative; and third, discursively and histor-ically, possessing a sexuality that is somehownever simply just a matter of preference but amatter of gender and of definitions of normalcyand deviance.

Consequently, it is my primary intention inthis chapter to expose, explore, and perhapsresolve some of these contradictions concern-ing homosexuality and masculinity that, whenconnected, constitute the complex phenomenonthat is contemporary gay masculinity. As fre-quently noted, this invokes a focus on thepolitics as well as the theory of gender and sex-uality, as the one has constantly informed theother and vice versa (Weeks, 1985). There arethree key sections: first, a consideration of thehistory of homosexuality; second, a discussionof various academic and political perspectivestaken from the successes and failures of gay lib-eration; and third, an evaluation of more recenttheoretical attempts to resolve, or at leastunderstand, the contradictions of masculinityand homosexuality.

THE HOMOSEXUAL TRIUMPHANT:HIS STORY OF HOMOSEXUALITY

It is now well-known, within more academiccircles at least, that homosexuality is a cultur-ally specific, modern, and Western phenomenon(Caplan, 1987; Greenberg, 1988; Katz, 1976;Plummer, 1981; Weeks, 1977). While same-sexdesire is in all likelihood universal throughouttime and space, the homosexual as a type ofperson is only a century or so old and only fullyexists in a similar form within parts of theUnited States, Australasia, and NorthernEurope, with variant forms elsewhere within thedeveloped world and very little that is trulycomparable anywhere else. What this assertioncrucially rests on is the distinction of sexual actsand sexual identities—or, to put it more directly,homosexual sex alone does not a gay man make.This accounts, among other things, for the rou-tine ability of a large number of men who havesex with men, in public toilets or elsewhere, not

to regard themselves as “gay” at all. It is alsoborne out in studies of sexual behavior thatreport very large discrepancies between thenumbers of men who have had sexual experi-ence with other men and the numbers of menwho identify themselves as homosexual or gay,most famously in the Kinsey Report of the1940s but reinforced in later research (Kinsey,Pomeroy, & Martin, 1948; Spada, 1979; Wellings,Field, Johnson, & Wadsworthy, 1994).

What this assertion also rests on is the logicof social construction. Social constructionisttheory, in a variety of ways, seeks to demon-strate that sexuality, far from being biological,constant, or inevitable, is socially variable, con-tingent, and ambiguous. Fundamental in thiswas the now legendary work of anthropologistMargaret Mead in Samoa, in which she demon-strated, in some empirical detail, a variety ofsexual practices and gendered identities thatwere often at significant variance from those inthe West, as well as the wider sociological con-cern with the social rather than biological natureof human society (Cooley, 1902; Durkheim,1951; Mead, 1977). More recently, social con-structionist accounts of sexuality have gainedsignificant impetus from the work of MichelFoucault. Foucault, in his pioneering Historyof Sexuality (1978), saw the homosexual as aspecific type of person, “invented,” as it were,through the work of a series of NorthernEuropean scientists of sex, or sexologists, in thelate 19th century, including the Swiss doctorKaroly Benkert, who coined the term homo-sexual; Krafft-Ebing; and Magnus Hirschfeld,among others (Foucault, 1978, 1984a, 1984b).The assertion that the homosexual identity is aculturally specific phenomenon that varies inperception, practice, and outcome from time totime and place to place also strongly under-mined the notion that the homosexual identity atleast, if not same-sexual activity, is simply theresult of some kind of behavioral, biological, orpsychological essence. In addition, for Foucaultthis counteracted any notion of Victorian repres-sion, and even sexual desire itself was con-structed discursively through processes ofmedical, scientific, and psychiatric labeling, aswell as other often state-driven attempts to setup and enforce the boundaries of sexual nor-malcy and sexual pathology. In conjunctionwith this, the rise of expertise per se, as part ofwhat Foucault called “scientia sexualis,” or an



entire science of sex, further hammered homethe conception of the homosexual as a type ofperson and homosexuality as a condition, a per-ception validated, reinforced, and perpetuated assexual “truth.”

This perspective has been adopted andelaborated throughout a variety of studies bothhistorical and anthropological, as well as polit-ical and sociological. In relation to anthro-pology, Foucault’s legacy has been used toillustrate the indeterminacy of sex, exposing awide diversity of cultural attitudes and practicesin relation to sexuality (see, for example,Caplan, 1987; Greenberg, 1988). More his-torically, Jeffrey Weeks (1977, 1981, 1985) inparticular provided a thoroughgoing analysis ofthe twin motors of reform and regulation thatwere then seen to found and form the develop-ment of contemporary gay culture. Gay libera-tion was thus seen to be the culmination ofmuch earlier movements toward reform datingback to the 19th century and the work ofEdward Carpenter (1908), among others, aswell as the increased visibility brought about bythe trial of Oscar Wilde in the United Kingdom.3

Politically, the same argument has been used tocritique medical and psychological attempts topathologize the homosexual and to develop aprimarily utopian vision of a world in whicherotic attachment is merely a matter of lifestyleor personal choice of no more concern thanliking tea or coffee (Bristow & Wilson, 1993;Harwood et al., 1993; Walter, 1980). Sociolog-ically, social constructionist theory has alsocome to inform a range of studies of gender andsexuality more widely. In particular, theseinclude interactionist work, in which sexualidentity is seen as form of self-constructednarrative, or storytelling; and feminist work, inwhich the logic of constructionism has clearlyfueled the sense of the unnaturalness of femi-ninity in the wake of second-wave feminismand, more recently, the attempt to deconstructthe very category of woman (Plummer, 1984;Riley, 1988; Wittig, 1997). Ironically, one mightalso now conjecture that social construction-ism has become adopted so routinely withinthe social sciences as to constitute a near“discourse” in itself.

That said, this particular history of homosex-uality is not without critique, perhaps most tire-somely from variant forms of essentialism thatnever-endingly try to claim that homosexuality

is the result of some abnormality in hormones,the brain, or parental upbringing (see, forexample, Le Vay, 1993). The problems of essen-tialism are now well established and are basedon three central points: first, that claims madeare of dubious reliability and validity in scien-tific terms, as they are often based on small sam-ples, animals, or identical twins, from whichwider generalizations are necessarily limited;second, that in reiterating the significance ofthe etiology of homosexuality, these claims havehad the consequence, intended or not, of bothmarginalizing and pathologizing homosexualitythrough the lack of any comparable attention toheterosexuality; and third, that such claimsundermine the capacity for change and absolveresponsibility both personally and socially,leading to an “I/they can’t help it” model ofhomosexuality.

The ambiguity of these claims morepolitically has not gone unnoticed whereattempts have not only been made to patholo-gize homosexuality (through aversion ther-apy, for example) but to establish the rights ofthose with a gay biology through an appeal tocivil liberties or a similar minority platform.Similarly, constructionist claims often cham-pion homosexuality as an alternative lifestylechoice, yet these beliefs can also lead to fearsof contagion, or gay sexuality “rubbing off,”which often underpins much resistance to gayand lesbian parenting (Epstein, 1987, 1988;Evans, 1993). It is not my intention here, how-ever, to evaluate these claims in detail or to fuelan already very old and tired debate betweenessentialists and constructionists.

I do, however, wish to raise several concernsin relation to the constructionist history of homo-sexuality as it is most commonly perceived,played out, and perpetuated within predomi-nantly sexual-political understandings of sexu-ality. It is of critical importance here to note thatI am not attempting to provide a critique ofFoucault’s work per se; rather, I am questioningsome of the ways in which it has been adoptedand applied elsewhere. I am thinking particu-larly of the work of various gay historians andthe adoption of their work within some forms ofsocialist feminism, as well as some of its morecontemporary and eclectic variants (Bristow &Wilson, 1993; Harwood et al., 1993; Patton,1985; Segal, 1990; Weeks, 1985). Althoughvarying significantly, all of these theorists

Gay Masculinities • 53


cite Foucault as a major influence in adopting apolitically informed perspective that is at painsto point out both that homosexuality is sociallyconstructed and that gay liberation represented ahigh-water mark in wider movements towardgreater social acceptance of sexual diversity. AsI have already documented and critiqued theseperspectives in detail elsewhere, I do not planto do so again here (Edwards, 1994, 1998).However, it remains necessary to summarizesome of the key problems: First, these perspec-tives often fail to problematize gay liberationsufficiently either theoretically or politically;second, to varying degrees, they present a viewof sexual history that is insufficiently racializedor gendered; and third, they tend to lead to aform of triumphalism, a kind of “we’ve made it”perspective that offers few solutions to currentproblems other than to reiterate the joys ofdiversity and pluralism ad nauseam. The restof this section will document some of thesedifficulties more fully, particularly as they per-tain to the relationship of homosexuality andmasculinity.

First, the history of homosexuality remainsprofoundly gendered. As I have argued else-where, gender and sexuality as practices, dis-courses, and indeed constructs are intricatelylinked, and it is often far more accurate to talk interms of gendered sexualities and sexualizedgenders than of gender and sexuality as if theywere two distinct categories (Edwards, 1990). Inaddition, the stigmatization of male homosexu-ality has much to do with gender. Gay men areoften castigated as the wrong sort of men: toomasculine, too promiscuous, too phallic, or toolacking in masculinity, somehow incompetent atit, or simply effeminate. Similar themes alsoemerge in relation to female homosexuality—lesbians become “butch diesel dykes” and mas-culinity in the wrong body or, conversely, somekind of feminine hormonal sexuality gone wild,“lipstick lesbians” who just can’t help helpingthemselves to “a bit of the other.” In sum, thegay man is often oppressed for being the wrongsort of man, and the lesbian is subordinated forbeing the wrong sort of woman.

What also comes into play here, however, isthe sense in which the commonly played outhistory of homosexuality as socially constructedfails to recognize the significance of gendereven within in its own terms. Some feministshave highlighted this gender absence as

indicative of a deliberate attempt to suppress theimportance of feminism, depoliticize academia,and indeed exclude women (Stanley, 1984).I would like to suggest that the issue here isperhaps wider and indeed more historical.Women’s sexuality, particularly in any formautonomous from men’s, has had a very longhistory of struggling to find voice in the faceof often concerted attempts to silence it or evendeny its existence. The comparative invisibility,even now, of lesbianism compared with thepublic spectacle, if not pariahlike, status of gaymale sexuality, is testimony to this, as is thefrequent desexualization of female homosexual-ity into mere “romantic friendship” (Faderman,1981). Recent attempts to reclaim some sense ofthe sexuality of lesbianism either discursively,through reinventing the connotations of theidentity of the dyke, or through representationsof women as promiscuous sexual predators,for example in the work of photographer DellaGrace, have often succeeded more in openlyparodying gay male sexuality and less in findingan alternative voice for the women who wish toexpress their sexual desires for other women(Grace, 1993). It is, I think, clear, then, that thiscontemporary constructionist story of sexualityis indeed his story of his homosexuality, and itis not satisfactory as an explanation of, or evenas an engagement with, its female equivalent.Strictly within that caveat, it may remainsatisfactory as an understanding of the historyof male homosexuality alone. However, as weshall see, several difficulties remain.

The gendering of this history of homo-sexuality does not end with the simple differen-tiation of its male and female variations. Farmore significantly, the history of male homo-sexuality remains gendered per se. The mostcursory glance through past forms of male same-sex sexuality reveals a very significantly varying,yet equally profoundly unending, connectionwith gender. Greco-Roman culture may show noappropriate parallel with contemporary under-standings of gay male sexuality, yet it equallydemonstrates its connection with questions ofmaleness and masculinity. Here, Spartan sexualrelations were hardly formations of gay iden-tity, yet they were importantly connected withinitiations into socially prescribed patterns ofmanhood (Eglinton, 1971). Similarly, the mollyhouses of the Renaissance were in no waysimple equivalents to contemporary gay male



clubs, bars, or ghettos, yet they did perform thefunction of providing meeting places for per-ceived gender, as well as sexual, deviants (Bray,1982). In addition, the sexology of the 19th cen-tury makes repeated reference to the connectionof gender to male same-sex desire, whether asa third alternative or as an inversion (Carpenter,1908). Equally, the clone culture of the 1970swas as much concerned to prove that gay menwere men and not simply gay and, in attemptingto reformulate the relationship between sexualityand masculinity, the connection remained. Noneof these historical moments is remotely the sameor even easily comparable, but they do in verydifferent ways repeatedly allude to the continuedconnection, and not separation, of “the love thatdare not speak its name” with questions of mas-culinity.4 To assert, then, that sexuality is a thingapart from gender for anything other than heuris-tic purposes is not only theoretically inadequatebut empirically inaccurate and politically naïve.

It is perhaps the politics of this social con-structionist history of homosexuality that are itsweakest link. I have already noted its feministlimitations, and one could equally highlight itswholesale whitewashing of the issue of race,color, or ethnicity, as have Kobena Mercer andIsaac Julien (1988). However, what is perhapsmost insidious here is the sense in which it failsto meet the needs or expectations of even privi-leged white gay men. As we shall see, sexism,racism, and ageism are but some of the “isms”thrown at gay male culture, but it is gay menthemselves who often seem to lose out most andsuffer most directly. As one disillusioned writerin the gay press recently pointed out

It was the politics of visibility, but rather thancreate an image that was drawn from our innerselves, we appropriated a macho stance. For thefirst time, we congregated in defined gay spaces,but because our struggle was based on sexuality,the meeting points were based around sex. Despitegathering under the “gay” banner, our ghetto wasvery much homosexual. By looking like “realmen” we made gay sex more acceptable but lostan opportunity to create a gay identity beyond theactive sex object. (Miles, 2003, p. 34)

This may seem gloomy, but Miles is farfrom alone in his complaint that gay culture isa shallow, youth-dominated, image-, sex-, andbody-obsessed world predicated upon self-loathing and leaving profoundly little room for

any alternative but to conform, pump iron, anddeny one’s emotional dissatisfactions, a feelingthat arguably remains largely unchanged andundiminished since gay liberation. Indeed,given the media’s increasing fuelling of gay,and perhaps all, culture as merely a matter offashion, looks, and entertainment, the pressuresare probably worse today. The commonlyplayed out constructionist history of homosex-uality has no answer to this. Within this per-spective, the homosexual is not only triumphantacademically as a socially constructed categorybut rather victorious socially, politically, andpersonally as an alternative way of life. In itsnever-ending emphasis on the power of comingout, in its championing of the hard-won bene-fits of gay liberation, and in its promotion ofthe politics of pluralism for sexual minorities,all that remains is to metaphorically, and per-haps literally, throw one’s legs in the air andenjoy it. Such an account never even conceivesof the question “and then what?,” let aloneoffering any solution. It is to this question ofthe failings and problems of gay liberation thatwe now turn.

CLONE COMPLAINTS:THE PROBLEMS OF GAY LIBERATION

Gay liberation is problematic not least becauseliberation per se is problematic, both theoreti-cally and politically. In theoretical terms, thenotion of liberation tends to imply essentialism,and, in relation to sexuality, this is compoundedby its conflation with the concept of repressionand the assertion of some otherwise containedor constrained sexual desire. The difficulty hereis not so much the charge of essentialism, whichmust remain in some senses merely a descrip-tive term, but the sense of confusion invokedconcerning what exactly is being liberated: asexual desire, a sexual identity, a sexual com-munity, or all three? This is not to deny in theleast that gay men still constitute a marginalized,stigmatized, and, on occasion, even demonizedgroup, yet such an experience is perhaps moreaccurately understood as a problem of subordi-nation, emancipation, or, indeed, oppression. Theterm liberation therefore remains rather inade-quate in theoretical terms.

Nevertheless, it has remained the politicalincantation of the gay movement since the



Stonewall rebellion of 1969.5 Given theaforementioned ambiguities of the terminologytheoretically, it is worth trying to unpack a littleof what is more politically meant by the term“gay liberation.” On its most immediate level,gay liberation proclaimed the importance ofcoming out, which was seen to work on threeinterconnected levels: first, through acceptingone’s sexuality for oneself; second, in exploringit with others of similar orientation; and third,by telling the rest of the world with pride(Walter, 1980). Coming out is again ambiguoushere, whether purely as a matter of personalchoice or more widely as a form of politicalaffirmation, as it retains the potential impli-cation of freeing an essential and hidden, orsimply inner and asocial, self. None of this,of course, affected the development of a thriv-ing commercial culture of clubs, bars, cafes,and shops premised on a politics of increasedvisibility through coming out.

This sense of ambiguity, or even ambiva-lence, concerning gay liberation was, however,also illustrated more academically. Some ofthe earliest works on gay politics, particularlythose of Hocquenghem (1972) and Mieli(1980), attributed a liberating force to gay desirein celebrating promiscuity, pushing the bound-aries of decency, and, more generally, goingagainst the mores of mainstream heterosexualsociety; others, particularly those of Altman(1971) and Weeks (1977), saw gay politics as aculturally specific phenomenon contingent onhistories of movements toward reform andslowly shifting morals and values. It was not,perhaps, surprising, then, that much of thisambivalence should also be played out througha series of academic debates that followed theonset of gay liberation. These more theoreticaldebates were in themselves often founded on thepolitical involvements of young writers and aca-demics making their careers in colleges and uni-versities. Most of these controversies centeredin turn on various, and often violently opposed,perspectives of the development of commercialgay culture and the practices and attitudes ofgay men, most notoriously those of the overtlysexualized and hypermasculine cruising clone.

The cruising gay clone has now becomesomething of pariah, both within academiccircles and more popular culture, pumped andinflated into near mythic status as the iconicsymbol of gay liberation. With his sexuality

blatantly displayed, literally bulging out of hisplaid shirts, leather jackets, and button-fly jeans,and publicly paraded down the streets of manyof the world’s most major cities in celebrationof his unconstrained promiscuous desire formore and more of precisely the same thing,namely those like himself, he became theemblem of the “sex” in homosexuality, or whatMichael Bronski once called “sex incarnate”(Bronski, 1984). Proclaimed by some as theepitome of a guilt-free lifestyle of sexual libera-tion and castigated by others as the nadir ofmisogynist self-loathing, the cruising gay clonecame, perhaps mistakenly, to represent gaysexuality in its entirety and divide politicallymotivated academia like an axe through anapple. More precisely, and as I have demon-strated elsewhere, what this entire uproar oftencentered on was the perceived relationship ofthe homosexual to the masculine (Edwards,1994, 1998).

Following this, then, I wish to explore andexpose this perception through a discussion ofthe various academic perspectives developedaround the gay clone and gay liberation morewidely. These include feminist work and men’sanalyses of masculinity, as well as gay and les-bian studies. A potential problem here is the ten-dency to perceive these debates as going onsolely between these areas of study, when theyhave, in fact, been conducted as much, if notmore, from within each of them. There is, then,no one feminist, no single gay, and no unitarymale perspective on the conundrums posed bygay liberation or even the gay clone; yet, as Ishall argue strongly, all of these perspectives areunderpinned by a varyingly implicit, yet mostlyassumed, perception of the relationship of thehomosexual to the masculine.

It is perhaps proper to start with gay men’sown perspectives of their liberation and the clonethat some of them helped create. One of the ear-liest and most influential of these was a chapterby Gregg Blachford (1981) in Ken Plummer’s(1981) path-breaking collection The Makingof the Modern Homosexual, titled “Male Domi-nance and the Gay World.” Relying heavily on aprimarily Althusserian understanding of the roleof subculture, Blachford perceived both repro-duction and resistance to male domination inpostliberation gay culture. Resistance was per-ceived to come through the lack of any directconnection of such styles and practices to any



wider culture that simultaneously also informedits reproduction through its separation from it. Toput it more simply, macho gay male cultureneither fully resisted nor purely reproduced maledomination by virtue of its strict containmentwithin a subculture. A somewhat later and lessacademically informed argument was made byJamie Gough (1989), who, although acknowledg-ing the sexist implications of some contemporarygay culture, saw macho gay men as merely aping“real” masculinity. Joseph Bristow (1989), in apowerful polemic against lesbian accusations ofhomosexual misogyny, pushed this argument fur-ther, seeing the gay clone as contrived and play-ful, theatrical and fake, a clone copy. The comiceffect of this was not lost on gay men themselves,who joked that any illusion of the clone’s mas-culinity was lost as soon as he opened his mouthand started discussing art and interior design,and society at large bore witness to the discogroup The Village People, who did a number ofdecidedly camp dance routines with the individ-ual members dressed as a cowboy, a cop, a con-struction worker, and other stereotypical symbolsof gay fantasy. From this perspective, then, mas-culinity and homosexuality were exposed asincreasingly playful social constructions that hadno intrinsic interaction or relationship.

Others, however, were less convinced of thefrivolousness. In Two Steps Forward, One StepBack, John Shiers (1980) sounded a personal noteof painful concern. In particular, this centered onhis perception that gay men were still caught inthe double bind and, indeed, double standards ofheterosexual society so that, in trying to maintainmore socialist or feminist convictions, gay menran the risk of losing sight of their own, primarilysexual, cause. Consequently, when copying moretraditional patterns of monogamous sexual prac-tices with long-term partners in private, gay menrisked little social opprobrium, but in publiclydisplaying a promiscuous desire for the mascu-line, they felt the full wrath of their stigma andheterosexual society’s homophobia. Ultimately,then, gay men were in a no-win situation ofbeing forced into a closet not of their own makingand made into public pariahs when they brokeits bounds. Rumbling under the surface herewere increasing concerns relating to the potentialpitfalls of the newly sexualized and, indeed,masculinized, dimensions of gay liberation.

At the same time, others still felt that gaymale promiscuity could, or even should, be

celebrated, a point put most forcibly in JohnAllen Lee’s (1978) Getting Sex: A NewApproach—More Fun, Less Guilt. Lee arguedthat gay men were quite simply better at “gettingsex,” having developed a highly sophisticatedsystem of dress codes and visual cues to indicatesexual preference, as well as adapting a varietyof formal and informal public contexts in whichto practice sex and enjoy it. Evidence for thiswas provided in the literary and often autobio-graphical accounts of John Rechy (1977) andEdmund White (1986), as well as in various sur-veys of sexual behavior at the time (Jay &Young, 1979; Spada, 1979). Similarly, in TheSilent Community, Edward Delph (1978) con-ducted an ethnographic study of men’s sexualbehavior with other men in public and semi-public places, such as parks, toilets, and saunas,and, in doing so, emphasized both the sophisti-cation of this behavior and its silence.

What these studies also illustrated, however,was the connection of gay men’s sexual prac-tices with questions of masculinity, not only inreinforcing the stereotype that men are simplymore promiscuous than women but the sensein which the clone donned a stereotypicallymasculine appearance and practiced a stereo-typically masculine sexuality that was divorcedfrom emotional commitment and intimacy, aform of sexual expression so minimal that evenconversation could destroy it. This was, ofcourse, precisely its appeal, the emotionallyrisk-free, pared-down, and butt-naked excite-ment: pure, exposed and throbbing—the cockstripped bare.

Others, though, found such sexual practiceslacking, and complained that development of anincreasingly body-conscious commercial sceneand networks founded on the promotion of sexbefore, and often without, love were not for all—that, ultimately, they were another lesson in thecontinued alienation of homosexuality. Of fun-damental importance in this was the articulation,or reworking, of the relationship of homosexual-ity and masculinity. Gay culture, in asserting thatgay men could be real men too, although divorc-ing homosexuality from its more negative rela-tionship to masculinity, also forced homosexualstogether into a form of matrimony that was notnecessarily happy. In particular, Michael Pollak(1985) saw the promiscuous cruising of theclone as a form of “internalized maximizationof profits,” or a performance-driven masculine



sexuality wherein gay men notched up partnerslike cars off a production line. In short, the con-straints of the closet were often swapped for thepressures of performance. Of importance in thiswas Pollak’s historically focused analysis ofthe development of gay male culture alongsideemergent forms of masculinity within industrialcapitalism that were, in turn, founded on a formof rationalized self-alienation. In a more romanticvein, some also complained that the commercialgay world provided little emotional (althoughplenty of sexual) sustenance, a point made moststrongly in the historically nuanced and eruditework of Barry Adam (1987) and echoed else-where (Dowsett, 1987). It reached its mostextreme form in the novels and plays of LarryKramer (1978, 1983, 1986), an AIDS activistin New York who once infamously accused gaymen of quite literally “thinking with their cocks”and “fucking themselves to death.”

What begins to emerge here is a bipolarizeddebate whereby the post–gay liberation gay manis either the emblem of a celebration of unin-hibited sexual expression or simply the latestincarnation of sexual oppression. Although bothperspectives in extremis remain problematic, itis the liberal, or perhaps liberationist, approachthat is most in question. In denying that thedevelopment and form of gay culture had anyconnection with wider society other than tochallenge it, or indeed with masculinity otherthan to celebrate it, gay liberationists also ranthe risk of disowning all political responsibility,a problem highlighted by the feminist critiqueof gay sexuality—to which we now turn.

Of most direct significance here were theconflicts that soon developed between gay menand lesbians. In the first instance, gay liberationmeant gay men and gay women, yet within avery few years, the two groups had suffered avery acrimonious divorce, and many lesbiansfound their interests better served within thewomen’s movement. Most fundamentally, thiscentered on a profoundly differing set of needsand wants, or what Annabel Faraday (1981)once called the “polar experiences” of gay menand lesbians. Although gay men were often pri-marily concerned with sexual liberation in theface of continued public hostility and actuallyrising, rather than falling, criminal prosecutions,lesbians were finding that much of their ownliberation depended on their gender ratherthan their sexuality. The women’s movement,

in highlighting the role of heterosexuality inwomen’s oppression, often offered very clearand direct support for lesbians with feministor gender-oriented concerns. More problemati-cally, gay men’s economic power was increas-ingly overt and being channeled into the rapidexpansion of a commercial gay scene of shops,bars, clubs, saunas, restaurants, and a wholehost of other services from which lesbiansfelt increasingly excluded, a factor that rapidlyturned into fierce accusations of sexism andmisogyny. Liz Stanley (1982), for example,experienced considerable disillusionment inworking with gay men politically, and SheilaJeffreys (1990) argued similarly that gay libera-tion was merely another aspect of men’s sexualliberation and men’s sexual needs masqueradedas the permissive society. Conversely, some gaymen increasingly complained that lesbians wereoften aggressive and moralizing in their lack ofsupport for gay men’s concerns, and lesbianscould themselves perhaps be accused of beingcomplicit in heterosexual homophobia. JosephBristow (1989) and Craig Owens (1987) arguedstrongly here that misogyny and homophobiawere not opposed but two sides of the same coinof patriarchal and heterosexual dominance. Thisconflict rapidly became both overly polarizedand problematic in itself, often diverting widerpolitical energies into infighting. On a morepositive note, lesbians and gay men later provedthey were still able to work together success-fully, for example, in opposition to Section 28, agovernment statute that attempts to outlawthe “promotion” of homosexuality and “pre-tend” families by local authorities in the UnitedKingdom.

Nevertheless, such conflict exposed a deeperdivide within feminism in relation to questionsof gender and sexuality, and feminist accountsof gay liberation were often confused and con-flicting. Perhaps most influentially, Gayle Rubin(1984), in her article “Thinking Sex,” arguedstrongly for an analysis of sexuality as a sepa-rate mechanism, or what she called a “vector ofoppression,” not simply dependent on, and indeeddistinct from, the analysis of gender. Conse-quently, she documented “hierarchies of sexual-ity,” through which heterosexuality, whethermale or female, and particularly if marital, wasstill privileged over homosexuality, which was, inturn, less stigmatized if monogamous; promiscu-ity, prostitution, sadomasochism, and pedophilia



were deemed the lowest or worst of all. This, inmany ways, revolutionized, or at least counter-acted, an increasingly vociferous North Americanview of sexuality as solely an extension ofgender domination, theorized most fully in thework of Andrea Dworkin (1981) and CatharineMacKinnon (1987). The most fundamental thrustof this perspective was to perceive sexualityprimarily as a form of power, most notoriously inrelation to rape and pornography.

Without wishing to stir up an already overlywhipped debate, the conflict that developedwithin feminism concerning sexuality alsoexposed a profoundly different, if not com-peting, set of feminist perspectives upon gayliberation. For Rubin, and indeed a variety ofother feminist writers, including Pat Califia, MaryMcIntosh, Lynne Segal (Califia, 1994; Segal &McIntosh, 1992), and Carole Vance (1984), gaymen constituted a marginalized group with theirown agenda; also, gay liberation, although farfrom unproblematic for women, was not neces-sarily about women (this remained primarily theresponsibility of feminism). For Dworkin (1981)and MacKinnon (1987), as well as Sheila Jeffreys(1990) and others (Stanley, 1982), however, thisseparation was false. Gay liberation was indeedabout gender oppression, and gay men weredeeply bound up with the degradation of womenand the feminine. The macho gay clone, in cele-brating the male and masculine sexuality, wasthen engaged precisely in the annihilation of thefemale and feminine sexuality more widely.

What opened up rapidly here was the sensein which it was the relationship of gender andsexuality, here homosexuality and masculinity,that was at issue. The more liberal feministapproach, in successfully exposing the complex-ities of sexuality, also ran the risk of separatingit entirely from gender, although more radicalor revolutionary feminists, in asserting its veryconnectedness to gender, could lose sight ofits specific significance. One potential solutionto an often escalating and entrenched sense ofconflict here emerged in the form of a morepoststructural feminism, concerned precisely toundermine the binaries of gender and sexuality,which I consider in the next section.

Given the ongoing concern here with theconnection, and not separation, of homosexual-ity and masculinity, the development of men’sown critical studies of masculinity remainssignificant, if rather overshadowed. We are

presented with something of a problem here:namely, the heterosexist bias of men’s studies,a point put most forcibly by Carrigan, Connell,and Lee (1985) in “Toward a New Sociologyof Masculinity.” They argued that the emergentmen’s studies, particularly in the late 1970s,neither recognized the significance of gay liber-ation in attempting to undermine traditionalmasculinity nor the importance of heterosexual-ity in maintaining male domination, but paidmere lip service to gay men in token chaptersand short passages in otherwise overwhelminglywhite, middle class, heterosexual works andperspectives. This was more than partiallyexplained as a result of the development of anew men’s studies of masculinity as a responseto second-wave feminism both personally andpolitically and partly as a necessary outcome tothe limits of the functionalist sex-role theorythat informed these studies and that could oftenonly adapt to seeing masculinity as a singular,rather than pluralist, concept and practice(Kimmel, 1987).

One major exception to this, and a significantdevelopment in overcoming it, was the work ofCarrigan and associates (1985) in formulatingthe notion of a hierarchy of masculinities.Connell (1987), in Gender and Power, extendedthis idea further and challenged the idea of asingular male sex role, arguing for a pluralisticand hierarchical notion of masculinities inwhich some forms were hegemonic and otherssubordinate. Thus, most obviously, black, gay,and working class masculinities were seen assubordinate to and, indeed, oppressed by white,heterosexual, and middle class masculinitiesthat remained mostly dominant or hegemonic,although this was still contingent on changingsocial and political contexts. Consequently,men’s studies of masculinity became increas-ingly complex and diverse in themselves, devel-oping more sociostructural, philosophical, andeven autobiographical dimensions in the workof Jeff Hearn (1987), Vic Seidler (1994), andDavid Morgan (1992), respectively.

Where did this leave the new critical studiesof men and masculinity in relation to gayliberation? The answer is, in some senses, frus-tratingly, not very far forward. Following thearguments of radical feminism, John Stoltenberg(1989) made a blistering assault on the failuresof gay liberation and made gay men out to benear traitors to the cause of gender politics; at



the opposite extreme, Robert Bly (1990) and theNew Men’s Movement promoted a return to atraditional patriarchal order that was implicitly,if not explicitly, homophobic. Although lessproblematic politically, the vast majority of morecontemporary men’s studies of masculinity stillremain overwhelmingly generalist in focus, oftenmaking merely fleeting mention of the specificsof gay masculinities.

One more thoroughgoing and empiricallybased work here is Connell’s (1995) Mascu-linities. Following interviews with a smallsample of gay men, Connell remained ambiva-lent concerning the impact of gay liberation onwider gender or masculinity politics. Althoughacknowledging the fundamental subversion ofheterosexual object choice in the formation ofgay identities, Connell reiterates the sense inwhich men’s bodies also incorporate mas-culinity. In desiring them, gay men thus remain,in a sense, “very straight.” The often criticizedwatering down of gay politics and its cooptationby consumer culture also adds to the sense inwhich the position of gay men, for Connell,remains contradictory in terms of gender poli-tics. Here, then, gay men’s identification asmen may be problematic, but their desire formen limits their commitment to sexual politics.We are, then, back to where we started: therelationship between desire and identificationin relation to homosexuality and masculinity.The question precisely, then, is one of how togo forward.

FROM HOMOSEXUAL TO HOMOSOCIAL:THE POSTSTRUCTURAL SOLUTION

Poststructural theory is often as amorphous as itis diffuse and as ill defined as it is wide ranging.It is not my intention, then, to discuss what nowconstitutes an entire canon of poststructural andpostmodern theory or the cultural studies andqueer politics that it often informs. In relationto gender and sexuality more specifically, how-ever, poststructural theory perhaps most funda-mentally provides a critique of identity politicsand, indeed, identity per se (Nicholson &Seidman, 1995). First, individual and groupidentities are perceived as equally semanticallyand socially dynamic, open, plural, conflicting,or contingent rather than fixed, closed, unitary,consensual, or set. Thus, the position of a young

gay black lawyer, for example, is quite simplyuncategoric. Second, identity politics moretheoretically are argued to have had the conse-quence, intended or unintended, of reinforcingrather than challenging the binaries of black-white, man-woman, straight-gay. And third,more politically, identity politics are perceivedto tend to undermine any wider political plat-form on which to challenge conservatism orminority oppression, due to their tendency toreinforce differences and divisions within andacross different groups. The previous sectiondemonstrated this itself by illustrating thedegree of conflict aroused, and often unre-solved, around gay masculinities. Poststructuraltheory clearly provides an effective critique ofthis, yet the question remains as to the efficacyof its solutions.

In this next section, I wish initially to focus onthe work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and JudithButler as two of the most eminent and influentialpoststructural theorists in relation to gender andsexuality. In addition, I will also consider morerecent attempts to apply their work more directlyto the question of gay masculinities. It is neces-sary in the first instance to explicate this work insome detail to see more precisely where it leadsus prior to examining its wider implications. Indoing so, I hope to show how poststructuraltheory adds to our understanding of the problem-atic nature of the relationship between desire andidentification that underpins the position of gaymasculinities. I will also seek to expose someof the difficulties that tend to ensue from thisperspective.

In Between Men, Sedgwick (1985) startedto forge a major reconsideration of the roleand nature of homosexuality through an analysisof its representation across a range of NorthAmerican, British, and other European literature.In particular, she constructed a new concept ofhomosociality to describe the range of affectiverelationships between men that exist on a contin-uum from the unemotional to the fully homosex-ual. As a result, although perhaps inadvertently,she drew a parallel with Adrienne Rich’s (1984)influential notion of the lesbian continuum usedto describe relationships between women. Themain thrust of Sedgwick’s analysis was, however,to interrogate the relationship of the homosexualand the masculine and, in particular, to exposethe extent to which the two concepts are interde-pendent. Her discussion was also historically



focused, seeing the homosexual identity asinterdependent with emergent forms of mas-culinity throughout the 19th century. This, then,led to a series of highly sophisticated textualanalyses of a selection of literary works from themid-18th century through to the mid-19thcentury, from which Sedgwick then extrapolateda complex map of developments in the genderednature of male relationships. As an analysiswithin the discipline of literary criticism per se,this was sophisticated and, indeed, often quitedazzling, yet it remained problematic, not leastbecause of the exposition of a series of socialand political developments from an analysis ofprimarily elite cultural texts.

Sedgwick (1990) then extended her analysisof the role of the homosexual in Epistemology ofthe Closet. Following on from Foucault, shesought to deconstruct the category of the homo-sexual and, more important, the entire divisivesystem of sexual categorization. The initial aimof her analysis was to undermine the persistenceof “the homosexual” as a defining category thatsimultaneously creates the closet from whichthe homosexual had to endlessly “come out.”The difficulty here is that the closet remains notmerely a semantic construction but an institu-tionally supported social reality premised onwider processes of stigma and ostracism. To putit more simply, the discursive closet would notmatter were it not for the negative consequencesthat may, and often do, ensue in coming outfrom the more social closet. However, the cut ofSedgwick’s work was as much to address thesemiotic question of the relationship of readerand text, as exemplified in her final chapter onProust, as it was to address the question of homo-sexual oppression.

Sedgwick’s work also echoed that of DennisAltman (1971) in Homosexual: Oppression andLiberation, in which he foretold that the endof homosexual oppression would also entail theend of the homosexual identity. What was alsoimplicit in Altman’s predicament was, however,the perceived necessity of the homosexualidentity if the social and, indeed, ontologi-cal, assumption of heterosexuality were to beopposed. Ironically, although recent decadeshave witnessed an ever-strengthening “dis-course of homosexuality” centered on increas-ing visibility and opposition to older negativedefinitions and stereotypes, discussion of hetero-sexuality has, for the most part, tended to remain

overshadowed, and it is difficult to see howSedgwick’s reverse policy of “unspeaking” thehomosexual can undermine this discursive priv-ileging of the heterosexual, let alone make thequantum jump into heterosexual social andpolitical dominance. The end of the homo-sexual does not, then, necessarily entail the endof the heterosexual, and the project remains,ironically, to remove heterosexuality from thesanctity of its discursive closet.

In later work, Sedgwick (1995) forged afurther disjuncture between sex and gender, heremasculinity and homosexuality, as two conceptsshe perceived as not necessarily in any waydirectly related. In sum, masculinity does notnecessarily relate to men, or men only, andSedgwick returns to an understanding of gendercentered on androgyny, as explored previouslyby Sandra Bem (1974), whereby some men andwomen have more, or less, masculinity and,indeed, femininity. This would seem not only toimplode gender dualisms but to throw upanother question entirely, namely the extent towhich masculinity has anything to do with men,gay or straight, at all.

A similar problem underpinned JudithButler’s (1990) attempt to implode the dualismsof gendered identity in Gender Trouble. Butlersought, in the first instance, to undermine thefundamental necessity of the category of“woman” and asserted instead that a feministpolitics must produce a radical critique of thepolitics of identity per se. On top of this, via aseries of psychoanalytic investigations, shesought to demonstrate the mutual dependenceand contradictions of the categories of sex andgender as wholly artificial and unnatural con-structions that exist primarily at the level ofrepeated performance. Consequently, she per-ceived gender as only truly existing throughcontinuous processes of acting, speaking, anddoing. In addition, at least by implication, thebottom line of Butler’s argument would seem,like Sedgwick’s, to be that the feminine haslittle to do with the female and femininity littleto do with women.

There was, however, an added dimensionhere, for gender is performed according tosocial sanctions and mores that can, and do, leadto what Butler (1990) calls “punishments,” on anumber of levels, from social ostracism to legalcontrol. Nevertheless, the thrust of her analysiswas that gender primarily exists at the level of



discourse. Thus, although its documentation ofthe power relations of discourse were important,Butler’s work ran the risk of missing an analysisof power as an institutionally coercive, politi-cally sanctioned, and socially practiced seriesof mechanisms of oppression. In addition, it isthis tension of the structural and the textual thatoften still lurks in the controversy surround-ing Butler’s arguments concerning the role ofdrag, defined as an overall gender performanceand not merely a camp minority practice, indemonstrating the artificiality and fantasy thatsurrounds gender categories. Nevertheless, theconcept of performance remains an importantone that opens up potentially radical politicalsolutions to overly entrenched understandings,and indeed practices, of gender, leading to Butlerwrestling with some of the political implicationsin later work (Butler, 1993).

How, though, does such a perspectivework in relation to questions of masculinity andhomosexuality? In following Freud, Butler(1995) argues that masculine identificationdepends on a prior formation of sexual orienta-tion and, in particular, a rejection of homosexu-ality. As a result, masculinity fundamentally andpsychologically depends on the disavowal notonly of femininity but of homosexuality, and, indoing so, is predicated upon a lack, or absence,rather than a given, or presence. The problem,then, becomes a near algebraic one: Masculinityas a positive identification depends on a double,not single, negative dissociation. The additional,and profoundly psychological, difficulty here isthat the loss of homosexuality is never avowedand therefore cannot be mourned. Butler’sargument depends on Freud’s analysis of poly-morphous perversity, whereby the infant experi-ences—and gains from—both homosexual andheterosexual attachment but to successfullyform a gender identity must suffer a loss, a loss,moreover, that cannot be affirmed. The doubleproblem that then ensues for the male infant isthat neither the attachment to another malenor its loss can be recognized, leading to theimpossibility of either affirming or mourninghomosexuality. This also has wider socialimplications, reflected in the lack of recognitionof gay male relationships and the intensity ofdifficulties involved in their loss, for whateverreason. Thus, more particularly, the AIDSepidemic is seen to expose the anguish of gaymen’s grief as a difficulty in mourning per se. In

sum, male homosexual attachment is put ontothe never-never: never having lost and neverhaving loved.

The mention of AIDS at this juncture is notcoincidental, and the conjunction of the rise ofthe epidemic with the simultaneous develop-ment and application of more poststructuraltheory to questions of sexuality is not insignif-icant. When AIDS was first recognized in theearly 1980s, predominantly in the gay commu-nities of the United States and as a sexuallytransmitted disease that continued to affectthe gay male population disproportionately inWestern societies, it was quickly perceived as asymbolic phenomenon as much as, if not morethan, a medical condition. To put it more simply,AIDS was rapidly presented and understood asa morally loaded disease of lifestyle. At theepicenter of this, once again, were the sexualactivities of the promiscuous gay clone and,indeed, 1970s gay culture more generally. Themoral outrage, homophobic vitriol, and back-lash that took place against the gay community,particularly through the tabloid media, whooften presented AIDS as the “gay plague,” isnow well documented, particularly in the workof Simon Watney (1987) in the United Kingdomand Randy Shilts (1987) in the United States.It was not, perhaps, surprising, then, that gaystudies often went on the defensive and furtherinvoked the logic of constructionism and thediscursive legacy of Foucault to prove that AIDShad no intrinsic connection with gay sexualityother than one of creating illness and stigmati-zation (see, for example, Altman, 1986; Crimp,1988; Patton, 1985).

However, this defensiveness had the effect,intended or not, of overriding an intriguingdimension raised by the epidemic of masculin-ity’s connection with sexuality, particularly inrelation to gay male sexuality. To put it directly,AIDS, in threatening the very life, let alonestyle, of promiscuous gay male sexuality in the1970s, opened up the question of just what hav-ing lots of sex meant to gay men and where theiridentities might end up without it. The funda-mental dependence of gay male identity and,indeed, masculinity more widely on sexualityand particularly sex per se was raised withinmore social psychological circles, particularlyin the work of Person (1980) and Kimmel(1994), as well as my own (Edwards, 1992), yetit was never fully raised within gay studies and



quickly turned into an often media-driven andpejorative question of “sex addiction.” In asense, then, AIDS triangulated the relationshipof gender, sexuality, and identity more strongly,although often the issue was only forced throughan individual, but also collective, experienceof grief.

This important, if rather painful, line of argu-ment was pursued to some extent by Leo Bersani(1988, 1995), who sought to connect a personalquestion of mourning, particularly in the wakeof the AIDS epidemic, to a political questionof militancy. The overall thrust of his analysiswas to seek to marry, rather than divorce, theintensely individual, psychological, and sexualwith the social, external, and pedagogic. At thecenter of this logic was, once again, the promis-cuous sexuality of the cruising gay clone. In thefirst instance, Bersani rejected the argument thatthe rise of a gay hypermasculinity was necessar-ily about subversion play or parody, arguing thatsexual desire remained, in essence, a seriousbusiness that could potentially reinforce patriar-chal or conservative politics as much as it couldundermine them. Thus, a homosexual, or evensexual, love of rough trade and uniforms did notmake that love radical. As a result, gay menwere, and are, in the uneasy situation of poten-tially desiring, and perhaps even sleeping with,their enemies. This is an argument that couldeasily be used to bolster some more simplisticand homophobic dimensions of feminism, asoutlined previously, yet, precisely becauseBersani, like Butler, invokes psychoanalytictheory, the issue becomes inverted, and gaymen’s desire for the masculine remains notonly to be problematized, but also to be cele-brated, precisely for its constant invoking ofthe disavowed, male, sexual object.

Where, though, does this leave our analysis ofthe relationship of homosexuality and masculin-ity? By way of concluding this section, I wouldlike to consider the work of Bech as perhaps themost complete attempt to document the morecontemporary nature of the relationship of mas-culinity and homosexuality. In When Men Meet,Bech (1997) starts by critiquing social construc-tionism for its lack of explanatory power andthen moves on to examine, pivotally, what hecalls absent homosexuality. This is, in essence, areworking of Sedgwick’s notion of “homosocial-ity,” in which masculinity is seen quite literallyto depend on both the permanent presence and,

indeed, the absence of homosexuality. To put itmore simply, relations between men, both pastand present, are characterized by the constantpossibility of, and quite simultaneously theequally continuous prohibition of, homosexual-ity. Thus homosexuality per se works as a pri-marily invisible mechanism in the maintenanceof masculinity. For example, the homosexualityof movies is demonstrated through the explicitlack or absence of portrayals of homosexuality,a point echoed elsewhere (Kirkham & Thumin,1993; Simpson, 1994). Thus Bech starts todemonstrate the crucial extent to which homo-sexual identity depends even more funda-mentally on masculinity than heterosexuality.This is intriguing, but it leads him into an equallyconstant overplaying of the significance of cer-tain stereotypes of homosexuality; namely, thathomosexuality is all about furtive glances andeven more furtive sexual practices and is usuallyconducted in cities. Quite where this leaves themonogamous practices of the suburban and ruralhomosexual is anyone’s guess. Despite this,Bech’s reworking of the relationship of homo-sexuality and masculinity retains an untappedpotential. In particular, it starts to tip into ananalysis of visual culture and the ways in whichthe male, and the masculine, have increasinglybecome both the object as well as the subject ofthe gaze; for example, in relation to contempo-rary patterns of sexual objectification, advertis-ing, and the world of fashion. This forms whathe calls a “telemediated” society, or visual andmedia culture that simultaneously emphasizesprocesses of aestheticization as well as sexual-ization and in which relations between menbecome, almost by quirk, absent of absenthomosexuality. It is important to note that thiswould seem to start to extend Sedgwick’smore historical and textual analysis of homo-sociality toward an understanding of morecontemporary and applied discussion develop-ments concerning masculinity, yet Bech’sanalysis in the final instance is left hangingand inconclusive. Also implicit and problematichere is Bech’s invocation of the increasingglobalization of gay sexuality, given the risingsignificance of the Internet and internationaltravel and of sexual practices generally thatnot only informs the development of the AIDSepidemic and sex trafficking but also, accordingto Dennis Altman (2001) at least, begins toscramble the very certainties of gay identity,



both theoretically and politically, as gay identitybecomes at once both globalized and localized.

To summarize, these applications of post-structural theory have reworked understandingsof the relationship of homosexuality and mas-culinity, in terms of sexuality and gender, asfollows: Successful heterosexual and mascu-line identification psychologically and sociallydepend on the repudiation of both femininityand homosexuality. Gay male sexuality offers apotentially, though not necessarily, radical chal-lenge to both psychological and social sexualand gender order. In addition, this necessaryrepudiation poses a series of difficulties for gaymen themselves, whose relationships and evenlosses are not avowed or recognized and whosedesires have the potential to work against themas much as with them. In sum, the relationshipbetween desire and identification, which I haveargued to be at the core of the problem raisedby identity politics, is both explored and expli-cated beyond a sense of simple contradictionto become something which, in a sense, cutsboth ways. In this scheme of things, then, gaymen are neither more nor less “masculine” ormisogynist than straight men but located in anawkward, and perhaps even dialectical, relationto gender both psychologically and socially.

Having said this, I should further note thata number of significant difficulties remain boththeoretically and politically. Perhaps the mostfundamental of these is the relationship of suchpsychoanalytically or textually centered theory tosocial or even cultural practice. Although someextrapolation of social and cultural implicationsfrom such work is perhaps easily accepted assimply common sense, wider aspects and ques-tions, including the issue of social and culturalchange, are in no way straightforwardly “readoff” from the use of psychoanalytic, literary, ortextual analysis. Without wishing to imply anyform of return to positivism, the sense of distanceinvolved is often further reinforced through thelack of empirically centered research or evidencethat might otherwise help to fill the gap exposedbetween theory and practice.

A second and equally difficult problem con-cerns the question of values. Identity politics,for all its faults in setting up overly polarizedand often divisive contests, not only used butrather developed, intentionally or not, a systemof value. In relation to our discussion here, mas-culinity became problematized in value terms as

something that was not neutral and that also hadan impact on such phenomena as institutionalpower relations and violent crime. Some of thisimpact at least is potentially lost in overdivorcingthe analysis of masculinity from men.

Third, although masculinity remains a socialconstruct that has no necessary, in the intrinsicsense, connection with men, it is clearly incor-rect to state that it has no relationship to menat all or that this is not qualitatively differentfrom its relationship to women. Furthermore,this also may undermine the sense in whichmasculinity itself can become problematized forboth men and women. To put it more simply, ifmen and masculinity are not one and the same,then they may remain related, and in separatingthem, one should not disconnect them entirely.

More important, the tendency to separateanalysis and theory from questions of practiceand politics also has the tendency to lead, poten-tially at least, to a neglect of the fundamentalways in which patriarchy and masculinity arereinforced and perpetuated through institutionsboth formal and informal and, perhaps mostimportant of all, the resistance to change thatmay come from individual men and women.What this begins to expose in more directlypolitical terms is a problem of both relativismand liberalism. Masculinity, although clearly alot more “open” than once conceived, is, equallyclearly, also not an entirely mutable phenomenonthat is “up for grabs”; some forms of “perform-ing” and “doing” masculinity remain more, orless, problematic than others.

Where, though, does this leave us in relationto gay men and gay masculinities? Poststructuraltheory would seem to offer more theoreticalsolutions to the conundrums posed by identitypolitics, yet it equally tends to elide discussionof its applications and implications in practice.In sum, the difficulty remains more political.Despite this, there seems little reason to presumethat these questions could not be addressedmore fully. More significantly, and perhapsironically, this seems to depend on underminingrather than reinforcing the sense of separationthat has developed between so-called old guardidentity politics and avant garde poststructuralor queer theory and politics (Seidman, 1995).The continuing logic of social constructionismis critical here, and the questions and the prob-lems involved, if not necessarily the answers,would seem to remain the same.



CONCLUSIONS: QUEERING THE PITCH?

At this final juncture, it is, I think, worthreturning to some fundamental questions inrelation to gay men. First and foremost, gaymen are not simply the same as other men,for if they were, their gayness would neithermatter nor even register as significant. Clearly,being gay does still matter, even within theliberal and open spaces of advanced Westernindustrial societies, let alone within the confinesof conservatism, moralism, or fundamentalismpast or present. Second, gay men remain astigmatized and marginalized minority whosegains, and these are still significant, are per-ilous. There is as yet nothing approachingfull legal or statutory equality for gay men orlesbians and very little antidiscriminatory legis-lation or protection. As such, their progressand position remain very open to regressionand undermining on many fronts. The AIDSepidemic exemplifies this in many ways andexposes not only the resistance of gay and les-bian communities but also their vulnerability.Third, gay men remain men, with all the perhapsincreasingly precarious privileges and benefitsthat maleness bestows on them. Although thesemay be both perilous and uncertain, gay menremain related to masculinity, and they cannotand, indeed, should not be understood as sepa-rated from it. Fourth, and more theoretically, itremains important to recognize the contingentand changing nature of, as well as the diversityand plurality of, masculinities and homosexual-ities. A fifth and utterly fundamental point, then,is that gay men do not constitute a homogeneousgroup, or even a unified category, and theirposition varies significantly according to suchfactors as social class, geography, race, or eth-nicity, let alone individual politics, practices, orpreferences. Whether or not, then, gay masculinityqueers the pitch of sexual politics depends on awhole host of other micro and macro individualand social factors. Consequently, there is no easyanswer, and accusations of gay male misogynyare no more, and no less, valid than endorsementsof the gay male relationship to more feministagendas. An added difficulty here is that theendless questioning and indeed “queering” ofgay men’s pitch is somewhat misplaced on anoppressed minority and is, perhaps, even a formof heterosexism in itself. What does remainmore certain, then, is the need to address far more

than previously an entirely different question ofheterosexual men’s relationship to their hetero-sexuality, not just to their masculinity—forthem to queer their own pitch.

NOTES

1. I refer here to Quentin Crisp’s now legendarymemoir-cum-novel The Naked Civil Servant (Crisp,1968), later dramatized by the BBC and starring JohnHurt in the title role, and Stephan Elliott’s 1994movie The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of theDesert, each of which in different ways celebratedeffeminate and cross-dressing homosexuality with avengeance.

2. See Freud (1977).3. Carpenter campaigned vigorously for legal

reform following the criminalization of homosexualacts, if not homosexuality itself, under the LabouchèreAmendment of 1885 in the United Kingdom; how-ever, the subsequent trial and imprisonment of OscarWilde achieved an unprecedented level of visibilityfor homosexuality and perhaps some wider ambiva-lence, if not sympathy, toward it. The more-or-lesssimultaneous categorization and criminalization ofhomosexuality, coupled with the rapid formationof movements toward reform, constitute a conjunctionof factors studied most fully in the work of JeffreyWeeks (1977).

4. It is interesting that this phrase comes fromthe poem Two Loves by Oscar Wilde’s lover, LordAlfred Douglas, yet gained a Wildean flourishwhen Wilde later quoted it in his own defense at histrial.

5. The Stonewall Inn, a gay pub in New York,was subject to frequent raids by the police in the1960s. On June 27, 1969, the clientele fought back,and so, legend has it, gay liberation began.

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PART II

GLOBAL AND REGIONAL PATTERNS



5GLOBALIZATION,IMPERIALISM, AND MASCULINITIES

R. W. CONNELL

71

THE NEED FOR A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE

IN STUDIES OF MEN AND MASCULINITY

Recent research on the social construction ofmasculinity has been very diverse in subjectmatter and social location, but it has had a char-acteristic focus and style. Its main focus hasbeen the making of masculinity in a particularmilieu or moment, whether a professional sportscareer in the United States (Messner, 1992), agroup of colonial schools in South Africa(Morrell, 2001b), drinking groups in Australianbars (Tomsen, 1997), a working class suburb inBrazil (Fonseca, 2001), or the marriage plans ofyoung middle class men in urban Japan (Taga,2001). The characteristic research style has beenethnographic, making use of participant obser-vation, open-ended interviewing, documentaryand discourse analysis. The primary researchtask has been to give close descriptions of pro-cesses and outcomes in the local site.

This ethnographic moment brought a much-needed gust of realism to discussions of menand masculinity. The concrete detail in such

studies corrected the abstractions of “sexrole” theory, previously the main frameworkfor social-scientific work on masculinity.Ethnographic research also challenged the waysof talking about men that had become predomi-nant in Western popular culture: biologicalessentialism, religious revivalism, and the mys-tical generalities of the mythopoetic movement.

Nevertheless, it has always been recognizedthat some issues go beyond the local. Even thereligious and mythopoetic men’s movementscan only be understood by considering theupheaval in gender relations that has produced awhole spectrum of agendas for remaking mas-culinity (Messner, 1997). Historical studies ofpublic images and debates about masculinity,such as Phillips (1987) on New Zealand, Sinha(1995) on India, and Kimmel (1996) on theUnited States, have been able to trace suchcultural processes over time and show thesignificance of a broader historical context forlocal constructions of masculinity.

As I have previously argued (Connell, 1998),this logic should be taken further. Global history

Author’s note: I am grateful for the generous assistance of John Fisher in the preparation of this chapter, and for advice fromcolleagues, especially James Messerschmidt and my coeditors, which has helped to improve it.


and contemporary globalization must be partof our understanding of masculinities. Locallysituated lives are (and were) powerfully influ-enced by geopolitical struggles, Western impe-rial expansion and colonial empires, globalmarkets, multinational corporations, labormigration, and transnational media.

A number of arguments now converge toemphasize this. Gittings (1996) and colleagueshave shown the extent to which constructionsof masculinity in a First World country, in thiscase Britain, are based in the history of empire.Nagel (1998) shows the interweaving of mas-culinities with the construction of nationalityand thus with the dynamics of war. Hooper(1998) shows the connection of masculinitiesto the system of international relations andthe processes of globalization. Ouzgane andColeman (1998) argue for the importance ofpostcolonial studies for understanding the cul-tural dynamics of contemporary masculinities.Though most research on masculinities has beendone in cities, most of the world’s population isrural, so Campbell and Bell’s (2000) argumentfor giving attention to rural masculinities is alsoimportant.

To understand local masculinities, then, wemust think globally. But how? In this chapter, Ioffer a framework for thinking about masculini-ties as a feature of world society and for think-ing about men’s gender practices in terms ofglobal structures. The first step is to characterizethe global gender order. We need to distinguishbetween two contexts of masculinity formation:local gender orders and transnational arenas.The next step is to consider the impact of glob-alization on men’s bodies. I then examine, inturn, the impact of globalization on masculini-ties in local gender orders and the masculinitiesconstructed in transnational arenas. Finally Iconsider the pattern of masculinity politics inthe global gender order as a whole.

THE WORLD GENDER

ORDER AS CONTEXT OF MEN’S LIVES

Masculinities do not first exist and then comeinto contact with femininities. Masculinitiesand femininities are produced together inthe process that constitutes a gender order.Accordingly, to understand masculinities on a

world scale, we must first develop a concept ofthe globalization of gender.

This is difficult, because the very conceptionis counterintuitive. We are so accustomed tothinking of gender as the attribute of an individ-ual, even an unusually intimate attribute ofthe individual, that it requires a considerablewrench to think of gender on the vast scaleof global society. As Smith (1998) argues forthe study of international politics, the key is toshift the focus from individual-level genderdifferences to “the patterns of socially con-structed gender relations.” If we recognize thatvery large scale institutions, such as the state andcorporations, are gendered (Hearn & Parkin,2001), and if we recognize that internationalrelations, international trade, and global marketsare inherently an arena of gender politics (Enloe,1990), then we can recognize the existence of aworld gender order. The world gender order canbe defined as the structure of relationships thatinterconnect the gender regimes of institutions,and the gender orders of local societies, on aworld scale (Connell, 2002).

This gender order is an aspect of a largerreality: global society. Accordingly, the analysisof the world gender order must start with thebroad features of contemporary globalizationand its historical predecessor, European imperi-alism. By imperialism, I mean the systems ofdirect colonial rule and indirect economic dom-ination that spread across the globe from theearly 16th to the mid-20th centuries. By global-ization, I mean the current pattern of worldintegration via global markets, transnationalcorporations, and electronic media under thepolitical hegemony of the United States.

How to understand global society is muchdebated. Current media talk about globalizationpictures a homogenizing process sweepingacross the world, driven by new technologiesand producing vast unfettered global markets,world music, global advertising, and worldnews, in which all the world’s people participateon equal terms. As Hirst and Thompson (1996)show, the global economy is highly unequal,and the degree of homogenization is oftengreatly exaggerated. Bauman (1998), too,emphasizes that globalization produces socialand cultural division as much as it produceshomogeneity.

Globalization is best understood as centeringon a set of linked economic changes characteristic

72 • GLOBAL AND REGIONAL PATTERNS


of the current stage of capitalism. The mainchanges are the expansion of worldwidemarkets, the restructuring of local economiesunder the pressure of the world economy, andthe creation of new economic institutions.Multinational corporations based in the threeeconomic great powers (the United States, theEuropean Union, and Japan) are the majoreconomic actors, alongside financial marketsthat have risen to an unprecedented scale andpower. The rise of these economic forces hasbeen accompanied by political change—thedominance of neoliberalism, or market ideol-ogy, and the decline of the welfare state in theWest and communist centralism in the East.

Globalization also involves a powerfulprocess of cultural change. Western culturalforms and ideologies circulate, local cultureschange in response, and the dominant cultureitself changes in an immense dialectic. Somehomogenization results as local cultures aredestroyed or weakened. But new formsappear—hybrid and “creole” identities and cul-tural expressions. All these processes are unevenin their impact and articulate with each other indifferent ways in different parts of the world(Lechner & Boli, 2000).

The historical processes that produced globalsociety were, from the start, gendered. Colonialconquest and settlement were carried out bygender-segregated forces. In the stabilizationof colonial societies, new gender divisions oflabor were produced in plantation economiesand colonial cities, and gender ideologies werelinked with racial hierarchies and the culturaldefense of empire. The growth of a postcolonialworld economy has seen gender divisions oflabor installed on a massive scale in the “globalfactory” (Fuentes & Ehrenreich, 1983), as wellas the spread of gendered violence alongsideWestern military technology (Breines, Gierycz, &Reardon, 1999).

The links that constitute a global genderorder seem to be of two basic types. The first isinteraction between existing gender orders.Imperial conquest, neocolonialism, and the cur-rent world systems of power, investment, trade,and communication have brought very diversesocieties in contact with each other. The genderorders of those societies have consequently beenbrought into contact with each other.

This has often been a violent and disrup-tive process. Local gender arrangements were

reshaped by conquest and sexual exploitation,imported epidemics, missionary intervention,slavery, indentured labor, migration, and reset-tlement. The process of economic developmentand the institutions of development aid continueto bring the gender politics of rich countriesinto relation with those of the “underdevel-oped.” This creates complex problems of genderequity, especially around recent attempts toextend the scope of “women and development”programs by bringing men more explicitly intogender issues (White, 2000).

The gender patterns resulting from theseinteractions are the first level of a global genderorder. They are local patterns but carry theimpress of the forces that make a global society.A striking example is provided by Morrell’s(2001a) analysis of the situation of men in con-temporary South Africa. The transition fromapartheid—itself a violent but doomed attemptto perpetuate colonial race relations—hascreated an extraordinary social landscape. In acontext of reintegration into the global polityand economy, rising unemployment, continuingviolence, and a growing HIV/AIDS epidemic,there are attempts to reconstitute rival patri-archies in different ethnic groups, whichclash with agendas for the modernization ofmasculinity, the impact of feminism, and thenew government’s “human rights” discourse.

The second type of link that constitutes aworld gender order is the creation of new“spaces” and arenas beyond individual countriesand regions. The most important seem to bethose I list here.

• Transnational and multinational corpora-tions. Corporations operating in global marketsare now the largest business organizationson the planet. The biggest ones, in industriessuch as oil, car manufacturing, computers, andtelecommunications, have resources amountingto hundreds of billions of dollars and employhundreds of thousands of people. They typicallyhave a strong gender division of labor, and, asWajcman’s (1999) study of British-based multi-nationals indicates, a strongly masculinizedmanagement culture.

• The international state. The institutionsof diplomacy and war, the principal means bywhich sovereign states have related to eachother, are heavily masculinized. Zalewski and

Globalization, Imperialism, and Masculinities • 73


Parpart (1998) aptly call this The “Man”Question in International Relations. UnitedNations agencies, the European Union, and arange of other international agencies andagreements have been set up to transcend theseold and dubious arrangements. They regulategender issues globally through, for instance,development aid, education, human rights,and labor conventions. They, too, are gendered,mainly run by men although with more culturalcomplexity than multinational corporations(Gierycz, 1999).

• International media. Multinational mediacorporations circulate film, video, music, andnews on a very large scale. There are also moredecentralized media (post, telegraph, telephone,fax, the Internet, the Web) and their supportingindustries. All contain gender arrangementsand circulate gender meanings. Cunneen andStubbs (2000), for instance, document the useof Internet sites to commodify Filipina womenin an international trade in wives and sexualpartners for First World men.

• Global markets. It is important to distin-guish markets themselves from the individualcorporations that operate in them. Internationalmarkets—capital, commodity, service, andlabor markets—have an increasing reach intolocal economies. They are often strongly genderstructured; an example is the internationalmarket in domestic labor (Chang & Ling, 2000).International labor markets are now (with thepolitical triumph of neoliberalism) very weaklyregulated, apart from border controls reinforcedby political panics in First World countries aboutillegal immigrants.

The net result of these two forms of linkageis a partially integrated, highly unequal, and tur-bulent set of gender relations, with global reachbut uneven impact. This is the context in whichwe must now think about the construction andenactment of masculinities.

THE MASCULINITIES

OF TRANSNATIONAL ARENAS

We should not expect the structure of genderrelations in transnational or global arenassimply to mirror patterns known in local arenas.The interaction of many local gender orders

multiplies the forms of masculinity present inthe global gender order. At the same time, thecreation of institutions and communications thatoperate across regions and continents also cre-ates the possibility of patterns of masculinitythat are, to some degree, standardized acrosslocalities. I call such masculinities “globalizing”rather than “global” to emphasize the process—and the fact that it is often incomplete. It isamong globalizing masculinities, rather thannarrowly within the metropole,1 that we arelikely to find candidates for hegemony in theworld gender order.

I will start with a sketch of major forms ofglobalizing masculinity in the historical develop-ment of global society and then focus on patternsin the contemporary postcolonial world.

Conquest, Settlement, and Empire. The creationof the imperial social order involved peculiarconditions for the gender practices of men.Colonial conquest itself was mainly carried outby segregated groups of men—soldiers, sailors,traders, administrators, and a good many whowere all these by turn. They were drawn fromthe more segregated occupations and milieux inthe metropole, and it is likely that those mendrawn into colonization were the more rootless.

Certainly the process of conquest couldproduce frontier masculinities that combinedthe occupational culture of these groups withan unusual level of violence and egocentricindividualism. The political history of empireis full of evidence of the tenuous control over thefrontier exercised by the state, from the Spanishmonarchs unable to rein in the conquistadors tothe governors in Capetown unable to hold backthe Boers. Other forms of control were similarlyweakened. Extensive sexual exploitation ofindigenous women was a common feature ofcolonial conquest.

In certain circumstances, frontier masculini-ties might be reproduced as a local culturaltradition long after the frontier had passed.Examples are the gauchos of southern SouthAmerica, the cowboys of the western UnitedStates, and the bush workers of outbackAustralia (Lake, 1986). However, conquest andexploitation were generally succeeded by somedegree of settlement. Sex ratios in the colo-nizing population changed as women arrivedand locally born generations followed, and ashift back toward the family patterns of the



metropole was probable. The construction ofan orderly settler masculinity might even bea goal of state policy, as in late 19th centuryNew Zealand (Phillips, 1987).

As Cain and Hopkins (1993) have shownfor the British empire, the ruling group in thecolonial world as a whole was an extension ofthe dominant class in the metropole, the landedgentry. The imperial state thus became a trans-national arena for the production and circula-tion of masculinities based on gentry customsand ideology, although these were increasinglymodified by military and bureaucratic needs.The narrow social life of the British rulingclass in India, marked by gender and racialsegregation and a striking lack of interest inlocal (or indeed any wider) culture, provides awell-documented case (Allen, 1975).

Conquest and settlement had the capacityto disrupt all the structures of indigenoussociety, although the course of events in differ-ent regions varied widely (Bitterli, 1989).Indigenous gender orders were no exception,and their disruption doubtless made it morefeasible for indigenous men to be drawn intothe masculinizing practices and hierarchies ofcolonial society. The imperial social ordercreated a scale of masculinities as it created ascale of communities and races. The colonizersdistinguished “more manly” from “less manly”groups among their subjects. A well-knownsuburb of Sydney in Australia is still namedManly because the first British governor wasimpressed by the bearing of some Aboriginalmen he saw there. In British India, Bengali menwere supposed by the colonizers to be effemi-nate, but Pathans and Sikhs were regarded asstrong and warlike. Similar distinctions weremade by the colonizers in South Africa between“Hottentots” and Zulus and, in North America,between (for example) Iroquois, Sioux, andCheyenne on one side and peaceable tribes suchas the Hopi on the other.

The deepening ideology of gender differ-ence in European culture provided generalsymbols of superiority and inferiority in theempire. Within the imperial “poetics of war”(MacDonald, 1994), the conqueror was virileand the colonized were dirty, sexualized, andeffeminate or childlike. In many colonial situa-tions, including Zimbabwe, indigenous menwere called “boys” by the colonizers (Shire,1994). Sinha’s (1995) study of the language of

political controversy in India in the 1880s and1890s shows how the images of “manlyEnglishman” and “effeminate Bengali” weredeployed to uphold colonial privilege and tocontain movements for change. In the late 19thcentury, racial barriers in colonial societies werehardening rather than weakening, and genderideology tended to fuse with racism in formsthat the 20th century never untangled.

The imperial state, and imperial trade andcommunications, as a transnational arena,affected gender relations among the rulinggroup. Colonial households with a large supplyof indigenous domestic servants changed theposition of wives, who became more leisuredand managerial—as shown in Bulbeck’s (1992)study of Australian women in Papua NewGuinea. Empire figured prominently as a sourceof imagery for the remaking of masculinity inBritain—in the Boy Scouts (as noted later) andin the cult of Lawrence of Arabia (Dawson,1991). Frontier masculinity played a similar rolein the United States, through such media as theHollywood western. As Mellen’s (1978) studyof masculinity in American films cautions, thereduction of masculine heroism to a test ofphysical prowess was a gradual development.Early Hollywood had a wider array of heroesand masculinities.

Imperial power was met, from the start, byresistance. Anticolonial struggles have continuedto the present day, usually classified as“terrorism” by the colonial or neocolonial pow-ers. This struggle has itself functioned as anarena of gender formation, as in the case ofPalestinian resistance to Israel. Dine (1994)traces some of the cultural consequences of theAlgerian anticolonial struggle for the French col-onizers. One was the creation of hypermasculineheroes out of the “paras” (French paratroopers),but another was the disillusion that could resultfrom a contrasting image of the home society’scorruption, or revulsion stemming from the tor-ture and destruction that accompanied colonialwar. The parallels with the U.S. experience inVietnam and the British experience in India andeast Africa are easy to see.

In South Africa, the armed struggle carriedon by the “comrades,” as the resistance fighterswere called, on behalf of the African NationalCongress produced a generation of young menaccustomed to violence and independent actionand also lacking formal education and regular



work experience (Xaba, 2001). The personaltrauma involved in anticolonial struggles—small-scale, intimate warfare with a racialdimension, with communities all around andwithin reach of the weapons—should not beunderestimated.

Postcolonial Situations and the NeoliberalNew World Order. It follows from what has justbeen said that decolonization and transitionto a postcolonial world are likely to involveproblems about masculinity and violence. Xaba(2001) goes so far as to write of a confrontationbetween “struggle masculinity” and “post-struggle masculinity.” In the new world, inwhich the African National Congress is thegovernment, responsible for law and order, the“young lions” of the resistance movement aremarginalized. Other men have the advantage inthe new racially integrated labor markets andpublic sector. The former “comrades” continueto be targeted by police; some become crimi-nalized and violent and are, in turn, targeted byvigilante actions responding to rapes, robberies,and killings. In the worst cases, a spiral ofcommunity violence results.

In cases where decolonization has beenaccomplished with less violence, the integrationof men into subordinate positions in the globaleconomy goes ahead more smoothly. The post-colonial state may appropriate colonial modelsof masculinity for the project of nation building,as Lee Kuan Yew did in Singapore (Holden,1998). National liberation movements oftenrecruited women; indeed, they often dependedheavily on women’s activism. The same move-ments in power have celebrated male “foundingfathers” and have had a very ambiguous relationwith women’s liberation (Mies, 1986).

With the collapse of Soviet communism, thedecline of postcolonial socialism, and the ascen-dance of the new right in Europe and NorthAmerica, world politics is more and more orga-nized around the needs of transnational capitaland the creation of global markets. To the extentthat the identification of men with the worldof work is established, the global capitalisteconomy becomes the key arena for the makingof masculinities.

Winter and Robert (1980) pointed out someof the consequences, especially the centrality ofinstrumental reason associated with the technicalorganization of work. The spread of the market

itself is important. In market exchange, therational calculation of self-interest is the key toaction. Men’s predominance in capitalist marketsthen underpins two cultural contrasts: betweenrational man and irrational woman and between“modern” and “traditional” masculinities.

Both managerial and working class masculin-ities are affected. The sarariiman (“salaryman,”or company man) embodied a rational calculationof self-interest in the new industrial economy ofJapan. Moodie’s (1994) study of South Africangold miners shows how, as the workforce becamedetached from the homestead economy and morecompletely proletarianized, gender practicesand gender ideas also changed—toward asharper separation of masculinity from feminin-ity. It is important to recognize that capitalistmodernization may increase gender distinctions.Parallel examples can be found in the metropole(Cockburn, 1983).

The neoliberal agenda has little to say,explicitly, about gender. The new right speaksa gender-neutral language of “markets,” “indi-viduals,” and “choice.” But the world in whichneoliberalism is ascendant is still a genderedworld, and neoliberalism has an implicit genderpolitics. The “individual” of market theoryhas the attributes and interests of a male entre-preneur. The new right’s attack on the welfarestate generally weakens the position of women,who are more dependent on nonmarketincomes. Deregulation of the economy, in acorporate world, places strategic power in thehands of particular groups of men—managersand entrepreneurs.

Wajcman’s (1999) study of multinationalcorporations based in the United Kingdomshows that even where women have enteredmanagement, they have had to do so on men’sterms, conforming to the masculinized cultureand practices of the managerial elite. In short, asWajcman puts it, they have to “manage like aman.” Research in the corporate world in theUnited States (Glass Ceiling Commission,1995) shows a similar picture.

It is not surprising that the restoration ofcapitalism in Eastern Europe and the formerSoviet Union has been accompanied by areassertion of dominating masculinities and,in some situations, a sharp worsening in thesocial position of women (Novikova, 2000).

It seems particularly important, then, toexamine the masculinity associated with those



who control the dominant institutions of theworld economy: the capitalists and businessexecutives who operate in global markets andthe political executives who interact (and inmany contexts merge) with them. I call this“transnational business masculinity.”

International businessmen are not readilyavailable for ethnographic study, but somesources of evidence exist: management literature,business journalism, corporate self-promotion,and studies of local business elites. These sourcesgive suggestive but partly contradictory indica-tions. Donaldson’s (1998) study of “the mas-culinity of the hegemonic,” based on biographicalsources about the very rich, emphasizes emo-tional isolation and a deliberate toughening ofboys in the course of growing up: the develop-ment of a sense of social distance and materialabundance combined with a sense of entitlementand superiority. Hooper’s (2000) study of thelanguage and imagery of masculinity in TheEconomist in the 1990s, a business journalclosely aligned with neoliberalism, shows adistinct break from old-style patriarchal businessmasculinity, although the new pattern includesmany remnants of colonialist attitudes towardthe developing world. The Economist associateswith the global a technocratic, new-frontierimagery and, in the context of restructuring,emphasizes a cooperative, teamwork-based styleof management.

A study of recent management textbooksby Gee, Hull, and Lankshear (1996) gives arather more individualistic picture. The execu-tive in “fast capitalism” is represented as aperson with very conditional loyalties, even tothe corporation. The occupational world reflectedhere is characterized by a limited technicalrationality, sharply graded hierarchies of rewards,and sudden career shifts or transfers betweencorporations. Wajcman’s (1999) survey indicatesa rather more stable managerial world that iscloser to traditional bourgeois masculinity andmarked by long hours of work and both depen-dence on, and marginalization of, a domesticworld run by wives.

The divergences among these pictures partlyreflect differences within the internationalcapitalist class (e.g., between big owners andprofessional managers) and partly differencesbetween the sources (magazines and textbooksmight be expected to exaggerate novelty).Nevertheless, there seem to be further reasons

for recognizing change, especially in relationto the embodiment of masculinity. There aresigns of an increasingly libertarian sexuality,with a tendency to commodify relations withwomen. Hotels catering to businessmen in mostparts of the world now routinely offer porno-graphic videos, and in some parts of the worldthere is a well-developed prostitution industrycatering to international businessmen.

Current business masculinity does notrequire direct bodily force any more than theolder bourgeois masculinity did. But corpora-tions increasingly use the exemplary bodiesof elite sportsmen in their marketing strategies,and “corporate boxes” at professional sportingevents are now a common setting for businessentertaining, deal making, and networking.Periodicals addressed to business audiences(such as the in-flight magazines of internationalairlines) seem to be giving increased attentionto fitness, sport, and appearance. It wouldseem that the deliberate cultivation of the bodyhas become a significant practice helping todefine contemporary business masculinity.

THE LOCAL RECONSTRUCTION OF

MASCULINITIES UNDER GLOBALIZATION

Under the pressure of global markets andmedia, but also as a result of active local desireto participate in the global economy and globalculture, pressures for change are set up in thelocal gender order. This may, and often does,lead to some reconstruction of masculinities, ina process different from the construction ofmasculinities in global arenas just discussed. Iwill explore the local transformation processesin this section.

Three preliminary points are important.First, reconstruction is not the work of menalone. As Fonseca (2001) and others haveemphasized, women are active in the shaping ofmasculinities. Second, any reconstruction islikely to be uneven. Taga’s (2001) case studiesof young Japanese middle class men show thepoint very clearly. Under cultural pressure fromwomen to move away from “traditional”Japanese patriarchal masculinity, four con-trasting patterns of response emerge, rangingfrom rejection of change to transformation ofidentity. Third, reconstruction does not startfrom the same point. There is no cross-cultural



equivalence in conceptions of masculinity;indeed, some cultures may not have such aconcept at all. But a certain common ground iscreated by processes of globalization.

An important reason for the unevenness ofchange is the internal complexity of genderrelations. At least four substructures in genderrelations can be identified (Connell, 2002). Iwill examine the reconstruction of masculinitiesin relation to each of these substructures in turn.

The Division of Labor. It is characteristicof modernity that the world of “work” is cultur-ally defined as men’s realm. In most parts of theworld, men do have a significantly higher laborforce participation rate than women. West Africaand the former Soviet countries are the mainexceptions. Fuller (2001), interviewing Peruvianmen in three cities, found that work is the mainbasis of adult masculine standing and self-respect. A man who cannot hold a regular job isfelt not to have arrived at full adult masculinity.In this, the Peruvian respondents are articulatingideas found in many parts of the world.

In fact, women collectively do as much workas men, often more. It is the type of work, andthe social relations in which it occurs, that matterin regard to gender. As Holter (2003) argues, thestructural distinction between the household (asa domain of gift exchange) and the commodityeconomy (where labor is sold and paid for) isa basis of the modern European gender system.This distinction has been exported into colonialand neocolonial economies, restructuring localproduction systems to produce a male wage-worker and female domestic-worker couple(Mies, 1986). This has generally produced (orreinforced) an identification of masculinity withthe public realm and production and femininitywith domesticity and consumption.

The process need not produce a “housewife”in the Western suburban sense. Where the wagework involved migration to plantations ormines, women might take over homesteadproduction (Moodie, 1994) or provide domesticservice for groups of men rather than for anindividual husband. The men’s work, too, mighttake on a distinctive local configuration. Themost famous example is the making of thesarariiman in Japanese economic developmentin the early 20th century (Kinmonth, 1981).This was a pattern of middle class masculinityadapted to a corporate power structure that

demanded conformity and loyalty in exchangefor security and high late-career rewards.

But if the world capitalist economy increas-ingly constructed men as wage earners and thustended to reshape masculinity by linking gen-der identity with work, this same process madethe new masculinities vulnerable. The globaleconomy is turbulent, marked by economicdownturns as well as booms, regional decline aswell as regional growth. Mass unemploymentwill undermine masculinities identified with“work.” This situation is now very common, as aresult both of the decline of former industrialareas such as the industrial cities of northernEngland and of the rural-urban migration thathas created huge underemployed workforces incities like New Delhi, Sao Paulo, and MexicoCity. A movement of women into employmentwill also undermine “work”-based masculini-ties. Such a movement is now happening world-wide as a result of women’s emancipation,women’s education, and the raw economic needof families unable to rely on a male wage.

The resulting challenges to masculinitieshave now been documented by researchers in avariety of settings: Corman, Luxton, Livingstone,and Seccombe (1993) in Canada; Connell (1995)in Australia; Gutmann (1996) in Mexico; andO’Donnell and Sharpe (2000) in Britain. Wecan reasonably regard this as one of the maindynamics of change in contemporary masculini-ties. Even the sarariiman is vulnerable. As thesecurity provided by the Japanese corporateworld declined in the 1990s, there began to bemore anxiety, and more satire, about this patternof masculinity. The new figure of the “salarymanescaping” has appeared in Japanese mediadiscussions (Dasgupta, 2000).

Power Relations. The colonial and postcolonialworld has tended to break down “purdah”systems of patriarchy that are based on theextreme subordination and isolation of women,in the name of modernization and women’srights (Kandiyoti, 1994). By and large, menhave adjusted to this. There are exceptions: forinstance, in the extremely disturbed conditionsof Afghanistan in the 1990s there was a reimpo-sition of severe controls on women by theTaliban regime. Broadly, however, the accep-tance of the principle of women’s presence inthe public realm (the vote, the right to work,legal autonomy) is one of the most important



and widespread of recent changes in genderideology among men. A large-scale survey byZulehner and Volz (1998) has shown that therejection of patriarchal models of gender rela-tions is particularly strong among the youngergeneration of German men, who favor eitheran egalitarian pattern or some compromisebetween the two. Anecdotal evidence suggeststhis generational difference can be found inother countries as well.

At the same time, the creation of a Westernizedpublic realm has seen the installation of large-scale organizations such as state agencies andcorporations. Men continue worldwide to holdthe large majority of top positions in govern-ments, corporations, courts, armies, churches,political parties, and professional associations(Connell, 2002).

Colonialism, decolonization, and globali-zation, however, have created many other situa-tions where power is not firmly establishedand conflict and disorder prevail. Peteet (1994)documents one such case, the PalestinianIntifada against Israeli occupation. Here theviolence of the occupation and the resistancehave changed the conditions in which masculin-ity is constructed. Older men no longer haveauthority over the process; rather, leadership inthe resistance is in the hands of young men.Boys and youth establish their identities andclaims to leadership within the collectivity ofyoung men. Beatings and imprisonment by theoccupying forces become a rite of passage forPalestinian youth.

Violence has also been particularly importantin the construction of masculinities in SouthAfrica. The struggles around apartheid produceda militarized (and still heavily armed) societyin which gun ownership and gun violence arewidely associated with masculinity (Cock, 2001).Waetjen and Maré (2001) show how both realviolence (assassinations and beatings of oppo-nents) and the symbolism of violence (appeal towarrior traditions) are used by the neocon-servative Inkatha movement in the creation ofan ethnic-national identity for Zulu men.

We should bear in mind that the construc-tion of masculinities in situations of conflict,although it may have spectacular public expres-sions (as it does in these cases), is still linked topatterns of gender relations in the private realm.Thus Peteet (1994) emphasizes the significanceof Palestinian mothers in the Intifada, both in

witnessing and dampening violence. Holter(1996), in a striking reanalysis of an old discus-sion of fascism, shows how Norwegian men’spropensity to adopt authoritarian stances isstatistically linked to their childhood familyexperiences of having a dominating father,experiencing parental divorce, and beingbrought up by a lone mother. Again it seemslikely that the connection shown between thechanging dynamics of families, and processes inthe public realm, is not confined to one country.

Emotional Relations. Patterns of emotionalattachment, although often felt to be the mostintimate and personal of all social relationships,are also subject to reconstruction by large-scalesocial forces. This may even be deliberate. Undercolonialism, Christian missionaries have oftenintervened against indigenous sexual customsthat contravene the missionary religion—especially indigenous homosexual and cross-gender practices and premarital heterosexualrelationships. For instance, missionaries backedby the Spanish colonial authorities tried tostamp out the third-gender berdache traditionin North America (Williams, 1986).

In the postcolonial world, although mission-ary intervention continues, the more powerfulinfluence seems to be commercial mass media.Multinational media corporations and localmedia imitating U.S. models circulate, on anenormous scale, narratives based on an ideologyof romantic love and images based on Westernmodels of attractiveness. This has been par-ticularly well documented for femininity (e.g.,Simpson, 1993), but of course the exaltation ofheterosexual romantic love also has an impacton men. It shifts the process of forming rela-tionships out of the arena of extended-familynegotiations (so-called arranged marriages,which appear oppressive only from within theideology of romantic love) into the arena ofindividual competition in a gender market(Holter, 1996). It is this, perhaps, that underliesthe discontent with current masculinity amongyounger urban men in Chile. Valdés andOlavarría (1998) indicate that this does notinvolve a basic critique of the hegemonic modelof masculinity but takes the form of a sense ofimprisonment in unchanging family roles.

The realm of sexuality and emotional rela-tionships may also be the site where largerchanges or tensions are registered. Ghoussoub



(2000) points to such a process in Egypt, whererumors about impotence-causing chemicals, anda burst of popularity for medieval sex manuals,can be understood as signs of a larger culturaldisturbance about masculinity. Ghoussoub notesthat the recent increase in women’s status inArab societies has posed dilemmas for menwhose identities are still based in traditionalconceptions of gender.

There is unlikely to be a radical break inthe pattern of emotional relations as a result ofthe impact of metropolitan or urban gendermodels. Research by Pearlman (1984) amongthe Mazatec people of Mexico points to a kindof coexistence. Young men who migrate to thecity to work and then return to the Mazateccommunity bring with them urban models ofmasculine dominance that are at odds with therelatively egalitarian gender relations of thiscommunity, in which women pursue their ownprestige and construct their own networks. Theyoung men do not abandon either model; rather,they develop a practice that Pearlman calls“code switching,” in which different patternsof masculinity are enacted with differentaudiences—older women versus other youngmen, for instance.

The recent research in metropolitan countriesthat considers hegemonic masculinity as adiscursive practice (Wetherell & Edley, 1999)reveals a very similar process. This researchshows that there are ways in which men arenot permanently committed to a particularmodel of masculinity—contrary to what weassume on the basis of familiar models of“gender identity.” Rather, men strategicallyadopt or distance themselves from the hege-monic model, depending on what they are tryingto accomplish at the time.

A comparable complexity has emerged inresearch with men involved in homosexualrelationships. Research in Brazil (Parker, 1985)encountered multiple patterns of sexual practiceand social identity, actively negotiated andplayed with by those involved. Over time, anunderstanding of identity that centered onsexual practice (emphasizing the distinctionbetween penetrating and being penetrated) hasbeen displaced by a medico-legal model focusedon the gender of one’s partner (thus emphasiz-ing the hetero-homo distinction). This in turnhas been challenged by a consciously egalitarian“gay” identity. A North American style of gay

identity, as the main alternative to heterosexualmasculinity, has now circulated globally. Thisprocess is widely criticized (often by homo-phobic politicians) as a form of cultural imperi-alism. But, as Altman (2001) observes, the“globalization of sexual identities” does notsimply displace indigenous models. Rather, theyinteract in extremely complex ways, with manyopportunities for code switching.

The dutiful Confucian or Islamic Malaysian sonone weekend might appear in drag at Blueboy,Kuala Lumpur’s gay bar, the next—and who is tosay which is “the real” person? Just as manyMalaysians can move easily from one language toanother, so most urban homosexuals can movefrom one style to another, from camping it up withfull awareness of the latest fashion trends fromCastro Street to playing the dutiful son at a familycelebration. (Altman, 2001, p. 92)

Symbolization. Mass media, especially elec-tronic media, in most parts of the world followNorth American and European models andrelay a great deal of metropolitan content. Asnoted, gender imagery is an important partof what is circulated. In counterpoint, “exotic”gender imagery has been used in marketingproducts from nonmetropolitan countries.

For instance, airline advertising by Singaporeand Malaysia presents images of flight atten-dants as exotic, submissive women—a tacticbased on the long-standing combination of theexotic and the erotic in the colonial imagination(Jolly, 1997). In the international sex trade, thesame device of racialized gender stereotypingis used in marketing Asian women to NorthAmerican and Australasian men (Cunneen &Stubbs, 2000). Lest this be thought a harmlessfantasy, we should note that the rate of death byhomicide among Filipino women in Australia—usually at the hands of non-Filipino men whohave been their husbands or partners—is nearlysix times higher than the “normal” rate of homi-cide in Australia.

The advent of metropolitan media, fashion,and ideologies creates many opportunities forcreative cultural work. The keynote is the activeappropriation and transformation of gendermeanings. This can be highly self-conscious. Astriking example is the marketing of a line ofmen’s suits by the Japanese fashion firmComme des Garçons under the catchphraseNihon no sebiro (Japanese Saville Row). Like



most Westernized businessmen’s dress since theearly 20th century, the actual cut of the clothesvaried only a little from older models. But theadvertising made an elaborate pitch to the “spir-itual elite” among men, to the idea of a Japaneseaesthetic, with overtones of imperial nostalgiaand a distinctively Japanese fusion of traditionand modernity (Kondo, 1999).

Davis (1997) describes a very differentreworking of these themes in the poor commu-nities of the Torres Strait Islands, in the far northof Australia. Collapse of the regional maritimeindustry in the 1960s had thrown the men backinto the community. One result was a revival ofboys’ initiation rituals, which had lapsed. Theseceremonies had previously been secluded. Theywere now made public, although girls’ cere-monies were not. The revival of “tradition” thusconstructed the “modern” pattern of masculinitybeing identified with the public realm and fem-ininity with the private. At the same time, thecelebration of local heroes from regional borderclashes was linked to the Australian nationalist-masculine cult of World War I Australian andNew Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) soldiers.The meaning of hero tales was thus shifted fromteaching conflict resolution to emphasizingnational identity. In both respects, the symbolicdimension of masculinity was reconstructed inways that linked it to themes of masculinity andnationality in the dominant European-settlerAustralian society.

The Western symbolism of masculinity is notfixed either, and the dynamics of globalizationare also in play in the metropole. As Messner(1993) has pointed out, it was an episode inthe military stabilization of global order, theUnited States operations in Kuwait and Iraq in1990 and 1991, that provided legitimation forpublic displays of emotion by powerful men.General Schwartzkopf was praised in the mediafor crying in public over his casualties. Niva(1998) agrees, going on to suggest that the sym-bolic “remasculinization” of American powerafter the defeat in Vietnam, modified by a cultof high-technology violence (the theme empha-sized in media coverage of the war), and fla-vored by compassion and cultural sensitivity,has created a template of “new world ordermasculinity.” But no such display of compas-sion or sensitivity accompanied the Westernattack on Iraq in 2003. Either the shift wasephemeral or—more probably—the Bush

government and its supporters simply drew onan alternative media imagery of power andtoughness that had coexisted with the other.

MEN’S BODIES IN

GLOBALIZATION PROCESSES

Because globalization refers to very largescale processes, it is important to recognizethat the effects of these processes appear atthe most intimate level. Men’s bodies, not justbroad masculine ideologies and institutions, areinvolved.

The global social order distributes and redis-tributes bodies through migration and throughpolitical controls over movement. The creationof empire itself involved migration, as groupsof the conquerors settled in the new lands. Insome cases mass migration followed, produc-ing the settler colonialism of North America,Australasia, Algeria, and Siberia. In settler colo-nialism, elements of the gender order of Europewere reassembled in new territories. Studies ofsettler masculinities show, however, that this wasselective and influenced by the local situation.Morrell (2001b) remarks on the production of arugged, rather than cerebral, masculinity in theboys’ schools of British colonists in Natal. Thisresonates with the construction of masculinityon the frontier of settlement in New Zealand(Phillips, 1987) and Australia (Lake, 1986).

Labor migration within the colonial systemwas a means by which existing gender practiceswere spread, but it was also a means by whichthey were reconstructed, as labor migration wasa gendered process. Moodie’s (1994) study ofmigrant labor in South African gold minesprovides the classic analysis, tracing the recon-struction of men’s gender practices in the spacebetween capitalist mining and the pastoralhomestead economy. Migration from the colo-nized world to the First World is also a massprocess. Studies of the Mexican-origin popula-tion of the United States were among the earli-est to explore the consequences of migration formasculinity (Baca Zinn, 1982) and have foundan active renegotiation of gender relations. Atraditionalist model of masculinity is repro-duced, but with great variation according toclass situation and the degree of ethnic exclu-sion being experienced. Poynting, Noble, andTabar (1998), interviewing Lebanese male



youth in Australia, similarly find contradictorygender consciousness and a strategic use ofstereotypes in the face of racism. There is anassertion of dignity, but a masculine dignity, ina context that implies the subordination ofwomen.

Men’s bodies, of course, are capable of otherpractices besides labor. Violence is a relation-ship between bodies that has been of greatimportance in the history of masculinities andwill be discussed further as we move on. Sexualpractices are equally important. The process ofeconomic development has for a long time beeninterwoven with population dynamics—boththrough “pronatalist” policies intended to buildnational strength and through population controlpolicies intending to make possible a risingstandard of living. As Figueroa-Perea and Rojas(1998) argue, although demography focuses onwomen as the unit of reproduction, the repro-ductive behavior of men is also a critical issue,especially where “fatherhood” is an importantpart of the cultural definition of masculinity.The population policies of the postcolonialstate are thus likely to encounter, and may seekto change, some aspects of men’s gendereddefinitions of their bodies.

The same is true of sexual health campaigns.It is now widely recognized that the shape andintensity of the HIV/AIDS epidemic is affectedby economic circumstances, communications,and the pattern of gender relations. For instance,the high rates of HIV infection among contem-porary South African gold miners are relatedto the construction of men’s lives in an alienat-ing and dangerous industry—a strong impulseto assert manhood, which in turn is understoodas “going after women,” and also a desire forintimate, “flesh-to-flesh” contact. “The verysense of masculinity that assists men in theirday-to-day survival also serves to heightentheir exposure to the risks of HIV infection”(Campbell, 2001, p. 282).

Bodies are never naked; they are alwaysclothed with meaning. But the meanings maybe reconstructed by imperialism and globali-zation. MacKenzie (1987) gives a historicalexample: the figure of the “imperial pioneer andhunter” in the Anglophone world of the late 19thcentury. Through the career of Baden-Powell,the founder of the Boy Scout movement, thecolonial imagery of the outdoorsman wasbrought back to the metropole as an agenda for

the education of boys. Through exemplaryfigures such as Theodore Roosevelt, it was fedinto the repertoire of metropolitan politics.Viveros Vigoya’s (2001) survey of Latin Americanresearch on masculinity gives a more currentexample: the changing definition of fatherhood.Contradictory situations are created when risingdemands for men’s involvement as fathers, inaccordance with international trends, are con-fronted by growing autonomy on the part ofwomen, also an international trend, or areblocked by economic dislocation resulting fromthe pressures of the global economy.

These relocations and reinterpretations ofbodies create many possibilities for hybridiza-tion and change in gender imagery, sexuality,and other forms of practice. The movement isnot always toward synthesis, however. The racialhierarchies of colonialism have been reassertedin new contexts, including the politics of themetropole. Ethnic and racial divisiveness hasbeen growing in importance in recent years. AsKlein (2000) argues in the case of Israel andTillner (2000) in the case of Austria, this is afruitful context for the production of masculini-ties oriented toward domination and violence.

MASCULINITY POLITICS ON A

WORLD SCALE

The world gender order broadly privileges menover women. Although there are many localexceptions, there is a patriarchal dividend formen collectively, arising from higher incomes,higher labor force participation, unequal prop-erty ownership, and greater access to institu-tional power; there is also cultural and sexualprivileging. This has been documented by inter-national research on women’s situation (Taylor,1985; Valdés & Gomáriz, 1995), although itsimplications for men have mostly been ignored.The conditions thus exist for the production ofa hegemonic masculinity on a world scale—thatis to say, a dominant form of masculinity thatembodies, organizes, and legitimates men’sdomination in the world gender order as a whole.

The inequalities of the world gender order,like the inequalities of local gender orders,produce resistance. The main pressure forchange has come from an international feministmovement (Bulbeck, 1998). International coop-eration among feminist groups goes back at



least a century, although it is only in recentdecades that a women’s movement has estab-lished a strong presence in international forums.Mechanisms such as the 1979 Convention onthe Elimination of all forms of DiscriminationAgainst Women and the United Nations’ Decadefor Women (1975-1985) placed gender inequal-ity on the diplomatic agenda. The follow-up1995 Beijing Conference agreed on a detailed“Platform For Action,” providing for interna-tional action on issues ranging from economicexclusion, women’s health, and violence againstwomen, to girls’ education.

Equally important is the circulation of ideas,methods and examples of action. The presenceof a worldwide feminist movement (howeverdiverse and conflicted) and the undeniable factof a worldwide debate about gender issues hasintensified cultural pressure for change. InJapan, for instance, a range of women’s organi-zations existed before 1970, but a new activismwas sparked by the international women’s liber-ation movement (Tanaka, 1977). This wasreflected in genres such as girls’ fiction andcomic books with images of powerful women.Men, and men’s cultural genres, graduallyresponded—sometimes with marked hostility.Ito (1992), tracing these changes, argues thatestablished patterns of Japanese “men’s culture”have collapsed, amid intensified debate aboutthe situation of men. However, no new model ofmasculinity has become dominant.

With local variations, a similar course ofevents has occurred in many developed countries.Challenge and resistance, plus the disruptionsinvolved in the creation of a world gender order,have meant many local instabilities in genderarrangements. These instabilities include thefollowing:

• Contestation of all-male networks and sexistorganizational culture as women move intopolitical office, the bureaucracy, and highereducation (Eisenstein, 1991)

• The disruption of sexual identities that pro-duced “queer” politics and other challengesto gay identities in metropolitan countries(Seidman, 1996)

• The shifts in the urban intelligentsia that pro-duced profeminist politics among heterosexualmen (Pease, 1997)

• Media images of “the new sensitive man,” theshoulder-padded businesswoman, and othericons of gender change

One response to such instabilities, on the partof groups whose power or identity is challenged,is to reaffirm local gender hierarchies. A mascu-line fundamentalism is, accordingly, an identifi-able pattern in gender politics. Swart (2001)documents a striking case in South Africa, theparamilitary Afrikaner Weerstandsbewegingmovement led by Eugene Terre Blanche, whichattempts to mobilize Afrikaner men against thepostapartheid regime. A cult of masculine tough-ness is interwoven with open racism; weaponsare celebrated and women are explicitly excludedfrom authority. There are obvious similarities tothe right-wing militia movement in the UnitedStates documented by Gibson (1994) andbrought to world attention by the Oklahoma Citybombing. Tillner (2000), discussing masculinityand racism in central Europe, notes evidence thatit is not underprivileged youth specifically whoare recruited to racism. Rather, it is young menoriented to dominance, an orientation that playsout in gender as well as race.

These fundamentalist reactions against genderchange are spectacular but are not, I consider, themajority response among men. As noted earlier,there is considerable survey evidence of wide-spread acceptance of some measure of genderchange (i.e., a swing of popular attitudes towardgender equality). This change of attitudes,however, need not result in much change oforganizational practice. For instance, Fuller(2001) remarks that despite changes of opinionamong Peruvian men,

the realms in which masculine solidarity networksare constructed that guarantee access to networksof influence, alliances, and support are reproducedthrough a masculine culture of sports, alcoholconsumption, visits to whorehouses, or storiesabout sexual conquests. These mechanisms assurea monopoly of, or, at least, differential access bymen to the public sphere and are a key part of thesystem of power in which masculinity is forged.(p. 325)

I would argue that this practical recupera-tion of gender change is a more widespread,and more successful, form of reaction amongmen than masculine fundamentalism is. Suchrecuperation is supported by neoliberalism.The neoliberal agenda for the reform ofnational and international economies involvesclosing down historic possibilities for genderreform. It subverts the gender compromise



represented by the metropolitan welfare state.It undermines the progressive-liberal agendasof sex role reform represented by affirmativeaction programs, antidiscrimination provi-sions, child-care services, and the like. Right-wing parties and governments have beenpersistently cutting such programs in the nameof either individual liberties or global compet-itiveness. Through these means, the patriarchaldividend to men is defended or restored, with-out an explicit masculinity politics in the formof a mobilization of men.

Within the global arena of internationalrelations, the international state, multinationalcorporations, and global markets, there is, nev-ertheless, a deployment of masculinities. Twomodels of the state of play in this arena haverecently been offered.

In a previous paper (Connell, 1998), I pro-posed that the transnational business masculin-ity I have described here has achieved a positionof hegemony. This has replaced older localmodels of bourgeois masculinity, which weremore embedded in local organizations andlocal conservative cultures, in a process welldescribed by Roper’s (1994) study of Britishmanufacturing managers. In global arenas, ithas had only one major contender for hegemonyin recent decades: the rigid, control-orientedmasculinity of the military, with its variant inthe militarized bureaucratic dictatorships ofStalinism. With the collapse of Stalinism andthe end of the Cold War, the more flexible,calculating, egocentric masculinity of the newcapitalist entrepreneur holds the world stage.The political leadership of the major powers,through such figures as Clinton, Schröder, andBlair, for a while conformed to this model ofmasculinity, working out a nonthreateningaccommodation with feminism.

Transnational business masculinity, however,is not homogeneous. A Confucian variant, basedin East Asia, has a stronger commitment to hier-archy and social consensus; a secularized“Christian” variant, based in North America, hasmore hedonism and individualism, as well asgreater tolerance for social conflict. In certainarenas, there is already conflict between thebusiness and political leaderships embodyingthese forms of masculinity. Such conflicts havearisen over “human rights” versus “Asian val-ues” and over the extent of trade and investmentliberalization.

Focusing more on international politics thanon business, Hooper (1998) also suggests apattern of hegemony in the masculinities ofglobal arenas. A tough, power-oriented mas-culinity predominates in the arena of diplomacy,war, and power politics—distanced from thefeminized world of domesticity but also distin-guished from other masculinities, such as thoseof working class men, subordinated ethnicgroups, wimps, and homosexuals. This is notjust a matter of preexisting masculinity beingexpressed in international politics. Hooperargues that international politics is a primarysite for the construction of masculinities; forinstance, in war or through continuing securitythreats. Hooper further argues that recent glob-alization trends have “softened” hegemonicmasculinity in several ways. Ties with the mili-tary have been loosened, with a world trendtoward demilitarization—the total numbers ofmen in world armies have fallen significantlyin the last 15 years. Men are now more oftenpositioned as consumers, and contemporarymanagement gives more emphasis to tradition-ally “feminine” qualities such as interpersonalskills and teamwork. Hooper also comments onthe interplay of North American with Japanesecorporate culture, noting some convergence andborrowing in both directions in the context ofglobal restructuring.

Although the “softening” of hegemonic mas-culinity spoken of by Hooper (1998), Connell(1998), Niva (1998), and Messner (1993) is realenough, it does not mean the obliteration of“harder” masculinities. The election of GeorgeW. Bush to the U.S. presidency, the politicalaftermath of the attack on the World TradeCenter in New York, and the remobilization ofnationalism and military force in the UnitedStates culminating in the attack on Iraq in 2003show that hard-line political leadership is stillpossible in the remaining superpower. It hasnever gone away in China. Bush’s distinctivecombination of U.S. nationalism, religiosity,support for corporate interests, and rejection ofalternative points of view is not, perhaps, an eas-ily exported model of masculinity. But localequivalents might be forged elsewhere.

If these are contenders for hegemony, theyare not the only articulations of masculinity inglobal forums. The international circulation ofgay identities, discussed earlier, is an importantindication that nonhegemonic masculinities



may operate in global arenas. They can findpolitical expression, for instance, around humanrights and AIDS prevention (Altman, 2001).

Another political alternative is provided bycounterhegemonic movements opposed to thecurrent world gender order and the groupsdominant in it. They are sometimes associatedwith the promotion of “new masculinities,” butthey also address masculinity as an obstacleto the reform of gender relations. The largestand best known are the profeminist men’sgroups in the United States, with their umbrellagroup NOMAS (National Organization of MenAgainst Sexism), a group that has been activesince the early 1980s (Cohen, 1991). Moreglobally oriented is the “White Ribbon” cam-paign, originating in Canada as a remark-ably successful mobilization to oppose men’sviolence against women, and now workinginternationally (Kaufman, 1999).

Such movements, groups, or reform agendasexist in many countries, including Germany(“Multioptionale Männlichkeiten?” 1998), Britain(Seidler, 1991), Australia (Pease, 1997), Mexico(Zingoni, 1998), Russia (Sinelnikov, 2000),India (Roy, 2003), and the Nordic countries(Oftung, 2000). The spectrum of issues theyaddress is well illustrated by the conferenceof the Japanese men’s movement in Kyoto in1996. This conference included sessions onyouth, gay issues, work, child rearing, bodies,and communications with women—as well asthe globalization of the men’s movement(Menzu Senta, 1997).

Most of these movements and groups aresmall, and some are short-lived. They have,however, been a presence in gender politicssince the 1970s and have built up a body ofexperience and ideas. These are circulated inter-nationally by translations and republicationsof writings, by traveling activists and researchers,and through intergovernmental agencies. Recently,some international agencies, including theCouncil of Europe (Ólafsdóttir, 2000), FLACSO(Valdés & Olavarría, 1998), and UNESCO(Breines, Connell, & Eide, 2000), sponsored thefirst conferences to discuss the implications forpublic policy of the new perspectives on mas-culinity. The role of men in achieving genderequality emerged as an issue in the Program forAction that emerged from the 1995 Beijingworld conference on women, and a number ofUnited Nations agencies are currently involved

with discussions and policy formation in thisarea (United Nations Division for the Advance-ment of Women, 2003). It seems that issuesabout changing men and masculinities havearrived on the international agenda.

CONCLUSION

The issues discussed in this chapter have onlyrecently come into focus. The earliest discus-sion I know of masculinities and global changewas in a special issue of the magazine NewInternationalist in September 1987, and thatwas very exploratory (Brazier, 1987). Actualresearch on men and masculinities in transna-tional arenas is still rare. Most of the argumentsin this chapter have been built up from indica-tions in studies that have other primary con-cerns. Yet the issues discussed here seem ofgreat importance. They bear on questions ofpeace and war, global inequalities and economicchange, as well as change in intimate relation-ships and identities. I hope this tentative synthe-sis will help to stimulate research and debate.

NOTE

1. By metropole I mean the group of rich coun-tries, mostly former imperial powers, that form thecore of the world capitalist economy.

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90

6MEN IN THE THIRD WORLD

Postcolonial Perspectives on Masculinity

ROBERT MORRELL

SANDRA SWART

This chapter examines men and masculinityin the postcolonial world, a world formerlycontrolled by European colonizers. It

considers how men and masculinity have beenanalyzed using a number of different theoriesand literatures and suggests that the specificgender conditions of the postcolonial worldrequire a flexible, yet syncretic, approach if theirlives are to be understood and, more important,appreciated and improved.

Our starting point is that the world stillbears the mark of colonialism. The World Bank,for example, divides the world into two eco-nomic categories: “more developed regions”—Europe, North America, Australia, NewZealand, and Japan—and “less developedregions”—the rest of the world. A further sub-category (a part of the less developed regionsthat includes the poorest countries of the world)is “Sub-Saharan Africa.” There is still goodreason to talk about the dichotomy betweenthe metropole and the periphery and about

the developed and developing worlds. Theseconcepts are crude, sometimes misleading, andoften inaccurate. Yet they retain an undeniabletruth. As a shorthand, for all its shortcomings,we shall in this chapter be using the term ThirdWorld to refer to the un- and underdevelopedregions concentrated in South America, Africa,and parts of Asia, an area often termed “theSouth” to distinguish its state from the industri-alized and wealthy “North.”

The differences between the First and ThirdWorlds can be found in the statistics shown inTable 6.1.

People in different parts of the world havehugely divergent experiences of life. We canmake some generalizations that will underpinthis study. Many babies never make it to theirfirst birthdays, and those who achieve this live inpoverty for much of their lives. Many will live inrural areas, with little access to the technologythat people in the more developed world relyon. And the situation is getting worse: The share

Authors’ note: We would like to thank R. W. Connell and Jeff Hearn for their helpful comments on this chapter.


of the poorest 20% of the world’s populationin the global economy in 1960 was 2.3%; in1997 it was down to 1.1% (Heward, 1999, p. 9).Beyond this generalization, there are genderdifferentiations, which this chapter will explore.

The Third World is still portrayed in themass media in ways that Edward Said (1978)explained in terms of the concept “orientalism.”The (mostly) black people of the Third Worldwere “othered.” Despite the vigorous debatesabout such (mis)representation, the Third Worldis nonetheless represented as a combinationof emaciated children, crying women, and menengaged in war. These gendered portrayals bothreflect global disparities and gravely misrep-resent them. In this chapter, we set out to seehow these global inequalities can be understoodin gendered terms. Following the main thrustof critical men’s studies, we move beyond gen-dered essentialisms to examine how differentmasculinities are constructed and how men arepositioned and act in the world. It is importantfrom the outset to note that there has been littleanalysis of men and masculinity in the ThirdWorld. Anthropologists have left a rich descrip-tion of the doings of men, although seldom havethese been put into a conscious gender frame,and rarely have these scholars incorporated thehistory of colonial and postcolonial society intotheir ethnographic accounts (Finnström, 1997).Two works consciously working from a criticalmen’s studies perspective provide exceptions tothis generalization in South Africa (Morrell,2001) and South America (Gutmann, 2001). It issurprising that the emergence of postcolonialtheory, with a strong element of feminism in it,has done little to rectify this omission, although,

as we show in the third section of this chapter, thegeneral approach has the potential both to focustheoretical light on men in the periphery and toprompt new angles of research into masculinitythat give greater weight to alternative paradigms(particularly, indigenous knowledge systems).

SOME HISTORICAL

AND THEORETICAL STARTING POINTS

Postcolonialism refers to the period after colo-nialism. Although the impact of colonialism iscontested, we take it to refer to a phase in worldhistory beginning in the early 16th century thateventually, by 1914, saw Europe hold sway overmore than 85% of the rest of the globe.

Another meaning of colonialism refers tothe political ideologies that legitimated themodern occupation and exploitation of alreadysettled lands by external powers. For the indige-nous populations, it meant the suppression ofresistance, the imposition of alien laws, andthe parasitic consumption of natural resources,including human labor.

Colonialism was a highly gendered process.In the first instance, it was driven by genderedmetropolitan forces and reflected the genderorder of the metropole. The economies ofEurope from the 16th century onward weregeared toward the colonies. The men whowere engaged in conquest and those who wereabsorbed into industry producing and profitingfrom the subordination of large parts of theworld, working and ruling classes together, werecomplicit in exploitative practices, the most

Men in the Third World • 91

Table 6.1 Differences Between the First and Third Worlds

Life Life LifeBirths per Deaths per Infant Expectancy Expectancy Expectancy Percentage1000 of 1000 of Mortality at Birth at Birth at Birth of Urban

Population Population Rate (Total) (Male) (Female) Population

More 11 10 8 75 72 79 75developed

Less 25 8 61 64 63 66 40developed

Sub-Saharan 41 15 94 51 49 52 30Africa

SOURCE: Population Reference Bureau (2001a, p. 2).



brutal of which was the nearly three-century-longtrans-Atlantic slave trade. Europe’s Enlighten-ment ambitions, fused with its colonial past,were based on the power and symbolic potencyof the nation-state. Today the process of thetransnational economy spells the decline ofnation-states as principals of economic and polit-ical organization. The decline of the nation-state and the end of colonialism also marks theconcomitant historical crisis of the values it rep-resented, chiefly masculine authority founded andembodied in the patriarchal family, compulsoryheterosexuality, and the exchange of women—all articulated in the crucible of imperialmasculinity.

As many have argued—from one of the firstAfricanist historians, Basil Davidson (1961), tothe historian of the transatlantic diaspora and itscultural impact, Paul Gilroy (1993)—the slavetrade changed the meaning of “race” and pro-duced an equation of black with inferiority.Much of the research on race (Hoch, 1979;Staples, 1982; Stecopoulos & Uebel, 1997) isstill trying to make sense of the way in whichmasculinities in the 20th century were shapedby the systematic elaboration of racist dis-courses. A derivative of recent theoreticaladvances has been to examine how the experi-ence of race in the colonies (Stoler, 1989) influ-enced class relations and identities in themetropole (Hall, 1992) and how metropolitanideas travelled into the periphery (Johnson,2001). In Imperial Leather, Anne McClintock(1995) argues that to understand colonialismand postcolonialism, one must first recognizethat race, gender, and class are not “distinctrealms of experience, existing in splendid isola-tion from each other”; rather, they come intoexistence in relation to each other, albeit inconflictual ways. Others have argued before herthat the Victorians connected race, class, andgender in ways that promoted imperialismabroad and classism at home, but McClintockargues that these connections proved crucialto the development of Western modernity.“Imperialism,” she explains,

is not something that happened elsewhere—adisagreeable fact of history external to Westernidentity. Rather, imperialism and the invention ofrace were fundamental aspects of Western, indus-trial modernity. The invention of race in the urbanmetropoles . . . became central not only to the self-definition of the middle class but also to the

policing of the “dangerous classes”: the workingclass, the Irish, Jews, prostitutes, feminists, gaysand lesbians, criminals, the militant crowd and soon. At the same time, the cult of domesticity wasnot simply a trivial and fleeting irrelevance,belonging properly in the private, “natural” realmof the family. Rather, I argue that the cult ofdomesticity was a crucial, if concealed, dimensionof male as well as female identities—shifting andunstable as these were. (McClintock, 1995, p. 5)

In his chapter in this volume, R. W. Connell(see Chapter 5) argues for the need to look beyondethnography and local studies to comprehendhow globalization is shaping gender power in the21st century. In this chapter, we argue that anecessary complement to this approach is theneed to recognize what anthropologists used tocall “the Fourth World”—a world that policies ofmodernization did not touch, where life contin-ued much as it had always done except that theecological consequences of advanced industrial-ization were experienced catastrophically inclimate change and attendant natural disasters.Added to this is the need to examine contextswherein development has failed and people nolonger believe in the promise of progress. Inlarge parts of the world, people today are poorerthan they were half a century ago. In mostinstances, the slide into poverty has not beenlinear but has been punctuated by moments ofmaterial improvement. There are few places inthe world that still harbor the illusion that, inmaterial terms at least, things will get bettersoon.

Globalization has been described as anotherform of colonialism or imperialism. It has not“corrected” the legacies of the uneven march ofcapitalism or the differential impacts of imperi-alism (Golding & Harris, 1997). Instead, global-ization has fostered media and culturalimperialism. Information technologies have dis-seminated Hollywood images around the world,giving an illusion of a homogeneous globalculture. This does not mean, as Anthony Appiah(1991) emphatically remarks, “that it is theculture of every person in the world” (p. 343).And, as Nyamnjoh contends, “globalization doesnot necessarily or even frequently implyhomogenization or Americanization, [as] differ-ent societies tend to be quite creative in theirappropriation or consumption of the materialsof modernity” (Appadurai, 1996, p. 17; Gray,1998). However, he concedes that the developing


world continues to bear the brunt of the riskand volatility associated with the exploitationof information technologies and markets.

Before turning to the different literaturesthat bear on postcolonial men and masculinity,it is important to note that the term postcolonialrefers inexactly to a political and geographicalterrain. On occasion, the term includes coun-tries that have yet to achieve independence, orpeople in the developed world who are minori-ties, or even independent colonies that nowcontend with “neocolonial” forms of subjuga-tion through expanding global capitalism. In allof these ways, postcolonial, rather than indicat-ing only a specific and materially historicalevent, seems to describe the second half of the20th century in general as a period in the after-math of the zenith of colonialism. Even moregenerically, postcolonial is used to denote aposition against imperialism and Eurocentrism.Although technically postcolonial, Canada, theUnited States, and Australia, for example, areseldom analyzed in this paradigm (although,see, as a counter, Coleman, 1998). Western waysof knowledge production and propagation thenbecome objects of scrutiny for those seekingalternative means of expression. The term thusyokes a diverse range of experiences, cultures,and problems.

ANALYZING POSTCOLONIALISM:THREE APPROACHES

This section examines three different literatures(postcolonial theory, writings on indigenousknowledge, and work on gender and develop-ment). All are, in one way or another, a responseto postcolonialism. We start out by consideringthe reasons for the emergence of postcolonialtheory and look at the intellectual and politicalclimate that spawned it. We then show how thisnew theory attempts to offer an alternative read-ing of agency and subjectivity and, at the sametime, tackles the issue of representation andpower in the periphery.

The second body of writing makes a claimfor the status of indigenous knowledge. Thisis a type of knowledge that is site specificand claims no universal validity. Historically,it predates colonialism. It has been attacked andmarginalized by the processes of colonialism,yet seldom has it been totally destroyed. It

therefore belongs to and is possessed byindigenous, formerly colonized peoples. Thistype of knowledge offers different ways ofunderstanding the world and making senseof life and death. Its assumptions are normallyquite different from those seen in Western,subject-centered frames. For example, humanexistence is understood in terms of communaland environmental belonging rather than assomething intrinsically related to the fact ofan individual’s birth.

The claims made on behalf of indigenousknowledge have been generated by postcolonialconditions and the perceived condescensionof the First World for the Third. Objecting tothe imperial gaze, Third World writers, insteadof using the sophisticated theoretical tools ofpostmodernism, have trawled the past andinterrogated cultural practices in the attempt togive indigenous knowledge appropriate statusin the world. Indigenous knowledge claimsautonomy and independence from metropolitanknowledge. It offers new ways of understandingthe world that are sometimes at odds with West-ern ways. It is, to use current South Africanand pan-African terminology, an attempt at arenaissance—to recover “old” ways of under-standing and to restore “old,” lost, or forgottenways of doing. As with postcolonial theory, oneof the major concerns of indigenous knowledgeis to reclaim agency and black (Third World)voices.

The third body of work (the gender and devel-opment literature) engages with postcolonialismin terms of ongoing inequality between the Firstand Third Worlds. It responds to the challengethat this poses for an international communityformally committed to human rights and equal-ity. This literature is not so much concerned withrepresentation as with actually effecting improve-ment in material life. Contributors speak fromboth metropolitan and Third World contexts asthey collectively try to find effective ways ofreducing inequality and promoting growth. Thisliterature has been much more sensitive todebates about gender and masculinity than thefirst two, partly because the language of theinternational community (especially agenciesof the United Nations) has been particularlyreceptive to developments in gender theory andresponsive to the suggestion that a gender (andlatterly a masculinity) lens be used to assist thedelivery of development projects.



Postcolonial Theory

Postcolonial theory is not a coherent bodyof writing or theorization. In fact, its realmis contested, and writers who ostensibly belongtogether as “postcolonial theorists” dispute itspolitical mission and ambit. Its rise and entrench-ment in academia may arguably be dated fromthe publication of Edward Said’s influentialcritique of Western constructions of the Orientin his 1978 book, Orientalism. Its origins arediverse. It is easier to follow these if we recognizea basic split in postcolonial theory, one thatMoore-Gilbert (1997) characterizes as post-colonial theory and postcolonial criticism.Postcolonial theory draws on postmodern theoryto unpick the modernist project, exposing its twinnature: freedom, self-determination, reason—andyet also submission, marginalization, and inade-quacy of the “other.” Postcolonial theory isprimarily associated with “the holy trinity”(Young, 1995, p. 165): Said, Homi Bhabha, andGayatri Spivak. What unites them is their intel-lectual debt to postmodern writers, their focuson the importance of culture, and their politicalopposition to the cultural domination of theWest. All three are based in prestigious Westernuniversities, something that has made somecritics skeptical of the sincerity of their work.

The originality of their work is best appreciatedby contrasting it with the work of Marxist schol-ars like Andre Gunder Frank (1971, 1978) andColin Leys who, in the 1960s and early 1970s,pointed out that political independence had notended the domination of the former colonies bytheir metropolitan masters but had strengthenedthe dependence of the former on the latter.Here the analysis highlighted ongoing materialinequality. Postcolonial theory focused on therole of culture in politics. The fact that the Orientwas “othered” and subjected to a Western gazeby colonial writers had consequence for theinhabitants of the Third World. They weredeprived of a voice. Postcolonial theorists devel-oped theories of race and subjectivity that openedup a new terrain of study and offered new con-cepts with which to analyze. Possibly the mostinfluential was the term hybridity—a term devel-oped to try and capture the fluidity of post-colonial life and the postmodern insights into themultiple identities and subject positions avail-able. Here the debt to postmodernism—the stresson conditionality and contingency and the suspi-cion of absolutes and progress—was very strong.

Postcolonial theorists, and Bhabha (1994) inparticular, argue that colonial identities arealways about agony and transition or flux.However, Bhabha does not accept a neat black-white division but subscribes to the idea of“messy” borders, “the tethered shadow of defer-ral and displacement” (cited in Loomba, 1998,p. 176). Where he detects the mimicry of whitemaster by black subject, he argues that this actu-ally undermines white hegemony and is there-fore an anticolonial strategy. He further arguesthat the identity of both colonized and the colo-nizer are unstable and fraught. This is becauseof inherent instability and contradictions in themodernist project.

Postcolonial theory insists that everyone hassome agency. This concept is both useful andinadequate. It is useful in the sense that it pro-vides a constructive starting point in literarystudies of representation and is very acceptingof the idea of a fluid or “multiple” identity. Thisbalances the more rigidly Marxian and struc-turalist perspectives, with their linear trajectoriesof class and power. However, postcolonial theorydoes not move the marginal to the center—itdoes not invert the historical hierarchy—it critiques the center from both the peripheryand the metropolitan core (Hutcheon, 1992).Bhabha (1994), for example, says “there is noknowledge—political or otherwise—outsiderepresentation” (p. 23). Everything is thus ana-lyzed in terms of linguistic interchange, offeringvocabularies of subjectivity. What postcolonialtheory often does not do is show how subjectivi-ties are shaped by class, gender, and geospatialcontext.

The emancipatory claims of postcolonial the-ory are contested in another way. Aijaz Ahmad(1992, 1996) and Ania Loomba (1998), particu-larly, have objected to the marginalization of pol-itics and the increasingly abstruse theoreticaldirection taken, as well as to the decreasingpurchase of this theory on Third World realities:the truths of class, race, and gender inequality.Similar concerns have also been expressed inThird World contexts (Sole, 1994). Neil Lazarus(1999) has characterized postcolonial theory as“the idealist and dehistoricizing scholarshipcurrently predominant in that field in general”(p. 1). It is not incidental that for these scholars,feminism and Marxism remain important inunderstanding the world and that for them, thatwhich Lenin said many years ago remains true:



“Politics begin where the masses are; not wherethere are thousands, but where there are millions,that is where serious politics begins” (quoted inCarr, 1964, p. 50).

When it comes to gender, the impact ofpostcolonial theory has been disappointing(Moore-Gilbert, 1997, p. 168). Spivak’s con-cern for Third World women, particularly theircultural position and representation, is univer-sally acknowledged, but in the study of menand masculinity, the impact has been slight,limited to one particular work (Sinha, 1995).One possible explanation for this is identifiedby Connell:

The domain of culture (all right, “discourse,” Iprefer the older language) is a major part of socialreality. It defines memberships of categories, andit defines oppositions between categories; hence,the very category of gender is necessarily cultural(or constituted in discourse). But it is not consti-tuted only in discourse. Gender relations alsoinvolve violence, which is not discourse; materialinequality, which is not discourse; organizationssuch as firms, which are not discourse; structuressuch as markets, which are not discourse. So theanalysis of the discursive constitution of mas-culinities, while often highly illuminating, cannever be a complete, or even very adequate,analysis of masculinities. (Ouzgane & Coleman,1998, point 21)

A second type of approach to the study ofthe postcolonial is “postcolonial criticism,”which is described as a “more or less distinctset of reading practices” (Moore-Gilbert, 1997,p.12), and which emerged within Englishlanguage and cultural studies. The close exami-nation of texts permitted a critique of colonialliterary method and also focused attention onthe representation of the racialized subject. Hereit shared its field of study with postcolonialthought, although it was much more sensitiveto the existence of indigenous critique. Amongthose whose writings have been acknowledgedare the South African author of Native Life inSouth Africa and one of the founders in 1912 ofthe African National Congress, Sol Plaatje(Plaatje & Head, 1996); Black American civilrights activist, author of Black Reconstruction, andcofounder of the National Association for theAdvancement of Colored People, W. E. B. du Bois(1934/2001); the Caribbean author of The BlackJacobins and theoretician of Marxism, cricket,and West Indian self-determination, C. L. R. James

(1938/1989); and the Martinique-born residentof Algeria who became famous as a revolution-ary writer, the author of Wretched of theEarth, whose writings had profound influenceon the radical movements in the 1960s in theUnited States and Europe, Frantz Fanon(1963/1986).

The willingness to search for and listen toalternative narratives (penned by those subordi-nated by colonialism) also made possible atrans-Atlantic conversation that fed into post-colonial debates and gave access to authors asdiverse as Henry Louis Gates, an authority inAfrican American identity studies who workedto include works by African Americans in theAmerican literary rights movement in the1960s; Walter Rodney, the radical Marxist fromGuyana, killed by a car bomb in Georgetownin 1980; and Patricia Hill Collins (1990) andbell hooks, prominent black American academicfeminists of the 1980s and 1990s.

Race and Gender:Black Men and Masculinity

Postcolonial theory draws attention toagency and is also powerfully subversiveregarding essentialisms. It is predicated on thedeconstruction of the “essential.” Diana Fuss(1989) says,

[Essentialism] is most commonly understoodas a belief in the real, true essence of things, theinvariable and fixed properties which definethe “whatness” of a given entity. . . . Importantly,essentialism is typically defined in oppositionto difference. . . . The opposition is a helpfulone in that it reminds us that a complex systemof cultural, social, psychical, and historicaldifferences, and not a set of pre-existent humanessences, position and constitute the subject.However, the binary articulation of essentialismand difference can also be restrictive, evenobfuscating, in that it allows us to ignore or denythe differences within essentialism. (pp. xi-xii)

In the field of gender studies, reaction toessentialism can be seen in the acceptance ofthe concept of “masculinities” developed by,among others, the Australian gender theoristR. W. Connell in the 1980s and 1990s. Elsewherein this volume, this development is exhaustivelydiscussed, so we now move on to examine howthe critique of essentialism has played out in theanalysis of black men.



How are we to understand “black men”? Thisis not a question that has received the attentionit deserves, as the focus of gender work inunderdeveloped world contexts and in terms ofrace has been insistently on women. An ironicconsequence has been to silence or to renderblack men invisible. For example, Heidi Mirza(1997) refers to “Black Feminism” as anythingthat is recognizably antiracist and postcolonial:“the political project has a single purpose: toexcavate the silences and pathological appear-ances of a collectivity of women assigned tothe ‘other’ and produced in gendered, sexual-ized, wholly racialised discourses” (pp. 20-21).

Black men need to be understood as“multidimensional social subject(s)” (Mac anGhaill, 1996, p. 1). The masculinity of blackmen needs to be considered in the “ambivalentand contradictory sites of black identity and eth-nicity and their complex interaction with stateinstitutions and racial ideologies” (Marriott,1996, p. 185). This involves highlighting therelationship between masculinity, sexuality,and power. One approach, which centralizesrace, is suggested by Gayatri ChakravortySpivak (1996), who guardedly suggests the pathof “strategic essentialism.” Trinh T. Minh-Ha(1995) personalizes the choices facing a post-colonial subject struggling with identity issues:

Every path I/i take is edged with thorns. On the onehand, i play into the Savior’s hands by concentrat-ing on authenticity, for my attention is numbed byit and diverted from other important issues; onthe other hand, i do feel the necessity to return tomy so-called roots, since they are the fount of mystrength, the guiding arrow to which i constantlyrefer before heading for a new direction. (p. 268)

The black man is faced with a choice andhas to exercise his agency. Identity becomes amatter of choice, although it is a choice playedout against the backdrop of environment andhistory.

Another approach is sociological—to exam-ine collectivities of black men and the socialconstructions of masculinity. Black men andboys in the British schooling system developsubordinate masculinities that reflect theirexclusion from hegemonic male power (Macan Ghaill, 1996). There is a defensive aspectto this construction of masculinity that per-mits the creation of safe space (both emotionaland spatial), but it also signals a defiance and

validates difference (Westwood, 1990). Elsewherein the United States, a similar marginal positionwith regard to societal power has resulted in theconstruction of African American masculinitiesthat are also subordinate to the hegemonic ideal.Such constructions include, among other things,the emphasis of physicality, a particular culturalstyle (“cool pose”), music (hip-hop and rap),and investment in sporting achievement. Butthere is a danger of essentializing black men byfixing and generalizing these choices to allblack men (Majors, 1986; Staples, 1982). Thishas resulted in the stereotyping and demonizingof black men as either thugs or sportsmen(Jefferson, 1996; Ross, 1998).

The focus on race generally and black men inparticular reflects a concern with politics and adesire for emancipation of the subject and theeradication of inequality. The foregrounding ofthe black subject (and race as analytical cate-gory) constitutes, according to Marriott (1996),“black political and cultural attempts to stabi-lize ‘blackness’” and “a determined attempt toretain the position and influence of race authen-ticity over ethnicity, gender and class” (p. 198).This approach, with its emphasis on symbolism,subordination, and resistance, has given rise tomany highly perceptive accounts of the experi-ence of colonialism. In the South African con-text, this approach has been used to explainapparent mental illness as a form of resistance(Comaroff & Comaroff, 1987) and has thussteered analysis away from what some consid-ered to be a unidimensional materialist registerof racial oppression. In other Third World con-texts, such as India, a similar approach to theunderstanding of oppression has been developedto demonstrate how identities shift and developin the interstices of society to accommodatehighly unequal gender relations. At the sametime, transgressive and dissenting voicesemerge to challenge the patriarchal discoursescentered on the family, community, and nation(Rajan, 1999).

Nonetheless, the focus on race cannot justbe about emancipation because black (just likeother) men are in oppressive relations withwomen. The strained relationship betweenblack women and men is carefully identified bybell hooks (1981, 1990). Compassionately, sheobserved, “Like black men, many black womenbelieved black liberation could only be achievedby the formation of a strong black patriarchy”



(hooks, 1981, p. 182). But she went on to pointout that black men were also responsible forhigh levels of violence against women, as wellas against other men, and cautioned againstromanticizing either black men or women. Hersubsequent work has been filled with hope, andshe looks to self-reflective, politically consciousblack men working with black women as ameans of advancing an emancipatory project.

We need to hear from black men who are interro-gating sexism, who are striving to create differentand oppositional views of masculinity. Theirexperience is the concrete practice that may influ-ence others. Progressive black liberation strugglemust take seriously feminist movements to endsexism and sexist oppression if we are to restore toourselves, to future generations of black people,the sweet solidarity in struggle that has histori-cally been a redemptive subversive challenge towhite supremacist capitalist patriarchy. (hooks,1990, p. 77)

In a similar vein in South Africa, KopanoRatele (1998, 2001) has sought to combatblack nationalist views that gloss over genderdifference. Arguing against racial essentialism,he points out that misogyny is a deeply con-stitutive aspect of urban, emerging middleclass, young, black men. For Ratele, blackmen have to face up to their masculinity ifthey want to live in harmonious relations withwomen and the broader society.

Admonitions about black men are notconfined to heterosexual behavior. JonathonDollimore (1997) is critical of Frantz Fanon’shomophobia, arguing that in Fanon’s writingthere are places where “homosexuality is itselfdemonised as both a cause and an effect ofthe demonising psychosexual organization ofracism that Fanon elsewhere describes andanalyses so compellingly” (p. 33). In attemptingto explore “the racial distribution of guilt” thatresults from the psychic internalization andsocial perpetuation of discrimination betweensubordinated groups, Fanon (says Dollimore)deploys some “of the worst prejudices [aboutthe sexuality of women and the heterosexualityof men] that psychoanalysis has been used toreinforce” (p. 32). Homophobia has become afeature of African nationalism, with leaderssuch as Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe) and SamNujoma (Namibia) launching witch huntsagainst gays (Epprecht, 1998). Among students

at a Zimbabwe training college, homophobia(rather than misogyny) is one of the definingfeatures of an African nationalist hegemonicmasculinity (Pattman, 2001).

Indigenous Knowledge

The second response to postcolonialismis presented here as an organic response ofindigenous people struggling to be heard. Inreality, the notion of indigenous people orknowledge itself runs the risk of essentializingand fixing. We refer to indigenous knowledgeas a value system that predates colonialism andwas integral to, and supportive of, precolonialsocieties and life. Such a value system wasoften the explicit target of early colonization,when missionaries sought to banish heathenbeliefs and replace them with the English lan-guage, English customs, and the ChristianBible. Over centuries of colonialism, many ofthese value systems were eroded and disap-peared. Their material and social forms wereoften the first to feel the effects of colonial-ism—buildings and space were regimentedalong colonial lines and families shaped to meetthe requirements of the colonial and, later, cap-italist economies. What was more tenaciouswere values and rituals concerning deep exis-tential and philosophical questions such as“who am I?” and “what is the meaning oflife?” Throughout the formerly colonizedworld, there has been a movement to recoverthis value system—in Australasia, in SouthAmerica, and in Africa there are now estab-lished movements to retrieve traditions and tovalidate alternative ways of understanding.

This development makes sense when oneconsiders Spivak’s (1996) deep skepticism aboutthe idea of “any easy or intrinsic fit between theaims and assumptions of First and Third World,or postcolonial, feminism.” For Spivak, theostensible emancipatory project of Marxismand Western feminism “runs the risk of exacer-bating the problems of the Third Worldgendered subject” (Moore-Gilbert, 1997, p. 77).Other postcolonial writers have gone further.Adam and Tiffin (1990) argue that “Post-modernism . . . operates as a Euro-Americanwestern hegemony, whose global appropriationof time-and-place inevitably proscribes certaincultures as ‘backward’ and marginal whileco-opting to itself certain of their ‘cultural “raw”



materials’” (quoted in Williams & Chrisman,1993, p. 13).

On the other hand, the claim for indigenousknowledge can easily be used to justify tyrannyand injustice on the basis that practices aredrawn from “our culture.” Indeed, the recentdebate in South Africa about whether HIVcauses AIDS has seen President Thabo Mbekireject scientific evidence concerning this con-nection as Western arrogance and has linkedhis own position to a broader campaign forcontinental regeneration (called the AfricanRenaissance), central to which is the restorationof indigenous knowledge to a position of respectand honor in politics and policy (Freedman,1999; Makgoba, 1999; Mbeki, 1998; Msimang,2000; Mulemfo, 2000).

Underpinning these weaknesses is the dangerof romanticizing the past and underestimatingthe responses of indigenous peoples to colonial-ism, which altered their culture and left nothingthe same. There is a constant temptation to con-struct an imaginary precolonial heaven to drivehome the point of the disastrous consequencesof colonialism (see Epprecht, 2001; Salo, 2001).In theoretical terms, indigenous knowledge runsthe risk of trying to sit “outside” Western per-spectives, a fruitless endeavor, according to allFoucauldian theory.

In Africa, the search for an independent voiceand, implicitly, indigenous knowledge has longroots and was frequently intrinsic to anticolonialstruggles. In historical literature, distinctions areoften made between millenarian, backward-looking, traditionalist uprisings (which attemptedto hold onto “the old ways”) and modern, nation-alist opposition to colonialism (which attemptsto struggle for a share of colonialism’s “gifts”—citizenship, employment on equal terms, accessto land and public services, and so on). Thedefeat of first-wave anticolonial movements didnot end the commitment to indigenous knowl-edge. V. Y. Mudimbe (1994) observes that thereexists a “primary, popular interpretation offounding events of the culture and its historicalbecoming. . . . Silent but permanent, this dis-creet and, at the same time, systematic referenceto a genesis marks the everyday practices of acommunity” (p. xiii).

The search for, and retrieval of, historical tra-ditions has been taken up by Africanist scholarsexploring questions of gender. An extremeexample (Oyewumi, 1997) has cast doubt on

the value of foundational feminist concepts andhas asked: Is gender still an appropriate unit ofanalysis, or is it merely a colonial impositionwith limited value? Should the concept of gen-der be expanded to focus on its relational com-ponent by examining African constructions ofmasculinities, as well as femininities? What cat-egories of identity and personhood are moreappropriate and germane to African societies?

The search for indigenous knowledge hasoften been accompanied by hostility towardWestern feminism. Ifi Amadiume (1987), forexample, attacks feminist work because of itsbinary use of the categories “man” and “woman”and its assumptions that men and women aredifferent and that they therefore have fundamen-tally different interests. She rejects analysis thatstresses the adversarial nature of gender rela-tions. Along with others, she develops an alter-native approach, which attempts to retrieveindigenous knowledge that challenges theuniversalist claims of Western thought. Shedescribes gender fluidity and harmony (asopposed to fixed gender roles and gender con-flict) in precolonial Igbo society (in present-dayNigeria). A similar argument is made for theYoruba (Oyewumi, 1997). In this view, genderceases to be the major category of analysis,becoming one of many. In this tradition, theconsensual (rather than antagonistic) features ofAfrican gender relations are stressed. Thesewritings analyze social life in ways that stresscommunity not just in temporal but in spiritual(“ancestral”) terms. In terms of these readings,gender is part of a variety of relational under-standings that are subsumed under a generalassumption about humanity. In this understand-ing, humanity is what is common among peopleand is what unites them. In some respects, thisview is incommensurable with modern world-views, which are distinguished by causal think-ing, linear time, the idea of progress, the selfas autonomous, the domination of nature, andrepresentation as the way in which politics isconducted. A “traditional” worldview, on theother hand, has at its center a complex continu-ity with the past, with ancestors and spirits, andis distinguished by correlative thinking, cyclicaltime, the self as communal, the interdependenceof people and nature, and the conduct of politicsvia participation.1 The idea of adhesion, whatmakes people live together, is therefore the start-ing point. In the South African context, this can



be seen in the concept of ubuntu (Broodryk,1995; Mbigi, 1995).

Ubuntu literally means “peopleness”(humanity). It has recently become synonymouswith a particular worldview. Ubuntu is a “pre-scription or set of values for a way of living yourlife as one person” (Johnson, 1997). The mean-ing of “being human” embraces values such as“universal brotherhood of Africans,” “sharing,”and “treating and respecting other people ashuman beings.” Centrally, ubuntu is a notion ofcommunal living in society. Being human can-not be divorced from being in society, and inthis respect, it is fundamentally different fromWestern notions, in which gender identities andother group identities are acquired individually(Johnson, 1997; Makang, 1997). Gender is animportant constituent of the reality, but in thelong run historically, the vast scope of the pastand the challenges of living join people (menand women) in the project of life. Individualsare the unit of analysis, but they are notself-standing, being rather part of a collectivity.One obvious problem with this approach,particularly in analyses of the Third World, isthat it has frequently been used to disguise theexploitation of women in African society. Byconcentrating on racial and ethnic oppressionprimarily as a result of external forces, theinternal forces of gender oppression have beenconcealed or ignored. In this sense, there is a realdanger of focuses on ubuntu simply reflecting orreinforcing patriarchal discourses. In SouthAfrica, the ubuntu approach has been used for avariety of purposes—party political, nationalist,and gendered (patriarchal).

Impetus has been given to indigenousknowledge approaches (labeled by Williamsand Chrisman, 1993, as “nativism”) by coloniallegacies that still divide black and white women.In South Africa, for example, feminism and thegoals of gender equality have been treated withsuspicion and rejected outright by some blacknationalists. Christine Qunta (1987) objectedthat feminism was a Western, white philosophythat was irrelevant to African conditions andwas designed to sow discord among blackpeople fighting for freedom. This objectionwas more subtlely made, and with greatersophistication, in the early 1990s as white femi-nists in the academy faced the wrath of blackfeminists “outside” (Hassim & Walker, 1992;Serothe, 1992).

Yet although nativist approaches correctlyhighlight the importance of race, alternative valuesystems, and global location, they can lose sightof enduring gender inequalities (Stichter &Parpart, 1988). Third World and African femi-nism provides a corrective to give the (black)female subaltern a voice and draws attentionto the diversity of experiences among women(Mohanty, Russo, & Torres, 1991; Lewis, 2001).In the process, the focus also falls on the rela-tionship of race to subordination and marginal-ization. Concerns about injustice and exploitationblend with those that focus on the condition ofpeoples in the developing (Third) world.

Development and Gender

Postcolonial contexts are, by definition,contexts that require or call out for develop-ment. Postcolonial can refer to countries asdissimilar as Canada and the Central AfricanRepublic. In this chapter, the development chal-lenges of what we earlier called Third World orunderdeveloped countries will be discussed.

The challenges of development in the ThirdWorld are vast and have become greater withglobalization and the spread of free-marketideology. The gap between the First andThird Worlds is getting larger, but of equalconcern is the growing stratification of ThirdWorld populations as the poor get poorer and anew middle class (often associated with theapparatuses of the state) gets richer. As femi-nists have remarked, this process has often hitwomen the hardest, producing the “feminizationof poverty.”

The challenges of development since theCold War period have been experienced inmany different ways. Starting with a moderniza-tion paradigm, the emphasis was on a gender-insensitive use of technology to solve thesupposed failure of Third World countries toconvert political independence into economicgrowth. The failure of this First World–sponsored approach caused a change of tack,and in the 1980s, the importance of genderwas acknowledged with the introduction ofwhat subsequently came to be termed “womenin development.” This approach introducedwomen as a central element into developmentpolicy and implementation. It was recognizedthat not only were women critical in reproduc-tion issues (biological and social) but that they



also did much of the work. Programs then beganto focus on delivering development to women.It was recognized within a decade that thisapproach was flawed: It focused in a simplisticway on a set of agents (women) and ignoredthe context of relationships and power relationsin which these women operated.

“Women in development” perspectiveswere part of, and contributed to, internationalwork that focused on the subordinated positionof women. Such work included, as a corrective,arguments about the hitherto neglected cen-trality of women in resisting globalization(and patriarchy) (Mohammed, 1998; Oduol &Kabira, 1995). In these analyses, masculinitywas, for the most part, overlooked, and menall too often tacitly were regarded as obstaclesto gender justice.

Thus it was that in the late 1980s and 1990sgender and development (GAD) perspectivesemerged. It was now acknowledged that notall women suffered equally (that it was poorwomen who should be the main beneficiariesof development) and that gender inequalitiesrequired not just a liberal feminist ministeringto “women” but a more sophisticated grap-pling with relationships that generated genderinequality. The new approach broadened thefocus of development work so that even thoughwomen remained an important focus as theintended beneficiaries in the delivery of pro-grams, it was now recognized that it wasunhelpful to simply target them for “help.”Attention had to be paid to context, and here thecomplexity of gender relations was acknowl-edged. Development could only be sustainableif gender inequalities were addressed. Projectsdesigned to address this, however, soon foundthat attacking patriarchy head-on (and castingmen as the enemy) was not a solution. Suchprojects divided communities and underminedthe goals of development. It was in this contextthat, in the mid-1990s, a focus on men andmasculinity emerged.

The introduction of masculinity into develop-ment debates was contested. The discussionswithin feminism concerning the political loca-tion and purpose of feminist men’s involvementin gender-emancipatory projects were alsoplayed out in the development realm. The con-cerns were that so much development work hadhistorically been directed at men that they shouldnot be reinserted into a development agenda

that was only beginning to redress the legacyof neglect of women. Would men once againdominate and pervert development for patriarchalpurposes? A more recent query has been aboutthe appropriation of gender into global gover-nance discourses. With gender becoming main-streamed, the concern has been raised that italso has become depoliticized, and women’sinterests have thus become decentered andsubject to marginalization (Manicom, 2001).

Two influential special issues of developmentjournals, edited by Caroline Sweetman (1997)and Andrea Cornwall and Sarah White (2000),have done much to clarify thinking and raisethe critical issues of gender and development.Developments within the United Nations—for example, the work of the U.N. InternationalResearch and Training Institute for theAdvancement of Women—have begun to insertmasculinity perspectives into influential develop-ment agencies (Greig, Kimmel, & Lang, 2000).

There are two basic themes that emerge fromthese debates. The first concerns the politics ofdevelopment and gender transformation. Thekey question here has been how GAD programshave actually affected gender relations and con-tributed to the reduction in gender inequality.Without wishing to impose a false uniformity onthe debate, it would seem that a number of issuesemerge. GAD has not yet fully acknowledgedthe importance of men in development work—men are ignored, or, as Andrea Cornwall (2000)puts it, “missing.” Following from this observa-tion, Sylvia Chant (2000) argues that GAD pro-grams would be strengthened if they paid moreattention to men and included masculinity work.She notes that such an approach could promotemen working together with women. The impor-tance of working with masculinity and the newacceptance that this is not a fixed gender identityalso features powerfully in this work. Develop-ment initiatives should focus on men’s self-image, their involvement in parenting and caring,reproductive health issues, and reducing violence(Engle, 1997; Falabella, 1997; Greene, 2000;Greig, 2000; Large, 1997). Reflecting initiativeselsewhere (for example, in refocusing domesticviolence work from female victims onto maleperpetrators), development agencies and govern-ments have begun to include work with and onmen in their programs.

The second issue that has been raised is that ofthe specificity of context and the appropriateness



of the theoretical framework currently used.Sarah White (2000) has argued that the shift towork with men and masculinity is predicated oneurocentric conceptions of development and ofgender. Here she has drawn on Third World fem-inism (itself connected to postcolonial theory) tourge a rethinking of development work in post-colonial contexts. She also begins to suggest thatindigenous knowledge systems need to be takeninto account in prosecuting a developmentagenda with gender results.

White’s cautions draw on debates outlinedearlier, about indigenous knowledge and post-colonial contexts. The concept of a “new man,”developed first in socialist literature in the SovietUnion and Cuba and transformed by masculinityscholarship into the image of a woman-friendlyman wholeheartedly committed to gender equity,is not appropriate to many Third World contextswhen it is used as a model for change. The ideaof the “new man” was really developed forNorthern, white, middle class, urban men. Itmisses men in the Third World whose situationsare different. This does not mean, however, thatthere is not something very important aboutdeveloping new role models and visions formasculinity. The transformation of male rolesand identities (which, in a theoretical sense,draws on the postcolonial theory describedearlier) is a key part of development work. In theCaribbean, Niels Sampath (1997) shows howmen are open to messages of transformation butwill use local idiom to make sense of the possi-bilities and will attempt change within existingparameters rather than aspiring to externallyprescribed norms. In Africa, the context fordevelopment work and the tenacity of indige-nous value systems remain important factors.

Traditional ordering of relations between gendersand generations based on hierarchy and authorityis now largely history, and more clearly so intowns than in the countryside. A moral orderingin this area survives, however, as social memory,as scattered practices, particularly important inrelation to reproductive strategies, and most ofall with poor urban youth, as an absence and ayearning. Poor families have less opportunitiesof substituting old orders with new ones, becauseof a situation of instability and lack of materialand immaterial resources. . . . Generally speaking,modern socializing practices, such as we findthem in poor sections of the cities, undertakenbroadly by religious institutions, schools and

nuclear family, have not filled the real or imaginedvoid left by the breakdown of time-honouredways. (Frederiksen, 2000, p. 221)

In the African context, the importance ofindigenous knowledge and context is madeabundantly clear in the work of Paul Dover(2001), an anthropologist whose work wasconducted in rural Zambia in the 1990s. Doverlocates his argument (specifically about repro-ductive health in Third World contexts) in acontext in which development is seen to havefailed. Zambia is a country where hope foran improvement in the material quality of life,carried by the copper boom of the 1960s, hasevaporated. People have thus turned from theoptimistic Western development discourses andhave sought understanding of their lives in older,indigenous discourses. Colonialism was neverable to eradicate these, but now they have greatervisibility and acceptance. These discourses placecosmology at the center of a person’s worldview.In terms of this perspective, the body and soulare not separate, and any problem has thereforeto be tackled by ministering to both. Becausecosmology is gendered and particular qualitiesare held to reside discretely in men and women,gender roles have a fixity that postcolonial theo-ries are reluctant to grant them. But this does notmean they are fixed. Rather, it means that thereare limits to change and that these are deter-mined by the parameters of the indigenous beliefsystem. In other words, Dover is not saying thatmen cannot change. He is not invoking primi-tivism or essentialism. He is arguing for the needto take full account not just of material circum-stances (which so tragically speak of inequality),but of culture. In the next section, we return inmore detail to the implications of these viewsand detail his arguments.


IN A POSTCOLONIAL WORLD

It is undoubtedly the stuff of caricature, butthere is also a great deal of truth in the observa-tion that the Third World is characterized bypoverty and subject to wars and violence. In1999, Africa alone was the site of 16 armed con-flicts, with 34% of countries hosting conflicts,making up 40% of global conflicts. Recentstatistics show that since 1970, more than 30 wars



have been fought in Africa. In 1996 alone, 14 ofthe 53 countries of Africa saw armed conflicts,accounting for more than half of all war-relateddeaths worldwide and resulting in more than8 million refugees, returnees, and displacedpersons (Diallo, 1998; King, 2001; Regehr,1999). Some of these conflicts lasted for severaldecades (such as the one in the Sudan, oftencalled a “forgotten conflict”).

The relationship of poverty to war is complex.There is no doubt that wars produce poverty andthat poverty creates conditions fertile for theprosecution of wars. As wars have historicallybeen highly gendered—declared and foughtprimarily by men but with civilian (primarilywomen) casualties an increasingly prominentfeature of modern wars—it is important that wenow look at constructions of masculinity inthe Third World.

Approximately 33% of the Third World’spopulation is under 15 years old (PopulationReference Bureau, 2001a). Most young people(about 85%) live in developing countries. Youthare numerically the largest and arguably themost significant political constituency. Theyare the group most subject to the scourges ofunemployment, most vulnerable to AIDS, andmost likely to be involved in wars. Mediaimages in 1999 and 2000 brought this hometo the world—boys as young as 10 years oldrecruited to fight and excited to commit brutali-ties that included large-scale amputations andsystematic rapes (not infrequently of familymembers). More than 50 countries currentlyrecruit child soldiers into the armed forces, andit is estimated that child soldiers are being usedin more than 30 conflicts worldwide (Goodwin-Gill & Cohn, 1994; Peters & Richards, 1998).

There are dangers in focusing on warsand bloodshed because this can easily distractfrom other less dramatic but equally importantdevelopments. There is a similar danger inlimiting discussion of violence to wars alone.Violence takes many forms, and these are byno means confined to theaters of war. The restof this section, therefore, will examine menand masculinity in three contexts: poverty,violence, and AIDS.

Poverty, Work, Family, and Identity

The changing nature of work that has been afeature of globalization in the First World and

the extension of under- and unemployment inthe Third World (Rifkin, 1995) has profoundlyaffected masculinities. Modern masculinitiesare centrally constructed around work. The lackof work and engaging in labor which no longerhas an associated status or meaning have pro-duced a variety of responses from men. Thesehave ranged from middle class men protestinginroads made into their privilege (Lemon, 1995;Swart, 1998), to older men striking out atyounger pretenders to enforce the power of patri-archy, to the subordination of juniors (Campbell,1992) to passivity by men in rural areas who nolonger can support their families and thus nolonger command respect (Silberschmidt, 1992).

There are two cases that we briefly want todiscuss. The first concerns men in employment.In much of Africa, and particularly in the formersettler colonies, African men have found jobsby migrating to the places of employment.This has not only given them access to moneyand the power that goes with it, it has placedthem outside the power of traditional chiefs,whose authority rests on patronage and kinship.Globalization has meant that men who havemanaged to hold on to jobs have become “bigmen” (Dover, 2001). They are, relative to theunemployed, well off, although this should notdivert attention from the fact that, relative to thebosses, they are poor, and they probably supporta great many family members on their wages. Ina recent examination of contemporary migrantlabor in South Africa, Ben Carton (2001) hasdescribed how African men negotiate issues ofidentity in this context. He looks at a poverty-stricken area and witnesses the arrival of theyoung men from the city. Bumptious with thepower of money, they bring their urban styleinto this rural context. They pay only someattention to the chiefs who notionally are incharge. The tempo of rural life picks up. Thereis carousing and celebrating, and then they leaveand return to the cities, leaving the chiefs toreclaim their positions. What makes the storyinteresting is that the men in employment stillacknowledge their rural origins. Even if theydo not fully pay the respects expected, theyacknowledge the position of the chiefs, althoughbriefly usurping it. We see in their behaviorthe residue of tradition and the penumbra ofindigenous knowledge. We see also how theynegotiate different identities—urban and rural,modern and traditional—but at the center is



the image of adult male. In another Africancontext, Paul Dover (2001) identifies the dif-ferent constituent components of manhood—amature body, a wife and children, an educationand labor, and the reciprocal expectation fortsika—respect and moral behavior (p. 156).

The second case is of those men who havefailed to retain a grip on the labor market.The literature that correctly identifies the femi-nization of poverty unfortunately all too oftenneglects to examine the consequences ofpoverty on men. Most African men do not “havework” in the Western sense of the word (a job).This is not surprising given the shrinkage ofthe world of careers and jobs, which has beenmore severe on the periphery. There are manyconsequences of this; among the foremost area rise in domestic violence, alcoholism, andsuicide (Gemeda & Booji, 1998; Mayekiso,1995).

Margrethe Silberschmidt, who conductedanthropological research in East Africa for 20years, made it the focus of her work to examinethe changing position of African men living in arural community in Kenya. The story is ofthe impact of colonialism, of changes in thepolitical economy and in local gender roles. Theresult is that men lose their status, power, andself-esteem, and there is heightened genderantagonism (Silberschmidt, 1992, 1999).

Colonialism came relatively late (in thesecond decade of the 20th century) to the Kisiidistrict. It was not welcomed, and the area wasamong the slowest to embrace Christianity,schooling, and wage labor. The imposition oftaxes forced men to seek work. This produceda major change in their societal roles. Beforecolonialism,

manliness was based on a father’s and a husband’sdignity, reflected in respect from juniors in hisfamily, his wives and most importantly, his ownself-restraint. The male head of the household wasits decision-maker and controller of its wealth. . . .As long as he lived, he was the only person whocould officiate at sacrifices [to] the ancestors,whose goodwill controlled the health and fertilityof the whole family. (Silberschmidt, 1999, p. 36)

The advent of migrant labor produced achange in the role of men—they became “bread-winners.” While men remained in employment,this change did not cause social problems, butwith the postindependence slump of the 1960s,

men no longer found work in the cities andreturned to the rural areas. Here, cattle villagesno longer existed (one of the effects of land lossand overcrowding). There was no alternativelifestyle to adopt, and men busied themselveswith odd jobs and informal activity. They nowearned very little, and what they did earn, theychose not to spend on their households but onalcohol and women.

The problem has three further dimensions.The economic position of women has not dete-riorated as it has with men. Women remaininvolved in subsistence agriculture. However,households still need the involvement of allfamily members, and the refusal and failure ofmen to contribute has produced great tension.This is exacerbated by the lapsing of bride-wealth payments and the decline in marriagerates. Men are no longer bound into families asthey were in the past. They thus escape respon-sibility, but they also lose status, because beingmarried remains an important part of manhood.Other aspects of masculinity that have theirroots in the precolonial period and are still val-ued are in the following list of “what a respectedand good man should do”:

• [He] takes care of his family• [He] educates his children and pays school fees• His wife does not roam about• He marries many wives and gets many

children• He is friendly and shows respect toward his

people• He assists his people when they have problems

and gives good advice• He is generous and does not quarrel• He respects himself (Silberschmidt, 1999,

p. 53)

Most men cannot live up to these ideals,and thus their self-esteem has dropped dramati-cally. One response has been a rise since the1960s in assaults and rape of women. Thisresponse has drawn on an available genderdictionary. Traditional conceptions of manlinessstress “men’s ‘role’ as a warrior i.e. men in Kisiiwere defined by violent deeds” (Silberschmidt,1999, p. 36) and include “command over womenin all matters, and, in particular, sexual control”(p. 70).

Thus men in Kisii have an uneasy and antag-onistic relationship with women as they try tocontrol their fertility and women resist. The men



have not responded to their problems by movingback into the family and becoming good fathers.They have sought solace in alcohol and loveaffairs. This is, however, not continentally oruniversally the case. Paul Dover’s (2001) workshows that although men in Zambia seem dis-tant and emotionally unengaged as fathers, infact there is a widespread belief that it is best fora child to have a mother and a father. In this con-text, a father gives emotional succor to a childwhen the child is young and commands respectlater on. The process of distancing that accom-panies the aging of the child is not considered tobe damaging but rather is an integral and impor-tant part of the whole process of parenting(Dover, 2001, p. 139).

With the decline of work, men have hadopportunities to shape their gender identities innew ways. As indicated, the response has beenvaried, but the option of becoming moreinvolved in family matters has remained. Suchinvolvement can take many forms. In somecases, it can represent a reactive response to aloss of power and involve the assertion of therights of the father within the family. In othercircumstances, it can involve greater engage-ment with parenting. The place of the father is,of course, a key issue in meditations about a“crisis of masculinity.” First World literature hasdebated the absent father ad nauseam. Somehave identified him as the cause of the malaiseof masculinity (Biddulph, 1997; Corneau,1991). Others have argued that “absent fathers”are but one of a number of issues which need tobe taken into account in understanding modernmasculinities. In terms of this view, no specialstatus should be given to “the father.”

Increasingly, work set in rural African contextsreminds us of the tenacity of traditions (Dover,2001; Heald, 1999; Moore, Sanders, & Kaare,1999; Silberschmidt, 1999). Within these tradi-tions, manhood, as a concept, is not questioned.Rather, it is the content of manhood and the waymen exercise their powers that have become criti-cal issues. In exploring this, Heald (1999), in herstudy of the Gisu of Uganda, argues that the dis-course of masculinity and its power to set moralagendas is widely acknowledged but that “this isnot necessarily in a way that is comfortable formen as the privileged gender” (p. 4).

But what of black youth, particularly in urbansettings or where authority structures (the state,for example) have lost their strength, who have

often claimed the status of manhood by definingthemselves violently against their fathers andagainst authority (Carton, 2001; Everatt, 2000)?There is a continuum, from outright rejection offamily and fathers to a difficult tension held byyoung men between independence and a residualconnection (maintained in memory or in realityby occasional trips to family in rural areas) withfamily and fathers. For many Third World youth,two realities exist—an urban, modern reality anda premodernist and traditional reality. They existside by side and can operate simultaneously(Niehaus, 2000). Thus we need to explore thebackward and forward effects on identity, created,for example, by the Gisu circumcision ritual,which is specifically designed to make the boys“tough” and “fierce” (Heald, 1999, p. 28), andurban socialization processes, by which youngurban boys are initiated into gang cultures thatalso stress violent behavior (Mager, 1998; Xaba,2001).

Violence and Men

This section began by noting the prevalence ofwars and societal violence, which prompts thisquestion: Is violence a postcolonial problem?

Amina Mama (1997), Third World feminist,has argued that violence in the Third World is adirect legacy of colonialism. Although the con-nection between historical and contemporaryviolence is strong, it does not alone explain thecurrent phenomenon. There is the temptation toexcuse the Third World’s violence by relating itcausally to poverty, which in turn can be associ-ated with colonialism. These factors are impor-tant, but it is important to note that most ThirdWorld inhabitants are not violent, and those whosometimes are are not violent most of the time.To examine men and violence, we need, in thefirst instance, to reject “Dark Continent” theo-ries about this being a normal or natural condi-tion. In the second instance, without denying theimportance of these factors, we need to note thatpoverty does not cause violence. In the contextof Central America, it has been noted thatmisogyny, rather than poverty, causes violence(Linkogle, 2001). This observation takes usdirectly to the issue of men and masculinity.

Although there can be little doubt that thearbitrary nature of the way in which colonialborders were established, colonial and imperialmeddling in ethnic and regional politics, and



subsequent international machinations and globalpolitics have contributed to wars, in this sub-section, we turn to look at the way in which con-structions of masculinity have been implicated inless spectacular, if equally deadly, forms of inter-personal violence. To give some sense of this,here are some recent details from Zimbabwe.In 1993, domestic violence accounted for morethan 60% of murder cases that went through thecourts. Although wife battery is more commonin rural areas, there are no accurate figures forthe phenomenon there. In towns, wife batteringoccurred among about 25% of married women(Getecha & Chipika, 1995, pp. 120-124).

How can we make sense of this? As a start-ing point, we take Suezette Heald’s (1999)anthropological study of the Gisu people inUganda, which is unusual for its focus on men.She finds that manhood is synonymous withviolence, but she does not stop there. “The attri-bution of violence is profoundly ambivalent.Might only sometimes equals right and, evenwhen it does, its legitimacy and limits are opento question.” She then examines

the extreme way in which violent power is locatedin men, a source of their rights but also . . . asource of self-knowledge and responsibility. . . .Men fear their own violence, their own violentresponses and the onus throughout, therefore, isupon self-control. The good man is one who is hisown master, and can master himself well. (Heald,1999, p. 4; see also Wardrop, 2001)

Trying, in the first instance, to make senseof Third World violence and, in the secondinstance, to help in reducing levels is only par-tially assisted by referring to the huge FirstWorld literature on families, youth, and violence(e.g., Hearn, 1998, 2001; Messerschmidt, 2000).As already indicated, it may make sense incertain contexts to promote men as fathers, butit makes less sense in societies in which thefathers (and other esteemed men, such as teach-ers) are among the major perpetrators of rape(Hallam, 1994; Jewkes & Abrahams, 2000;Jewkes, Levin, Mbananga, & Bradshaw, 2002).

To reflect on a postcolonial masculinity, weturn again to the work of Heald (1999) on theGisu of Uganda in the late 20th century. Sheconcludes,

The Gisu imagining of their identity as male citi-zens is deeply “essentialist” and, while it might be

thought that the strength and formation of thismale character has much to do with militaristicpast, its continuing salience can just as easily berelated to the very loss of a warrior role. Nosimple anachronism, it keeps it alive as a possibil-ity and provides the discursive justification formale claims to status. And . . . this, in turn, createsits own characteristic moral dilemmas. (p. 165)

The warrior role of Gisu men is a deeplyentrenched part of ethnic identity, which is itselfan expression of autonomy, of resistance tocolonialism and postcolonial forces that beat atthe specificity of the local and penetrate it withglobal goods, messages, and technologies. Tocriticize the warrior image is to threaten Gisulife itself. And yet this does not give rise to a sit-uation of unbridled violence. As Heald (1999)observes,

Gisu ethics addresses the problem of socialcontrol through the necessity for self-control.Self-assertion as the right of all men is thuscoupled with restraint as the mark of the socialself. This gives a particular understanding ofAfrican selfhood in the context of male egalitari-anism in which the use and control of force is atthe disposal of all. (p. 3)

The critical issue for Gisu society is notwhether men are violent but how they use thisviolence. This is not just a social issue; it is aprofoundly spiritual one. One can see this mostclearly in the circumcision ritual (imbalu),during which 17- to 25-year-old men are cir-cumcised. If one is not circumcised, one is nota man. The process is highly ritualized, verypainful and frightening. The young man muststand before a large group of people while theprocedure is performed. He must show no signof “fear, pain or reluctance. . . . Failure threatenson many counts. Most evidently in the displayof cowardice or fear. . . . the whole of his adultlife is also seen as dependent on imbalu” (Heald,1999, pp. 50-51).

The ordeal needs and nurtures two things:strength (of both mind and body, although Gisudoes not distinguish along such Cartesianlines) and violent emotional energy (lirima),which is needed and harnessed in the process.“A good man is one whose lirima is strictlyunder control” (Heald, 1999, p. 18). Lirima isa “basic fact of life” and is associated withmen, not boys or women. “It is not something



which can be tampered with or altered. It isinherent in the nature of men” (Heald, 1999,p. 19).

Through circumcision, all men becomeheroes. They are heroes because they have sur-vived the ordeal with dignity. “Having faced‘death’ he is deemed free from the fear of it andcapable of taking responsibility for himselfamongst other self-determining Gisu men. . . . Itis thus, above all, a rite of emancipation fromparental authority” (Heald, 1999, p. 52). Here-after, a man is expected to marry, set up a house-hold, and look after dependants. But the ritual iseven more important, for, in proving their ownmanhood, the young men “are in effect provingthe identity of all Gisu as men and validating thepower of the tradition which unites them all.Caught by the ancestral power of circumcision,the boys, in effect, personify the power of theancestors and the continuity of tradition”(Heald, 1999, p. 51).

So, for Heald, Gisu men must be violent to bemen. Their violence is an affirmation of theircollective being, a rejection of the modern, anaffirmation of their past. Yet, and this is the keypoint, the violence is not unrestrained. It is noteither “good” or “bad.” Men have power and theobligation to use it wisely.

This is not necessarily in a way that is comfortablefor men as the privileged gender. The attributionof violence is profoundly ambivalent. Might onlysometimes equals right and, even when it does, itslegitimacy and limits are open to question. Asalready implied, in the West, as the older codes ofmasculinity have come under threat, a crisis ofmasculinity is now more apparent than oneinvolving women. (Heald, 1999, p. 4)

Violence, then, belongs to men, but it is thesource of self-knowledge and responsibility.“Men fear their own violence, their own violentresponses and the onus throughout, therefore, isupon self-control. The good man is one who ishis own master, and can master himself well”(Heald, 1999, p. 4).

AIDS and Men

In 1999, worldwide, there were 33.6 millionpeople living with AIDS: 16.4 million men, 14.8million women, and 1.2 million children under15 years (Whiteside & Sunter, 2000, p. 36).Although these figures are contested, there is

little doubt that what started out as a homosexual,white, Northern disease has become a hetero-sexual, black, Southern catastrophe. Sub-SaharanAfrica is by far the worst affected. In 1999, therewere nearly 24 million people living with HIV inthis region. The area with the next most seri-ous rate of infection was Latin America, with1.3 million. The adult prevalence rate in Africa is8%. The next highest is the Caribbean (1.96%).Australia and New Zealand have a rate of 0.1%(Whiteside & Sunter, 2000, p. 38). Of the world’sHIV-infected people, 70% come froman area that contains only 10% of its population.In Sub-Saharan Africa, 55% of HIV-infectedpeople are female.

In Africa, the disease is overwhelminglyspread via unprotected heterosexual acts. Manyyoung Africans (15-19 years old)—many morethan in the equivalent age-group in developedcountries—have had sex. In most African coun-tries, about 30% of boys are sexually experi-enced, whereas for girls, the rates vary fromfewer than 10% in Senegal and Zimbabwe tomore than 45% in the Côte d’Ivoire (PopulationReference Bureau, 2001b). Despite the fact thatboys are generally more sexually active than girls,it is the girls who, for reasons of biology andgender inequality, are more seriously affectedby HIV/AIDS. In every country surveyed by thePopulation Reference Bureau, girls were two tothree times more likely to be infected than boys(Population Reference Bureau, 2001b, p. 19).

Until recently, the focus of attention on AIDSwas either on homosexual men or on women.It has only been since the late 1990s thatresearchers, policy workers, and AIDS activistshave begun to call for the issue of heterosexualmen to be involved. Mostly, these are calls forthe involvement of men, recognizing that genderinequality is at the heart of the pandemic andthat constructions of masculinity therefore needto be taken into account (Bujra, 2000; Foreman,1999; Tallis, 2000).

Masculinity is constructed in many differentways. Two major concerns in AIDS scholarshipare how sexuality is expressed and how this islinked to issues of gender power, especially inhyperheterosexuality contexts. Sexuality ismost publicly on display as heterosexuality. InAfrica, this is partly an effect of high levelsof homophobia and partly because in somecontexts, homosexuality has no resonance inindigenous culture (Epprecht, 1998). This has



not prevented, especially in South Africa, astrong gay movement from emerging (Gevisser& Cameron, 1994). As already indicated, gaymen are no longer the most afflicted by AIDS,but in South Africa it has been gay men, by andlarge, who have led and propelled social move-ments around AIDS. Zackie Achmat, SimonNkoli, and Edwin Cameron (Gevisser &Cameron, 1994, pp. 10-11), for example,declared their support for people living withAIDS while promoting messages of gay toler-ance. Elsewhere in the Third World, in Brazil,for example, the gay world has also been thrustinto the forefront by the pandemic, and, in theprocess, masculinities have publicly been prob-lematized. The heterosexist norm has beenshaken by AIDS (Parker, 1999).

And yet, in Africa, compulsory heterosexual-ity is a key feature of hegemonic masculinity.Numerous studies now testify to the importanceamong young and old men of having sex withwomen and having many female sexual part-ners. These preferences might not individuallybe problematical except for the insistence onpenetrative sex (MacPhail & Campbell, 2000),the levels of force, and the disregard for safetythat accompanies sexual transactions (Wood &Jewkes, 1997).

In three revealing studies in South Africa, theconstructions of masculinity are revealed to becritical for the way in which pleasure is soughtand obtained. Thokozani Xaba’s (2001) study ofcadres recently demobilized from the ANC’smilitary units shows how their disillusionmentwith the new political order and their failure tofind a place in the new South Africa drove themto crime, including armed robbery and rape. Inanother context, young black men in an impov-erished township engage in a headlong pursuitof sex and girlfriends as they try to obtain statusand self-esteem. But they are caught on thehorns of a dilemma—if they all want lots ofgirlfriends, it will mean that they will competewith one another, and this produces homosocialtensions. These tensions are most often takenout on their sexual partners (who are assaulted),but at the same time, their predicament—nolife trajectory out of intense poverty—remindsthem that love is “dangerous” (Wood & Jewkes,2001). Even among young, rising, middleclass, urbanized African men, the importanceof “having a girl” is central to constructions ofmasculinity. Although the levels of violence

associated with poorer and marginalized blackmen is not a feature in their relationships, theblack ouens (“guys”) are nevertheless heavilyinvested in the possession of women (Ratele,2001). None of these men is concerned aboutinequalities in their relationships. The powerof men over women is a foundation of theirmasculinity.

We now turn to an anthropological study thatinvestigated HIV/AIDS in Zambia. Paul Dover(2001) starts with power—in Shona, simba. Itcan be understood as social as well as physical.It is an amoral force that can be tapped,although it resides, in bodily terms, in a man’sbody in terms of vitality and potency (p. 113).In Shona thought, power is at the center of reli-gion. It is ambiguous and can be used for goodand evil. Age and ancestors are veneratedbecause social power is granted as one movesthrough the (social and age-structured) system.To use power for “fighting” leads to punishmentby the ancestors and “failure” (p. 115). In thissystem, which is rather like that of feudalEurope, (male) chiefs do not only occupy secu-lar positions of authority, they are also peoplewith specific spiritual powers and alone officiatein rituals that confirm the ongoing importanceof tradition, the spirits, and the ancestors.And yet, “as well as achieving community orlineage positions of power, male roles are boundup with modern ideals of being the ‘head ofhousehold’ bread-winner” (p. 120). Thus themodern and the traditional are fused.

In Zambia, power and gender are conceived inways that do not fit snugly into Western modes ofthought. In terms of understanding HIV/AIDS,the significant points are that body and mind-spirit are not separated and that to cure a bodyrequires ministering to the whole person, alsotaking into account ancestral influence. Simba isa male attribute, and HIV symptoms and modesof transmission are understood and treated ingender-specific ways. Calls by government andhealth NGOs to use condoms as the main way ofreducing HIV transmission have not been suc-cessful precisely because they do not take intoaccount indigenous gendered understandings andare therefore resisted by men.

How does one acquire masculinity inZambia? Dover (2001) identifies a life coursesimilar to that described by Silberschmidt andHeald. “Becoming married and having childrenare [also] important markers of having achieved



adulthood” (Dover, 2001, p. 136). As a boymatures physically,

he will increasingly be expected to help his fatherand other kinsmen with male tasks. He also takeson less deferential body postures to older males.At the same time a male superiority is assumedeven to his mother: he sits on the stool while shesits on the floor. (Dover, 2001, p. 136)

Men have the capacity for action and agency,which is captured in the saying, “Men’s heartsare different because they accomplish what theydesire, but women often fail!” This is translatedinto all areas of activity but specifically inregard to women. Men are seen as not beingsatisfied with what they have; women, by con-trast, are held to be “easily satisfied” (Dover,2001, p. 146). And yet, as both Chenjerai Shire(1994) and Dover point out, women are appreci-ated for their capacities and play a major part inthe development of masculinity. Although theymay not have simba, this does not mean thatthey are powerless.

In terms of AIDS, there is nothing intrinsic tothe indigenous value system that promotes non-consensual sex even though the inequalities insocial power and material wealth provide reasonto expect that women’s voices, in the negotiationof sex, are not always heard or heeded.

As indicated earlier, the initial focus in theAIDS pandemic was not on heterosexual men,although this is changing. One of the major waysin which men are engaged in prevention cam-paigns is via sex education. Many of these inter-national campaigns focus on the technology ofsex (condoms) or on communication style. Thetransmission of information is often the centralplan of programs (Varga, 2001). Dissatisfactionwith these interventions, as well as a profounddisillusionment with the idea of developmentand the promise of modernity, has produced anumber of indigenous responses. In SouthAfrica, the best known is “virginity testing”among Zulu speakers in KwaZulu-Natal. Theinitiative draws on an old practice conducted bywomen and bound up with bride-wealth prac-tices. Young girls are physically inspected inpublic to see if the hymen is intact. Girls aregiven a certificate, which is synonymous withbeing HIV negative. In this process, old Africanwomen are resurrecting a role that has fallen intodisuse and are asserting their power. What makes

virginity testing problematic, however, is that itmakes girls responsible for the spread of thedisease—boys are not tested. The internationalfocus on gender inequality and masculinity isthus left out (Leclerc-Madlala, 2001).

It is easy to condemn such local interventionson many grounds, including the violation ofchildren’s rights. Yet to do so runs the risk ofnegating indigenous knowledge and of preach-ing to the very people who are most affected andwho, in these kinds of initiatives, are trying toregain control of their lives. Fortunately, there isevidence of sensitivity in many areas of genderwork that suggests that in the response to AIDS,space will be made for indigenous knowledgeand the people who are affected.

There are, of course, difficulties. To getmen to change and be more responsive towardand respectful of women requires overcomingobstacles that are rooted in men’s position andpower in the spheres of production and socialreproduction. Yet programs that work withmen have been successful. In Jamaica, 50% ofurban fathers reported changes in domesticroles, including significant involvement infamily life (shopping, cooking, and cleaning).In Brazil, young men are far more flexible (thanthe men of the previous generation) in their roleexpectations and are much more willing to takeon caring duties (Greig et al., 2000, p. 8).

For rural people who still revere “tradition,”there are also possibilities. In Zambia, a pro-gram of “responsible patriarchy” has been dis-seminated by the church. This has been verypopular but runs the risk of reestablishing malepower in the home (Dover, 2001, p. 242; seealso Schwalbe, 1996). It is important to remem-ber that most African men are poor and not welleducated in Western school terms. It is not easyto see how Connell’s “patriarchal dividend”plays out in their lives. Yet, Paul Dover (2001)argues, “The roles of responsibility in hege-monic models of masculinity have many posi-tive aspects, but a basic question is how topromote these without reproducing the under-lying system of gender inequality” (p. 243).Turning from approaches stressing a “softer”masculinity that includes introspection and car-ing, Dover looks at the areas of joint interestbetween men and women for hope. Men andwomen pursue common community and politi-cal goals. They are also increasingly sharingtasks and responsibilities at the household level.



The explanation for these changes is that“women’s and men’s common interests areusually more important than other differencesand working together gives better opportunitiesfor achievements” (Dover, 2001, p. 244). Thisapproach gets away from the binary, almostManichean, view of women as victims andmen as perpetrators and promotes an approachrooted in the material realities of the ThirdWorld and in local (indigenous) value systemsas well.

CONCLUSION

Men in the postcolonial world face manychallenges. Poverty, violence, and AIDS areamong the most daunting. Yet, they do notface these challenges alone or without resources.Theoretical attention given to postcolonial situa-tions shows that men already are respondingcreatively to their marginalization, not least byunderstanding what this marginalization meansand how, historically, it has come about. The rep-resentation of black and postcolonial masculin-ity can now no longer be taken for granted asneutral. The way in which black men are posi-tioned has become central to the ways in whichwe think about men in postcolonial contexts.

Postcolonial men use a variety of culturalresources to give their lives meaning and to shapetheir interaction with their social environment.Indigenous knowledge offers ways of understand-ing life in terms that are not derived from themetropole or necessarily mediated by the culturaleffects of globalization. Such understanding canpromote harmonious and communal living and, inthis way, provide a buttress against the corrosive,individualizing imperatives of globalization.

Yet globalization undoubtedly affects thepostcolonial world. It aggravates class divisionsand deepens poverty. Fortunately, it also providesthe possibility for new forms of collective actionand politics (Hyslop, 1999). People in the ThirdWorld wrestling with the depredations of global-ization have been able to take some comfortfrom the growth of the “third (service) sector,” inwhich nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)have proved to be critical in fostering develop-ment. In many countries, NGOs have become theprimary agents for the delivery of services.Growing sensitivity in the development sectorto the importance of working with men and

masculinity and to the danger of ignoring localconditions and knowledge has provided someroom for cautious optimism. Initiatives arebringing men and women together to build a newfuture. They are helping to shape fresh and inno-vative ways of “being a man.”

NOTE

1. These ideas are drawn from seminars deliveredby James Buchanan at the University of Natal,Durban, in March 1997.

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7MASCULINITIES IN LATIN AMERICA

MATTHEW C. GUTMANN

MARA VIVEROS VIGOYA

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BACKGROUND

The embryonic study of men and masculinitiesin Latin America has already made rich theoret-ical and empirical contributions to the field as awhole. Covering an area of several hundred mil-lion men and women within some two dozencountries and well over 100 language groups,scholarly research in the 1980s and 1990son hombres and homens in the region emergedas a crucial component of gender studies asa whole.1

One of the outstanding features of scholar-ship on men and masculinities in Latin Americastems from the fact that the field was initiatedand developed by feminist women as an out-growth of their previous work in the 1970s onwomen’s oppression and feminist movements.Men’s studies were envisioned from the begin-ning as a component part of gender studies andthe struggle against gender inequalities overall.Thus, their origins stand somewhat in contrastto the study of men and masculinities in theAnglo-Saxon world, where it was far more acase of men studying other men—men likethemselves in at least some respects. Indeed, tothis day, feminist women continue to play a par-ticularly prominent role in the study of men andmasculinities in this region.

In addition to noting its origins in earlierfeminist efforts, the study of masculinities inLatin America was born from practical efforts tounderstand and combat AIDS. In this respect,the study of AIDS illustrates another noteworthycharacteristic of the study of masculinities inLatin America: its attention to social problemsand their solutions. In line with scholarshipmore generally in the region, and at a time whenclass was no longer seen as a relevant distinctionin other regions of the world—when, instead,issues of ethnicity, race, and sexual orientationreceived far more attention in scholarship ofmasculinities elsewhere—class inequalitieshave remained far more consistently embeddedin the research of Latin American social scien-tists. Part of the reason for this undoubtedlyrelates to the fact that the process of moderni-zation in Latin America has always beenextremely uneven. The crises of the 1980s, forinstance, were catastrophic for masses of peoplein Latin America, and governmental responsesmerely accentuated the differences between richand poor, broadened unemployment amongmen, and forced women to find new ways ofsurviving in ever more precarious circum-stances. As we will see, these crises also con-tributed to the transformation that some in theregion termed “an erosion of machismo.”


The ideology of mestizaje, racial and ethnicmixing, has been so strong historically in LatinAmerica that the relevance of race and ethnicityfor the study of masculinities in Latin Americahas not been recognized nearly as much as isnecessary in the region. Historically, ethnicityhas been understood in Latin America as a ques-tion of triethnic societies of Spanish, Indian, andBlack peoples, which were somehow magicallymolded into a mestizo whole. Only in the finalyears of the 20th century did people in LatinAmerica begin to talk seriously of multicultural-ism and pluriethnicity.2 Consequently, only a fewstudies of masculinities in Latin America to datehave focused on Indian and black populations.

As is true for other parts of the world, there isa tendency in research on masculinities in LatinAmerica to oversimplify supposed commontraits found among men in the region as a wholeand to equate manliness with particular nationalor regional qualities, as if distinctions amongmen within the region mattered little and as ifwomen were not also active participants in thecreation and transformation of cultural traitsin general. The tension between generalizing forLatin American men overall and emphasizingcultural diversity between men continues toprovoke debate and controversy. Similarly, theimpact on the region of gender stereotypes aboutthe region that emanate from elsewhere is areflection of the conceptualization outside LatinAmerica of a solitary Latin American mestizomale. Other men—for example, blacks, Indians,and men who have sex with other men—havebeen largely ignored or misrepresented.

Most of the initial studies of masculinitiesin Latin America have been conducted byanthropologists, historians, psychologists, soci-ologists, and researchers in public health.Although some disciplines and concentrationsin particular areas and interests have been betterrepresented than others in the field, feministstudies on the relationship of men to genderinequality and attention to AIDS and same-sexsex have been consistent concerns within theemerging scholarship on men and masculinitiesthroughout Latin America. In the 1990s, severalNorth Americans wrote outstanding ethnogra-phies and histories in English of men and mas-culinities in Latin America. During the sameperiod, there was a simultaneous “boom” inresearch on this subject written in Spanish andPortuguese in Latin America. But very few of

these Spanish and Portuguese studies weretranslated into English, and for this reason,many English-only scholars have not hadaccess to the investigations and conclusions oftheir Latin American colleagues. To be sure,more than a matter of translation is involved,because there are not only linguistic obstaclesto collegial exchanges but a need to facilitatethe ongoing process of learning from differentconceptual frameworks, methodological styles,and research questions.

KEY THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES

By the end of the 1980s in Latin America, thetwo theoretical paradigms that had been domi-nant in the 1970s—North American functional-ism and Marxism—came under sharp critique.In their place, in distinct disciplines of thesocial sciences, renewed attention was paid toquestions of daily life, emotions and feelings,and gender relations. As soon as the workingclass became less central, for example, theso-called new social movements (among them,the feminist movement) opened the way fornew theoretical conceptions and new socialconcerns. Feminist women historians, anthro-pologists, and philosophers provided new theo-retical and political frameworks; Joan Scott(1999) and Marta Lamas (1986, 1996) pointedto the ways power is articulated in genderrelations; Henrietta Moore (1988) and VerenaStolcke (1992) underlined articulations betweengender, class, race, ethnicity, culture, and history;and Gayle Rubin (1993) developed a widelyused framework for understanding the relation-ship between gender and sexuality. The workof authors like Pierre Bourdieu, AnthonyGiddens, and Norbert Elias also proved espe-cially influential in Latin American studies ofmasculinity.

Bourdieu’s (1990, 1998) discussion ofMediterranean beliefs organized around “the cultof virility,” for instance, has been used to discussmore generally questions of male domination inrelation to other forms of power inequalities.Research in Latin America on sexuality, love,the body, and personal negotiations that takeplace in intimate spaces has drawn on the workof Giddens (1991, 1992). Elias (e.g., 1994) hasbeen employed to explore the relationshipbetween broad social transformations and

Masculinities in Latin America • 115


daily life with respect to power equilibriums.Although not focused on questions of gender, thework of Néstor García Canclini (e.g., 1995) onquestions of “hybridity” (cultural mixing) is alsoworth mentioning for its general influence inunderstanding the particularities of modernityand masculinity in Latin America, although itmust be added that this concept has been criti-cized when employed to promote a kind of “neo-exotic” Latin America in which hybridity issimply the source of pleasure, in contrast to aview of the region grounded in an understandingof the politically challenging and incompatibledifferences that exist there.

Theories of hegemonic and marginal mas-culinities by R. W. Connell (1987) and othershave been adapted to specific local conditionsin studies throughout the region (Viveros,Olavarría, & Fuller, 2001), and more recently,concepts developed in queer theory (e.g.,Butler, 1993) have helped researchers framecertain aspects of their investigations relatingto subordinate forms of masculinity (Fuller,1997). Among the important studies of mas-culinity and the body in Latin America havebeen those by Jardim (1995), Leal (1995), andViveros (1999). In his influential formulationlinking questions of hegemonic masculinitywith studies of the body, Benno de Keijzer(1998) advances the notion of “masculinity asa risk factor”; in the field of public health, forinstance, issues of domestic violence, reproduc-tive health, and alcoholism are directly tracedby de Keijzer to hegemonic patterns of maleembodiment.

KEY EMPIRICAL RESEARCH

Among the areas of research that have beendeveloped in the study of masculinity in LatinAmerica, some of the most promising havefocused on questions of family divisions oflabor, parenting, and housework; homosoci-ality in friendship and social spaces; mascu-line identity construction; reproductive healthissues concerning same-sex sex, active andpassive sexuality, AIDS, and male reproductiverights; ethnicity and masculinity among indige-nous, African Latino, and mestizo populations;class and work; and the infamous matter ofmachismo.

Fatherhood and Family

Santiago Bastos (1998) seeks to understandgender relations as they are manifested in inter-nal dynamics of households in popular sectorsin indigenous and nonindigenous householdsin the same working class neighborhoods ofGuatemala City. Bastos examines the manner,often implicit, in which economic responsibilityand domestic authority operate and proposesthat we conceptualize the activities of headsof households as analytically discrete, in partnormative and in part actual and practical.Elsewhere, Bastos (1999) explains certainambiguous behavior by men in popular sectorsthrough the “double system” of masculinity inrelation to men’s capacity to fulfill their roles aseconomic providers and men’s need to presentthemselves as free from social ties, in particularthose with women.

In their study on heads of householdsand fatherhood among popular sectors of thepopulation of Medellín, Colombia, MarieDominique de Suremain and Oscar FernandoAcevedo (1999) use a similar analytic per-spective to show that, along with new socialand parenting demands on fathers, the objec-tive obstacles—unemployment and unstableemployment, “displacements,”3 marital separa-tions, and women’s adoption of new roles—impeding a positive realization of this paternalrole have multiplied. As one of the few scholarsto deal with the construction of masculinity indominant social sectors in Latin America,Norma Fuller (1997, 2001) demonstrates thatin the middle class, Peruvian men have notexperienced significant changes as much aswomen, because the latter have entered spherestraditionally considered masculine and havein this way acquired new freedoms. Thus, ifmen have seen reason to question existingmale models, it is due to the transformationsundergone by women.

In O Mito da Masculinidade, Nolasco (1993)argues that paternity in Brazil represents themost conflictive dimension of masculine iden-tity. Nolasco examines the father-son link tobetter understand what happens to men whoattempt to create a sense of belonging andinvolve themselves with their own childrenmore completely than did their own fathers. ForNolasco, fatherhood is a manner in which meninsert themselves into society to fuse the



processes of masculine identity constructionwith the authoritarian role that is performedby men.

Hernán Henao (1997) describes recentchanges in the manner of being a father inColombia. Drawing on a series of field studiesin the Antioquia region of that country, Henaopoints out that the image of the traditional fatherhas existed precisely because of the discoursepromoted by mothers and priests. The tradi-tional father has been “an unreachable being,one who disappears in everyday events.” Today,on the contrary, fathers are men expected tointeract more with family members and to enjoytheir home environment, very different from thefathers of bygone times, when male roles andvalues were determined by men’s lives outsidethe domestic sphere. As Henao suggests, thesenew demands on the father began taking shapein the 1960s, with the feminist movements at thetime, and acquired a particular salience in the1990s, when Colombian men began to becomeaware of the gender problem.

In his ethnographic study on changinggender relations in Mexico City, MatthewGutmann (1996) explores themes associatedwith fatherhood, such as the precarious connec-tion between masculine sexuality and reproduc-tive imperatives; the importance of blood tiesand their relation to abandonment and adoption;and popular concepts about family, adultery, andpolygamy. For Gutmann, diverse paternal prac-tices existing in Mexico reveal the ambiguouscharacter of masculinity there. In this context,he argues that there exists no solitary modelof Mexican masculinity against which men cancompare themselves or be compared. The resultsof his research lead to an opposite conclusion:For many men, being a committed parent is acentral characteristic of being a man. Further,Gutmann shows how the ideas and practicesrelated to fatherhood are elaborated differentlyin a range of social classes. Thus, in popularclasses with lower educational achievement andfew economic resources, it is not rare for men tocare for small children; in social sectors withmore resources, on the other hand, maids andnannies assume the majority of child care.

Adolescent fatherhood has been largelyignored in examinations of fatherhood in LatinAmerica. In a recent study on adolescentmale fatherhood in Brazil, Jorge Luiz Cardoso(1998) points to a “wall of silence” erected by

institutions, researchers, and individuals affectedin Brazil. He suggests that even when an adoles-cent father tries to play an active role in rearinghis son or daughter, social institutions mayimpede or deny him the right to take on thisrole. Cardoso’s study concludes that by cul-turally attributing conception and child rearingto women alone, the widespread perception inBrazilian society that children belong exclu-sively to their mothers is perpetuated, and ado-lescent fathers continue to be regarded merelyas sons and not as potential fathers.

These studies illustrate the contradictions ofcontemporary fatherhood in Latin America, theimpact of socioeconomic and political changeson intrafamilial relations, the progressive dein-stitutionalization of fathers’ role—increasinglymore independent of authority—and the grow-ing importance of fatherhood for masculinelife projects. As noted, many authors point to agreat variability in the experience of father-hood according to men’s socioeconomic andethnic-racial allegiances, their generation, theirprimary experiences, the specific moment ofthe life cycle in which they find themselves, andthe sexes and ages of their children.

Homosociality

With respect to the expression of masculinityin public spaces, including symbolic spacesof power in which women have traditionallynot been present, Marqués (1997) points out, “inearlier Western patriarchal societies, most sociallife took place in exclusively male spaces, sothat homosociality was an inevitable fact”(p. 28). Denise Fagundes Jardim (1992) pre-sents a similar reflection about the social con-struction of male identity among the workingclass in Porto Alegre, Brazil. In her descriptionof the butecos (bars where working class mengather), Jardim shows how men in Porto Alegreappropriate this social space to construct mas-culine territories. In these transitional spacesbetween the public work space and the privatespace of family life, conversations about poli-tics, sports, or business are privileged, and whensomeone touches on a topic about private life, itis discussed from an impersonal and coded per-spective, with little direct reference to the per-sonal lives of those gathered. In another articleabout the same topic, Jardim (1995) highlightsthe importance for men of being able to share



moments with other men in which they canreflect on ideal masculine behavior. In particu-lar, they seek to present themselves as workersand providers for their families and to con-trast this image with the negative figure of theBrazilian malandro (vagabond).

In his article on sports in Brazil, Edison LuisGastaldo (1995) describes male relationshipswithin a martial arts academy, Full Contact, andanalyzes the practices and representations of thebody by one group of participants. According toGastaldo, the men’s discourse about the relationof their bodies to this sport is characterized bythree traits in particular: the use of the body forsparring, the rejection of pain, and the accep-tance of rules that control this martial art. Thedescription and discourse analysis of the practi-tioners of this sport suggest that the emphasisplaced on overcoming pain and exhaustionby submitting to a strict regimen is part ofconstructing a masculine form of perceivingand molding the body.

The work site is another location affected bygender relations, involving as it does differencesand inequalities in jobs, income distribution,working conditions, and the classification ofwork as male or female. This is illustrated ina study by Virginia Guzmán and PatriciaPortocarrero (1992) through analysis of thelife histories of male and female workers inLima, Peru. In particular, Guzmán andPortocarrero examine the value assigned towomen’s and men’s work within factory workspaces and the ways in which gender andbroader social identities are linked. The authorsmaintain that women’s presence in factories isnot entirely accepted and that the values mostesteemed in this environment are those mostassociated with “virile” qualities such asstrength, capacity for resistance, the possessionof technical knowledge, and the exercise ofpower. They also point out that the factory isoccupied materially and symbolically by menand that discourse in the union is also dominatedby notions of dominant masculinity, clearly linkedin turn to a conceptualization of public space andcitizenship as male privileges.

As in other parts of the world, homophobiain Latin America is a widespread source of vio-lence directed at men who are seen as in somesense effeminate or are believed to have sexwith other men. Homophobia in Latin Americacan be approached narrowly, as applying only

to the ideas and actions of heterosexualsagainst homosexuals, or it may be understood ina broader sense, as incorporating feelings ofhomosocial discomfort and engendered ide-ologies of domination and subordination. It isnot surprising that the issue of homophobia isgiven more systematic attention in studies ofsubordinate masculine practices (e.g., homo-sexual, transvestite, cross-dressing, gay, dragqueen) than are heterosexual men in LatinAmerica. Just as surely, however, scholarswhose research is more concerned with self-identified heterosexual men also address matterslike homosocial desires, fears, experiences, andprejudices in relation to topics like male friend-ships and social spaces. In Quibdó, Colombia,for instance, Mara Viveros (2002) reports thatmale youth routinely use the epithet maricas(queers) when referring to other youth who havedemonstrated a lack of lealtad (loyalty). AsViveros concludes, “To betray the group con-stitutes the worst crime and a youth who wasaccused of being a traitor was labeled a ‘mar-ica,’ not for his sexual practices but becauseof his disloyalty” (p. 208).

Such studies highlight the importance thatmen ascribe to these spheres of masculinehomosociality in Latin America, where the verycompetition among men allows them to vali-date their maleness. In a sense, one could saythat encounters between adult men in thesespaces mitigate the forces that drive the mas-culinity of young gang members. With modernity,there emerges a feminine presence in spaces thathave been regarded as proverbially masculine,such as cafés, bars, places of recreation andsport, workshops, and factories. Despite the factthat there are multiple concepts of masculinity,and despite the recent increase in encountersbetween men and women in time and space,however, there has often, in Latin America, beena tendency to reproduce relations groundedin hegemonic masculinity; that is, to ignore orsubordinate women.

Identity Construction

Two pioneering studies, largely exploratory incharacter, have faced the challenge of recogniz-ing and analyzing what it means to be a man andthe consequences of being a man within a LatinAmerican context. Indeed, one of the principalthemes analyzed is the construction of masculine



identity. Among the first Latin American studiesseeking to answer these questions was the workof Sócrates Nolasco (1993) and that of Rafael L.Ramírez (1993/1999).

In the first case, in a study of 25 middle classmen between 25 and 35 years old, Nolasco(1993) analyzes the oppressive forms in whichBrazilian men are traditionally socialized—theirrelation to work, themselves, partners, friends,and children—thereby questioning the socialparameters through which to define what a manis. Nolasco proposes that in various countries,increasing numbers of men are seeking otherpaths, therapies, and communities that willallow them to discover another kind of subjec-tivity, one in which emotions are not classifiedaccording to a sexist referent and in which emo-tions are not regarded as something harmfuland irrational. The stereotype of the macho maleexcludes such subjective dynamics, makingindividuals believe that men are made from aseries of absolutes: They never cry, they mustbe the best, they must always compete, theymust be strong, they must not get affectivelyinvolved, and they must never retreat.

In his study, Ramírez (1993/1999) exploresthe construction of masculinity in Puerto Rico.The study begins with a critique of how theterm machismo has been used and continueswith a description of diverse masculinities indistinct ethnographic contexts. Ramírez alsoinsists that the dominant ideology of masculin-ity is reproduced among men in homosexualrelations and concludes his study by suggestingthe possibility of constructing a new masculineidentity, one stripped of the power games andcompetition present in the traditional malerole. Ramírez concludes that in Puerto Rico,“masculine identity is embodied in the genitalsand is articulated with sexuality and power”(p. 48) and that “encounters between menare based on power, competition, and possibleconflict” (p. 58).

In contrast to Ramírez (1993/1999) andothers, such as Olavarría and Parrini (2000),Sócrates Nolasco (1993) attempts to distinguishhis study from feminism, arguing that theorganization of groups of men cannot be char-acterized as a political movement and thateach of these movements has its own character-istics and dynamics. Nolasco also criticizeswhat he sees as the association made by earlyfeminism between patriarchy and men and the

representation of women as virtuous and men asfundamentally bad.

Reproductive Health and Sexuality

In recent years, men’s role in reproductionhas become an important focus of studies onmasculinity in Latin America (see, for example,Lerner, 1998). Scholars began by questioningthe exclusive emphasis on women in reproduc-tive health research, seeking instead to examinemen’s influence on women’s health and onreproductive decisions in general (Tolbert,Morris, & Romero, 1994). Important studies,such as those of Juan Guillermo Figueroa(1998) in Mexico, Hernando Salcedo (1995)and Viveros and Gómez (1998) in Colombia,and Tolbert, Morris, and Romero (1994) inLatin America overall, have attempted to fillthis void. Figueroa (1998), for example, seeksto conceptualize the ways in which LatinAmerican scholars, educators, and activistshave interpreted reproductive health in themale sphere and to analyze how men may be“located” within reproductive health processes.A particular theme discussed by Salcedo (1995)and Tolbert et al. (1994) has been the way inwhich gender relations overall affect decisionsmade in relation to abortion. Viveros and Gómez(1998) discuss male sterilization in Colombiaas a contraceptive decision taken in a specificsocial context that defines and limits men’scontraceptive options, models of masculinity,and the meanings of fatherhood and sexuality.

To incorporate men more explicitly in repro-ductive health research, Figueroa (1998) usesaspects of traditional demographic analysislinked to fertility to identify more comprehensiveindicators of individual experiences involvedin fertility and the reproductive process overall.Subsequently, Figueroa argues that by ignoringexisting power relations between men andwomen, the medicalization of fertility can tend toendorse existing and exclusive “gender special-ization.” Men are, in effect, treated as agents whocan impede or facilitate the regulation of fertilitybut are, ultimately, incapable of regulating it. Heconcludes by proposing several analytical andmethodological strategies to uncover the pres-ence of men in the reproductive health sphere.

In their research, Tolbert et al. (1994) dis-cuss the relationship between gender relationsand decisions to have abortions by couples in



Colombia, Peru, Mexico, and elsewhere. Inparticular, they note that couples whose rela-tionships were characterized by a greater genderequality were more candid in their negotia-tions about abortion. In a similar fashion, basedon 72 formal interviews with Colombian menwho wrestled over abortion decisions, Salcedo(1995) analyzes the relationship between mas-culinity and abortion, including masculinerepresentations of sexuality, reproductive life,and feelings of desire. Salcedo evaluates men’sfirst reproductive event as a male rite of passage,discusses men’s tendency to separate repro-ductive and sexual desires, and examines therelation between men’s desire for heirs andwomen’s own affective lives. Salcedo concludesby calling on men to participate more in repro-ductive decisions and to seek alternative waysof thinking about fatherhood.

In his study of 300 Uruguayan men,Gomensoro (1995) comes to similar conclusions.His findings show that men may change someopinions about family, couples, sexuality, andsome of their social roles but that they often pre-serve a deeper set of “existential infrastructures.”For this reason, relationships between couplesand families are paradoxically more conflictivethan ever before. In response to this crisis, he pro-poses a “new masculine condition.” de Keijzer(1998) links masculine socialization to certainforms of intrafamilial violence, abuse, and sexualpunishment; to the limited use of birth controland participation during pregnancy; and to theprincipal causes of male mortality. He (1998)conceives of “masculinity as a risk factor” inthree arenas: men’s relationships with women,with other men, and with themselves. In eacharena, he explains how hegemonic masculinityhas a notably harmful impact on men’s health.

A common denominator in each of thesestudies is to reveal men’s involvement in a realmtraditionally assigned to women—the reproduc-tion of the species—and to study male behaviorand attitudes in sexual and reproductive healthseparately and from male points of view invarious cultural contexts in Latin America.Although it has generally been argued that mas-culine sexuality is characterized by its separa-tion from reproduction, these studies show how,by questioning the relationship between mascu-line identity and values associated with sexual-ity, male participation in different reproductiveevents (e.g., birth control, abortion, fatherhood,

sterilization) has been made problematic. Atthe same time, it is clear that a rift still existsbetween adoption of a modern discourseemphasizing male participation in reproductivedecisions and the construction of new modelsof family life and gender relations on a moredemocratic and equal basis throughout theregion.

Several studies (e.g., Cáceres, 1995; Serrano,1994) point to the fact that adoption of traits orbehaviors identified as masculine or femininebecause they represent active or passive roles insexual relations is independent of sexual orienta-tion. Thus, many scholars have attempted toshow that homosexual or heterosexual behavioris not necessarily linked to a differentiated senseof sexual identity (Parker, 1999). Writing inColombia, José Fernando Serrano (1994) arguesthat homosexuality is a constructed category thatrefers to certain aspects of human life, that itinvolves more than sexual components, and thatit carries with it certain implications for how lifemay be lived and a way of understanding andexperiencing the world. Drawing on interviewswith homosexual men from urban, middle classsectors in Colombia, Serrano determines thatthere exists no unitary homosexuality but rathera diversity of situations—multiple homosexualgenders in which feminine and masculine com-ponents interact, varying according to individuallives. At the same time, through their practices,homosexual men in urban Colombia assign newmeanings to categories and roles imposed bysociety, in this way resolving the tensionbetween the identity socially suggested to themand the identities they develop and recreate.

In his article on health and bisexualityin Lima in the 1990s, Carlos Cáceres (1995)proposes a taxonomy of the range of experi-ences of homosexual men in Lima. The “char-acters” described by Cáceres are neither staticnor clearly defined but rather in a process ofappearance and disappearance. In this way, inworking class sectors, for instance, one findsthe “active” or “mostacero” bisexual man, whodoes not question his basic heterosexuality; theeffeminate “marica” or “cabro,” who will notcall himself a man; and the transvestite, whoexpresses himself through aggressively exag-gerated feminine mannerisms. In middle classsectors, one finds the “entendido,” who partici-pates in clandestine homosexual encounters,and the “married bisexual,” the “bisexual gay,”



and the “gay,” who participate fully in localhomosexual culture and assume a macho style.Based on these characterizations, Cáceres pro-poses programs for AIDS prevention and sexualhealth that take into account the heterogeneityof sexual meanings.

Richard Parker (1999) is also interested inproblems of sexual and reproductive health inrelation to the development of sexual communi-ties in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America.Parker argues that some studies about gay com-munities in various developed countries pointto an important correlation established betweensocial development and support networks forgay communities and the resulting reduction ofrisk in sexual behavior. According to Parker, theabsence of such structures in developing coun-tries largely explains the limited behavioralchanges in sexual matters in these regions. Thespread of HIV/AIDS and the emergence of newhomosexual communities, each with its owninstitutional structures and social representa-tions, have called attention to specific socialdynamics and economic and political processesfound in sexual communities, particularly indeveloping countries, albeit within the contextof an increasingly globalized system (see alsoParker, 1994; Parker & Terto, 1998).

Based on the studies examined, we mayconclude that the relationship between sexualbehavior and gender identity in Latin Americais a very complex one and that the way in whichsexual identities are constructed in differentcultural contexts depends to a large degree onthe categories and classifications used in eachculture to treat sexuality. The focus of thesestudies has evolved from concern with actualsexual behavior to explorations of the sociocul-tural conditions in which such behavior occursand to the cultural norms that organize sexuality.How men and women in the region engage inverbal play with these corporal reference points,how they perform with more or less skill thegestures associated with masculinities and fem-ininities, and how they defy concepts and prac-tices prevalent in the worlds into which theywere born are the subjects of Claudia Fonseca’s(2001) examination of the discourse and sub-stance of philandering in Porto Alegre, Brazil,and Xavier Andrade’s (2001) look at politicalpornography in Guayaquil, Ecuador. From thispoint of view, local cultural categories and theclassification schemes structuring and defining

sexual experience in different contexts havebeen increasingly emphasized, as it has becomeevident that categories such as homosexualityand heterosexuality do not reflect the diver-sity and complexity of the lived sexual experi-ences and that homosexual and heterosexualbehavior have been disconnected from a distinctsense of gender identity.

Despite the work of gender studies to breakwith binary thinking, such models die slowly,and male-female divisions are still the founda-tion for much gender research in Latin America.A parallel model is found in some studies whosesubject is same-sex sex among men, where rigidactive-passive contrasts aim at explaining whyactive, penetrating men are not necessarily con-sidered homosexual or gay by themselves orby others in society more broadly. As RichardParker (1999) shows, although retaining usefulelements, the active-passive taxonomy can missas much as it captures with respect to changingnorms and actual sexual practices (see alsoLancaster, 1998; Núñez Noriega, 2001). Withboth so-called political passivity and sexualpassivity there is evidently more at play than isperhaps immediately apparent; both forms ofassumed passivity represent territories thatremain to be more fully charted. Clearly, oneobstacle that must be overcome in studyingsexual passivity in Latin America is the notionthat passivity is the mirror opposite of activity.Part of this conflation is confusion over powerand control in sexual politics and choice. Inher study of transvestites, queens, and machosin Mexico City, Annick Prieur (1998, p. 129)makes a similar point when she insists that,although her informants are victims of symbolic(and not so symbolic) violence, they are also injust as real a sense actors who choose certainelements of their lives; they are not simply thepassive subjects of history.

Ethnicity and Race

In Latin American societies—multicultural,with a broad array of social classes—it hasbecome necessary to think about the variousways in which masculine identities are con-structed in various social sectors, ethnic groups,and sociocultural contexts. Although stilltoo few in number, studies already conductedon ethnicity, race, and masculinity in LatinAmerica have drawn important conclusions



and indicate several new areas for futureresearch. Work in Brazil by Ondina FachelLeal (1992a, 1992b), for instance, considersthe connection between cultural identity andgender identity. Drawing on her work on gaúcho4

culture, Leal noted that gaúcho identity isstrongly linked to masculine identity anddescribed cultural expressions of the formersuch as myths, enchantments and seduction magic,verbal duels, and representations of death. Leal(1992a) looks at the meaning of masculinesuicide in Rio Grande do Sul, the region wheregaúcho culture is concentrated in Brazil, wheresuicide is a common practice and death rep-resents a challenge and an opportunity for mento prove their masculinity.

Men in the Afro-Colombian population havebeen the focus of several studies. Joel Streicker(1995) analyzes the links established betweenclass, race, and gender in daily life in the coastalcity of Cartagena, Colombia. In particular,Streicker examines the interactions betweenthese three categories in the everyday discourseof the residents of one barrio in Cartagena, claim-ing that the interdependence of race, class, andgender is related to the naturalization of differ-ence and provides a powerful way of neutral-izing social and individual subjectivities. Thenotion of masculinity is constructed not only inopposition to femininity but also in contrast tothe masculinity of black men and rich men: Thefirst group is considered dangerous and asso-ciated with what is animal; the second is per-ceived as more feminine because rich men areseen as more interested in themselves and moresubject to restrictions imposed by their wives.From this perspective, Mara Viveros (1998,1999) analyzes the representations of masculin-ity of a group of adult men from middle classsectors of Quibdó, the capital of the Chocóregion of Colombia, where the largest percent-age of the Afro-Colombian population lives.The author contends that sexual performanceand a capacity for seduction and conquest aretraits linked to black and masculine identities.Rather than confirming the racist stereotype thatblack men are obsessed with sex, this findingillustrates the overlap between gender and ethnic-racial identities. If one takes into account thatidentity is a relational construct, it is evidentthat Chocoan male masculinities have emergedin contrast to nonblack masculinities, becauseChocoan men have in this manner used their

corporeality in constructing their ethnic-racialidentities as much as they have their genderidentities. More recently, Fernando Urrea andPedro Quintín (2001) have conducted importantresearch among Afro-Colombian males youngerthan 25 years old in the city of Cali in the Pacificregion of the country, seeking to understand therelationship between forms of sociability andconditions of socioracial exclusion there, aswell as the production of subjectivities and iden-tities among these young men.

Work by others, such as Santiago Bastos(1999) in Guatemala and Thomas Gregor(1985) in the Amazon region, representspioneering explorations of the largely untap-ped topic of men and masculinity amongindigenous peoples throughout the Americas.Taken as a whole, these initial forays into ques-tions of ethnicity, race, and masculinity inLatin America demonstrate that just as it isimportant to recognize multiple masculinitiesacross ethnic and racial lines, it is also neces-sary to understand that there is no essentialblack, gaúcho, or indigenous masculinity inLatin America.

Work

The connection between men’s employmentand their financial “maintenance” of a house-hold and the connection between paid work andmale identities is developed by numerous schol-ars, such as Agustín Escobar Latapí (2003), wholooks at the impact of economic and socialrestructuring in Mexico on the lives of Mexicanmen in Monterrey, Guadalajara, and MexicoCity in relation to their families, schooling,migration, and work. In Chile as elsewhere, asJosé Olavarría (2001) demonstrates, the indus-trial revolution separated the workplace fromthe home. This was particularly true in urbanareas. Such a separation detached the placewhere people lived from sites where they pro-duced. As the familial division of labor betweenwage-earning father-provider and domestic,child-rearing mother became general and rou-tinized, men came to assume ever more patri-archal roles at the head of nuclear families;women took charge of few outside matters.Especially in the 20th century, this type offamily became idealized by a large sector of theurban poor in Santiago as the normal and naturalmodel. In fact, the existence and perpetuation of



the patriarchal nuclear family was turned intoan ideological truth through theories of sex-determined roles (see Chant, 2002b). SteveStern (1995) shows, in his study of colonialMexico, certain of the historical permutationsthat eventually led to a system in contemporaryMexico whereby remunerated labor was sociallycompulsory for men.

Machismo

Men in Mexico, Latin America, and indeedall Spanish-speaking countries have often beencharacterized as uniformly macho by anthropol-ogists, other scholars, and journalists. Despitethe fact that the terms macho and machismohave short histories as words, many writersfrom all over the world have seemed intent ondiscovering a ubiquitous, virulent, and “typicallyLatin” machismo among men from these areas.In the 1990s, there was a veritable boom inethnographic and kindred work on machismo;for instance, the works of de Barbieri (1990),Parker (1991), Lancaster (1998), Limón (1994),Brusco (1995), Carrier (1995), Gutmann (1996),Mirandé (1997), Fuller (1998), and Ramírez(1993/1999).

The central claim of Brusco (1995), forexample, is that evangelist Protestantism inColombia has liberated women because it has“domesticated” men: Evangelist husbands andfathers eschew “public” machismo—drunken-ness, violence, and adultery—and return to theirfamily responsibilities. Ramírez (1993/1999)notes that the expression machismo is not usedin the working class areas he studied in PuertoRico, yet it is commonly employed in academicand feminist circles on the island. Lancaster(1992) reports that particular and unequal male-male sexual relations are what ultimately“grounds” the system of machismo in generalin Nicaragua. Women may be ever present inmen’s lives, but they do not factor into the mas-culinity equation for basic bodily reasons.

In short, the word machismo has become abellwether term in nearly all discussions of menand masculinities in Latin America. Althoughfewer scholars today argue that all LatinAmerican men exhibit an obvious and identicalmachismo and that machismo, in the sense ofsexism, is unique to Latin America, still, bothpopularly and in most scholarly literature, a tacitview that machismo is ubiquitous in the region

is alive and well. Without doubt, throughout theworld today, machismo is a common expressionfor sexism, yet it is a term with a remarkablyshort history as a word, and its etymologyderives as much from international political andsocial currents as from cultural artifacts peculiarto Latin America (see Gutmann, 1996).

CURRENT DEBATES AND CONTROVERSIES

Of the many specific topics of significant dis-cussion and disagreement in the study of menand masculinities in Latin America at the begin-ning of the 21st century, we would highlightthree. One, as indicated earlier, is the subject ofsame-sex sex. By the late 1990s, most scholarscarefully avoided simplistic employment ofthe term “homosexual” to refer to men whohave sex with other men in the region. Studiesof Brazil and Mexico have been especiallyfruitful in developing these distinctions (forBrazil, see, for example, Beattie, 2001; Green,2000; Kulick, 1998; and Parker, 1991, 1999; forMexico, see Carrier, 1995; Hernández Cabrera,2001; Higgins & Coen, 2000; Núñez Noriega,1994, 2001; and Prieur, 1998).

Another topic of controversy in the regionrelates to understanding change and resilience;more specifically, how much men have changedin recent years. One area of research has beennew forms of masculine domination and con-tradictions between modern discourses andso-called traditional practices. More generally,there has been considerable debate regardingdiverse factors involved in change, such as polit-ical movements and modernization efforts withrespect to education, reproductive health, andchanging employment patterns.

Finally, it is important to note certain generaldifferences evident in studies conducted from incontrast to those about Latin America. Scholarsfrom Latin America often are especially con-cerned with developing and adapting theoriesfor the complex conditions pertaining in dif-ferent parts of their region, and they have shownthemselves more reticent to adopt wholesaletheories of, for example, hegemonic masculinitythat initially emerged from distinct Europeanand U.S. historical and cultural contexts. It goeswithout saying that sweeping generaliza-tions about “Latin American men” or “LatinAmerican machismo”—stereotypes, as often as



not, grounded in the colonial imaginary andEuropean notions of modernity—are encounteredfar more in studies written by scholars writingoutside Latin America than in research performedby those writing from within the region.

FUTURE WORK

In the 1980s and 1990s, studies of “men-as-men” in Latin America developed in the wake ofearlier feminist research by women and as anextension of these other studies. More than wastrue in the United States, studies of men-as-menin Latin America were usually framed by femi-nist theories of gender oppression, regardless ofwhether the primary focus was on heterosexualmen or men who have sex with other men. Thatis, from the beginning, in studying men asengendered and engendering beings, in LatinAmerica there was a more unambiguous adop-tion of critical feminist lenses for understandingmen-as-men within general paradigms delineat-ing power and inequality. The “me too-ism” thatdeveloped in parallel in certain wings of men’sstudies in North America and Europe has beenfar less influential in Latin America, although,to be sure, a translation into Spanish of RobertBly’s mythopoetic manifesto on Iron John,Hombres de Hierro: Los ritos de iniciaciónmasculina del Nuevo Hombre, was quicklybrought into print in 1992. Scholarship on menand masculinities in Latin America has beenmarked by feminist theoretical frameworks, andmany women who have long been active inresearch and activism concerning women’soppression have been leaders in the emergingstudy of men and masculinities in the region.

With respect to announcements of the deathof antiquated masculinity, one need not adoptthe view that there is a New Man who has sur-faced from the Argentine pampas to the shal-lows of the Rio Grande River, nor claim thatchallenges to men and masculinity are novelphenomena of our contemporary age, to recog-nize that men and women throughout LatinAmerica have been grappling with what seem tomany to be new ideas and relationships relatedto their masculine identities.

Despite differences of class, ethnic group,region, and generation, Latin America is stillseen by many as constituting, in some palpablesense, a coherent area of historical and cultural

commonalties with respect to certain aspects ofgender and sexuality. That is, despite the real andunanimous acknowledgement of the profoundimpact of globalization on sexualities throughoutLatin America, there is still simultaneously thedeep-seated sense that these global influenceswere still filtered through particular, local, LatinAmerican contexts. For this reason, to under-stand men and masculinities in the region, we arecompelled to seek more than simply the Latinversions of global trends and transformations.

Although we find pan-Latin frameworksaltogether inaccurate, we are compelled nonethe-less to ask how sexualities in Latin America arepart of global processes of change, those trans-formations under way in the late 20th centurythat carry profound implications for sexualitiesin the Latin Americas (see Olavarría, 2001;Parker, 1999).

Economically, these changes are evident intracing the impact of neoliberal programs onreproductive health programs, the growingnumbers of women working outside the homefor money, and the expansion of internationalsex markets (see de Barbieri, 1990; García,1994; Viveros, 1999). Politically, men and mas-culinities in Latin America have been affectedregionally in dramatic ways by feminist projectsand globally by urban movements for socialservices in which women have often played asignificant role and in which men have beenchallenged by women’s independence andinitiative (see Chant & Gutmann, 2000; Fuller,1997; Gutmann, 1997; Valdés, Benavente, &Cysling, 1999); by general trends towarddemocratization that have raised new issuesof cultural citizenship, including issues con-cerning gender differences (see Gutmann, 2002;Viveros, 2001); and by AIDS activism in manycountries of the region (see Parker & Cáceres,1999).

Demographically, mass access to modernforms of contraception and the consequent fallin birth rates has tested gender and sexualityidentities, behavior, and roles in intimateand associational ways (see Figueroa, 1998;Salcedo, 1995), and the fact that girls’ atten-dance rates at school have risen more quicklythan boys’ has had obvious implications innumerous ways, including the training and qual-ifications of women and men for various sectorsof employment. The shift from more uniformlydifferentiated divisions of household labor in



the countryside to situations that have givenrise to greater fluidity in gender employmentpatterns as a result of modernization and urban-ization has, accordingly, had dramatic conse-quences for men and women as they havebecome more thoroughly incorporated intowage labor relations.

Research is needed in several areas relatingto men and masculinity in Latin America. Asmentioned, the relationship between ethnicity,race, and masculinity in the region is an impor-tant topic for future work. Another concernsvarious aspects of masculinity and violence,from state-sponsored wars to domestic abuseto questions of criminality. Despite recentwork on reproductive health, additional studieson issues as diverse as AIDS and vasectomiesare necessary, including further applicationsof de Keijzer’s (1998) formulation regarding“masculinity as a risk factor.” Although somehistories of masculinity in Latin America haveappeared in English (e.g., Beattie, 2001; Green,2000; Stern, 1995), we need to better distin-guish between more genuinely novel identitiesand social relations involving men and womenand those sometimes too casually termed “tradi-tional.” More generally, there is some urgencyin the need for gender analysis to be broughtinto areas of research involving men but inwhich men have not been treated as engenderedand engendering beings, such as the displacedof Colombia, Mexican immigrants to the UnitedStates, and the political hierarchies throughoutthe continent.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Throughout this chapter, we draw liberally fromour other work on men and masculinity in LatinAmerica. We would like to express our gratitudein particular for the opportunities we havehad in recent years to participate in conferencesand panels on various aspects of this theme—ranging from fatherhood to homosociality toreproductive health—in Bogotá, Cambridge,Cartagena, Chicago, Lima, Medellín, PortoAlegre, Providence, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador,and Santiago. On every occasion, we havelearned from each other and from other col-leagues about the specific meanings and reali-ties of being a man historically and today inLatin America.

NOTES

1. For the sake of simplicity, in this chapter,Latin America refers to the peoples living in countriesin the Western Hemisphere where the Spanish andPortuguese languages predominate, as well as to the35 million Spanish-speaking people in the UnitedStates. For a recent, excellent survey of gender in theregion, see Chant (2002a).

2. This new emphasis on multiculturalism isalso reflected in changes made to several nationalconstitutions in Latin America during this period inwhich nations were redefined as multiethnic andpluricultural.

3. “Displacements” refers to the more than onemillion people in Colombia who, in the 1990s, wereforced to abandon their homes, fleeing violence per-petrated by one or another military group in thatcountry.

4. The gaúcho is defined by the author as a ruralcattle worker who lives in the pampas of southernLatin American.

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8EAST ASIAN MASCULINITIES

FUTOSHI TAGA

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The recent expansion of research on menand masculinities is phenomenal. Oneafter another, different aspects of the

social construction of masculinity in variousmoments and milieus have been disclosed.Most of the research published in the English-speaking world, however, comes from withinthe Western world and from Western perspec-tives. Although it is important to consider theconstruction of masculinity in the worldwidecontext with the background of globalization(Connell, 2000), non-Western masculinities arelikely to be distant from the concerns of interna-tional academic work, both in terms of theobject of knowledge and the viewpoint. EastAsia is no exception, even though it containsone of the three great economic powers in theworld. Research on East Asian masculinities issmall in quantity and is relatively unknown,compared with that on Western masculinities.

In this chapter, through a review of the mainliterature, both in English and Japanese, I willtrace in outline the history of East Asian mas-culinities and present the main findings andthe nature of the research in East Asia. Tobegin with, I will describe the characteristics ofEast Asian masculinities in premodern societyand then discuss the impact of the foundation ofthe modern capitalist nation-state. Next I pre-sent the dominant forms of masculinities afterWorld War II in each country and then discuss

issues concerning men and masculinities incontemporary East Asia. Finally, I introduce thecurrent trend of research (especially in Japan)and consider the future of research on men andmasculinities in East Asia.

PREMODERN SOCIETY

In premodern East Asia, although there was adefinite distinction between men and women,and male dominance was notable (especiallyamong the ruling class under the influence ofConfucianism), a softness of manner and evenhomosexual behavior did not threaten a man’smanliness. At the same time, there seems tohave been diversity in the construction of mas-culinity according to class and region.

East Asia has many kinds of cultural and reli-gious traditions. Confucianism, Buddhism, andTaoism have each had a great influence over awide area. Relations among the three areambivalent. On the one hand, each has regardedthe others as heresy and disapproved of them. Onthe other hand, by gradual introduction of doc-trine derived from the others, each has under-gone significant changes over the centuries andhas had much effect on the construction ofmasculinity (and femininity) up to the present.

In regard to the definition and symbolizationof gender relations among the ruling class,


Confucianism has been the most influential ofall. Confucianism is a series of ideas that origi-nated in the instructions of an ancient Chinesegreat thinker, Confucius (551?–479 B.C.). Histeachings and related texts became the corecurriculum of Chinese education in theHan dynasty (206 B.C.–A.D. 220), after whichConfucianism spread to other East Asian coun-tries (Tu, 1998). One of the main characteristicsof Confucianism is the definite distinctionbetween the public (outer) space occupied bymen and the domestic (inner) space occupied bywomen. These spaces were linked by a firmhierarchy of the sexes that was dominated bymen. For example, Li-chi, one of the traditionalConfucian textbooks, says that the woman mustpractice the art of “following”—following herfather as a daughter, following her husband as awife, and following her son as a mother.

In the period when China was dividedbetween the northern dynasties and the south-ern dynasties (A.D. 220–589), against thebackground of the flourishing of Taoism andthe consolidation of the philosophy of “greatervehicle” Buddhism, the influence of Confu-cianism was weakened. In the Sung period(960-1279), however, Confucian thought wasrestored as neo-Confucianism, which broughtrenewed emphasis on familial duty and moralasceticism. In the Choson dynasty of Korea(1392-1910), which was the most Confucianizedof all dynasties in East Asian history, the con-tinuation of the family lineage is one of the mostimportant duties for yangban upper class. Awoman who did not have a son was considereda nonperson (Cho, 1998). In Tokugawa Japan(1603-1867), neo-Confucianism was a funda-mental basis of spirit and behavior for thesamurai warrior class (De Vos, 1998). In China,neo-Confucianism reached its apex during theCh’ing dynasty (1644-1912) (Tu, 1998).

At first glance, it seems that gender relationsin East Asia were not much different from thoseof Western countries under the influence ofChristianity. But we can see specific character-istics of the construction of traditional EastAsian masculinities in regard to heroic imagesand male homosexual behavior. Louie andEdwards (1994) argue that, in Chinese culturaltradition (and probably also in other parts ofAsia), concepts of manliness have been con-structed around the intertwining of two ideals:wen (mental or civil ideals) and wu (physical or

martial ideals). The balance between wen andwu and the notable presentation of both weresupposed to lead to masculinity at its highestlevel. This is most obvious in Ruhlman’s (1975)three types of hero, seen in Chinese popularfiction: scholar, swordsman, and prince. Thescholar is the symbol of wen and the swordsmanrepresents wu. The prince plays only a passivepart but is skilled in choosing scholars andswordsmen who will enable him to fulfill hisdestiny. In other words, he sits between andabove wen and wu. Significantly, in Chinese tra-dition generally, it has been considered that wenwould be superior to wu and that scholars andofficials would be more respected than soldiers.In addition, wen is closer to women than wu, incontrast with Western concepts. For example, asLouie and Edwards point out, although aromance of scholar and beauty is a commontheme in Chinese fiction, the wu hero showshis strength and masculinity by containing hissexual and romantic desires.

The second distinctive characteristic of EastAsian traditional masculinity is the toleranceof male homosexual relationships. Accordingto Hinsch (1990), Chinese men were notdivided into strict categories of “homosexuals”and “heterosexuals” and experienced a relaxedbisexuality, at least before the 20th century.Based on literary and historical documentation,Leupp (1995) argues that male homosexualbehavior was celebrated rather than toleratedin premodern Japan. Nanshoku (male-to-malesex), which was one of the two subconcepts ofshikidô (the way of sexual behaviors; the othersubconcept being joshoku, male-to-female sex),began to spread within the Buddhist monasticcommunity in the ninth century and permeatedthe samurai (warrior) class as well by the 12thcentury. Nanshoku did not necessarily contra-dict the Confucian code of Japanese feudalsociety. Because of men’s bisexuality, homo-sexual behavior did not threaten the continua-tion of the family lineage, which was dependenton the birth of male offspring. The “high andlow” structure in sexual relations betweennenja (the lover, of elder or upper status) andchigo (the loved, of younger or lower status)was also concordant with this hierarchicalsocial structure. According to Furukawa(1995), nanshoku was thought to bring mas-culinity to a man; joshoku was thought to makea man weak.



On the other hand, it is argued that, in thepopular classes, more egalitarian gender rela-tions were constructed compared with those inthe ruling class. For example, Brugger (1971)argues that within the Chinese peasant family inprecommunist traditional society, the roles ofmen and women were determined by economicnecessity rather than by Confucian ideology.Certainly, a rough distinction would be seenbetween a woman as the domestic manager anda man as the breadwinner. However, at the lowersocial levels, the husband’s power over his wifewas not as strong as Confucian ideology pre-scribed because of the woman’s participation inphysical labor and the vague boundary betweendomestic management and breadwinning. Womenas well as men are thought to have enjoyedsexual freedom outside marriage.

In addition to the difference by class, we mayalso see regional differences in gender patternswithin each country. For example, Edo (today’sTokyo) in the Tokugawa period is characterizedas a “masculine city” (Nishiyama, 1997). Thepopulation of Edo in the early 18th century wascalculated to be around a million and wasdivided roughly equally between samurai andchônin (townspeople). Building the metropolishad required the influx of a great number ofindividuals with traditional skills and knowl-edge, ranging from craftsmen to scholars, mostof whom were male. According to a censustaken during the Kyôhô era (1716-1739), twothirds of the chônin population was male. As forthe samurai class, present in large numbersbecause daimyo (provincial lords) were requiredto be in the capital, with vassals, in alternateyears, the armed force was exclusively male.There were constant conflicts among the chôninover their rights and interests and also betweenthe samurai and chônin, who managed to usethe authority of the bakufu (feudal government)or their lord to gain advantage over competitors.Such demography and social structure formedan atmosphere in which justice usually meantviolence.

THE IMPACT OF MODERNIZATION

Social conditions in East Asia experiencedgreat changes in the latter half of the 19th cen-tury. Each country aimed to build a modern cap-italist nation, introducing Western technology

and political systems. Contrary to generalassumptions, however, modernization rein-forced and reconstructed gender division andhierarchy in East Asia rather than leading toliberation and equality between sexes.

Japan succeeded earliest in East Asia in thetransformation into the modern nation-state. Asin the birth of the modern European nations,only men were given citizenship rights, such asthe vote and the right to own property. Womenwere not to win those rights until the end ofWorld War II. Against a background of strongnationalism, the ryôsai kenbo (good wife, wisemother) ideology was formed through a rein-terpretation of Confucian virtue. Although itlegitimized the modern gender division oflabor, this ideology ranked both sexes equalin the sense that women also contribute to thenation through the production of high-qualitychildren. The formal curriculum of primary andsecondary education was designed in the 1880swith that ideology in mind. Boys and girls wereindoctrinated with the idea of different dutiesfor men and women through moral education,and only girls were taught needlecraft anddomestic science (Fukaya, 1966). A similareducational system for girls was introduced toKorea under imperial Japan’s control in theearly days of the 20th century (Sechiyama,1996, p. 142).

In China, after the beginning of the 20thcentury, the disorganization of rural peasantcommunities and the increase of factory work-ers reinforced male power and the demarcationbetween the roles of breadwinner and domesticmanager. Although the Kuomintang governmentlegislated for equality of the sexes in the rightsof property, inheritance, and divorce in 1931,these rights did not work in practice in districtscontrolled by traditional gentry. The recruitmentof large numbers of men into the army duringthe Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) and theChinese Civil War (1945-1949) acceleratedgender division (Brugger, 1971).

The influence of industrialization and milita-rization, interwoven with Western science andChristian ethics, produced changes in men’ssexuality. As progressive scholars supportedWestern medical and psychological doctrinesand Christian notions that the only purpose ofsex was reproduction, the Chinese and theJapanese began to see homosexuality as patho-logical or criminal (Furukawa, 1995; Hinsch,

East Asian Masculinities • 131


1990). Gradually, most Japanese men becamecareful neither to display homosexual behaviornor to realize their own homosexual desire.Watanabe and Iwata (1989) argue that, fromthe demographic viewpoint, such a change ofsexuality was reasonable, especially in Japan,whose fukoku kyôhei (enrich the country andstrengthen the military) policy encouragedhaving as many children as possible, to providelarge-scale manpower to growing labor marketsand military forces. The population of Japan,which was about 33 million in the 1870s, wasalready steadily increasing and reached about55 million in 1920.

The conversion of masculinity in the con-text of modernization can be confirmed mostremarkably in the portraits of the JapaneseMeiji Emperor Mutsuhito (1868-1912) and hisfamily (Osa, 1999). The emperor, who had beenmerely a noble and had little political powerin the Tokugawa era, suddenly became a topmanager of politics and the military of amodern nation-state because of the MeijiRestoration (1868). In that year, Mutsuhitolooked androgynous in traditional Japaneseclothes. It was more important for his appear-ance to display his nobility than his maleness.In the portrait of 1888, however, he was drawnin the style that gives dignity to Europeanmonarchs in the 19th century: sitting on a chairwith a sword; wearing Western military cere-monial dress; with moustache, beard, and thickeyebrows. The emperor’s masculinity wasrepresented more clearly in relation to theempress and their children. Although femaleemperors had existed in the past, the ImperialConstitution of 1889 limited the successionexplicitly to male descendants. Subsequently,the empress was located as support behind theemperor rather than represented as a politicalleader. In the newspaper images of the imperialfamily that were distributed as an appendix in1905, we can clearly see the emperor’s figure ashusband and father.

We may find similar changes in theiconography of political power in the process ofChina’s modernization. When Sun Yatsendeclared the foundation of the Republic ofChina and took the temporary presidency in1912, he was wearing modified Western dress.The last emperor of the Ch’ing dynasty, Puyi,was still wearing traditional hair style and dressin the picture taken that same year.

AFTER WORLD WAR II:SALARYMAN AND SOCIALISM

After World War II, each country in East Asiawitnessed a different construction of masculinityaccording to the prevailing political-economicstructure and the attitude toward Confucianism(Sechiyama, 1996; Shinozaki, 1995).

In Japan, after the defeat in the war,Confucianism was denied, at least officially, asa feudal idea. Democracy and modernizationwere encouraged under the guidance of theAllied Powers. During the period of economicgrowth starting in the 1950s, the sarariiman(derived from the neologism “salaryman,”meaning a salaried, white-collar employee ofprivate-sector organizations) became the hege-monic discourse of Japanese masculinity(Dasgupta, 2000).

This term has different connotations indifferent contexts. Within the job context,“salaryman” is one side of a dualistic genderdiscourse, the other side of which is the “officelady,” a female employee who generally has nochance for promotion and mainly serves asan assistant for male employees (Ogasawara,1998, p. 12). In the mirror of the office lady,the salaryman represents male privilege, domi-nance, and centrality in the company and thesociety. In the family context, the salaryman isone side of another duality in gender discourse.Here the opposite is sengyô-shufu (full-timehousewife), whom, ideally, he is supposed tomarry (Dasgupta, 2000). As the breadwinner,the salaryman husband was accustomed todemanding the services and attention of hisindulgent wife in an authoritarian manner inwhat was referred to as teishu kanpaku. Thispattern of relationship was considered normaluntil the 1970s (Salamon, 1975). Within thisdiscourse, a salaryman represents not only theheterosexual but also the provider and domina-tor of woman. Further, Ueno (1995) points outthat men’s activities in Japanese industrialsociety have been expressed by terminologythat has strong military connotations: forexample, kigyô-senshi (corporate soldier) andshijô-senryaku (market strategy). Although themilitary has not represented a Japanese mascu-line ideal since the defeat in World War II, themilitary image has survived in the masculinefield of the economic war.



Although the term sarariiman, with itsimplications of middle class, white-collaremployees in a large company, is almost syn-onymous with masculinity in contemporaryJapanese discourses, the majority of male work-ers do not fit with this image. More than halfof all private sector male employees in theJapanese economy (excluding agriculture) wereemployed in small firms (fewer than 100 work-ers) in 1960, in 1980, and again in 2000. Thepercentage of white-collar workers (the total ofprofessional and technical workers, managers,and officials; clerical and related workers; andsales workers, including self-employed andfamily workers) grew slowly over this periodbut had reached no more than 46% by 2000.Clearly, the classic salaryman was always in aminority.

We can get a glimpse of working class men’slives from ethnographic research. Most of thoselaborers who are paid daily lead a life that is farfrom both “the company” and “the marriage”indispensable to the image of the salaryman(Fowler, 1996; Gill, 1999). Many are single; livein cheap, poor-quality lodgings; and look for1-day contract jobs every morning. Althoughthe pay for day labor is not bad compared withthat of the salaryman generally, the salary paritytends to disappear into a hedonistic lifestyle(mainly gambling and alcohol). Although thesalaryman enjoys the seniority system, confi-dently expecting pay increases and promotionwith increasing age, the day worker finds itmore and more difficult to endure hard manuallabor and eventually is thrown into unem-ployment. Roberson (1998), through participantobservation research in a small company, arguesthat, unlike the stereotypical image of thesalaryman who swears loyalty to his companyunder the life-long employment system, theworkers in that small company create theiridentity more through leisure and relationshipsoutside work rather than through work and thecompany.

Although there is a general lack of research,we can draw some limited conclusions aboutthe construction of masculinities in the socialiststates in this period. In China, the Maoist regime(beginning with the Socialist Revolution in 1949,through the Great Leap Forward in 1958-1959and the Cultural Revolution that began in 1965,ending with Mao’s death in 1976) providedconflicting social contexts for the construction

of masculinities. First, there was a contradictionregarding gender between the Maoist regime’sofficial policy and the actual power structure(Brugger, 1971; Sechiyama, 1996). On the onehand, the regime actually promoted more egali-tarian gender relations. Women’s status wasimproved not only economically but in theprivate arena through various policies, such asrural collectivization; the mobilization ofwomen to the labor force; the revision of theMarriage Law, which legalized divorce; and thepropaganda campaign for gender equality, whichwas represented by the unisexual “Mao jacket”and Mao’s words “Women hold up half the sky.”On the other hand, the political, economic, andmilitary power was kept almost exclusively inthe hands of men.

Second, as far as the ideal masculine imagegoes, there seemed to be a contradiction betweenthe Confucian cultural tradition and Maoism. Asrelated earlier, Chinese tradition has shownrespect for the intellectual who exemplified wen.By contrast, Maoist policy regarded intellectualswith hostility and idealized violence and manuallabor. We can find the images of heroic mas-culinity in the People’s Liberation Army soldierand the manual worker painted on a campaignposter in 1971 (Honig, 2002).

Korea was divided into two countries in 1948.In the capitalist state of South Korea, rapidindustrialization and urbanization from the1960s increasingly conspired to place a man inthe position of breadwinner. Like the Japanesesalaryman, the Korean husband and father cameto spend most of his time and energy on workand on his association with colleagues outsidethe house. The result was a “fatherless” complexwhere the wife and mother took over the role ofhead of the family (Lee, 1998).

Although the socialist nation of North Koreamobilized women into the labor force, it wasdifferent from postrevolutionary China withrespect to the powerful influence of Confu-cianism (Sechiyama, 1996). Intellectuals wererespected in North Korea. We can learn thisfrom the symbol of the Korean Worker’s Party,in which a pen (intellectual) is centrally locatedbetween a hammer (worker) and a sickle(farmer). Because of tendencies that retained thedifference between men and women, genderequality had not been achieved as much as inChina, and men participated less in housework,although women worked as hard as men.



CHANGING MASCULINITIES IN

RECENT DECADES

The recent promotion of equality between thesexes on a global scale has had a great impact onthe construction of masculinities in East Asia.In the capitalist nations of Japan and SouthKorea, the governmental policy of gender equal-ity, the economic recession, and demographicchange threatened the hegemonic form of mas-culinity that had been established after WorldWar II. As a reaction to this situation, some mentried to redefine masculinity. In the People’sRepublic of China, in which the socioculturaldistinction between the sexes had been the mostrevised in East Asia, gender relations are beingreconstructed along with the introduction of thecapitalist market economy. In the complex of con-ventional and alternative values, we can see thecomplicated conditions in which masculinities areconstructed.

In Japan, a series of governmental policiesaimed at gender equality undermined the legiti-macy of male dominance and gender divisionof labor (Ôsawa, 2000). The symbolic event wasthe enactment of the Basic Law for the Gender-Equal Society in 1999. To promote equalitybetween the sexes and to stop the birthratedecreasing, the government admitted men’sparental leave by law in 1991. An official cam-paign also began to promote men’s participationin child care. A poster and TV advertisementpublished by the Ministry of Health and Welfarebecame topical in 1999. In both, the husband ofJapan’s most popular female singer cradled hischild, saying, “A man isn’t called a father unlesshe takes part in raising his child.” The Tokyometropolitan government began to grope forways in which a man could be independent ofthe company and strike a balance between work,family, and community (Metropolitan TokyoWomen’s Foundation, 1998). These efforts hadlimited success. Despite the 1991 law, Japanesemen rarely take parental leave. The reasonsinclude insufficient pay guarantees and the resis-tance to a man’s absence from the workplace for“private” reasons. For example, among govern-ment employees in 1998, of all men who wereentitled to take parental leave, only 0.2% did so;the percentage among women was 86.2%.

Economic recession also delivered a blow tosalaryman masculinity. The increasing number

of suicides by men who experienced anxietyabout work brought on by the continuing reces-sion and the collapse of the old corporate safe-guard system prompted a reappraisal of men’sformer working style (Fuyuno, 2001; Kashima,1993). In 1997, when personnel downsizingwent into full swing, the number of men’s sui-cides per 100,000 population in Japan roserapidly from 26 to 36.5 in 1 year; that of womenrose from 11.9 to 14.7. In 1997, suicide moti-vated by economic or occupational problemsmade up 25% of all suicides among men,although it made up only 5% among women.

Analyzing the articles in postwar Japanesenewspapers, Okamoto and Sasano (2001) traceda transition in images of the salaryman. The ten-dency to take the term salaryman for grantedappeared at the beginning of the postwar eco-nomic boom in the 1950s. In the latter half ofthe 1960s, the post–oil crisis period, salarymenwere expected to be good taxpayers, to bebreadwinners, and to go straight home afterwork. The self-evident nature of the salaryman,however, came to be doubted in the latter halfof the “bubble economy” period in the 1980s.The traditional images regarding salarymenhave been marginalized in the 1990s.

Demographic changes have also had a strongimpact on Japanese masculine identity. TheJapanese enjoy the longest life span, on average,in the world. In 1955, the average life expec-tancy of Japanese men and women was about63 and 67 years old, respectively. This became71 and 76 in 1975 and 77 and 83 in 1995. Thisextension of the average life span brought tosalarymen a new problem of “the second life”after retirement (K. Itô, 1996). The fast-growingelderly population has increased the numbers ofmen who must take care of aged parents or anelderly wife (Harris, Long, & Fujii, 1998).

In light of these social changes, negativeimages of the salaryman have come to thefore. “Sarariiman as beleaguered and rou-tinized, forever cogs in someone else’s wheel,are common images in the popular culture”(Allison, 1993, p. 1). Ogasawara (1998) foundthat female employees tended to resist controlat work more than male employees, despite theinferiority of their place in the company system.The seeming lack of male resistance may beunderstood as the consequence of their personalassessment and identification with company andmanagement goals. According to a case study of



a Japanese security company by Shire (1999),male employees are encouraged to align theirindividual attitudes and behavior with companygoals through company socialization, but themeaning of social adulthood for a femaleemployee is related to future family roles. InJapan’s salaryman culture, in contrast to Westerncounterparts, group acceptance and membershipin successful groups are more respectable than adisplay of individual aggressiveness. Karôshi(death from overwork) is more a result of“hyperdevotion” to the company than a resultof a “hypercompetitive” orientation (Kersten,1996). Seeking after-work relaxation, salarymenoften go out to hostess clubs where the hostesses“treat them like men” and make them feelimportant and privileged while drinking.However, such “masculine privilege depends onthe ability and willingness of males to continueto work as productive and compliant workers”(Allison, 1993, p. 2). These observations indicatehow pervasive and effective are corporate con-trol mechanisms for male employees.

Likewise, in the home, the status of salary-men as husbands or fathers is increasinglyambivalent. Their teishu kanpaku behavior hasincreasingly been viewed as problematic andunsupportive (Salamon, 1975). Because of thesurviving custom that husbands should handtheir salary over to their wives, combined withthe “fatherless household” syndrome similar tothat in South Korea, a situation has developedin which more power in domestic managementlies with the wife. As may be discerned fromthe popular saying that was prevalent in the1980s—“It’s important that husbands arehealthy and not at home”—salaryman fatherstend to have only guest status in the family(Kersten, 1996).

In response to such trends, “men’s move-ments” that question assumptions about mas-culinities began to spread in Japan (Ôyama &Ôtsuka, 1999). One group established the“Men’s Center Japan” in Osaka in 1995(Menzusentâ, 1996). Otoko no Fesutibal (men’sfestival), the national annual conference thataims at the solution of men’s problems andserves as an interchange for men’s groups, hasbeen held since 1996. The workshops in thisconference cover a lot of issues: men’s sexual-ity, domestic violence, working life, communi-cation between husband and wife, fatherhood,and so on (Menzusentâ, 1997). Although the

majority of men’s movements take a profeministstance, an essentialist discourse, which advo-cates a clear distinction of paternity from mater-nity on the basis of Jungian psychology, isgaining popularity (Hayashi, 1996).

Men’s movements are budding little by littlein South Korea, as well. The main example isthe “fathers’ movement,” which aims at goodrelations between a man and his wife andchildren. In 1997, this movement organized theNational Organization of Fathers Club, in whichabout 70 groups joined, and established theFather Foundation as an NGO. With the recentrecession, however, fathers are primarilyexpected not to be sacked rather than actuallyexpected to be a “good father.” In Japan, the50-year-olds of the postwar baby boom gener-ation are at the center of the men’s movement,but in South Korea, the 30- and 40-year-oldswho are the first nuclear family generationlead the men’s movement. Also in South Korea,there are Christian men’s movements, whichwork together with the U.S. Promise Keepers;men’s movements for egalitarian culture; andtelephone counseling for men (Chung, 2000).

Against the background of social changesin which traditional sexist ideology and egalitar-ian antisexist ideology coexist, more men areexperiencing conflicts concerning gender andare being encouraged to cope with them.According to Soh (1993), men (and women) inSouth Korea, who are faced with contradictorydual gender role ideologies, organize theireveryday life by compartmentalizing their inter-actional situations: public versus private andformal versus informal.

Japanese men’s conflicts about gender arethe subject of my recent research with youngmen of the middle class (Taga, 2001, 2003).This interview-based project explored the areasof life in which men experienced gender conflict,how they came up against it, and how they dealtwith it. Some wondered how a husband shouldshare paid work and housework with his wife,some questioned the validity of male dominanceover women, and some were rethinking the “tra-ditional” definition of masculinity. Some expe-rienced conflict and were encouraged to rethinkgender relations because they fell in love with acareer-oriented girl. The ways they dealt withthe conflicts are various. Some tried to suppressconflict concerning the definition of masculinityand to achieve a stable masculine identity,



regarding the career as the most masculinepractice. Some responded by converting sexistviews to an antisexist perspective, preserving thepartnership with a career-oriented girlfriend.Some tried to get over the conflicting situationby avoiding commitment to any ideologies con-cerning gender before marriage or getting asteady girlfriend. Others avoided conflicts bychoosing as wife a woman who agreed withtheir sexist beliefs.

Although some subjects in the study werereappraising traditional masculinity, the mean-ing of “becoming a man” (ichininmae ni naru)for Japanese men seems to be fundamentallyunchanged. Most took for granted that theywould take a decent job and get married to awoman at some point in the future. Even asenior student who envied women for what heperceived to be their lack of need to find a careercould not imagine a workless life in any realis-tic way. Among 21 subjects of that study whoseemed to be heterosexual, only one student hadno interest in getting married. One of two sub-jects who confided their homosexual orientationhoped to get married to a woman and to havechildren. Despite the recent climate in whichbooks dealing seriously with homosexualityhave been published both in academic (Vincent,Kazama, & Kawaguchi, 1997; Yajima, 1997)and nonacademic fields (S. Itô, 1996), and somekinds of manga (comics) glamorize male homo-sexuality (McLelland, 2000), nonheterosexualsstill tend to be derided in everyday life.

In China, with the return of capitalism afterMao’s death, arguments have been heard thatencourage women to stay home. The growth ofthe private sector seems to cause a revival of thegender division of labor (Entwisle, Henderson,Short, Bouma, & Fengying, 1995). But the rateof men’s participation in housework in China isstill particularly high in comparison with otherAsian countries (Sechiyama, 1996, p. 189).

Underlying views about masculinity, andtheir relation to the social conditions of eachcountry, can be seen in preferences for a baby’ssex. In China and South Korea, there is a strongpreference for male babies, even now. Accordingto statistics, the ratio of boys’ births to girls’ isabout 116 to 100 in South Korea and 114 to 100in China; the ratio in Japan and some Westerncountries is generally about 105 to 100, whichmay be the biological standard (Sômuchô-Tôkeikyoku, 2000). The continuity of the

patrilineal family is still a very important principlefor Korean life (Lee, 1998). In China, althoughthe Confucian tradition has been denied offi-cially, the idea that the male succeeds to thefamily name does not change easily. Havingchildren, particularly boys, is also very impor-tant for the future labor force, as well as forsecurity in old age for the farmer and the self-employed family under the imperfect socialsecurity system. The capacity to determine sexin utero resulted, under the “One Child Policy,”in widespread abortion of female fetuses. Onthe other hand, a preference for girl babies hasbecome stronger in Japan recently. It seems thatmore Japanese began to want their own daugh-ter to look after them in their old age rather thana daughter-in-law (Wakabayashi, 1994).

RESEARCH ON MEN

AND MASCULINITIES IN EAST ASIA

Judging from the limited literature in Englishand Japanese, Japan has made the greatestadvances in research on men and masculinitiesin East Asia. Most of the research publishedin English reflects work done by Westernresearchers or by East Asian researchers whoare studying in Western countries. In theJapanese literature, there is hardly any researchon men and masculinities in Asian countriesother than Japan. In South Korea, according toChung (2000), men’s studies were introduced inthe official curriculum for the first time in PusanUniversity in 1998, but Korean men have paidless attention to the issue than Japanese so far.Therefore, in this section, I will focus on thetrend of research on men and masculinitiesin Japan, referring to works not cited in theprevious sections.

Although a large number of studies aboutsex roles had been done (Azuma & Suzuki,1991; Shirakawa, Shiraishi, & Sukemune, 1992;Sugihara & Katsurada, 1999), there were fewJapanese academic studies focusing on men andmasculinities until the mid-1990s. There were,however, a few pioneering works.

In the 1980s, feminist researchers and womenjournalists who came under the influence ofJapan’s women’s liberation movement in the1970s began research on men and masculinities.To begin with, they translated into Japanese



Western literature such as The Hazards of BeingMale (Goldberg, 1976) and Dilemmas of Mas-culinity (Komarovsky, 1976) and introducedthe realities of men’s lives in the United States(Shimomura, 1982) and Sweden (Jansson, 1987).Original studies appeared in the late 1980s.Kasuga (1989) is one of the most representative.Based on field observation and interviews insingle-father circles, she pointed out the contra-diction that patriarchal society created for singlefathers. They were alienated from the supposeddominant position of men because of theirparental role and by virtue of their singleness. Inthe mid-1990s, when Japan’s representative fem-inists published the seven-volume collectionFeminism in Japan, they included a volume ofJapanese men’s studies as an addendum (Inoue,Ueno, & Ehara, 1995). Although most of theessays in this volume were nonacademic, thevarious issues were covered: sexuality, family,labor, men’s movements, and so on. All contrib-utors were men who had experienced the impactof feminism.

A short time after the female pioneers,male researchers started their own research.Watanabe (1986) is the pioneering empiricalwork. Based on observations of transvestitecircles and using psychoanalytic theory, heargued the necessity of men’s liberationfrom the current repression and argued fordanseigaku (men’s studies) to complementjoseigaku (women’s studies). The same authoralso edited the first interdisciplinary anthologyof men’s studies, in which both men andwomen researchers contributed articles fromthe perspective of sociology, psychoanalysis,sexology, and anthropology (Watanabe, 1989).

The 1990s witnessed the burgeoning ofJapanese men’s studies. Kimio Itô is one ofthe leaders (Itô, 1993). It is said that he openedthe first men’s studies class in Japan at KyotoUniversity in 1992. After he published Dansei-gaku Nyûmon (Introduction to men’s studies)explaining men’s studies and issues aboutmen for nonacademic readers (K. Itô, 1996),men’s studies began to diffuse not only in acad-emia but also within adult education. Texts alsoappeared discussing men’s movements in theUnited States (Nakamura, 1996), reviewing thebooks about men and masculinities (Nakamura &Nakamura, 1997), and considering the historyof Japanese men’s movements (Ôyama &Ôtsuka, 1999). In 1998, a substantial men’s

studies session was held for the first time at theconference of the Japan Sociological Society.The titles of the presentations were “AnAnalysis of Masculinities as an Arena and theScope of Men’s Studies” (Tadashi Nakamura);“Sociology of Gender Formation: Men’s StudiesPerspective” (Futoshi Taga); “The Invisibilized:Sport-Maladapted Men” (Takao Ôtsuka); “TheSexuality of Disabled Men and the Cultureof Disability” (Tomoaki Kuramoto); and “Onthe History of the Men’s Movement in Japan”(Haruhiko Ôyama).

This attention to the male gender awakenedJapanese researchers’ interest in the perfor-mance and plurality of masculinities andbrought some unique approaches to the con-struction of nondominant forms of masculinity.Sunaga (1999), interviewing men who recog-nized themselves as hage (bald), argues that theinteraction between a bald man and people whoderide him contributes to the reproduction of thedominant images of masculinity. Most bald menthought that there was no way other than endur-ing and laughing along with the taunting,because if they tried to conceal their bald heador got angry with it, they would be seen asunmanly not only because they were bald butalso because of their attitude. Another uniqueapproach to Japanese marginal masculinity isUkai’s (1999) case study of “trainphiles,” mostof whom are men. Trainphile men tend to beridiculed and thought alienated from companywork, family, normal dress, and relationshipswith women. But they are very competitive intheir own circles in relation to knowledge oftrains and the collection of train-goods. Ukaisuggests that they have retreated from the com-petition for hegemonic masculinity in the widersocial context and are chasing it within a local-ized context. As related earlier, Taga (2001)shows that among middle class young men withsimilar living conditions, diverse masculineidentities develop.

CONCLUSION

This chapter has presented, in a broad per-spective, the main features of the constructionof East Asian masculinities. Similarities andcontinuities may be observed to some degreeagainst a background of cultural tradition, butmasculinities have also displayed differences



corresponding to the social milieu and thehistorical moment. I conclude this chapter byoffering several suggestions for further develop-ment in this field.

First, the more the public interest in men’sissues keeps growing in East Asia, the moreresearch from a practical perspective will berequired. On the one hand, we need to reinterpretwomen’s issues as men’s issues. For example,although most discussions about domestic vio-lence and prostitution focus on women as thevictims, we should also inquire why men batterwomen and why men buy the services of prosti-tutes. On the other hand, it is also important toexplore the negative consequences of being mas-culine for men themselves. It was pointed out inthe previous section that men’s suicide and over-work (i.e., the behavior of “company-first men”)are increasingly seen as problems in Japan. Thesocial background of such men’s behaviors,however, has not been explained sufficiently.English-speaking countries have made advancesin research studies that illuminate men’s motivesfor domestic violence and propose counter-measures (Dutton & Golant, 1995), that explainmen’s depression in relation to adherence tomanliness (Real, 1998), and that propose anti-sexist programs for boys in school (Askew &Ross, 1988). We must examine the applicabilityof these findings to East Asian countries anddevelop programs suitable for the region. As oneof the vanguard, a citizens’ group in 1998 set outa program of violence prevention for men inJapan (Nakamura, 2001).

Second, we should promote research on theconstruction of East Asian masculinities in acomparative perspective. If the characteristicsof a society are illuminated by comparison withother societies that seem similar (Sechiyama,1996, p. 4), a comparison with other societieswithin East Asia is as important as comparisonswith countries outside the region. The compari-son between socialist societies (China andNorth Korea) and capitalist societies (Japanand South Korea) would be a typical approach.For example, the impact of the military on theconstruction of masculinity could be exploredby comparison between South Korea, whichpractices conscription, and Japan, which hasrenounced war under the constitution createdafter World War II.

Finally, it is important to show the interna-tional audience East Asian realities from East

Asian perspectives. It seems that Westernperspectives and international statistics do notalways mirror East Asian realities. As noted ear-lier, Louie and Edwards (1994) argue that theinappropriate application of Western paradigmsof masculinity to Chinese men led to the notionthat Chinese men are effeminate and “not quitereal men.” They propose an alternative para-digm of masculinity. Hoffman (1995) observesthat in South Korea, despite the official ideologyof gender difference, there exists an underlyingcultural psychology that stresses a fundamentalintimacy between men and women in whichgender categories are blurred. Among olderJapanese couples, the tendency of the wife totake the initiative with the family budget(Kersten, 1996) and the husband’s emotionaldependence on his wife (Salamon, 1975)implies a complexity in the power relationsbetween men and women in East Asia that is noteasily captured by superficial observation.

If the modernization of masculinity in globalsociety means the Westernization of masculin-ity, we may get a hint for the deconstruction ofmasculinity (and femininity) from non-Westerncultural traditions. Although the recent globalmovements for gender justice seem to offersome challenge to the hegemony of modernmasculinity, they have not necessarily suc-ceeded in offering an alternative vision that cantake over from the current gender order. In cre-ating an alternative vision of gender in globalsociety, what East Asian experiences and per-spectives can offer must be considered.

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9MEN, MASCULINITIES,AND “EUROPE”

CRITICAL RESEARCH ON MEN IN EUROPE (CROME):IRINA NOVIKOVA, KEITH PRINGLE, JEFF HEARN,URSULA MUELLER, ELZBIETA OLEKSY, EMMI LATTU, JANNA CHERNOVA,HARRY FERGUSON, ØYSTEIN GULLVÅG HOLTER, VOLDEMAR KOLGA,EIVIND OLSVIK, TEEMU TALLBERG, AND CARMINE VENTIMIGLIA

141

In this chapter, we provide a broad view ofthe dynamic changes that seem to be occur-ring in Europe in relation to men and men’s

practices. This is an especially interestingand, from feminist and profeminist points ofview, a rather anxious time to be surveying theEuropean field. In particular, as we will demon-strate, the momentum of an enlarging EuropeanUnion (EU) and of a broadening NATO allianceis pushing forward crucial changes of emphasisin dominant relations of power associated withissues of gender in both Eastern and Westernparts of Europe—changes that generate oppres-sive and hegemonic forms of masculinities.Indeed, we will argue that the very projectof creating and re-creating the idea and the prac-tice of “Europe” is itself central to this process.Therefore, instead of providing a detailed

survey of what is occurring with regard to men’spractices in each European country, in the lim-ited space available to us we have chosen tofocus on the wider European canvas, a “biggerpicture” that we believe has, to a considerableextent, been neglected in recent Europeanwritings on men and masculinities. At the sametime, we seek to make links between theseprocesses in Europe and even broader, moreglobal, trends in relation to men’s practices thathave received some attention in recent years(Connell, 1998, 2002; Pease & Pringle, 2001;Pringle, 1998a, 1998b).

Given what has just been said, in a task suchas ours, it is crucial to access a broad range ofmaterials relating to men’s practices acrossEurope. Consequently, among other sources,this chapter explicitly draws on the work carried

Authors’ note: We are extremely grateful to all scholars from the countries of East-Central Europe, the Baltic regions,and Russia who have been helpful in providing information and critical insights for this chapter. We are, of course, well awarethat we have not addressed the issues in such countries as Hungary, Slovenia, Yugoslavia, Ukraine, and Byelorussia. Otherscholars would be welcome in this field.


out by a thematic research network titled “TheSocial Problem and Societal Problematisationof Men and Masculinities.”1 The central objec-tive of the network (to which all the coauthorsbelong) is “to analyse men’s practices, genderrelations and policy responses to them in theirsocial and cultural contexts, as both socially andculturally constructed and with real materialforms, effects and outcomes for people’s lives”(Hearn & Pringle, 2001). It therefore collates,assesses, and disseminates data on men andmasculinities from across Europe from anexplicitly critical, feminist, and profeministperspective (Hearn et al., 2002; Pringle et al.,2001). The very formation and operation of thenetwork for this purpose suggests some impor-tant issues central to our chapter. Consequently,we here consider the reasons for the network’sexistence, as well as some major conceptual andpractical challenges it has faced in relation tothe topic of men and Europe. Later we will dis-cuss more broadly what we regard as the mostcritical of these issues.

One of the reasons for developing a Europeanresearch network focused on the issue of menhas been the gradually growing realization thatmen and masculinities are just as gendered asare women and femininities (Hearn et al.,2002). Gendering of men is both a matter ofchanging academic and political analyses of menin society and of contemporary changes in theform of men’s own lives, experiences, and per-ceptions, which often develop counter to theirearlier expectations and earlier generations ofmen. However, the network is also premised onthe recognition that these gendering processes inrelation to men often have a particular quality.Not only are men now increasingly recognized,albeit to varying extents, as gendered, but they,or, rather, some men, are also increasingly rec-ognized as a gendered social problem in manyEuropean countries. This can apply in terms ofmen’s violence to women and children, crime,drug and alcohol abuse, health problems, buyingof sex, accidents, and so on—as well as, indeed,the denial of such problems as sexual violence.Such problematizations of men and construc-tions of men as gendered social problems in theEuropean context apply in academic and politi-cal analysis and in men’s own lives and experi-ences. They also exist more generally at thesocietal level, and in quite different ways indifferent societies. Although it may be expected

that some more general problematization ofmen and masculinities may now be observablein many, perhaps most, European societies (forinstance, in terms of media and public policydebates), the form this problematization takes isvery different indeed from society to society.

Such an approach clearly leads to awkwardquestions about how one can actually speak ofmen and masculinities “in Europe” or provide acomparative analysis of men and masculinitiesacross Europe. This awkwardness arises partlyfrom the massive cultural variations in socialcontexts encountered across Europe, as well asfrom the fact that the issue of men and mas-culinities has been studied to very differentextents and in very different ways across Europe(Hearn et al., 2002). However, the awkward-ness also derives from the question of what wemean by Europe. Like, say, “Asia,” the conceptof “Europe” is a social construction. Moreover,that process of social construction has at leasttwo aspects. The first aspect focuses on whichgeographical areas are deemed to be European asopposed to other—and by whom such definitionsare set. The second aspect considers whetherthere are some countries deemed to be moreEuropean than others and, within specific coun-tries, whether there are certain sections ofsociety that are similarly deemed to be more orless European—and, once again, attention needsto be paid to who has the privilege of definitionin such situations (Pringle, 1998a).

Issues of “being European” are of centralconcern for several reasons. First, the defini-tional processes involved are highly political,and, as we shall show, the relations of powerassociated with them are deeply gendered(Yuval-Davis, 1997). Second, these processes ofdefinition have very material consequences forindividuals, consequences that depend upon theindividual’s precise social location, one veryimportant determinant of which is gender.

Moreover, for the last 45 years, but especiallyin the last 10 years, one particular institution thathas become increasingly crucial in debates aboutwhat, who, and where is Europe and Europeanand who, what, and where is more or less other isthe European Union. The EU is an economic,social, and political union, initially of six coun-tries in 1957, that has sought to increase the har-monization of economic and social policiesacross member states but still respect the princi-ple of “subsidiarity” (decisions being made at the



lowest appropriate level). The EU is premised ona “single market” among member states and onparliamentary democracy, albeit of differentforms in the member states. Over the years, thishas inevitably involved tensions between thepush to economic and social convergence andthe defence of national political interests. As ithas expanded, these tensions have become morecomplex, although it is probably fair to say thatthe “strong agenda” toward greater unity hasbecome more dominant in recent years.2

The current dynamics regarding men andmasculinities between EU member states andthose countries in Central and Eastern Europegenerally labeled as other, many of whom areacceding to the EU, provide a clear illustrationof the issues mentioned earlier. This is true interms of the definitional processes concerning“otherness,” the close associations of thosedefinitional processes with gendered powerrelations, and the central implication of the EUproject itself in those processes. In this chapter,we focus on these dynamics partly because webelieve they tell us something very importantabout being a man and being a woman inEurope now. Thus, rather than producing somemonolithic and (probably Western dominated)survey of men’s practices across Europe, weexamine patterns of hegemonic and nonhege-monic men’s practices in terms of the processesby which the concept and the practice of Europeis currently being constructed.

The next section of the chapter considersthe current dynamics concerning “masculinities”in some of the countries of Northern, Southern,and Western Europe—specifically, the countriesof the European Union pre-2004 and nationsalready closely associated with the EU (forinstance, Norway and Switzerland). What, inparticular, are the trends regarding dominant andless dominant forms of masculinity there, andhow far do such trends relate to the EuropeanUnion project? The third section of the chapterconsiders the trends in some of the countries ofCentral and Eastern Europe and the impact of theEuropean Union project on those trends.

NORTHERN, SOUTHERN,AND WESTERN EUROPE

In a chapter of this size, it is not possible toprovide a comprehensive survey of men and

masculinities in all of Northern, Southern, andWestern Europe. Nor, from our perspective,would such a survey necessarily be useful.Indeed, many analyses of social phenomena inEurope concentrate on just those geographicalsegments and scarcely mention countries in thecentral or eastern parts of Europe; or, if theydo mention the latter, these are frequentlytreated as a homogeneous bloc (Pringle, 1998a).This is one simple example of how hegemonicjudgements are made about what constitutesEurope or which parts of Europe are deemedmore (or less) worthy of attention or respect.It is important that we do not compound thistendency here, either by focusing dispro-portionately on those parts of Europe that holdrelative dominance in a range of social andeconomic domains, including the academic, orby dismissing the individuality and complexityof countries in the central and eastern partsof Europe. Rather, our aim is, at least partially,to look critically at men’s practices and mas-culinities in terms of the processes of theEuropean Union project itself.

Moreover, in terms of the amount of criticalacademic and analytical material available, itwould be easy to write a chapter on men inEurope that was dominated by the situation inNorthern, Southern, and Western Europe. Theextent of critical academic analysis on men andmasculinities varies greatly across Northern,Southern, and Western Europe, both in terms ofits overall content and in terms of which topicsrelated to men’s practices receive coverage andwhich do not (Hearn et al., 2002). Nevertheless,compared with the situation in central and easternsectors of Europe, the North, South, and Westhave been the location for a massive proportionof the relevant academic material on men inEurope. In some countries, especially Germany,Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom,there is now some form of relatively establishedtradition of research on men, albeit of differentorientations. In many countries, the situationis made complex by a difference between theamount of research that is relevant to the analy-sis of men and the extent to which that researchis specifically focused on men. For example, inFinland and Italy, there is a considerable amountof relevant research, but most of it has not beenconstructed specifically in terms of a tradition ofexplicitly gendered research on men (Hearnet al., 2002).

Men, Masculinities, and “Europe” • 143


Critical research on men’s practices inNorthern, Southern, and Western Europe onforms of masculinity formation in those regionshighlights several significant patterns.3 In termsof issues that concern home and work, recurringthemes across nations include men’s occupa-tional, working, and wage advantages overwomen; gender segregation at work; and manymen’s close associations with paid work. Inmany countries, there are twin problems of theunemployment of some or many men in certainsocial categories along with work overloadand long working hours for other men. Thesecan especially be a problem for young menand young fathers, and they can affect bothworking class and middle class men, as, forexample, during economic recession. Anotherrecurring theme is men’s benefit from avoidanceof domestic responsibilities and the absenceof fathers. In many countries, there is a gen-eral continuation of traditional “solutions” indomestic arrangements, but there is also grow-ing recognition of the micropolitics of father-hood, domestic responsibilities, and homeworkreconciliation, for at least some men. At thesame time, there are counter and conflictual ten-dencies. On the one hand, there are increasingemphases on home, caring, and relationships.This may be linked to “family values,” fromeither a politically right wing or gender-equalstatus perspective. On the other hand, there aretendencies toward more demanding and turbu-lent working life, through which men may bemore absent.

As regards social exclusion, this can figure inthe research literature in different ways, such asunemployment, ethnicity, and homosexuality,and with considerable variation between coun-tries. The social exclusion of certain men linkswith unemployment of certain categories ofmen (such as those less educated, rural, ethnicminority, young, older), men’s isolation withinand separation from families, and associatedsocial and health problems. These are clearissues throughout all countries. Globalizingprocesses may create new forms of work andmarginalization. Some men find it difficult toaccommodate to these changes in the labourmarket and changed family structure. Instead ofgoing into the care sector or getting more edu-cation, some young men become marginalizedfrom work and family life. It should also benoted that there is a lack of attention to men

engaged in creating and reproducing socialexclusion, for example, in regard to racism.

The recurring theme in the Western Europeanliterature on men’s violence takes the form ofthe widespread nature of the problem of men’sviolence toward women, children, and other men,and in particular, the growing public awarenessof men’s violence against women. Men are over-represented among those who use violence, espe-cially heavy violence. This violence is also agerelated, with a weighting toward younger men.

Violence against women by known men isbecoming recognized as a major social problemin most countries in Western Europe. The abu-sive behaviors perpetrated on victims includedirect physical violence, isolation and control ofmovements, and abuse through the control ofmoney. There has been much feminist researchon women’s experiences of violence from menand the policy and practical consequences of thatviolence, including those of state and welfareagencies, as well as some national representativesurveys of women’s experiences of violence.Gendered studies of men’s violence towardwomen is a growing focus of research, as isprofessional intervention. Child abuse, includingphysical abuse, sexual abuse, and child neglect,is now being recognized as a prominent socialproblem in many countries. Both the genderednature of these problems and how serviceresponses are themselves gendered are beginningto receive more critical attention, in terms ofboth perpetrators and victims or survivors. Thereis some research on men’s sexual abuse ofchildren, but research on this is still under-developed in most countries. In some countries,sexual abuse cases remain largely hidden, asdoes men’s sexual violence toward men.

In terms of health issues and men’s practices,the major recurring themes are men’s relativelylow life expectancy, poor health, accidents,suicide, and morbidity. Some studies seetraditional masculinity as hazardous to health.Men also constitute the majority of drug abusersand are far greater consumers of alcohol thanwomen, although the gap may be decreasingamong young people. It is surprising that therehas been relatively little academic work onmen’s health from a gendered perspective inmany countries. Socioeconomic factors, qualifi-cations, social status, lifestyle, diet, smokingand drinking, hereditary factors, and occupa-tional hazards can all be important, and they



seem to be especially important for morbidityand mortality. Gender differences in health alsoarise from how certain work done by men ishazardous. Evidence suggests that generallymen neglect their health and that for some men,at least, their “masculinity” is characterized byrisk taking, an ignorance of the male body, andreluctance to seek medical intervention for sus-pected health problems. Risk taking is espe-cially significant for younger men as regardssmoking, alcohol, drug taking, unsafe sexualpractices, and road accidents.

One particularly noteworthy pattern that cutsacross issues of home and work, social exclu-sion, violence, and health is the different extentsto which research in various countries hasaddressed one or both of two categories ofmen’s practices: first, the problems some mencreate for women, children, other men, andthemselves, and second, the problems somemen have to endure as a result of patriarchalrelations of power in society. For instance, tosome extent, the focus of research in Finlandtends to have been on the misfortune of somemen in respect to issues such as mortality,unemployment, job insecurity, and alcohol anddrug abuse. In Germany, too, in recent years,there has been a significant growth in studiesof men who are said to represent disadvantagedgroups in society (Hearn et al., 2002). Similarly(yet differently), considerable research in Norwayhas focused on the positive value of men asfathers and the various societal barriers thatmay be limiting their ability to fulfil that posi-tive potential. By contrast, the emphasis ofcritical research on men in the United Kingdomhas been much more on the problems somemen may create for women, children, and (toperhaps a lesser extent) men, particularly in theform of violence (Hearn, 1998; Hearn et al.,2002; Pringle, 1995, 1998a).

Such differences of emphasis do not by anymeans simply represent differences in the actualsize of social problems as far as we know them.For instance, the issue of men’s violence towardwomen in Finland is a massive one socially(Heiskanen & Piispa, 1998), with levels ofviolence comparable to community-based stud-ies in the United Kingdom (see, e.g., Mooney,1993). However, this comparability between thetwo countries in the statistical size of the prob-lem is not represented in the amount of criticalscholarly activity devoted to the issue in Finland

and the United Kingdom, the attention accordedto it being far greater in the latter than in theformer (see also Hearn, 2001). Exactly thesame point could now be made in relation toSweden, following the recent survey there of theexperiences of 7,000 women (Lundgren, Heimer,Westerstrand, & Kalliokoski, 2001). ThatSwedish study also provided some significantevidence of high levels of child sexual abuse inSweden committed primarily by men againstchildren, another issue that has been promi-nently researched and addressed in the UnitedKingdom to a far greater extent than anywhereelse in Northern, Southern, and Western Europe(Hearn et al., 2002; Pringle, 1998a). An evenmore recent qualitative study of the Swedishwelfare system by one of the coauthors of thischapter (Pringle, 2002a) suggests that dominantdiscourses within the system routinely seek todownplay forms of oppression perpetrated bymen upon women and children, especiallywhere such forms of oppression are mainly per-petrated by men from within the white ethnicmajority. That study also suggests a tendencywithin the Swedish research infrastructure toavoid topics or research methodologies thatmight bring such forms of oppression by meninto clearer view. This state of affairs can onceagain be contrasted with that in the UnitedKingdom where such forms of oppressiontoward women and children are far more fullyproblematized publicly, professionally, and interms of the research community. Moreover, anearlier qualitative research study of the Danishwelfare system seems to suggest a pattern inDenmark similar to those described earlier forFinland and Sweden, compared with the UnitedKingdom (Pringle, 2002c; Pringle & Harder,1999).

As a generalization, we may say that eventhough there are indications that men’s violenceis beginning to receive more attention as awhole, the bulk of critical research on masculin-ities in Northern, Southern, and Western Europehas focused considerably more on the problemsthat men endure than on the problems mencreate (Pringle, 1998a, 1998b, 2002b), with theUnited Kingdom and, to some extent, Germany(Hearn et al., 2002) being slight exceptions.

The division of research attention betweenthe problems men endure and the problems mencreate is not tenable in scholarly terms. Instead,the frequent analytic unity of “the problems



men endure” and “the problems men create”has to be recognized. For instance, one cannotadequately address the issue of men’s healthwithout in various ways considering the pro-found linkages between that subject and men’sviolence more broadly: for example, as regardsaccidents, mortality rates, drug and alcoholabuse, and inattention to self–health care (Hearnet al., 2002; Pringle et al., 2001). Similarly,one cannot adequately address either the issueof promoting men as carers or the issue ofmen’s violence without a mutual considerationof the linkages between the two topics (Pringle,1998b).

EUROPE AND THE EU

The implications of the current imbalance ofresearch attention devoted to “the problems menendure” in the countries of Northern, Southern,and Western Europe should be consideredmore broadly. In many countries of Central andEastern Europe, profound transformations ingendered power relations are occurring as aresult of the social and economic upheavalssince the late 1980s and due to the increasinglinks being forged with countries of the West.Moreover, a considerable number of thesestates are, at the time of writing (2003), them-selves shortly due to accede to the EU within thenext year. Interestingly, the EU’s own researchand policy approach to men’s practices haslargely mirrored the imbalance in the majorityof the current 15 member states. The EU hastended to concern itself far more with issuessuch as reducing the limitations on men ascarers, men’s working conditions, and men’shealth rather than on topics such as men’sviolence toward women and children (Pringle,1998a, 2002b). Although there are signs thatsome shift is beginning to occur in EU priorities,EU policy and research priorities overall remaintilted very much in favor of “the problems menendure.” For instance, even the very consider-able concern of the European Union with childprostitution and pornography and the sexualexploitation of children betrays this order ofpriorities. That concern has largely focused onthe activities of EU citizens (mainly men) out-side the territory of the EU—typically in partsof Central and Eastern Europe, South Asia, andEast Asia (Pringle, 1998a, 2002b). This emphasis

has largely ignored the systematic abuse andexploitation of children within the confinesof the EU itself. The development of EU policyon these issues as some of those countries inCentral and Eastern Europe themselves becomeEU members is of considerable interest.

An obvious illustration of EU priorities inrelation to men’s practices is the trafficking ofwomen. In recent years, this topic has beenplaced relatively high on the EU agenda, par-ticularly in relation to women from the centraland eastern parts of Europe. Although this mayseem to contradict the previous argument, thecontext of the EU’s interest in trafficking in factsupports that argument. EU interest has largelybeen framed in terms of the fight against crimeassociated with migration into the EU fromoutside its borders rather than arising primar-ily from concern with women’s well-being(Pringle, 1998a, 2001). The emphasis of this EUanticrime initiative on cross-border traffickingseems to have largely ignored the male usersof trafficked women—most of these users are,of course, citizens within existing EU memberstates. There are clearly a considerable numberof these men, and it is their activities within theEU that fuel trafficking. This relative invisibilityof users within the EU’s approach to traffickingremains true despite the recent EU presidencyof Sweden (Pringle, 2002b), the country that hasled the way in antiprostitution policy in Europeby placing the emphasis of prosecution on theusers rather than the women (Månsson, 2001).The focus of EU concern has not primarily beenon its own citizens who create the traffickingproblem; instead, the focus has been on externalmigrants and their countries of origin outsidethe EU, not least the Baltic states.

This outward focus, also observable inrelation to the commercial sexual exploitationof children (Pringle, 2002b, 2002c), is a clearexample of that hegemonic definition of “other-ness” to which we alluded in the first section ofthis chapter. The commercial sexual exploita-tion of children and the trafficking of womenare intensely gendered and are direct outcomesof practices associated with hegemonic formsof masculinity. In both cases, the reaction ofthe EU and most of its existing members hasbeen to divert attention to the non-Europeansphere or to the citizens of allegedly problem-atic European nation-states currently outsidethe EU. The implications of this are that they



are defined as less civilized, less “European”than the existing member states of the EU towhom they supposedly pose threats from out-side. It is again interesting to consider (a) howEU policies and practices in relation to suchgendered issues will develop when some ofthose stigmatized “others” become memberstates in the next year and (b) what messagesregarding gender are already being received andconstructed in those countries about to accedeto the EU. In other words, how will genderedotherness be dealt with by both the existingEU members and the candidate states as theymake the transition to membership?

The EU and its member states have conflatedthe issue of women trafficking with the broadersubject of inward migration. The latter subject,along with the allied topic of racism, offersyet another example of the way in which powerrelations associated with hegemonic forms ofmasculinity are entering into the processes bywhich the idea and practice of Europe is beingconstructed. Racism, in one guise or another,seems to be very widespread in virtually all thecountries of Europe. Social exclusion andprocesses of social marginalization are oftendefined (Hearn et al., 2002) and constituted(Pringle, 2002c; Pringle & Harder, 1999) dif-ferently in the various European countries.Nevertheless, very many of the national reportsproduced by the thematic research network part-ners acknowledge racism as a highly significantissue, even if its precise configuration variesfrom one cultural context to another. The issueof hegemonic masculinity is remarkably absentin debates about the dynamics of racism(Mueller, 2000) in Northern, Southern, andWestern Europe (Hearn et al., 2002; Mueller,2000; Pringle, 2002c). The relative silenceabout men’s practices and racism in Europeanacademic and policy considerations seemsparticularly strange (Pringle, 2001).

Often central to the issue of racism in Europeand the issue of how EU member states treatmigrants are questions about what Europe is,who is European, and who is “more European”—and who is, once again, “other”? Such questionsmay often be partly about whose masculinity ispurer or more superior. Yet both the currentmember states of the EU and the EuropeanCommission itself have largely avoided con-fronting those highly gendered issues in theirpolicies to combat racism and in addressing the

issue of migration. The part played by powerrelations associated with hegemonic forms ofmasculinity in the processes of “Europe creation”has been disguised and ignored. We need to askourselves what impact this state of affairs is hav-ing on conceptions and practices of gender acrossthe countries within the central and eastern partsof Europe, many of which have been definedby the processes noted earlier as “other.” This isespecially the case given their growing economic,social, and cultural dependence on the states ofNorthern, Southern, and Western Europe, as wellas the imminent prospect for some of the EU’smembership.

This situation, whereby the states of Centraland Eastern Europe are gravitating economi-cally, socially, culturally, and politically towardtheir neighbors in the West, raises importantissues about complex hegemonic and nonhege-monic forms of masculinity developing in boththe (culturally) Western and Eastern segmentsof Europe and the complex relationshipsbetween those segments. One way of opening upsome of those issues may be by consideringmodels by which men’s practices have beenconceptualized transnationally. Transnationalcomparative analyses of men and masculinitiesare still relatively scarce. Significant exceptionsto this include Connell (1991, 1998, 2002),Cornwall and Lindisfarne (1994), Hearn (1996),and Pease and Pringle (2001). This scarcity alsoapplies to Europe. In fact, our survey here andsome earlier articles produced from the out-comes of our network (e.g., Hearn & Pringle,2001; Hearn et al., 2002; Pringle et al., 2001)represent considerable advances in this respect.As regards developing an initial analysis of theinteractions between processes of masculinityformation in the Eastern and Western parts ofEurope, Connell’s model of changing historicalforms of “globalizing masculinities” offersparticular assistance (Connell, 1998). Althoughhis thesis may be criticized for an overrelianceon Western-oriented globalization theories(Pease & Pringle, 2001), there seems no reasonto doubt his central contention about the ongoingdevelopment of a “global business masculinity.”As he argues, certain hegemonic masculinitieshave now been globalized, with the making ofmasculinities shaped by global forces. Thus, tounderstand masculinities in specific local con-texts, we need to think in global terms, at leastto some extent (Pease & Pringle, 2001).



The main axes identified by Connell forthis “global business masculinity” are the “met-ropolitan societies,” particularly those of theNorth Atlantic such as North America andWestern Europe (Connell, 1998). This concepthas proved useful for analyzing some develop-ments in Western Europe: for instance, the recenthistory of masculinity formation in Ireland(Ferguson, 2001). It may also be relevant to arange of broader issues in the northern, south-ern, and western parts of Europe. For example,there are the issues of growing job insecurity,more unemployment, and longer working hours(Hearn et al., 2002). Moreover, one highlyunderresearched issue across Europe is thetopic of men in power (Hearn & Pringle, 2001;Hearn et al., 2002). It is true that dominant anddiverse genderings of mainstream business andgovernmental organizations have been subjectto research and analysis. Moreover, feministsand critical, feminist-influenced studies havespelled out the explicit and implicit gender-ings of business organizations and management(Acker, 1990; Collinson & Hearn, 1994, 1996;Ferguson, 1984; Hearn & Parkin, 1983, 1995;Mills & Tancred, 1992; Powell, 1988). Never-theless, much research on gender relations inorganizations has not considered the genderingof women and men in organizations with equalthoroughness. This is despite the fact that theexplicit gendered focus on men and masculini-ties in organizations and management is impor-tant in several ways, including the analysis ofnational and transnational private and publicsector managers and managements. This ongo-ing relative silence in itself attests to the criticalimportance of hegemonic forms of masculinity,not least those associated with global capital.

For present purposes, it may be useful to con-sider the concept of global business masculinityin relation to the European Union as a whole.On the one hand, if that concept is particularlyconsonant with a “neo-liberal” welfare model(Esping-Andersen, 1990, 1996), as it seems log-ical to assume, and if the European Commissionespouses certain neoliberal approaches (as itoften seems to do in prescribing budget strin-gency), then the economic and social profileof European Commission policies might beexpected to promote global business mas-culinity. On the other hand, if we consider theEuropean Commission’s (1994) first WhiteChapter on Social Policy, The Way Forward, we

find a rather confused and confusing mélangeof statements. Many of these clearly do espousea form of neoliberalism, as expected. However,more unexpectedly, a significant number ofothers apparently derive from a more sociallyresponsible conservative corporatist or evensocial democratic ideology (Pringle, 1998a).

A similarly mixed picture emerges regard-ing mainstream EU policies toward Centraland Eastern Europe. On the one hand, a heavilyneoliberal agenda is often apparent. The criteriaset by the EU for states hoping to accede to theEU have strong neoliberal overtones. Thisapproach is similar to the often socially regres-sive criteria set by the EU, the World Bank, andthe International Monetary Fund whereby someof the states of Central and Eastern Europe weregiven financial support in the 1990s (Pringle,1998a). The message clearly being sent by theEuropean Union and its member states to thecentral and eastern parts of Europe has been,and still is, that highly capitalist values (whichwe may regard as consonant with global busi-ness masculinity) are to be prized and pro-moted. What is the impact of such an approachon those countries in Central and EasternEurope already seeking to cope with majorsocial and economic transformations? In partic-ular, what is the impact on gender relations,which have also been undergoing various formsof transformation in those countries? On theother hand, the European Union has placedpolicies in a central position that are clearly notconsonant with the values of global businessmasculinity. An obvious example is the EU’semphasis on gender equality mainstreaming,which necessarily applies to acceding states aswell as to existing members. What might be thecomplex consequences of such policies for gen-dered power relations in those acceding states?

In this section, we have reviewed variouscomplex ways by which gendered power rela-tions associated with dominant forms of mas-culinity are entering centrally into the hegemonicprocesses whereby the European Union, itsmember states, and associated countries areseeking to redefine “Europe” and what it is tobe “European.” Moreover, as we have also seen,the part played by gender relations within theseprocesses has largely been kept invisible.

In the next section, we consider how genderrelations within some of the countries in thecentral and eastern parts of Europe have been



undergoing transformation arising from thesocial and economic changes occurring theresince the late 1980s and the influence of trendsin the northern, southern, and western parts ofEurope, particularly via the activities of the EUand NATO.

THE COUNTRIES OF EAST-CENTRAL

EUROPE, THE BALTIC REGIONS, AND

THE NEW INDEPENDENT COMMONWEALTH

Gendered Transitions

The issues of men and masculinities in East-Central Europe, the Baltic states, and the coun-tries of the Commonwealth of IndependentStates are to be contextualized within regionaland national developments and the ways inwhich the gendering of cultures and nationshave “organized” variable routes into modernformations of nation-state and citizenship. Mostof the states and cultures of the region, togetherwith their perceived European identity, havebeen historically shaped by forces of exclusionand marginalization as well as by shared periph-erality between the German, Russian, British,Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires. Gen-der, men, and women are themes that require along-term comparative analysis of how culturalmeanings of gender were constituted and sta-bilized in these specific settings. A related andfascinating issue is how meanings of genderframed individual experiences of men andwomen who have embodied “the historicalstructures of the masculine order in the formsof unconscious schemes of perception andappreciation” (Bourdieu, 2001, p. 4).

National histories of the region represent anextremely rich and yet unresearched potentialarchive in constructing gender orders so thatthere is a danger of simplification and general-ization in an attempt to overview men’s prac-tices, research on men, and critical studies onmen in the complexity of postsocialist political,economic, social, and cultural restructurings. Aswell as the many points of similarity, there arealso critical points of deep and significantdifference that constitute “what men really are”or rather—as history has intervened—“whatmen have become” (Blom, Hagemann, &Hall, 2002) and what “men of Europe” arebecoming.

The breakdown of the socialist bloc in thepast 10 years has brought a radical change in thedevelopment of Europe and, indeed, the wholeworld. It has also turned out to be an experiencebeyond its categorization as a “transitional”period to the world of capitalism and the freemarket. Most countries of the region have expe-rienced the resurgence of a nationalism that hasincorporated elements of an agrarian “return totradition” (or “roots”), together with an urbanpopulist perspective of the “return of the nation”and a “transitional” feedback in the shape of a“return to Europe.” The reunification of thenation in the countries that received indepen-dence, reclaimed their political independence,or renationalized their postsocialist politicalspaces meant transforming trajectories of terri-torial imaginations of state and nation in thenewly rebordered community and reunifiedidentity of Europe.

The dissociation of the socialist economicand political system was seen as men’s returnfrom their “satellite” emasculation in the social-ist hierarchy of political power to their tradi-tional power positions in family and in society.As Zarana Papic (2000) points out,

The most influential concept in post-communiststate-building was the patriarchal nation-stateconcept, the ideology of state and ethnic national-ism based on patriarchal principles inevitablybecame the most dominant building force. Variousforms of ethnic nationalism, national separatism,chauvinist and racist exclusion or marginalisationof old and new minority groups are, as a rule,closely connected with patriarchal, discriminatoryand violent politics against women, and their civiland social rights, previously guaranteed under theold communist order.

Arguments that blame women’s eman-cipation for social problems such as fallingbirth rates, “emasculation” of men, “selfish-ness” of women, and sexual depravity every-where are not unique. There are precedents inEuropean social history before World War II(Brittan, 1989; Segal, 1990). The difference isthat we reproduce these “backlash” argumentsin a new transitional situation, marked by anendless political crisis. Political effeminacy canbe compensated for, in nationalist and religiousfundamentalist moods, by media imagery of a“powerful politician” or a “strong businessman”(Novikova, 2000).



Ethnicization of political processes inpostsocialist states, a shared regional charac-teristic, incorporated the politics of “genderrestoration” (Eley, 1998). It has been somewhatsimilar to the arguments about motherhood inthe welfare politics of welfare states during theinterwar period when “maternalism was themedium of restabilization, of reestablishingwomen’s place in the home—not as the founda-tion of female emancipation . . . but as the basisof gender restoration” (p. 514). This “genderrestoration” as a backlash response to socialist“sex equality” projects in a national, regional,and European setting has been instrumentalizedand deployed in several scripts—starting fromeconomic shock therapy in Poland, combiningwith antiwomen social policies, and leading tothe tragic Balkan decade. At the same time, var-ious neoethnicity scripts of postsocialist nationrebuilding have been carving out the related leg-islation in national labor and family codes, thusreflecting a targeted, active reconstruction ofmen’s social roles and representations, as wellas images of masculinity.

Ethnicization of postsocialist national proj-ects has been actively feeding into con-structions of national hegemonic masculinitymodels, or the rise of masculinism (Watson,1996). It formed the bedrock of “order” and“rationality” in reunifying political imagi-nations. In their turn, these have been bringingin resistant discourses of manhood, male roles,and male behavior in subordinated groups ofpopulations (e.g., Latvian-Russian in Latvia,Rumanian-Hungarian in Rumania, Ukrainianversus Roma people in Ukraine) in the immi-nent presence of minority homelands over theborder.

On the other hand, in the complexities ofthe transnational “east-east” divide, the politi-cal, economic, and military “completing ofEurope” controversially urges the constructionof the “bedrock” male identity in state- andnation-building projects. This transnationalbedrocking process has actually exposed certainshared characteristics in the gender histories ofnations and states, specifically, scenarios “withthe doubled or contradictory temporal concep-tion of the nation” (Wenk, 2000, p. 69). AsSilke Wenk argues, following Anne McClintock,“on the one hand, the nation presents itself as aproject of the future, and, on the other hand, asa project grounded in a mythically original past

as well” (Wenk, 2000, p. 69). Anne McClintockemphasizes that

the temporal anomaly within nationalism—veering between a nostalgia for the past and theimpatient, progressive sloughing off of thepast—is typically resolved by figuring the con-tradiction in the representation of time as a nat-ural division of gender. Women are representedas the atavistic and authentic body of nationaltradition, . . . embodying nationalism’s conserva-tive principle of continuity. (Wenk, 2000, p. 69)

Silke Wenk (2000) continues: “Men wouldthen stand ultimately for the opposite, for progressand also for discontinuity. Nationalism’s anom-alous relation to time is thus managed as a naturalrelation to gender” (p. 69).

The explicit mobilization of masculine“bias” (Connell, 2002, pp. 58-59) in the politicalrestructuring of the postsocialist “easts” ofEurope, informed by the post–Berlin Wall refor-mation of strategic geoeconomic interests,explicitly gendered explosive “transitions” inexisting concepts of gender stereotypes, images,roles, and values in the societies. The Balkantragedy exposed violence as a transnational issueof violence across Europe—beyond the regionaltransparency of the extreme levels of men’s vio-lence against women and children and other menin situations of armed conflict. The exposure toforms of “gendercide”—either rape of “enemy”women or massive murder of battle-age “enemy”men—affected gender relations, systems, andtraditions dramatically and structurally.

Somewhat similar syndromes are character-istic of warless countries of the region who aregoing through “peaceful” marketization of theireconomies. Zarana Papic (2003) writes,

Although some post-communist states with amore or less ethnically “pure” population struc-ture, like Poland, were not practising extremeethnic violence, all of them violated women’sessential human rights, above all the right toabortion, thus showing that the colonisation ofwomen’s bodies is central to post-communistprocesses of nation-building. Because men havegained decisive political and reproductive controlover women, these societies are often labeledas “male democracies,” or “new patriarchies.”The absence of women from politics in post-communist transitions reveals the damagingeffects of the patriarchal communist legacy, whichgave women the right to work, education, divorce,



abortion, but prevented them from becomingactive political subjects of their own destiny.Along with the nations’ new legislatures becom-ing masculinised, Eastern European gender rela-tions have become predominantly sexualised.

In Poland, for example, the research onunemployed men under 36 years old (performedfrom 1994 through 1996; Pielkowa, 1997, citedin Novikova, 2000) shows that “after they losttheir jobs 40% of them reported the loss offamily leadership which was taken over bytheir working wives. 23,4% of the unemployedhusbands assumed household responsibilitiesand 3,8% took over the upbringing of childrenfrom their wives” (Oleksy, 2001). The loss ofjobs also affected their lifestyles: Unemployedmen spend most of their time watching sports onTV and playing cards with friends. Twenty-eight percent of these men perceived the changein family relations as negative after they hadbecome unemployed; 32% reported the worsen-ing of husband-wife relations (Oleksy, 2001).Clearly, the effects of men’s unemploymentbring us to address the issue of men’s health.

In Lithuania, an ethnically heterogeneousand neighboring country of Poland, such factorsas military conflicts in the Balkans and citizen-ship issues, as in Latvia and Estonia, have notarisen, and the “transitional” period has beenconsidered as another instance of a “peaceful”scenario. Lithuania is the only country in theregion with a law on equal opportunities formen and women and an ombudsman’s office.However, the Lithuanian Human DevelopmentReport 2000 points out,

The demographic situation in Lithuania began todeteriorate in 1990. Since then the birth rate hasbeen declining continuously, resulting in a nega-tive natural increase in population even thoughmortality—after an increase in the first half of thedecade—has decreased slightly in the past fiveyears and in 1999 reached the same level as1990. . . . Mortality among men of all age groupsliving in either rural or urban areas was 1.2-1.3times higher than that of women. . . . People ofworking age accounted for 23.7% of the total mor-tality rate; 3.6 times more men from this age[group]. . . . Mortality among men of all agegroups living in either rural or urban areas was1.2-1.3 times higher than that of women. . . . mencommit suicide far more often than women do(73.8 and 13.6 people per 100,000, respectively).The greatest difference between the suicide rates

of men and women is in rural areas, where mencommit suicide seven times more often thanwomen do. The proportion of young people whocommit suicide remains high. . . . women inLithuania live almost ten years longer than men onaverage. (Maniokas et al., 2000)

In Estonia, and more generally, in manyother countries of East-Central Europe, “men’slow life expectancy is a major health problem”(Kolga, 2001). Across the region, life expectan-cies of men have dropped, and the life-span gen-der gap varies from 10 to 15 years. There is anincrease in coronary heart disease. Stress as agender-related process and the cardiovascularheart disease epidemic among middle-aged menare again common features of dysfunctionalsocial welfare, health care, and body politics.Cardiovascular mortality, chronic stress, andmale suicide rates in former communist coun-tries are 73 per 100,000 in Russia and Lithuania,64 in Estonia, 59 in Latvia, 49 in Hungary (com-pared with 19 per 100,000 in the United Statesand an average of about 28 in Western Europe).In Poland, according to Oleksy (2001),

The number of suicide attempts registered by theMilitia in the 1980s went down from 4.7 thousandin 1980 to 3.7 thousand in 1989. . . . Men consti-tuted ca. 79% of suicides then. The number of sui-cides increased greatly in the 1990s in comparisonwith the 1980s, and men were still more numerousin this population—81%. Public statistics for1990 show that for every 100 thousand men therewere 17 suicides and for every 100 thousandwomen there were 4 suicides, and in 1998 26 and6, respectively. . . . The analysis of the data givenin the report shows that there may exist intercon-nections among the four areas discussed, they arenot, however, scientifically justified ([there are]no surveys in this area on a sample in [all of]Poland). Increasing unemployment, especiallyamong men, may be connected with crime com-mitted by men in Poland, also domestic violence,deterioration of the condition of health of Poles,an increase in suicide committed due to hardshipfollowing a job loss and inability to find newemployment.

In Russia, as Janna Chernova (2001) argues,one of the probable explanations of the new risein the death rate is massive stress caused by themacroeconomic instability that leads to uncer-tainty about the future of Russian society. Thisexplanation is supported by two important facts:



First, the rise in the death rate at the beginningof the 1990s was not caused by children and oldpeople; second, it was men who suffered themost. One of the primary reasons for thesedeaths was the rise in alcohol consumption inthe beginning of the 1990s (compared with thelow level reached at the time of the antialcoholiccampaign of 1985-1988) (Chernova, 2001).

All these examples explicitly show howimportant it is to observe political, economic,and social developments from the point of viewof men to integrate the gender analysis of theprocesses of men’s social and cultural self-identifications in these developments. At thesame time, data from several countries indicatethat research and statistics are concentratedon men’s misfortunes (somewhat similarly topervasive themes in Finnish research) (Hearnet al., 2002). However, such studies are notbased on gendered analyses of men’s practices,values, roles, and so on. Such analyses shouldpursue the formation of specific multinodalidentities of men as a gendered process reflectedby the structuring of men’s positions in labormarkets (and their “shadow” aspects). The keyquestions here are how men see themselvesand how the diversity of men’s roles in thisdispersed space is constructed in contrast to theessentialist notion of the nation-state that hasexcluded or marginalized them in the formalstructures of national cultures.

Labor and Family

Family patterns and division of labor, as wellas self-perceptions of men as agents of familyand the private sphere, cannot escape deep, con-sequential transformations. One may assumethat hegemonic masculinity in diverse nationalcontexts is based on the role of a family manand breadwinner, and as such, dictates choicesand the form of social welfare policies today.Moreover, the Lithuanian Human Develop-ment Report 2000 (Maniokas et al., 2000) notesspecifically that “the breadwinner is a farmer.”However, for the families that have a “bread-winner with no income,” the report points out,“These households have only 59% of the aver-age household income. Social assistance bene-fits are the major source of the household’ssurvival.” This suggests a specific formation ofa passive receiver-consumer model, or, in otherwords, a reobjectification process in which

charity, explicit or implicit, becomes a dominantfeature in organizing the “citizen-consumer.”Yuval-Davis (1997) argues that in this dis-course, “Citizenship stops being a political dis-course and becomes a voluntary involvementwithin civil society, in which the social rights ofthe poor, constructed as the passive citizens,would be transferred, at least partly, from enti-tlements into charities (p. 84).

Yuval-Davis (1997) emphasizes that

in the name of social cohesion, obligations arebeing shifted from the public sphere of tax-financed benefits and services to the privatesphere of charity and voluntary services. Andcharity, usually, assumes the dependency and pas-sivity of those given the charity. Rights becomegifts and active citizenship assumes a top-downnotion of citizenship. (p. 84)

This discourse implies the hegemony of anenterprise culture, either national or transna-tional, “with an economically successful middleclass male head of a family” (Yuval-Davis,1997, p. 84). This is particularly important toconsider, for example, in such societies asEstonia, in which

the population is basically divided into two majorclasses: economically active and non-active popu-lation. The relation between these two classesdepends from two main factors: economic situa-tion and population age structure. As we see, morethan half the population is economically inactive(713 000 persons are economically active and 390000 are non-active persons). From the economi-cally active population ca 10% is unemployed,and almost half (172 300) the economically non-active people are retired, pensioners. The relationof self-employed and employees is now ca 1: 10.(Kolga, 2001)

The related question is how the forms ofcitizenship inspired with neoliberal economicpolitics transform the gender relations of menand women as well as relations between menin their private and public practices. Witheconomic restructuring and the development ofsocial forms of gender related to the nonmone-tary economic sector, the deterioration of theformer social welfare system brings the “wel-fare” function of women (taking care of childrenand the elderly) into the family. A woman takesback her “natural” functions in the family withthe collapse of social care and health care. She



also takes part in the nonmonetary productivepart of a family, in addition to her monetaryincome, which is likely to be insufficient for thefamily’s survival. In Latvia, for example, it isnot unusual to have urban families involved inmonetary sectors of the national economy spendlarge amounts of time in the countryside duringplanting, growing, and harvesting seasons, thusorganizing their gendered time use accordingly.Postsocialist women may also be invited intothe service sector of a transitional economy asan offshoot of their functions in the family.The postsocialist woman definitely experiencesdeprivileging moments differently from men,as she was brought up in the socialist (but stillpatriarchal) system and has now finally been“caught up” in the repatriarchalization of hersociety.

At the same time, in this variegated nationaland transnational context, the family is becom-ing a site of men’s practices, roles, and valuesthat seek new microsocial forms of gender con-tracts within the family itself. Voldemar Kolga(2001), for example, points out that in the1990s, traditional families—couples (officiallymarried or cohabiting) with children—still formthe largest group, as in Estonia. However, henotes the growth of the number of childlesscouples (22% in Estonia, compared with 19% inthe EU) as a sign of the new times.

In Russia, as Janna Chernova (2001) argues,the number of men is greater than the numberof women in the cities when both are under30 years old, and in the villages when both areunder 50. She indicates that these tendencieshave not resulted in an increase in marriages.

Since 1994 the situation with the two most impor-tant marriage indexes has changed: the tendencyof a decrease in the summarial marriage coeffi-cient is still taking place but there is an increase inmiddle marriage age. The number of officiallyregistered marriages decreases among youngergenerations. . . . Thus, the main tendency in theprocess of family forming is that young people ofboth sexes give up a traditional form of marriagemore often, and its official registration, in particu-lar. As results of different researches show, youngpeople prefer living together as an alternative toofficial marriage. (Chernova, 2001)

In Poland, a comparative analysis of familytype “shows that the number of single mothersand fathers rose together with the rise in

population in the 1990s. In this group, both in1988 and 1998, single fathers constituted ca.11%, single mothers—89%” (Oleksy, 2001).

Polish researchers have represented furtherportrayals of men. For example, Kostyla andSocha (1998; cited in Oleksy, 2001) write abouttypical Polish young men of the 1990s whoassist in the delivery of their children, take theirchildren for walks, share household responsibil-ities with their wives, and cook for their women.They devote over 10 hours daily to professionalactivities, avoid medical doctors, eat unhealthyfood, smoke cigarettes, and drink alcohol toovercome stress. And although Polish youngmen follow the European trend, playing squashand bicycling during the weekend, only 65out of 100 will live to the age of retirement(65 years old in Poland). Moreover, men “con-stitute about 70% of drug abusers and theydrink 3-4 times more alcohol than women. Therate of suicides shows a consistency which hasbeen detected for many years—the relationbetween men who commit suicides and womenwho commit suicides is 3:1” (Oleksy, 2001).

These examples, whether from the Balkansor the Baltic regions, testify to the issues of menand masculinities in these regions as differ-entiated contextually. On the other hand, theseexamples, at least partially, expose some patri-archal processes, tendencies, and structures(Holter, 1997, p. 281) of men’s individual andcollective uses, practices, institutions, identifica-tions, and values of masculinities. Governance,army, family, work, health care, and socialsecurity are regarded as highly risky and destruc-tive forms of men’s “gender privilege” (Greig,Kimmel, & Lang, 2000, p. 1) that need transfor-mative change. The Balkan decade shows howan armed conflict brings in the essential mean-ings of gender as part of a nation’s senseof continuity. The Lithuanian, Polish, Estonian,and Russian examples show a different anddifferentiated landscape of transition in whichthe naturalizing of gender has been taking place,with the aggressive entry of capitalism acting asa break to the former economic and politicalsystem by gender as its “evaluative code”(Holter, 1997, p. 65).

Transition Toward “Europe”

In this context, the process leading toward aunified Europe and its recentering strategies



along the geopolitical axis West to East werearticulated in the early 1990s (Modood &Werbner, 1997) as coming back to the “normal”and to civilization, or as a recivilizing process.

Return to Europe! Every day the Polish pressbrings new articles about the conditions of ourreturn to Europe. We are returning to Europebecause we just had our first free elections. We arereturning to Europe because we expect Poland tobecome a member of the Council of Europe. Andyet we cannot return to Europe as long as ourtowns are dirty, our telephones dysfunctional, ourpolitical parties reactionary and parochial, andour mentalities sovietised. Europe is a measure, apurpose, a dream. (Jedlicki 1990, p. 6 cited inKürti, 1997, p. 27)

Cultural and “civilizational” normalizationrhetoric implicitly pulls in the rhetoric of differ-ence between the European (“normal”) self ofthe recovered nation and its “other,” thusswitching public visions of “East” from a com-munist virus to the alien and contaminatingpresence of “strangers inside” (Bauman, 1998),added to a long list of forms of postsocialistabjections.4 The progressivist discourse of “thereturn to Europe” has been incorporated intoreimaginations of national fraternal projects thatensure protection to economic power concen-trated in the hands of men. This concentration offinancial power and resources resulted from theeconomic discrimination against women andtheir alienation from political power in thesocialist period. Another important factor wasthat the socialist period had blocked ways inwhich women’s movements could have devel-oped their autonomy, diversity, advocacy, andempowerment mechanisms, which were sub-merged under the populist and nationalistagendas of the 1990s.

In terms of Europe and, specifically, theEuropean Union, the demand of the EU to har-monize national legislations of the accessioncountries with gender policies of the EuropeanUnion does not “bypass” developmental connota-tions. The demand actually minimizes an impor-tant recognition that women’s and men’seconomic and social situations in East-CentralEuropean countries radically worsened in thepostsocialist liberalization of national markets.It vacuum cleaned the space of social policiesrather successfully, having thrown out anunwanted baby together with the bathwater—the

opportunity for women’s movements to carvethemselves out of the democratic process ofthe late 1980s and early 1990s. The democraticprocess instrumentalized women’s experiences ofparticipating in environmental, popular mothers’movements by coopting them into the indepen-dence, reconstruction, and revival agendas.

At the same time, a complex relationshipbetween local, traditional gender systems(themselves in transition) and the productionof manhood in the socialist mythology of men’sroles and hegemonic masculinities (them-selves in crisis) was contested, reworked, andreaffirmed as a relationship between residual(traditional and socialist) and emergent (neolib-eral) institutions, practices, and ideologies.Symptomatically, this is how Dimitar Kamburov,a profeminist researcher from Bulgaria, arguesabout men’s issues in his country and culture: “Ageneral understanding that males’ positions areOK historically and socially in this regionsomehow cancels the very vision of issueslike men and masculinities” (D. Kamburov,personal correspondence, April 26, 2001). Healso emphasized that “the historical ambiguities,of men’s position are in the social, culturaland everyday structure of Bulgarian, SoutheastEuropean and East European communitarianstructure,” and he indicated that this is the “prob-lem of hidden matriarchy and men’s fictivepower and spurious authority in the region. Thequestion of traditional labour distribution as animplicitly subversive agent of men’s domination”is part of the same argument.

In Estonia, as Voldemar Kolga (2001) argues,the patriarchal structure of society has changedover time, but many attitudes and stereotypestreating men’s central role as universal andnatural have survived until today. “Men inEstonian society have traditionally been attributedthe role of a leader, strong actor and punisher,while women have been viewed as caretakers,subordinates and those expressing compassion”(Kolga, 2001). At the same time, with economicrestructuring, from 1995 onward, “the unem-ployment rate among men has been somewhathigher than among women. According to [a] 1997labour survey, women’s unemployment rate was9.7% and men’s 11.2%” (Kolga, 2001).

The return into “ethnic authenticity,” into“normal statehood and nationhood” as theretrieval of “natural gender order” was trau-matically compromised by the tsunami-like



transformations in national labor markets, theirtransnationalization, and the political “re-Europeanization” of the region (marked as aWest-East relationship). Mass media celebratedthe survival of the “strongest.” As a form ofwishful thinking, they also fabricated theview of “successful” First World projects, suchas the Nordic, American, West European, andJapanese, as normative (because economicallysuccessful) models of gender relations (Novikova,2000). In this context, what Dimitar Kamburovunderlines as a problem for men in the Balkanregions can be referred to as common to theeast-central part of post–Berlin Wall Europe. Ashe writes,

The advent of machismo as an overreaction to thenew crisis of masculine positioning is related tothe crisis of men’s self-reflection as an outburst ofthe radical change of values of success and senseof life in the process of transition. (D. Kamburov,personal correspondence, April 24, 2001)

In Russia, however, there has developed adiscourse, defined as “masculinity crisis,” withmajor indicators of low life expectancy com-pared with women, self-destructive practices (e.g.,so-called bad habits such as hard drinking andalchoholism, smoking, excessive eating), andhigh rates of morbidity and mortality that makeit a “sad privilege” to be a man (Chernova,2001). Demographic, health, and birth and deathrate studies; new studies of men and violence;exclusion of some men’s groups (homosexuals,for instance) from the field of the normativemasculinity—all this led to the emergence of apeculiar “victimization theory.” According tothis theory, men are passive victims of their bio-logical nature and structural (cultural) circum-stances. In other words, men are represented inthis theory as victims who can hardly be called“actively functioning” social agents of their ownlives (Chernova, 2001). Finally, the rhetoricaltriumph of nationalists’ “man as a victim” whois not responsible for the political, economic,and social malfunctioning in the (not uniquely)Russian context has been developing into amultifunctional instrument that can attackeither “those emancipated women” in the pastor “feminist (Western and rotten) spoils” in thepresent.

The victimization and infantilization of menbecame a topic in the Soviet territories at least

20 years ago, and (surprise!) the public discoursesince then has similarly condemned womenoccupying men’s places. Neither the Russian“masculinity crisis” nor the “Eastern maleinferiority complex” (labeled as “men’s effemi-nization,” “men’s emasculation,” “men’s infan-tilization”) seem to be just national or regionalsymptoms of socially gendered transformations.A social and psychological crisis of masculinityis not the first attempt of its “justified” reaffir-mation in modern times. However, its postmod-ern manifestation is mobilized across Europein an overall utterance of denouncement thatspeaks against epistemologically informed polit-ical and social practices that delegitimize thegender of hegemonic conceptualizations of“equality” and, at least in Eastern Europe, enjoythe steady cannibalization of gender equalitypackaged as sexual transgression and perversion.

Meanwhile, as Stephen Whitehead (2002)points out, in the West, men in crisis eithershould find their “authentic selves” outside ofthe stereotypical machismo that damagesand imprisons them or reassess their mas-culinity by adopting roles that are “relevant tomodern times.” They might also “find theiridentity in fraternal projects and missions” torestore a “damaged inner psyche” that hasbeen “damaged through consumerism and/ordomestication” (p. 55). He then argues that

the crisis of masculinity discourse suggests thatthe inability of many men to cope with the newexpectations of women (feminism), combinedwith the demise of traditional work patterns andmale roles, makes them especially vulnerable toengaging in forms of resistance that lead on tocriminal behaviour. . . . In short, women’s new-found expectations and achievements are a socialproblem, not a social good—not least becausethey serve to put those males who are seen as mostlikely to offend (working-class white and blackyouths) in an untenable situation whereby their“natural” masculine inclinations have no readyoutlet. Thus the relation between feminism, malecriminality and redundant and dysfunctionalforms of masculinity is reified. (p. 53)

In different situations, however, either lowprofessional competitiveness or the effects ofeconomic restructuring on different socialgroups of men are easily transformed into mas-tering the public desire for narratives of violatedmaleness naturally embodied in men’s practices



as performances of dominant masculinityimages: “Significantly, the male crisis discoursehas seeped out of cultural discussion and is nowincreasingly being used to inform public policy”(Whitehead, 2002, p. 51), and this looks true ofpostsocialist policy developments as well.

In Latvia, for example, the new labor codehas a clause on paternity leave as a right for theworking father. On the one hand, it is an attemptto reclaim men as active fathers by practicinggender equality in the family and the labor mar-ket. However, contextually, this legislative mea-sure addresses the issue of absence of fathersfrom their families—discursively constructed as“men’s crisis” and “crisis of a Latvian family.”Returning a father to a family has been a signif-icant component of the “healthy normal nuclearfamily” discourse, against the reality of thesingle-parent (mainly single-mother) family.Another implication lies in the valorization ofthe private sphere by enhanced paternity rights,although there is not a parallel enhancement interms of valorizing women’s jobs in the labormarket (at least in terms of their salaries). The“cultural image of the New Father” (Hondagneu-Sotelo & Messner, 1994, p. 206), acceptedunproblematically, is not linked up with careerand pay equity for women as “a structuralprecondition for the development of equalitybetween husbands and wives in the family”(p. 205). Moreover, domesticity can become aterritory for conservative familism to “conquer”in terms of expanding new gender privileges anddisadvantages in family socialization patterns forchildren. The initiatives for changing a father’srole in the family are not adequately accompa-nied by gender-informed educational reformsand creation of societal awareness about the plu-rality of family models and their social valoriza-tion beyond a “universal” nuclear, heterosexual,“normal” family.

One can also presume that reevaluation of afather’s role in the family is negotiated in revis-ing gender orders of welfare regimes acrossEurope; thus the private sphere is graduallycompleting the gendered power mapping of theprivate, but also the public. Family has been,increasingly, an extremely important social andeconomic agent in the transnational genderedeconomic circuit and a revised site of crumblingsocial policies, with the return of caring func-tions to the private domain. However, inviting afather’s caring (apart from hidden social welfare

restructuring) can fit “into a right-wing familyvalues agenda, almost suggesting that childrenneed fathers more than they need mothers (ifnot fathers, at least patriarchs)” (Aronson &Kimmel, 2001, p. 49). Let me dwell on thisargument and add that professionalism remainsa central value in the practice of masculinity,along with the appropriated (or “retrieved,” or“returned”) caring function of a father.

“Return to Europe,” as the mainstream polit-ical and economic agenda of the countriesincluded in the EU-accession cohort, is part ofthe globalization process. In these terms, mili-tarization of Europe as part of global militariza-tion is a “‘technical modality’ of connectivity”(Tomlinson, 1999, p. 4) in the package ofprocesses that are rewriting the autonomy prin-ciples of the nation-state in its supranational andregional negotiations and involvements. Theboundaries of regional military blocks arebecoming actual borders of global mapping ofpower relations, within which, for any countryto join the EU, the metonym of Europe, meansto prove exactly that “I am not a stranger.”It achieves this by diffusing angst to those eitherin their territories (diasporas, clefts in the Balticregions, new vs. old in East-Central Europe)as extensions of strangers outside their coun-tries or through Islamization of angst expressedin the works of theorists as a major trait ofglobalization. In this context, the outcome ofthis gendered social and economic processawaits research, with the focus on men’s (and“new” minority or transnational men’s) self-identifications and views about their situationin the 1990s, following the radical economicand political change in gender regimes. Its cen-tral questions should be (a) What is consideredrelevant in the self-articulation of cultural andsocial identities of men in minority, diasporic,and transnational communities? and (b) Howdo men consider the democratic managementof their societies with regard to the specificproblems of diversity and transformation?

“Completing Europe” is likely to remain abattlefield, an explicitly gendered project. Thatproject may manifest itself either in rebuildingsmall nation-states and their armies or in con-structing a new role of a future European soldierin high-tech, “remote-control” wars. The latterwill be “an anonymous legionary supporting aEuropean/international order in invisible andintangible wars, with invisible, media-defined



enemies” (Novikova, 2000). Whatever language isused, militarization of the economy, accompaniedwith the European Monetary Union, betrays thetwo gendered dimensions of the nation-state,translated into a supranational formation—armyand money—recarving new visions of hegemonicmasculinities out of “soldiering and sea trading,”the men’s occupations that, as R. W. Connellargues, gave rise to early modern Europe as agendered enterprise (Connell, 1987).

The globalized international market isanother projection of the global “battlefield”within which postsocialist countries must elabo-rate their gendered projects and schemes of wel-fare regimes. The national economies have beenstructured and perceived so that the privatesector is more “male” and the public sectorconcentrates men mainly in the upper echelonsof power and salaries. The picture, however, iseven more complicated by the presence of whatis called an “informal economy” in all countriesof the transitional belt. It definitely is anothersphere of male dominance in regard to produc-ing transnational, regional, national, and localhierarchies and patterns of men’s social identi-ties and representations.

As the past 15 years have shown, postsocialistsocieties have (possibly unknowingly) worked torestore a man-as-breadwinner model of family(variable) and related private-public divisions ofgender roles. A man is defined in his social roleand social identity of breadwinner as dominant,thus involving implicitly his control over incomeand possession. As such, this role is granted asocial representation of hegemonic masculinityimageries. R. W. Connell (1987, 1995), however,argues about the historical production of contem-porary Euro-American masculinities. The issuehere is dominance-inequality as the dimension ofsocial structures in dominated European coun-tries whose gender relations have historicallybeen part of European imperial configurationsand very diverse men’s practices, cultural formsand norms, and identifications. The “frontiers”of Europe offer new “Eastern” leverages fornew policies for European and global coproduc-tion of “a dominance-based masculinity” thatR. W. Connell sees as operating in “a technocraticrather than confrontationist style” and, moreover,as “misogynist as before.”

The misogyny is not a static phenomenon,and gender regimes on both national and supra-national levels avoid confrontational politics by

recruiting the “innocently” class-blind but“perfectly” gender-friendly language of negoti-ation, partnership, and cooperation. We areobviously dealing with forms of misogyny thatwork covertly in the space between politicallycorrect legislations and destructive social andeconomic environments. In this, the notion ofcollectivity as providing values of gender equal-ity is being devalued. The return of “biology” isbound up with high levels of violence againstwomen and men, homosexuals, children, oldpeople, and immigrants across Europe (burningof Turkish houses in Germany, murdering of animmigrant boy in Norway, harassment at a gayrally in Belgrade), which is what lies behind thediscourse of multiculturalism across Europe.The skinhead actions in Russia and anti-Semiticoutbursts across Europe in 2002 are symptomsof the processes in which the mosaic of “biol-ogy,” “strongest,” “authenticity,” “enemy,” and“order” is brewed into the Molotov cocktaillegitimation of a reconstructing word (e.g.,peacekeeping), as West-East European male“rationality” claims to progressively reproducea new European social world and its genderorder.

STUDIES ON MEN IN

THE COUNTRIES OF EAST-CENTRAL

EUROPE AND THE FORMER SOVIET UNION

At the same time, it is difficult to disagree withElzbieta Oleksy (2001) that, due to little interestin “men’s” issues in our countries, “it is difficultto talk about men’s politics.” In Poland, forexample, there is only one organization thataddresses men exclusively: the Association forthe Defense of Fathers’ Rights (StowarzyszenieObrony Praw Ojca).

Across the region, men are active in organiz-ing gay groups; there are men who are interestedin organizing fathers’ groups (e.g., in Poland)and men’s groups analogous to Robert Bly’smythopoetic trend. However, it is extremely dif-ficult to collect information on men’s groupsand organizations across the region.

Academic communities of the regions andcountries were exposed to women’s studies inthe early 1990s, when family and demographicsociologists were searching for promising areasof research that would open roads to the West.



Thus there was an attempt to translate women’sstudies in a way that was relevant to our envi-ronments, as something parallel to that whichtraditional women’s research had been doingin Soviet socialist times. Gender studies wereappropriated with less difficulty becausethe word feminist meant everything alien to theideas and traditions of those nations in theprocess of self-reconstruction after regainingpolitical independence from the USSR in 1991.Gender studies promised something that couldmore easily work with mainstream academia.

At the time of state and nation rebuilding, thepower of the nation had to be in the hands ofmen. All problems related to men were labeledas men’s crises because, according to wide-spread opinion, the Soviet socialist regimes hadinfantilized and feminized them in the ideologyof sexual equality. The nationalist discoursesof the early 1990s literally did not leave anyroom for forming influential and independentwomen’s movements, and women’s and genderstudies centers were politically ghettoized in theacademic communities.

Apart from societal transformations havingbrought new values and identities into genderrelations, research on women had been active inthe former socialist and Soviet academic institu-tions, as women had been viewed in terms oftheir productive as well as reproductive value inevery nation. What research there was on menhad “accompanied” the research on women. Itwas becoming of more importance in the 1980s,with demographic decline and growing alco-holic consumption, in particular in the regionsof the USSR.

What Elzbieta Oleksy (2001) notes forPoland is also true for other countries: “mas-culinity as an independent research topic hasenjoyed little if not marginal popularity amongPolish authors.” Iva Smidova (2002), a researcherfrom the Czech Republic, writes,

In the Czech Republic, men have not been studiedyet; the theme of masculinities is often consideredas unproblematic, or “men’s role” is only dis-cussed under other branches of sociologicalinquiry—mainly research on family. Men (andwomen still) are an “exceptional” topic for thegeneral public opinion; for they must understandand know “what is going on here.” To question theeveryday experience and (re)define it as problem-atic, to list men’s problems and study them, or justdeconstruct men’s position and stereotypes of the

“norm” and point to prejudices will be a delicatetask. (p. 1; see also Smidova, 2003, 2004)

There, however, has emerged a new type ofresearch on changes in men’s practices andimages (Smidova, 2002). Smidova points to animportant, specific feature that might be attrib-uted to the development of feminist and genderstudies in other countries of East-CentralEurope: a tendency in the Czech Republic tostudy women in relation to men and not toexclude men from feminist studies and research.

Issues of men’s practices, values, andmasculinity images have been among the-matic interests for scholars in the Balkancountries such as Svetlana Slapsak (Slovenia),Rastko Mocnik (Slovenia), Marina Blagoe-vich (Yugoslavia), Zarana Papic (Yugoslavia),Tomislav Longinovich (Yugoslavia), and others.In the Baltic regions so far, several attempts toattract academic and public attention to men’sissues were made at the Valmiera conferencein 1998: Nordic men involved in men’s studiesorganized a special workshop with a focus onmen and violence and men and family roles.

Publications and translations of works aboutmen and masculinities are gradually andsteadily becoming part of our research horizon,as, for example, the collections on integratingpost-socialist perspectives on men (Novikova &Kambourov, 2003), and on men and masculini-ties in Russia (Oushakine, 2002). The latterincludes scholars who have done individualresearch on men’s issues in politics, business, andculture in Russia and outside it. However, theyare not united in networks, seminar programs, orteam research projects. The academic settingsare structured so that women researchers in gen-der, women’s, and feminist studies remain intheir peripheral spaces, with no potential for acareer in mainstream academia. Thus womenresearchers practice a “borderland” strategy bycombining research they are personally interestedin with research that will be beneficial for theircareer. A man who would pursue the goal ofmaking a career in the national academy certainlyexcludes the “feminized” periphery from hisambitions, apart from exceptional cases in whichgender studies are used as a route for an acade-mic jump into a Western program or institution.

There are no research projects on the issuesidentified in this chapter that have been con-ducted by scholars in the regions and countries



we deal with here and, more specifically, byscholars from those regions and countries work-ing in a concerted way. There is an obvious con-nection between the noticeable absence of suchscholars among male academics engaged in crit-ical and feminist research on men and masculin-ities and their marginal presence in mainstreamacademic research. This is not to assert that aparticular experience is crucial to the research ofparticular issues. It is to say that the exclusionand marginalization of particular issues in poli-tics and research explicitly tells us more aboutgeneral moments in the gendered structurationof the region’s democratic deficit.

CONCLUSION

As should be clear from our analysis in thischapter of the underlying (and often hidden)gender processes that permeate the current(re)creation of “Europe,” the EU research net-work on men, from whose outcomes we havemainly drawn, represents a significant step inbringing together women and men researchersfor the development of good quality Europeanresearch on men in Europe. The research andnetwork team has included scholars fromPoland, Estonia, Russia, and Latvia and hasprovided an excellent opportunity for colla-boration with and learning from the expertise ofcolleagues, as well as promoting comparativemethodologies and disciplinary developmentsof men’s research into national and regionalsettings. It is particularly important because theresearch network addresses men and masculini-ties in the four main aspects that have neverfound direct relevant research and policy state-ments in the East-Central European states, theBaltic states, and Russia. These aspects aremen in relation to home and work, men in rela-tion to social exclusion, men’s violence, andmen’s health.

For the future, the outcomes of the networkpoint to the urgent necessity for researchers toaddress all these aspects—most of all, in terms ofwhich models of differential welfare regimes arebeing constructed in the countries of East-CentralEurope, the Baltic states, and Russia. This is inthe context of the EU’s eastern enlargement andthe demands of the EU on accession countries toharmonize their legislations with acquis commu-nataire (the entire body of European laws). If

distinctions and contrasts can be made in thewelfare regimes of Western Europe (see Esping-Andersen, 1990, 1996, for one influential modeland, for a critique, Pringle, 1998a, 2002b), thehistorical trajectories of gender orders and stateregimes in the countries of Central and EasternEurope will need to be brought to the level ofcomparative analysis, together with research onhow the ongoing gendering of these nation-statesincorporates and transforms these trajectories.

A gender analysis of the constructed welfareregimes should be combined with a critique andgreater attention to conscious gendering of men’spractices and relations to the welfare regimedevelopments by taking into account their inter-action with dominant cultural, regional men’spractices, and traditional views of men and mas-culinities. This challenge involves an emphasison the relatively weak connection (or its absence)between gender research and statistical reportingon men’s practices within the countries of Centraland Eastern Europe—in contrast, for example,to such countries as Germany, Norway, and theUnited Kingdom. Moreover, gender as a categoryin statistical reporting and analysis is not usedin Central and Eastern Europe to the extent towhich the data can be used for research on men’spractices as gendered process. This pointsemphatically to the shortage and even public andacademic invisibility of feminist, women’s, and gen-der studies in the countries of the region and thepolitically grounded transplantation of gender intomainstream academic language to neutralize thecritical stance of this category of analysis.

Thus, in this chapter, we have not onlydemonstrated that the “re-creation” of the “NewEurope” centrally involves gendered and gen-dering processes; we have suggested that theseprocesses cannot be fully understood withoutconsideration of the complex interaction ofoppressive power relations operating between adominant West (partly in the form of institutionssuch as the European Union and NATO) and thecountries of Central and Eastern Europe. Howfar those power relations can be subverted intransformation by the rapidly changing societiesof that part of Europe will be a crucial issue overthe next decade for the well-being of those liv-ing there—especially women and children, butalso men. In this context, it is to be hoped thatthose institutions that generate transnationalresearch (such as the European Union) willdevelop further projects, such as the thematic



research network from which the coauthorshave drawn here, to carefully scrutinize theseprocesses. Current indications, such as therecent publication of the European CommissionFramework 6 Programme, are not necessarilyencouraging.

NOTES

1. This network is funded by the EuropeanCommission (Contract Number HPSE-CT-1999-0008). The Web site for the network is http://www.cromenet.org.

2. The EU currently comprises 15 countries:Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France,Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, theNetherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the UnitedKingdom. At the time of writing (the very beginningof 2003), 10 more countries have been formallyinvited to join the EU by 2004, subject to positiveoutcomes in national referenda: Cyprus, the CzechRepublic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta,Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia. In addition, it is pro-jected that Bulgaria and Romania should be able tojoin by 2007. In addition, 12 of the 15 EU memberstates (all except Denmark, Sweden, and the UnitedKingdom) now have the same currency (the Euro), aspart of the European Monetary Union.

3. The summary that follows, of current researchon men’s practices in Western Europe (includingbrief considerations of men at home and work, underconditions of social exclusion, men’s violence, andmen’s health), draws heavily on the outcomes of theEuropean Commission-funded thematic networkmentioned earlier (see Hearn et al., 2002; Hearn &Pringle, 2001).

4. The notion of “abjection” as an explanationfor oppression and discrimination is derived fromJulia Kristeva’s (1982) book Powers of Horror: AnEssay on Abjection, in which she succinctly says,“The abject has only one quality of the object andthat is being opposed to I.” Kristeva’s theory of abjec-tion is concerned with figures that are in a state oftransition or transformation. The abject is located in aliminal state that is on the margins of two positions;it has to do with “what disturbs identity, system,order. What does not respect borders, positions,rules” (Kristeva, 1982, p. 4).

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PART III

STRUCTURES, INSTITUTIONS,AND PROCESSES



10CLASS AND MASCULINITY

DAVID MORGAN

Students of gender tend only to see gender; class analysts tend only to see socialclasses. The research questions are often crudely put as being questions of genderor class instead of asking how gender and class interact in the lives of historicallysituated social groups.

—Marianne Gullestad (1992, p. 62)

165

Class is one of a number of socialhierarchies or systems of social stratifi-cation that have represented core ele-

ments in sociological analysis. Other systemsinclude slavery and caste and feudal systems,and these are usually seen as being distinct fromclass relationships in that they are associatedwith particular historical epochs or geographicalareas. Class stratification is seen as the formmost closely associated with industrial and cap-italist societies, although elements of othersystems may also be present. In addition, thereare hierarchies that can overlap and coexist withany of these particular systems of stratification.These can include gender, age, and generation,as well as race and ethnicity; some more recentanalyses would argue for the inclusion of hier-archies based on sexualities and forms of abilityand disability.

All these sets of differences have some fea-tures in common. They are relational in that thevarious elements (working class, slave, women,black, etc.) cannot be considered apart fromother, usually opposed, elements. They refer to

some kind of hierarchical organization andinequalities of power. They are structured in thatthey, to a greater or lesser extent, exist outsideindividuals and persist over time. And they are,again to varying degrees, seen as significant dis-tinctions in the societies in which they exist.Sociological analysis, until fairly recently, hastended to focus on class and class relationships,although there may be considerable variation inthe ways in which these terms are understood.This is partly because of the influence of at leasttwo of the discipline’s “founding fathers,” Marxand Weber, and partly because of sociology’scentral interest in the defining and distinctivecharacteristics of “modern” societies.

It should be noted at the outset that there isa particularly British or European focus in thischapter, although the chapter does not, as weshall see, exclude wider considerations. This ispartly because of my own intellectual back-ground as a British academic but also partlybecause many of the key debates and modes ofanalysis originated in Britain, although theymade use of some of the key theories from other


parts of Europe. Class has sometimes been seenas a particularly British obsession, and this inpart relates to its historical position as the firstindustrial capitalist society, a point recog-nized by Marx and many of the early socialists.However, questions of origin are here lessimportant in a chapter that is exploring the inter-relationships between masculinities and class,and I hope that, in the course of this discussion,some general principles may be developed thatmay be found useful in analyzing a wide rangeof social and historical contexts.

Questions about the relationships betweendifferent social hierarchies developed in thelast part of the 20th century, and one of the moreheated sociological debates has revolved aroundissues of class and gender, more specificallyabout whether women have been marginalizedin traditional class analysis. Joan Acker (1973),in an influential article, claimed that the relativeinvisibility of women in class analysis was acase of “intellectual sexism”; John Goldthorpe(1983) presented a vigorous defense of thetraditional view. One important issue raised inthe course of this debate was whether theindividual or the “family” should be treatedas the unit of class analysis (Crompton, 1993;Lee & Turner,1996; Morgan, 1996).

As was so often the case when genderwas discussed, the focus was almost whollyon women and their marginal position withintraditional class analysis. As such, the debatecould be seen as part of the wider feministcritique of conventional social science and theway in which, whatever the topic, women wereeither marginalized or stereotyped. What wasnot explored in the course of the debate wasthe position of men within class analysis. Yet amoment’s thought would seem to suggest thatmen and masculinity were heavily implicated inclass analysis, where, in British iconography atleast, the bowler hat of the upper middle classhangs between the cloth cap of the working manand the top hat of the traditional upper class.Was it simply an accident that led to men beingpresented as the key class actors, or were theconnections between class and masculinitycloser than might first have been suspected?

About the same time as the gender and classdebate, there was another loosely associateddebate concerning the centrality (or otherwise)of class analysis (Devine, 1997; Lee & Turner,1996; Pakulski & Waters, 1996; Savage, 2000).

Toward the latter part of the 20th century, thereappeared to be a general impression, at leastwithin the United Kingdom, that class analysisno longer had a “promising future.” This wasin part a consequence of a recognition of other,at least equally important, social divisions, suchas those of gender or race and ethnicity. Classanalysis also appeared to be less relevant withthe collapse of the Berlin Wall and the erosion ofmany communist societies. With a developingglobal perspective, many of the traditional, ofteneurocentric, class divisions seemed to be lessable to explain social inequalities and conflictsall over the world. Class increasingly has globaldimensions, and these do not necessarily linkeasily to categories developed in other timesand under other conditions. Even within thecountries where class analysis had originated,there was a growing suspicion that althoughinequalities clearly persisted, the old languageof class was inadequate when it came to under-standing these inequalities. The development ofterms such as “underclass” and “social exclu-sion” seemed to bear witness to a diffuse senseof unease about traditional class categories.Finally, there was a growing popular perceptionthat class divisions were old-fashioned and thatthe remaining remnants would be swept away ina fluid, increasingly open, postmodern society.

More recently, however, class analysis seemsto have returned, albeit with some importantmodifications (Devine, 1997; Savage, 2000).One interesting question, however, remains.How far was this apparent erosion—or at leasttransformation—of class analysis linked toshifts in the gender order and the possible ero-sion of patriarchal structures? If, as the class andgender debates suggested, class had been fairlystrongly linked to themes of men and masculin-ity, were there links between changes in the gen-der order and changes in the position of classwithin the analysis of social structures?

In this chapter, I shall enquire what it wasabout class, and class analysis, that seemed toencourage a particularly strong identificationwith men and masculinities. However, this iden-tification was implied rather than explicit, latentrather than manifest. Part of the story is the wayin which questions about the gendering of classwere avoided or remained invisible for so long.I shall present a fairly closely integrated and rel-atively stable model closely linking the two andcontrast this with a more fluid and open set of

166 • STRUCTURES, INSTITUTIONS, AND PROCESSES


connections that may be said to be characteristicof late modern times. Before this, however, Ishall need to consider what is meant by classand some differences in emphasis and approachwithin class analysis.

DEFINITIONS AND DISTINCTIONS

Picture a first-year sociology class in, say, the1980s or even later. The topic for discussion iswhat we mean by class. Is it income? But whatabout the rock star or a sports personality whomay, at his peak, be earning more than the primeminister? Is it occupation? If so, on what basisdo we say that one occupation ranks higher thananother? Perhaps it is education. But does thisnot depend on income and occupation? Then,especially if the discussion is taking place in aBritish university, someone will raise questionsof accent and how a person talks, arguing thatyou can place individuals as soon as they opentheir mouths.

Much of the discussion, you conclude,revolves around particularly British obsessionsto do with relatively fine distinctions, snobbery,Oxbridge, and the old school tie. The concernseems to be more at the individual level, abouthow to place that individual in relation toanother, rather than more abstract concernsabout social structure. When British social crit-ics refer to “outmoded” class distinctions, it isusually these distinctions, which are manifestedat the interpersonal level, that are being refer-red to rather than wider structural differencesassociated with a capitalist society. But a littlereflection on these debates might suggest thatit is important to distinguish the particular his-torical experiences of any one particular societyfrom understandings of class in a more general,structural sense.

In this chapter, I am less concerned with thedifferences between different theoretical tradi-tions—notably the Marxist and the Weberian—and more concerned with some of the morecommon features of and issues within classanalysis. Thus there will be general agreementthat we are dealing with inequalities that are theproducts of social structure rather than the pres-ence or absence of individual attributes, such asintelligence, physical strength, and so on. Thereis also a general agreement that in talking aboutclass, we are talking about economic divisions

and inequalities. A kind of more or less explicitWeberian analysis would seem to be at the heartof much empirical class analysis. This entailslooking at the unequal distribution of lifechances insofar as these deal with the ownershipor nonownership of different forms of prop-erty and different levels of income. Weberianswould argue that such a mode of analysis ismore inclusive than a more strictly Marxistanalysis in that Marxist class and class actionremains a potentiality within Weber’s categories,although not the only one.

Within class analysis, there are a range ofqualifications and distinctions, some of whichhave a particular relevance when it comes toconsidering the relationships between mas-culinity and class:

• Objective and subjective understandings ofclass. This is the distinction between the cate-gories that are established in class analysis andthe way in which class is actually understoodand experienced by individuals or, indeed,whether the term class has any meaning at all.

• Class in itself and class for itself. This well-known distinction, deriving from Marxistanalysis, contrasts class as a category, a modeof distinguishing and classifying people andclass as the basis for some form of collectiveaction. This entails the development of someform of class consciousness, an awareness ofsome shared fate, and collective experiences,together with some understanding of the possi-bilities of challenging or even changing theclass system.

• Bipolar models of class and more complexhierarchical models. This may refer to soci-ological accounts or social actors’ own per-ceptions of the class structure. Bipolarmodels may be more or less simple descrip-tions (mental-manual) or imply some degree ofclass antagonism (bourgeoisie-proletariat) orfall somewhere in between (them-us). Themore complex models see the class structure asa sort of ladder with three or more levels.

• Class and status. Although, strictly speaking,this takes us beyond class analysis, it is impor-tant, as several popular and social-scientificunderstandings of class contain elements ofboth. Roughly speaking, class in this instancerefers to the unequal distribution of life chances;status refers to the social distribution of honoror prestige. It could be argued that the popularand widely used distinction between upper,middle, and working contains elements of bothclass and status.

Class and Masculinity • 167


• Class as based on individuals and class asbased on families or households. This is a dis-tinction with particular relevance for a gen-dered analysis of class (Curtis, 1986). Muchclass analysis takes individuals as the units andthen aggregates them. However, several sociol-ogists have argued that the family or the house-hold should be the unit of analysis, althoughthe matter becomes complex once one movesaway from assuming that the class position ofa household is determined by the class of themain (male) breadwinner (Morgan, 1996).

• One final distinction deals with the historicallocation of the idea of class. The CommunistManifesto famously begins with the words“the history of all hitherto existing societyis the history of class struggles” (McLellan,1988, p. 21). Much of its actual focus, how-ever, is on classes under capitalism. Socio-logical analysis has tended, explicitly orimplicitly, to limit the idea of class to capi-talism and postcapitalism. Thus there is a dis-tinction between an almost timeless notion ofclass divisions, popularly outlined in terms ofthe “haves” and the “have nots,” and one that ismuch more historically situated and identifiedwith modernity.

What I have presented here is a highlysimplified version of some complex debates.Their relevance for the exploration of the rela-tionships between class and masculinity will,I hope, emerge in the subsequent discussion.One final set of issues remains for clarification.In common with much current discussion,reflected elsewhere in this volume, I shall hence-forth write of masculinities rather than mas-culinity, although I recognize that there aresome difficult issues associated with this move.Within this framework, as will appear later, theidea of hegemonic masculinity is important.These ideas are discussed at greater length else-where in this volume.

THE MASCULINITIES OF CLASS

There is one further distinction that should bemade before continuing with the analysis. Wemay see, as has already been suggested, men asholders of class power. Thus men will be founddisproportionately located in the highest levelsof political, economic, educational, and cul-tural organizations. In this respect, we may seemen as centrally involved in class practices, as

individual or collective class actors. But wemay also see men involved in the central dis-courses about class power. Many of the keytheorists of class have been men, and it is rea-sonable to suppose that their location in genderhierarchies is as important in shaping, if notin determining, their worldviews as their loca-tions within a class system. Of course, in real-ity, this distinction becomes a little blurred,as discourses and practices are always closelyrelated. Put another way, modes of understand-ing and researching class may reflect genderedperspectives just as the class practices them-selves will also be gendered.

We may see these issues below the surfaceof the gender-class debate already mentioned.Goldthorpe’s (1983) defense of the “conven-tional view” of class claimed that he was repre-senting the world as it was rather than the worldas we might like it to be. If that world be maledominated or patriarchal, then, to simplify con-siderably, that is how we should represent it.Up to a point, Goldthorpe’s argument wascorrect in its generality, if not in its particul-arities. In everyday as well as in social sciencediscourse there does seem to be somethingparticularly masculine about the idea of class.And class practices, although much more opento variation, might seem to reflect these dis-courses, at least for much of what we describeas modern times. Put simply, class is gendered,and men have assumed, or have been allocated,the role of class agents.

How has this identification, albeit often sub-merged, between men and class come about?There are several overlapping reasons.

If we return to the key elements in the(broadly Weberian) model of class, we findstrong connections between property, occupa-tion, and masculinities. In the case of property,we find, historically, strong identificationsbetween ownership of different kinds of prop-erty, family and family name, and inheritanceand the male line. In the case of occupation, theconnections are perhaps less strong, although itcan be argued that most occupational titles havestrong masculine connotations. Some occupa-tional titles (e.g., policeman) are explicitly gen-dered, and popular speech still talks of sendingfor a “man” to come round and repair the centralheating or the dishwasher. Other titles havestrong historical and symbolic associations withprized masculine characteristics such as physical



strength or group solidarity, coal mining andsteel working, for example. Even less physicaloccupations, clerical workers for example, orbank clerks, initially were associated with“respectable” men until these occupationsbecame feminized (Lockwood, 1958). The sameis true for a whole range of professions, andmany of these occupational boundaries wereoften fiercely defended against the incursionsof women through the practices of trade unionsand professional associations (Walby, 1986). Wecan say, therefore, that occupational titles andoccupational boundaries were policed by thepractices of men and that, insofar as occupationbecame a key indicator of social class, the iden-tification of masculinities and class can be seenas having deep historical roots. The same is alsotrue in terms of property, the other basis of classdistinctions, where the links between property,class, and masculinity were often given legalunderpinnings. This is not to say that women didnot have occupations or property but that maleproperty and male occupations became the moredominant.

Another set of distinctions reinforced themasculine character of class: those between thepublic and the private. Conventionally, the ter-rain of class and class struggle is located in thepublic sphere, the sphere of employment, wherethe deployment of wealth and property and pol-itics is easily seen. The public sphere was alsothe sphere dominated by men as they engagedin employment or class and political action.Women might be seen as backstage or “behind-the-scenes workers” in class struggles, their ownclass position reflecting that of their husbands(Porter, 1983). In some cases, they provided veryobvious and significant support, but this wasusually defined as “support,” secondary to themain action. Only rarely, in the public imagina-tion, did women appear as class actors in theirown right.

Drawing together the two last points, wehave the development of the idea of “the bread-winner” and “the family wage.” Conventionally,or so it emerged from the early 19th century, thehead of the household was a man, and he con-stituted the main or sole provider for his wifeand children. It was on this basis that claimswere made in terms of “the family wage.” Inpractice, the reality was much more compli-cated, but the idea of the man as “provider”remains remarkably persistent in a wide range of

modern cultures, right up to the present day(e.g., for Warin, Solomon, Lewis, & Langford,1999; also, Hobson, 2002). It can be argued, infact, that the idea of the provider is a major ele-ment in the construction of masculine identity;it is a moral as well as an economic category.Hence the devastating personal effects of unem-ployment that have been documented by manyresearchers over many years.

In a somewhat more abstract vein, we mayconsider the contribution of the ideologicalconstruction, which sees men, in contrast towomen, as effective actors. This is partlybecause the public sphere, as outlined earlier, isnot simply different from the private sphere butis also seen as being, in many ways, more sig-nificant than the private sphere. The elevation ofthe economy and the spheres of war and politicsare accompanied by the downgrading of thedomestic. Thus public statues celebrate warriorsand statesmen, and the large-scale heroic canvasis given greater significance than the miniatureor the still life. On the one side there is risk anddanger, the possibilities for heroic achievementor spectacular downfalls; on the other side thereis the routine and the everyday (see Morgan,2003). The very word “actor” (which has beentaken over into sociological analysis) still hassome masculine connotations. Wherever the“action” is, it is not in the home. Action andactor merge with active, which in its turn con-trasts with passive.

Finally we need to emphasize the distinctionbetween production and reproduction, whichsome writers see to as a key to understandingthe masculinization of class. O’Brien (1981), inparticular, recognized the contribution to classanalysis made by Marx and Engels, but she alsodemonstrated how the Marxist tradition tendedto focus on labor and production and playeddown reproduction. Indeed, it could be arguedthat, within Marxism, reproduction tended to beseen in more metaphorical terms (stressing thereproduction of class relationships) rather thanas something to do with gendered relationships(O’Brien, 1981).

It can also be argued that class contributed toboth a unified sense of masculinity and morediffused, perhaps more conflictual, models ofmasculinities. On the one hand, we have theidentification of men, all men, with the publicsphere, the sphere of production, which con-tained those areas in society where the action



was. Many men, whatever the amount or sourceof their income, could identify with the providerrole and the sense of moral responsibility thatthis implied. But at the same time, class experi-ences and practices pointed to different ways ofbeing men, different ways of being constitutedas effective social actors. These differences(which will be explored in more detail later)could be polarized between “them” and “us” orbecome embodied in a range of finer dis-tinctions, such as those between “mental” and“manual,” “skilled” and “unskilled,” or evenworkers in different departments or offices.Other masculine themes that might be woveninto class analysis are notions of collective soli-darity (traditionally associated with the workingclass) and individual achievement and risk tak-ing, associated with the classic bourgeoisie, orthe middle classes. Yet again, we can contrast asense of masculinity that derives from havingauthority or control over others and the solidar-ities of the shop floor or the coal face.

Representations of class struggle and classdifferences traditionally drew from masculineimagery. Although the rhetoric might refer to“working people,” the representations of theworking class frequently included masculinesymbols (such as the hammer or clenched fists)and emphasized collective solidarity. At the veryleast, such representations of solidarity dis-solved gender differences in a large class iden-tity and frequently went further than this toconvey collective, embodied masculinity. Thelanguage was the language of struggle, of classwar and conflict. Representations of the opposi-tion also deployed masculine, if negativelyvalued, images of wealth and luxury.

Media representations of industrial disputesin the latter part of the 20th century frequentlyseemed to play on these understandings. Onthe one hand, we have the raised arms of themass meeting; on the other, we have men insuits, more individualized, leaving or enteringcars or making public statements in an abstractlanguage of rationality (Philo, 1995). Here, incontrast to the working class images, workerswere presented as sheep who were easily led bypolitically motivated leaders or group pressure.Management, on the other hand, was presentedas dealing with some of the key issues in thenational economy. However valued, both sets ofrepresentations drew on different strands in theconstruction of masculinities, and it could be

said that the class struggle was represented interms of these contrasting versions.

Within the writings on men and masculini-ties, class and gender converge in the concept of“hegemonic masculinity” (Connell, 1995). Themain argument here is that the recognition of adiversity of masculinities should not obscure thefact that in a particular social formation, certainmasculinities are more dominant, more valued,or more persuasive than others. In part, theserefer to characteristics that have little directly todo with class, such as heterosexuality or respon-sibility. But in part, they also have strong con-nections with class. A good example of this isthe idea of rationality. However defined (andthis is clearly a complex, multistranded con-cept), rationality is associated with the practicesof men and, increasingly, with the public lifeand with those most visibly or actively involvedin public life. It is associated with the abstractlogic of the market, the dominant principlesof bureaucratic organization, and the generalconduct of private life. The idea of rationalityis an ideological theme that brings togetherboth class and gender, forming a core featureof modern hegemonic masculinity.

THE CLASS OF MASCULINITY

One of the earliest books in the recent floodof texts on men and masculinities specificallyplaced class and class differences at the centerof its analysis (Tolson, 1977). To a large extent,Tolson takes it for granted that class provides amajor framework within which masculine expe-riences and contradictions may be explored.Thus he begins a section titled “Working-classmasculinity” with these words: “The paradox ofmasculinity at work is most apparent within theexperience of manual labor” (p. 58).

A later section within the same chapterfocuses on the distinctive features of middleclass masculinity. As already noted, we can seetwo contrasting ways of “doing” masculinity,and these are easily recognized within certainconstructions of social class. The one is collec-tive, physical and embodied, and oppositional.The other is individualistic, rational, and rela-tively disembodied. These can be broadlydescribed as working class and middle classmasculinities, respectively. Of course, moredetailed probing will reveal complexities and



ambiguities. There are, for example, the middleclass (and often embodied) solidarities of clubs,sports teams, public schools, and so on. Andthere are working class individualities repre-sented in popular social types such as “Jack thelad,” “the cheeky chappie,” and “the hard man.”It is, indeed, difficult to come to terms withsome of the contradictions within constructionsof masculinity without taking on board somesense of class distinction. Masculinities are bothsolidaristic and individualistic, both embodiedand disembodied. An understanding of class andof historically constructed class differenceshelps us to explore some of the tensions andambiguities of masculinity.

Up to now, we have tended to focus on abipolar, largely oppositional model of class,and it may be argued that this focus on struggleor opposition conforms to one influential modelof masculinity. However, there are other modelsof class and class differences that point to threeor more classes. Clearly, the very notion of the“middle” class implies at least three classes,although much sociological analysis that usesclass classifications tends to leave out the upperclass, largely because the numbers involved areassumed to be too small to influence analysis of,say, health or voting patterns. However, morestructural analysis should include the upper class(or power elite or any alternative term), as it isclearly highly influential, if numerically small.Moreover, such a class is both constructed byand has a major role in constructing dominant orhegemonic notions of masculinity to do withcontrol, the exercise of power, rationality, and soon. C. Wright Mills’s (1959) The Power Elite, forexample, can be read as a study of masculinities.

Once we move beyond the bipolar model, arange of possibilities become open to us. Thereis, first, the possibility of three or more classes,usually based on some classification of occupa-tions. Occupations are implicated, in differentways, in the classifications developed by theBritish Registrar General, Goldthorpe, and ErikOlin Wright (see, e.g., Marshall, Rose, Newby, &Vogler, 1989, pp. 13-62). The trouble with manyof these classifications is that they do not neces-sarily map easily into class experiences; the factthat certain occupations may be groupedtogether for the purposes of analysis does notnecessarily mean that the individuals so groupedwill understand their commonalities in classterms. Class, once we move from bipolar

models, comes to be seen as something thatis played out in different sites that do notnecessarily have much to do with each other.Divisions at the workplace, in terms of skills,pay, privileges, and so on, do not necessarilycarry over into the areas where these individualslive their family lives or enjoy their leisureactivities. Class as experience needs to be fil-tered through particular agencies, such as hous-ing, residential area, educational experience,and so on. Further, although masculinities maybe shaped by or play a part in shaping these dif-ferences, this is by no means inevitable. Somedivisions, indeed, such as the divisions betweenthe “rough” and the “respectable” working classor the fine gradations recorded by RobertRoberts (1971) in his account of The ClassicSlum may be as much maintained by the work ofwomen as by the occupational status of men.

Further, one of the key features of a classsystem, as opposed to feudalism or a castesystem, is its relative openness and the degreeof mobility, both social and geographical, thatis allowed. Recognizing the possibilities ofsocial and geographical mobility does open upthe possibility for more complex masculinitiesand their relationship to class. Here we have the“failed” masculinity of the downwardly mobileindividual whose failure in class terms may beread as an indication of a weakness of character,which might also be gendered (lack of ambition,alcoholism, etc.). Here we have the defensiveand uneasy masculinity of the recent arrival intomiddle class occupations, localities, or lifestyles.This may contrast with the apparently morestable masculinities of those who have managedthe easier passage from the middle class family,through school and university, into a middleclass occupation and a lifestyle enhanced by anappropriate marriage and the “right” location.This may also contrast with the, probably dwin-dling, traditional working class communitiesthat provide another basis for the reaffirmationof masculinities through shared experiencesand lifestyles. Geographical mobility (with orwithout social mobility) may also play its partin blurring or sharpening masculine identities.Community studies have explored differencesbetween the “established” and the “outsiders”that, to some extent, cut across class divisions(Elias & Scotson, 1994).

Watson developed the useful term “spiralist”to describe those who are both geographically



and socially mobile (Watson, 1964). Suchmobilities may now, increasingly, take on aglobal dimension. Whether such complexitiescontribute to an overall eroding of hegemonicmasculinity or whether they open up the possi-bilities for a much wider range of masculinepractices is a matter for further investigation.

It might also be argued that the experienceand practice of mobility itself is related tothe construction of masculinity in oppositionto femininity and the experiences of women.Thompson (1997), using more qualitative oralhistorical material, argues (in the British con-text) that the generation of men born in the1930s and 1940s experienced some modestimprovements in the course of their life. Thiswas not the case with the women in the sample.For women, marriage often has a depressingeffect on social status. Thompson argues forthe importance of considering the interplaysbetween family, occupation, and gender inexploring the processes of social mobility andthe numerous, often unrecognized or unacknow-ledged ways in which women assist in men’sexperiences of upward mobility.

We may reach an interim conclusion atthis point. We have seen a two-way interactionbetween class and gender, with particular refer-ence to masculinities. Masculinity remains arelatively underexplored aspect in the examina-tion of class practices. Yet the position that classanalysis plays, or at least has played, in socio-logical analysis as a whole and the continuingimportance of class as a social division may inpart derive from this close but largely unrecog-nized masculine character of class. Conversely,one of the reasons why it has been found neces-sary to pluralize “masculinities” is that ways ofdoing masculinity are always mediated throughother social divisions, of which class remains oneof the most important. The connection betweenclass and masculinity is an intimate one. WhenI see a middle class man, I do not see some-one who is middle class and then someone whois a man, or vice versa. I see both at the sametime. The major social divisions—class, gender,ethnicity, age, and so on—may be likened toprimary colors, which are more often seen intheir many combinations than individually.

Up to now I have suggested a relatively closeassociation between class and masculinity,although the last few paragraphs have pointedto some possible complexities. In very broad

terms, a relatively tight association betweenclass and masculinity may be characteristic ofmodern or capitalist societies (for a historicalanalysis, see Davidoff & Hall, 1987). Some ofthe relevant features of these societies are rela-tively clear distinctions between home andwork, clear and relatively stable occupationaltitles, the dominance of a male breadwinnermodel, and the continuing importance of heavyand manufacturing industry. With a return tomore blurred distinctions between home andwork, the decline of clear occupational titles andjobs or careers for life, the decline of the malebreadwinner model, and the growth of a serviceeconomy, we may also have a weakening of therelationship between masculinity and class. Thiswill be explored in the next section.

MASCULINITY AND

CLASS IN LATE MODERNITY

The last three decades has seen asubtle reworking of the relationshipbetween class, masculinity and theindividual.

Mike Savage (2000, p. xi)

Probably one of the most significant influ-ences on the changing relationship betweenclass and masculinity has been the decline ofthe male breadwinner model in practice and,although perhaps to a lesser extent, in ideol-ogy. In the past, it might be argued, men weremore strongly “classed” than women becausethey had closer associations to the key practicesand institutions that maintained class. For manymen, of course, this might be an illusion; never-theless it might be possible for the more weakly“classed” men (perhaps because of unemploy-ment, disability, or simply having a wife whowas the main breadwinner) to continue to derivesome class identity from their more fortunatebrothers. Hence there was some partial justi-fication for the traditional practice of locatinga household in terms of the class of its headand for women to be allocated class posi-tions on the basis of their husbands’ orfathers’ class positions. With a weakening ofmen’s attachment to the labor market and astrengthening of women’s attachment, somerevision was clearly necessary.



As has already been noted, two analyticalstrategies emerged in response to the growinginvolvement of married women in the labormarket and the related decline in relevance (butnot always in ideological importance) of themale breadwinner model. The first was to stateclearly that the unit of class was the individualrather than the household. Various consequencesfollowed. Both men and women could be seenas units within the class structure, although mentended to occupy higher class positions thanwomen. It is also likely that the issues aroundwhich everyday class struggles were foughtbecame more various. Notions of “the familywage” became less important and issues todo with working conditions, hours of work,parental leave, and so on came more and moreto the fore. It would not be true to say that classitself became feminized, but it could certainlybe argued that it became less masculine.

The other strategy was to take seriously theidea of the household as a unit and to explorethe consequences of this. However, there werealso shifts in the idea of the household as aunit so that new models no longer treated thehousehold as an undifferentiated “black box”and came to take account of differences withinthe household. For example, an interest in“cross-class marriages” (in which husbandsand wives were, in terms of occupation, ofdifferent classes) developed, and the conse-quences of these differences were explored ina variety of ways (McRae, 1986). Particularattention was paid, as might be expected, tothose households wherein the wife was of ahigher social class than her husband. One mightargue that this might further lead to the weaken-ing of the association between class and mas-culinity or serve to remind us that, in interactionalterms, the impact of class and the elaboration ofclass-based identities might vary according tothe different sites within which an individualwas involved. Thus a working class man mar-ried to a middle class women might have adifferent sense of class at home than at work,where some of the more traditional solidaritiesmight still be relevant.

Such conclusions, however, may be prema-ture. For one thing, the class differences withinmany cross-class households were relativelysmall and were based on occupational criteriathat might not necessarily be of any relevance,certainly outside the workplace. In short, the

objective measures of class might not necessarilytranslate into more subjective processes of classexperiences and identities. However, the presenceof cross-class households constituted one pieceof a larger jigsaw that, when completed, wouldshow a much more complicated relationshipbetween class and gender.

One relatively underexplored theme mightbe mentioned. Classically, class (based on eco-nomic criteria) was distinguished from status,where issues of prestige and esteem were cen-tral. However, as both were aspects of socialstratification, it was frequently the case that thedistinctions became blurred. Status considera-tions could reinforce class distinctions (as incases where we get a merging of economic andcultural capital) or could cut across them and,presumably, weaken their political effective-ness. In the male breadwinner model, it couldalmost be said that class and status frequentlyoverlapped and, further, that the distinctionbetween them was gendered. Thus men tendedto be to the fore in matters of class and classstruggle, and women were involved in maintain-ing and reproducing everyday status distinctionsthrough their domestic labor, their parenting,their organization of consumption, and theirgeneral moral demeanor within the local com-munity. Partly as a result of the changes alreadydiscussed, men come to be more involved instatus work and women in class work, and thedistinction between the two modes of stratifi-cation, always difficult to maintain in practice,becomes even less easy to maintain.

It is likely, in fact, that the tensions betweenclass and status have always been present andthat a gendered understanding of stratification,especially one that takes masculinities seriously,might highlight some of these. Thus it can beargued that different ways of doing masculinityor of “being a man” can themselves constitutestatus divisions. This, indeed, is one of the con-sequences of thinking about hegemonic mas-culinities. One complex set of examples may bederived from considering issues of sexualities.Studies of young men, in particular, have shownhow a notion of aggressive heterosexuality maybe the basis of positive and negative status(Mac an Ghaill, 1994). However, sexual statushierarchies might not necessarily correspondto conventional notions of heterosexuality orhomosexuality, as Lancaster’s (2002) study ofNicaraguan men indicates that what is often



more important is a distinction between takingthe active or passive role rather than the genderof the sexual partner. Clearly, such distinctionstake place within conventional class divisions,although they do not necessarily underminethem.

What of the alleged decline in the centralityof class and its possible impact on hegemonicmasculinity or patriarchy? Speaking very gener-ally, it is possible to talk about a late-moderndevelopment whereby class and class divi-sions became less central and more complex.Alternatively, we may talk of a late-moderndevelopment in which class has become moresimplified. In terms of the first, the lines ofargument have already been indicated. Thisincludes a decline in the overall salience ofclass (especially as related to occupation); agrowing emphasis on other social divisions; afragmentation of class divisions, identities, andthe sites where class work is performed; and ablurring of the distinction between class andstatus. This last reflects a context within whichconsumption and leisure assume greater impor-tance. We may also note organizational changes;for example, the development of “flatter”hierarchical structures, which might be seen ashaving the consequence of a reduction of classand status divisions at the place of work. Thesefactors, in combination, might contribute to aweakening of patriarchal structures in generalbut will certainly undermine the masculinity ofclass. However, these finer, more complex classand status divisions might still be important inexploring the varieties of masculinities presentin a late modern society.

A more simplified model, however, emergesif we take the idea of “life chances” seriously.Here we look at different combinations ofeconomic and cultural capital and assess theconsequences of these for the life chances ofindividuals. Theoretically, a large number ofcombinations may be possible, but in practice,we may talk of three major divisions. At thehighest level, we have those with considerableamounts of cultural and economic capital andwho are at the highest level of private organiza-tions and state bureaucracies. This is clearly aminority, but also, increasingly, a global minor-ity. For the most part, we are talking aboutmen so that there are clear interactions betweenmasculinities and class and status situations.One only has to look at the photographs of

international top-level gatherings to becomeaware that we are dealing with the practicesof men and the reproduction of hegemonicmasculinities.

At the lowest level, we have those withrelatively little economic and cultural capital(certainly little economic capital!) and withhighly uncertain life chances. Terms such asunderclass or the socially excluded have beendeveloped to capture this group, although bothterms have their problems. Thus Devine (1997,pp. 220-221) concludes, along with numerousother commentators, that the idea of an “under-class” is flawed, although it is possible torecognize the growth of a sizable minority(sometimes estimated as around 20%) of peoplein poverty in both the United States and theUnited Kingdom. This is, clearly, not an exclu-sively masculine group, and, indeed, it is oftenthe case that the burdens rest more heavilyon women, whether as single parents or asworkers in low-paid, uncertain jobs. The domi-nant characteristics of this “class” becomemagnified when seen through a global lens.

It is doubtful whether there is a single mas-culinity that can be identified with the sociallyexcluded, although certain public representa-tions are highly gendered. Thus media represen-tations stress themes of masculine violence,either collective (as in rioting) or more individ-ualistic. Or there are themes that concern absentfathers and the lack of a stable adult male rolemodel. Dominant themes are those to do witheither a failed masculinity, the lack of opportu-nity to live up to what is expected in terms ofbeing a provider, or stigmatized forms of mas-culinity. Thus Savage (2000) writes, “working-class work has been constructed as ‘servile’work, which no longer bestows mastery orautonomy on its incumbent” (p. 153). However,even attempts to live up to hegemonic models ofmasculinity (as in the case of asylum seekerswho might otherwise be characterized as heroicindividuals) also become stigmatized.

Between these two extremes, there is themore fluid class situation characterized bydifferent mixes of economic and cultural capitaland different life chances. The middle group(which is not the same as some theoreticalnotion of “the middle class”) may, for example,be ranged in terms of relative stability, andcertainty of life chances, from the very stableor predictable at the top to the highly uncertain



at the bottom. It is here that the links betweenmasculinities and class are becoming morevarious or more fluid. Although there are con-siderable differences within this broad middlecategory, whether these differences coalesceinto class differences is a little more difficult todetermine. Clearly, there are some occupationsthat are still shaped around strong constructionsof masculinity; on both sides of the Atlantic,firefighters constitute one such occupationalidentity (Baigent, 2001). But whether membersof such occupations construct themselves interms of wider class identities remains open toquestion. The same might also be said of somenewer occupational identities, such as “bounc-ers” or doormen, associated with developingleisure industries.

Up to now, apart from a few passing refer-ences, the analysis has been based largely inmaterial and theories developed in the UnitedKingdom and, to a lesser extent, the UnitedStates. In terms of traditional class analysis,there might be some justification for this, as hasalready been argued. However, there are goodreasons to doubt whether such an analysis canbe straightforwardly transplanted to countriesoutside Europe and Anglophone nations. Forexample, Scott (1996) argues for a variety ofcapitalist classes and suggests that the variationssuch as the “Latin” model might be shaped byfamilistic and kinship ties to a greater degreethan late-modern models in the West. Suchmodels of the capitalist class also deploy differ-ent constructions of masculinity. Bertaux (1997)argues that most studies of social mobility (thekinds that have proliferated in Britain and theUnited States) tend to assume a relatively stablepolitical order, within which such class move-ments take place. However, notions of mobilitybecome much more problematic for those coun-tries (such as the formerly communist nations ofEastern Europe) that experienced revolutionaryupheavals that challenged notions of privilegeand inequalities. The gendered implications ofthese major transformations have not beenexplored to any large extent.

A further challenge emerges when we aban-don the implicit assumption that the nation-stateis our unit of analysis and, instead, begin toexplore flows and movements on a global scale(Urry, 2000). It remains an open question as towhether the class models, developed from thecore writings of Marx and Weber and reflecting

very particular historical events, can simply betranslated to this more global framework.Similarly, it is doubtful whether a simpleupgrading of the class struggle from the nationalto the global arena can be anything more thana first approximation of what is an increas-ingly complex situation. Thus Waters (1995), ina useful survey of globalization theories, arguesagainst the strong model for the developmentof transnational classes. There are, however, anincreasing variety of transnational class experi-ences (which also have relevance for theconstructions of masculinities). A more fruitfulline of analysis would seem to be to explore thedifferent interpenetrations of the global and thelocal and the ways in which these shape and areshaped by classed and gendered experiences.For example, Waters notes how processes ofconsumption and production mingle in globalcities: “Under globalization, migration hasbrought the third world back to the global citieswhere its exploitation becomes ever moreapparent” (p. 93). Such meetings do not neces-sarily undermine the close associations betweenmasculinities and other social divisions; indeed,they may well intensify them.

CONCLUSION

This chapter has argued that there has been arelatively underexplored theme in the analy-sis of social class; namely, its association withthe construction of masculinity. Very broadly, itcould be argued that in the early stages of indus-trial capitalism and up until the late 20th century,there was a relatively strong association betweenclass and class practices and masculinities. Aswe move close to our own times, these connec-tions have, in some cases, perhaps become moreapparent, although in other cases, the links havebecome more obscure. The growing uncertaintyin class analysis perhaps reflects and has animpact on what is sometimes, rather too loosely,called the crisis of masculinity.

This is not the place to elaborate on the prob-lematic idea of that “crisis,” which is discussedelsewhere in this volume. However, very simply,we may identify a model of stable masculinityagainst which any sense of crisis might be mea-sured. Such a model would include a relativelyhigh degree of congruence between public dis-courses about masculinity and the public and



private practices of masculinity. For individualmen, there would be a sense of ontologicalsecurity—a relatively stable sense of “being inthe world.” Even where a man may feel that hehas fallen short of his responsibilities as a man(reflected, perhaps, in notions of dishonor orunmanliness), the standard by which he is seento have fallen short remains relatively clear.

Such an ideal, typical model of masculinitycould clearly accommodate and interact withhierarchies based in social class. Class divisionsmay have underlined the fact that there weredifferent ways of “doing” masculinity (collectiveversus individual, hands versus brains, and soon), and these different modes of masculinitywere reinforced by clear distinctions at work andbetween communities. To some extent, however,these differences might be seen as variations ona theme; the “respectable” breadwinning work-ing man and the sober, rational member of thebourgeoisie might have a lot in common in termsof a sense of what it is to be a man, despite thelarge differences and oppositions in class terms.Put another way, class might be seen as a prob-lem in terms of Marxist contradictions or moreliberal notions of citizenship and social justice,but masculinity was not seen in this light. Henceclass analysis remained ungendered for a longperiod of time, and it has been only in relativelyrecent times that any discussions of gender andclass have come to focus on the practices of menrather than on those of women.

It is part of the argument of this chapter thatthe undermining of a relatively stable sense ofmasculinity (at least in its more public discourses)was associated with growing uncertainty aboutthe nature and significance of class. Thus, thegrowing “presence” of women in all areas ofsocial, political, and economic life presented aproblem for conventional class analysis, just as itpresented a problem for established or hege-monic masculinities. Both class and genderbecame challenged by the recognitions of othersocial divisions, such as race and ethnicity, age,sexualities, disabilities, and abilities. A greatsense of fluidity in social life, brought about byflexibilities in working practices and the variouscomplex strands of postmodernity and globaliza-tion, provided yet further challenges to bothclass and gender. More detailed historical andsocial analysis will be required to unravel theconnections between class and masculinities, butit is hoped that this chapter makes clear that sucha program would be worthwhile.

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178

11MALE SEXUALITIES

KEN PLUMMER

I want to fuck. I need to fuck. I’ve always needed and wanted to fuck. From my teenageyears I’ve always longed after fucking.

—A male friend speaking to social psychologist Wendy Hollway (1996)

Men have an overwhelming desire to relieve themselves upon a woman’s body.

—Roger Scruton (1986)

I just like screwing. I can remember going back when I was six, seven, eight, nine, ten,we had a pub in [country town]. Saturday, Sunday morning, I’d lay in bed and flipmyself ten or twelve times, and get the thrill of not being able to ejaculate. I’ve alwaysbeen highly sexed.

—Barney, a gay man, speaking to Gary Dowsett (1996)

For a man, sex instinctively is a testosterone drive towards the ultimate release ofclimax. When he becomes aroused, he automatically seeks release. His fulfillment insex is mainly associated with the release of tension leading to and including the orgasm.

—John Gray (1998, May 8)

Ihave started this chapter with these quiteprovocative quotes because they capture thevery common and very simple story that is

most frequently told of male sexuality. It is pow-erful, natural, driven; it is uncontrollable; it ispenis centered; it seeks to achieve orgasmwhenever it can. The truth of this is often notvery nice. After all, as we have seen depicted

and been told many times, it is overwhelminglymen who rape, who buy pornography, whodevelop sexual fetishes, who engage in sexualviolence of all kinds, and who become the serialkillers. It is men who are driven to seek sexin all its diversities. They are the assertors, theinsertors, and the predators. Of course, somewomen—perhaps a growing number—do these

Author’s note: I would like to acknowledge here the thoughtful and helpful comments of Jeff Hearn and Bob Connell on anearlier draft.


things. But overall, sex is seen to have a muchmore driven quality for men. They are pressuredto have sex as some intense inner need and, inturn, they may well pressure others into it.1

Thus, men are much more likely than womento become sexual consumers: They will pay forsex in all its varieties—prostitution, pornogra-phy, striptease, sex tourism, massage, lap danc-ing, telephone sex, fetish sales. They are muchmore likely to feel that they can assert them-selves to take sex when they want it, not just inobvious rape situations, but more routinely, withtheir wives (wife rape), girlfriends (date rape),children (son or daughter rape), and other men(homosexual rape). They are much more likelythan women to feel they have a specific turn-on—a little out of the ordinary—which must bemet. Where are all the women who “must” stealmale underwear, who must expose their genitalsto men passing by in the street, who must makeobscene phone calls to unknown men? “Perver-sion,” says Robert Stoller (a leading psychiatristof sexual diversity), “is far more common inmen than in women; women practice almostnone of the official diagnoses” (Stoller, 1976,p. 34). Men are much more likely than womento be driven to break the sex laws and becomesex offenders; male sex offenders overwhelm-ingly outnumber female sex offenders in allareas except one—prostitution—and althoughwomen may commit crimes of passion, they arenot the same as the so-called lust murders ofmen (Caputi, 1988). Most recently, with the cre-ation of the new so-called diseases of “sexualaddiction” and “sexual compulsion,” it is againoverwhelmingly men who identify with this cat-egory and seek help through compulsive anony-mous groups. Patrick Carnes, the guru of sexualaddiction theory, has described the seeminglyextraordinary lengths to which some men will goto get their sex (Carnes, 1984). Many become“sex addicts.” Again, only a minority of menmay be involved in all of these, but it seems thatmany, many fewer women are.

HEGEMONIC SEXUALITY:THE PENIS-CENTERED MODEL OF SEX

At the center of this image of male sexuality,both physically and symbolically, lies thepenis. As feminists so clearly know, ours is aphallocentric culture. Not only is the penis the

source of the male’s erotic pleasures—a featurethat even young boys can learn, and one thatcan make masturbation such a prominentfeature of male sexuality—but it is also anenormously potent symbol. Engorged and erect,it is a sign of male power, assertion, andachievement, a gun to conquer the world. Butflaccid, it is also a sign. It has become “weak,soft (or semi-soft), less active; it has no stamina,no control. It cannot perform ‘like a man’”(Potts, 2002, p. 142). At its worst, it is a signof impotence, and, as Paul Hoch (1979) onceremarked, “absolutely the worst thing a mancan be is impotent” (p. 65). In the microcosmof an erotic encounter, a man seems always tohave to worry over the performance of his penis,and this—combined with the pleasure goal—gives a significance to the penis that is hard toignore (Hoch, 1979).2

All this connects to another version ofmale sexuality that is a seemingly rather sadderstory—the flip side of the coin, but a perhapsmore tragic vision. Male sexualities are also signsof weakness and vulnerability. Many accountsof male sexualities start from a sense of man’sinsecurity and fear. Most commonly, the issue ofthe penis is raised. The penis in itself is a ratherpoor appendage of the male body. It is “fragile,squashy, delicate . . . even when erect the penis isspongy, seldom straight, and rounded at the tip,while the testicles are imperfect spheres, alwaysvulnerable, never still” (Dyer, 1985, p. 30). Thephallus (the erect penis), however, is a differentstory. As Richard Dyer (1982) once said, “Thefact is the penis isn’t a patch on the phallus”(p. 71). The point is that although the peniscommunicates messages of sexualities, it isimmensely symbolic as well as physical. Thusthe need to conceal an erection at certain timesor to have and maintain an erection at othersis crucial. The penis can betray the man, and ithas to become socialized and able to performin the right ways at the right moments (Tieffer,1995). As Reynaud (1981) has argued, “Man’smisfortune is that his penis, the symbol ofpower, is in fact one of the most fragile andvulnerable organs of his body” (p. 36).

Men’s sexuality so frequently seems to cometo focus on the penis (physical) and the phallus(symbolic): Both can bring problems. Thus thereare worries of size when it is flaccid, worries ofit not getting erect quickly enough, worries of itbeing too erect too often, worries of it not

Male Sexualities • 179


staying erect long enough, and severe worries ofit not getting erect at all. Then there are problemsof ejaculation—of coming too soon, too late, ornot at all. Often, all of this is significant becausemen let it—or make it—define their masculinity.Sexuality, it has been argued, is “the mainstayof male identity” (Person, 1980, p. 605). As thepsychoanalytic theorist Ethel Person (1980)once famously argued, “There is a wealth ofevidence to suggest that in this culture, genitalsexual activity is a prominent feature in themaintenance of masculine gender, while it is avariable feature in feminine gender. . . . In men,gender appears to lean on sexuality” (p. 619).

All this may seem obvious to many studentsof male sexualities. True, this is the common-sense story, and it is mirrored a thousand timesby more scientific stories. Indeed, while writingthis chapter, I was persistently drawn to it. Yet,obvious as it may seem to many, I kept thinkingthat sexuality is not really like this at all for allmen at all times. To argue so would be to fallinto the trap of essentialism and, worse, to seemale sexuality as overdetermined. If male sexu-ality were really just like this, we surely wouldfind even more problems concerning it thanwe do. We can, indeed, find enough problemsaround it to make some feminists argue that thisis precisely their point: Sexuality is male, and itis trouble.

In the face of a wave of research and writingthat I have come to call the “new theories of sex-ualities,”3 we can now see that men change (justlike women) across time, space, and contexts.Sexualities are never simple biological facts,however much some people protest that theyare. Indeed, for some commentators, “Sexualityis so diverse, confusing and culturally informedthat perhaps it is beyond any real understand-ing” (Whitehead, 2002, p. 162).

In this view, human sexualities are complexhistorical actions, relations, and practicesperformed through metaphors and languages,shaped by social divisions, lodged in politicalprocesses, and always open to change. Recentwork shows very definitely that sexualities arepatterned by cultures; they are shaped by class,gender, and age; they are negotiated throughinstitutions of family, religion, education, andeconomy; they shift across the life space andcycle; and they are enmeshed in all manner ofpower relations. More generally, as Lynne Segal(1997b) comments,

Male sexuality is most certainly not any singleshared experience for men. It is not any single orsimple thing at all—but the site of any number ofemotions of weakness and strength, pleasure andpain, anxiety, conflict, tension and struggle, noneof them mapped out in such a way as to make theobliteration of the agency of women in heterosex-ual engagements inevitable. Male sexuality cannotbe reduced to the most popular meanings of sexacts, let alone to sex acts themselves. It becomesintelligible only if placed within actual histories ofmen’s intimate relationships with others—or thelack of them. (p. 215)

I think Lynne Segal is correct, but you wouldnot really know this from the spate of studiesthat support the view I have outlined. Indeed,what we may have here is a case of hegemonicmale sexuality,4 buttressed by a series of scien-tific and cultural props pointing in the samedirection and telling us what men are really like.Hegemony expresses the privileged positionsof dominant groups and establishes “the fundof self evident descriptions of social realitythat normally go without saying” (Fraser, 1992,p. 179). Hegemonic male sexuality works toessentialize the male sexualities of some meninto the sexualities of all, as well as reinforcingassumptions about a bipolar feminine essentialsexuality.

In this chapter, I look a little at these hege-monic stories; there is no doubt that they arevery common, but they are not definitive. I willlook at the persistent reinforcement of this hege-monic model in nearly all directions, and thenturn to changes that suggest that the sexualitiesof men may well not be as unified or as simpleas commonly outlined. Focusing on hegemonyis important, but it fails to take into account thefact that human beings are agents and actorswho resist and transform hegemonies (Connell,1995). This will take me into what may be calledthe “new sexualities studies” and into contem-porary social changes that some identify as queerpostmodernism. A sense of some of the newmale sexualities that challenge and fracture thehegemony will be highlighted.

STORIES OF HEGEMONIC MALE SEXUALITY

In what follows, I plan to quickly raid a sampleof stories. They all point toward a major narra-tive of an essential male sexuality, mirroring



what I have located so far. In various ways, theyhelp to assemble the resources through whichmale sexuality comes to be seen as given andnormal. Any one account on its own would notstand, but I hope to show that there is a massiveconvergence into a particular version of what itis to be a sexual male.

Evolution and the Biological Story

Perhaps the major contemporary account ofmale sexuality to display this story line has grownfrom biology and evolutionary theory. For many,it mirrors common sense so perfectly that itsvalidity seems almost irrefutable and inevitable.Although there are many variations on the theme,the core position is that gender differences inregard to sexuality are striking and given “innature.” In one version, the presence of testos-terone in the male is seen as a prime driver ofsexuality (e.g., Goldberg, 1973). In another, thebiological significance of a single sperm and asingle egg are seen to differ dramatically. Thus, aphysically adult man releases hundreds of mil-lions of sperm in a single ejaculation and thenmakes more, whereas a newborn female’s ovariescontain her entire lifetime allotment of folliclesor immature eggs; a woman commonly releasesa single mature egg cell from her ovaries eachmonth. Thus, although a man is biologicallycapable of fathering thousands of offspring, awoman is able to bear only a relatively smallnumber of children. It is but a short step fromthis biologically based difference to argue thateach sex is well served in long-term evolutionaryadaptations by distinctively different “repro-ductive strategies.” From a strictly biologicalperspective, a man reproduces his genes mostefficiently by being promiscuous—that is,readily engaging in sex with many partners. Thisscheme, however, opposes the reproductive inter-ests of a woman, whose relatively few pregnan-cies demand that she carry the child for 9 months,give birth, and care for the infant for some timeafterward. Thus, efficient reproduction on thepart of the woman depends on carefully selectinga mate whose qualities (beginning with the likeli-hood that he will simply stay around) will con-tribute to their child’s survival and successfulreproduction. For reproductive potentials to befulfilled and humans to satisfactorily reproducethemselves, there is an evolutionary necessity formen to have sexual intercourse with as many

women as they can; for women, the task is to findthe best man and the best seed.

This popular argument of evolutionary psy-chology hence argues that men are much moresexual and that this serves evolutionary adaptiveneeds. The male is seen as more sexual andmore likely than the female to desire sex with avariety of partners. Of course, this theory mayalso be seen as a major device to legitimizethese behavioral patterns in men and women:They are natural, adaptive, and, hence, neces-sary. In more extreme versions, they can evencome to legitimize phenomena such as rape andsexual violence. One example of this new evo-lutionary thinking is the controversial study ofrape by sociobiologists Randy Thornhill andCraig Palmer (2000). Drawing on the evolution-ary theory of sex, they claim that rape is a nec-essary part of the evolutionary process. They seeit as completely congruent and compatible withthe development of sex differences. In this view,rape becomes a device in which men can havesex no matter what. Male rape “arises frommen’s evolved machinery for obtaining a highnumber of mates in an environment wherefemales choose mates” (Thornhill & Palmer,2000, p. 190). Sociobiology suggests that cul-tural patterns of reproduction, promiscuity, thedouble standard, and, indeed, rape, like manyother patterns, have an underlying biologic.Simply put, male sexualities have developedaround the world because women and meneverywhere tend toward distinctive reproductivestrategies that reinforce hegemonic sexuality. Itis seen as an evolutionary necessity.

Conventional Sociological Stories

A quick version of hegemonic masculinitymay also be found in one of the earliest socio-logical statements of men’s studies (David &Brannon, 1976; see pp. 11-35). This study isorganized around four key dimensions of themale sex role, and although these are stereo-types, and knowledge has moved beyond themas the world of their existence has changed, theymay well serve as a useful starting point whenapplied to sexuality. David and Brannon suggestthat men in general are bound into the followingexpectations (and here they can also be seen toembody their sexualities more particularly):

“No sissy stuff”—the stigma of anythingvaguely feminine. The implication here is that



sexuality for men must not involve anythingremotely feminine (emotional, passive, etc.). Ithints at the way in which homophobia (the fearof homosexuality) may serve to partially struc-ture male sexuality, and it also suggests thatmen’s sexuality must indeed be different fromthat of women.

The “big wheel”—success, status, and theneed to be looked up to. The implication here isthat sexuality for men must involve being seento be successful, that a man must be looked upto for his sexual competence. And, as suggestedearlier, for men, sexual competence may wellhave a lot to do with the effective working oftheir well-socialized penises: getting it up andgetting to ejaculate.

The “sturdy oak”—a manly air of toughness,confidence, and self-reliance. The implicationhere is that sexuality for men must be assertive.Men should not have any self-doubt about theirsexuality.

“Give ’em hell”—the aura of aggression,violence, and daring. The implication here isthat sexuality for men must conform to thatmost worrying of expectations—rough and vio-lent sex. For some this may mean that coercivesex (from rape to harassment) may be felt as acentral feature of good sex.

Each of these broad themes, then, can beseen to characterize aspects of hegemonic malesexuality. Men must not be like women in anyway; must succeed in sex; must exude a manlysexuality; and must be forceful, assertive, andaggressive.5

Feminist Stories

Although it is well recognized that there aremany contrasting feminist positions, at the heartof many accounts of male sexuality, of whateverpersuasion, lies a description of men that ishardly flattering—one that is likely to arouseconsiderable discomfort, if not outright anger, inmen. In the 1970s, for example, Phyllis Chessler(1979) almost groans with pity for us:

What demon do men run from? What enemyhovers behind them, what enemy waits to envelopthem from within, if they pause a bit in thetaking—if not the giving—of sexual pleasure? Isthis style the inevitable conclusion of a childhoodin which boys spend years trying to hide theirerection, years of trying to masturbate in thedark—as quickly, as silently as they can, in order

to avoid discovery? Is it such prolonged childhoodsilence that leads men into valuing loud noises,yelling out “dirty words,” or into a dependency onrepetitious, visually exaggerated, closely detailedpornographic displays? (pp. 224-225)

Certain themes consistently reappear in femi-nist discussions of male sexuality, and accountsof male sexuality as prone to violence, pressure,coercion, and objectification abound. For some,sexuality is almost defined as male; for others,it is seen as a major device through whichmen maintain their positions of power and keepwomen under a constant state of threat. One groupof English feminists, writing in the 1980s, cap-tured such themes succinctly under seven head-ings. Asking themselves what male sexuality waslike, they concluded that it was about power,aggression, penis orientation, the separation of sexfrom loving emotion, objectification, fetishism, anduncontrollability (Coveney, Jackson, Jeffreys,Kay, & Mahony, 1984). There is no doubt fromtheir discussions that they saw each of thesefeatures not only as male but also as very damag-ing and destructive to women, creating the com-posite stereotype of the traditional macho man:an emotionally crippled, sex-obsessed, aggressivedominator. Taken together, many of these attri-butes could highlight a whole structure of fear andviolence imposed on women by men—of sexualslavery, sexual exploitation, and sexual terrorism.The theoretical analyses and the empiricalevidence brought to focus on male sexualityled to an inexorable logic: Sexuality is male.Once women recognized this, they had only afew options: Attack sexuality with all their might,for “we are fighting for our lives; we are dealingwith a life and death situation” (Dworkin, 1981,p. 26); retreat entirely from it, leaving men to theirsexuality and women to establish alternativeworlds; or both. In any event, a woman-identifiedworld—without men—became the goal (Dworkin,1981; Leidholdt & Raymond, 1990; Vance, 1984).As Andrea Dworkin (1981) remarks,

Man fetishizes [the woman’s] body as a wholeand in its parts. He exiles her from every realmof expression outside the strictly male-definedsexual or male-defined maternal. He forces her tobecome that thing that causes erection, then holdshimself helpless and powerless when he isaroused by her. His fury when she is not thatthing, when she is either more or less than thatthing, is intense and punishing. (p. 1)



More nuanced readings still agree that menare the problem, but they also highlight thelinked problems of women’s sexuality and,sometimes, the role of women in motheringmen. In a gentler form, Dorothy Dinnersteinsays that “a central rule under a strikingly wide-spread set of conditions is, first, that men actsexually more possessive than women, andsecond that women act less free than men to seek‘selfish sexual pleasure’” (cited in Williams &Stein, 2002, p. 5). Even here, in this weakerform, male sexuality is more possessive andselfish than female sexuality.

Research Stories:The Clinical Therapy Tradition

Another tradition for looking at sexualitytakes it increasingly into the realm of the clini-cal and therapeutic. This is a deeply normativeand prescriptive view of the world. It establishesbroad, normative models of what human sex-uality is really like, identifies problems peopleexperience because they do not fit the model,and then proceeds to assist people to followthat model. In the early days, much of therapyconcerned issues of object choice (the “clinicaldisorder” of homosexuality, for example), butsince the 1960s, a major sex therapy “industry”has grown up that maps out the proper routesfor male and female sexualities. The work ofMasters and Johnson (1966) was mostfamous for its “discovery” of a sexual responsecycle: excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolu-tion. This model is almost entirely focused on asequencing of arousal and orgasm—establishing,in effect, that whenever a firm erection is notpossible, or orgasms do not take place, there issexual dysfunction. Although on an individuallevel, therapy may be able to provide supportand change, on a wider public level, it has theconsequence of reinforcing what male andfemale sexualities should be like. It is highlynormative and prescriptive.

The ideological functions of sex researchhave been much discussed. Janice Irvine’s(1990) study Disorders of Desire is a fineaccount of just how coercive much sexology andsex research has been over the past century.Indeed, much contemporary therapy and sexol-ogy continues in the same vein today, with thehelp of new technologies, all usually bringingpotential reinforcement to the hegemonic

model. Viagra is a clear case of this. Hitting theheadlines during the 1990s, it signposted whatwas a hitherto unknown sexual problem, butone that now appeared on a massive scale. Theproblem was impotence. If sales of Viagra areany indication (nearly 200,000 prescriptionsare filled each week, and some 17 millionAmericans use the drug), then it could flag a new(even global!) social problem for men—andwomen, too. Erectile dysfunction now becomesthe issue. This also suggests a model of dys-function for the aging male, with Viagra andmedicalization as the solution.6

Both Leonore Tiefer (2000) and BarbaraMarshall (2002) suggest that the story of Viagraand, indeed, medical interventionism over the“science” of sexual dysfunction is a whollymechanical way of looking at sexual issues, andone that most of the world had not even dreamtof before its arrival in the mid-1990s. At itsheart, it deflects attention from all the politicaland cultural concerns of sexuality and works tomake cultural expectations of gender becomemore rigid (Marshall, 2002).

Research Stories:The Empirical Tradition

Much research during the 20th century hascatalogued the differences between male andfemale sexuality. The mammoth volumes pro-duced by Kinsey and his colleagues (Kinsey,Pomeroy, & Martin, 1948; Kinsey, Pomeroy,Martin, & Gebhard, 1953) provide a mound ofdata based on some 12,000 (nonrandom) NorthAmericans living in the 1930s and 1940s, and inSexual Behavior in the Human Female (Kinseyet al., 1953), some key contrasts are broughtout in Part 3.

Another major example can be found in thestudies of Shere Hite (1981), conducted in the 1970sand early 1980s and providing one of the larg-est surveys of male sexuality ever produced.Although it is very detailed—7,239 men returneda 13-page questionnaire, and this was turned intoa 1,000-page book composed of their comments—it has been much criticized on scientific (andpolitical) grounds. Nevertheless, it does contain awealth of detail from men willing to write abouttheir sex lives. At the heart of the study, onceagain, is the idea that sex is very important tomen. They like intercourse because of thephysical pleasure, because of psychological and



emotional support, and because in part it is avalidation of their masculinity (p. 333). Theyhave a fear of impotence or loss of erection(p. 340). Hite claims that a traditional model ofsex—foreplay, intercourse, male orgasm in thevagina—is “far and away the most usual typeof sex” (p. 414) and, indeed, suggests that formen, the male orgasm is “the point of sex andintercourse” (p. 454;. although they have theirstrongest orgasms in masturbation [p. 431], andnearly everyone in the study masturbated [a mere1% did not]). Often sex was accompanied byguilt (p. 486). “Love” was important but oftenpainful; marriage, even when difficult, was liked(p. 206) because there was someone to carefor them and because of the stability, domesticwarmth, and regularity of home life (p. 209). Itwas common to have sex outside of marriage,unknown to their wives; many had little guiltabout it and even felt it had enhanced their mar-riage (p. 142).

In a slightly different vein, research storiesfrom young people suggest these differencesappear at an early age. James Messerschmidt(1993), in a review of many contemporarystudies of young men across class and ethnicity,suggests that “normative heterosexuality is con-structed as a practice that helps to reproducethe subordination of young women and toproduce age specific heterosexual styles ofmasculinity, a masculinity centering on anuncontrollable and unlimited sexual appetite”(p. 90). “Natural sex” serves as a routine resourcein accomplishing and reinforcing young men’semerging manliness.7

Likewise, in an influential U.K. study,Holland, Ramazanoglu, Sharpe, and Thomson(1998) found that “many of the young menimplicitly concur with the absence of subordi-nation of female desire in the very commonlyexpressed view that while men want sex,women want love and relationships” (p. 124).Some boys’ voices from the study make thisclear:

Most boys can have sex without any feelings,whereas a girl has to have feelings. It’s totally dif-ferent. It’s much deeper for a girl than it is for aboy. (young male, middle class, AC,8 18 years old)

Sometimes I just want to have sex, and I am goingto have sex, but it is only going to be for me.(young male, working class, ESW, 19 years old)

The interviewer asks one young man: “anddid the girls enjoy it?” and the response comes:

I don’t know. I didn’t really ask. As long as Ienjoyed it I weren’t bothered. I am now, but thenI didn’t know, I just thought it was their duty. Iwas a bit sexist. (young male, working class, A, 17years old)

Likewise, in New Zealand, Louisa Allen(2003), studying some 500 young people, foundthat the major discourses among the youngreplicated classic positions. Her article is evencalled “Girls Want Sex, Boys Want Love,” andin one focus group, we hear the following:

Michael: Guys are basically always ready.

Anabella: I heard some statistics . . . and guyssupposedly think of sex six times an houron average.

Darren: Oh it’s heaps more than that. (all laugh)

Tim: If I wanted to ejaculate, I could probablydo so in less than a minute. . . .

Chris: . . . a guy is sort of almost guaranteed tofeel good (having sex you know, feel thesame in the end anyway so. . . .)

Darren: Guys have got a lot to prove. There’s alot . . . there’s a lot for guys to live up tolike uhm gotta be all macho and gotta becool and all this sort of stuff, gotta scorenice chicks or if you have got one chick,you have got to score often. . . .

But they do go on to suggest a change in themaking:

Peter: Sex is good. It’s nice but its not essential.I’d still love her . . . I’d still want to bewith her. So you know it’s nice but Imean if it had to stop then it would, and Iwould still go out with her. . . . (p. 227)

“Pop Narratives”

Then there are the immensely popular cul-tural texts, such as John Gray’s (1992) Men AreFrom Mars, Women Are From Venus. Here menand women are seen as being so very differentthat they might as well come from differentplanets, and their lives are lives of inevitableconflicts. Thus Gray’s task is to act as an omni-scient interpreter of all this and to help showwhat the differences are and what can be doneabout them. “Great sex,” as he calls it, involves



connecting up these differences. Great sexconnects the core selves of men and women.Graphically, he says, “He is trying to empty outwhile she is trying to be filled up” (p. 27). Heis force and active—she wants it. Women aretold that “sex is the direct line to a man’sheart” (p. 18); men have a need for “quickies” or“fast food sex” (pp. 77, 82, passim); and womenshould be patient; because men become arousedvery quickly (indeed, it is “as easy as shaking acan of beer and then letting it pop”) (Gray, 1992,1995, 1998, and as discussed in Potts, 1998).

Bernie Zilbergeld’s (1999) best seller, TheNew Male Sexuality, provides a guide that ismuch more cautious than Gray’s.9 Although inthis book he starts by suggesting that mostmen are engulfed in a “Fantasy Model of Sex”(for which the claim is, “It’s Two Feet Long,Hard as Steel, and Will Knock Your Socks Off,”p. 15), the main message of the book is thatthis fantasy model is breaking down, and a newopenness is starting to appear. At the start of thebook he is at pains to suggest some of the mythsthat surround men’s sexuality. In a sense, theydo constitute some elements of the main malestory line of sex, and so they are worth repeatinghere—not so much as myths, but as key plotsthat often shape the workings of male sexuality.Slightly abridged, they include the following:

• A real man isn’t into sissy stuff like feelingsand communicating.

• All touching is sexual or should lead to sex.• A man is always interested in and always ready

for sex.• A real man performs in sex.• Sex is centered on a hard penis and what’s

done with it.• If your penis isn’t up to snuff, we have a pill

that will take care of everything.• Sex equals intercourse.• A man should make the earth move for his

partner or at the very least knock her socks off.• Good sex is spontaneous with no planning and

no talking. (Chapter 2)

We have been here before. The listrehearses most of the features we have alreadyencountered.10

Gay Male Sexual Stories

Gay male sexuality poses a curious seriesof questions for the hegemonic model. By

definition, hegemonic male sexuality is definedthrough heterosexuality, and gay relations areostensibly excluded. And yet there is one majorstrand of “gay” analysis in the gay male com-munity which suggests that gay male sexualitytakes us closer to what “true” male sexuality isall about. In the 1980s, for instance, there was anotorious debate with certain feminists overwhether gay men were more phallic centeredand more male in their sexualities than hetero-sexual men—who at least had their sexualities(partially) regulated by (some) women. LizStanley (1982), an English lesbian sociologist,could remark that

gay men, perhaps more than any other menally themselves with the activities and products ofsexism. More than any other men they choose toact and construe themselves and each other inways dominated by phallocentric ideologies andactivities. (pp. 210-211)

But there are also those within the gaymovement who see that sex is the core ofthe gay male experience and is too often sani-tized and demeaned. Gay sex is revolutionarysex. Repeatedly, gay men rehearse the idea that

gay sensibility is truly subversive because itinsists on the primacy of sexuality beneath itsadoration of the civilized. While ostensibly it isconcerned with disseminating new ideas aboutculture, its real concern is the dissemination ofsexual knowledge, with which it is obsessed. . . .Gay sensibility sexualizes the world. (Kleinberg,1980, pp. 62-63)

In a recent and very engaging history of gayculture, Michael Bronski (1998) suggests that itis male sexuality that heralds gay radicalism.For him, gays signpost a very positive but verythreatening pleasure class that embodies “thepossibility of freedom of pleasure for its ownsake” (p. 214). And because, he says, “our mostfundamental experience of pleasure is essen-tially sexual in nature” (p. 213), gay men pro-vide the means for us to reconnect our bodies toour minds, to experience wholeness, to avoidsplitting. It is a lot to ask from “sexuality”—andgay men.

Much research on the sexualities of gay mendocuments the sheer quantity and range ofsexual experiences that many gay men have andhow they have built sexualized communities and



institutions to embody them: car parks, woodsand parks, toilets and beaches, parties, bath-houses and clubs become colonized for maledesires (Delph, 1978). One recent study findsjust how central a sense of masculinity may befor gay male sexuality:

I was just thinking how incredibly hot it was tohave this stud sort of fucking me. . . . That he wasinside me and giving himself to me and so on. Andin that sense he represented all the, you know, . . .all the masculinity and that strength and so on thatI, you know, wanted it up inside me. . . .

And it’s like . . . it’s almost like this man ininjecting some of his masculinity into me . . . giv-ing me some of that. And so I find it [receptiveanal sex] a very augmenting experience asopposed to a diminishing experience. . . . In asense it’s like me sort of taking something fromhim. . . .

It was quite a sexual thrill to do somethingdangerous. It is going beyond the boundaries, thatis what sex is all about . . . about breaking thetaboos. . . . It was an incredible thrill. . . . (Ridge,2004)

For some (but by no means all or even most)gay men, then, this meant the creation of amacho culture of sleaze and leather, where thenotion of desire or lust took precedent overother concerns. Male pleasure is closely linkedto male fetishism and male power. The pleasureof the penis takes over—a gay phallocentric cul-ture is invented. The gay male culture of sleazeand leather can be seen as a model of truly lib-erated lust—sex for pleasure’s sake, uncontami-nated by bourgeois notions of intimacy andrelationships. One example of political pornog-raphy put it like this:

Meat may be the most moral book ever assem-bled; a morality of participants in which being“good” is giving a good blow or rim job, being“good” is being hot and hard, being good is lettingit all come out: sweat, shit, piss, spit, scum; beinggood is being able to take it all, take it all theway. . . . Story after story in Meat expresses thesheer joy and exuberance—the wild pleasure inlicking assholes, eating shit, drinking piss—taking it all. . . . The truth is the biggest turn on.(Gay Sunshine Press, 1981, pp. 6-7)

So here is a curious paradox. Gay malesexuality may be the key to heterosexual malesexuality—it may suggest the routes that most

men would take if they were not shaped byrelations with women. Gay men become thechampions of the pleasure principle. And yet,once again, although this may be a feature ofsome parts of the gay world, I would worry ifthis were presumed to characterize it all. Onceagain, we are on the verge of a sexualized essen-tialism that will need challenging.11

Research on HIV/AIDS

One last comment. Since the 1980s andthe growth of the worldwide pandemic ofHIV/AIDS, there has been a growing industry ofresearch into sexual behavior. Most of this sug-gests just how driven male sexualities are, moreor less across the world. Whether this drivennessis biological or cultural is largely beside thepoint. In AIDs prevention work, over and overagain, men talk of how it is their right to havesex; to have unprotected sex, which is morenatural; that they have the need for outlets; thatif their partners will not give them sex, they haveto take it. As a global Panos report indicates,

Thais of both sexes say men “have strong sexualdesire and need some outlet”; South African min-ers claim that regular intercourse is essential for aman’s good health; and in Indian society “it isconsidered natural for men to be ‘lustful.’” Thisviewpoint appears universal. (Panos, 1999, p. 17)

DISMANTLING THE

HEGEMONY? TRANSFORMING

WESTERN MEN’S SEXUALITIES

From the snapshots I have displayed, therewould almost seem to be a universal conver-gence on the nature of male sexuality, frommany different perspectives. There would seemto be a hegemonic male sexuality. And yet, thisis far too generalized a picture. An essentializ-ing narrative has taken hold that portrays menas driven by sex; focused on their penises; inpersistent need of orgasm; and often as border-line, if not actual, rapists. This may be the hege-mony, but I for one am not really happy withthis. True, I can see many signs of all this inmany men in many contexts, including myself,as I move through my daily round. Yet it isa very dark picture, and there is somethingworryingly inaccurate about it.



What, then, is to be made of all this?Certainly not that all men are like this and nowomen are: The first key thing to notice is thatthere are significant overlaps between male andfemale sexualities, overlaps that may even beincreasing for some. Indeed, sociologists PepperSchwartz and Virginia Rutter (1998) have madea surprising claim—based largely on researchevidence. They suggest that there is a bell curvecontinuum of women’s and men’s sexuality. Asthey say,

A large proportion of both female and male popu-lations share much of the middle ground . . . sex-ual experience isn’t all that different for men andwomen, but perhaps like us you wonder whatcauses men and women at one end of the contin-uum to be so different from other men andwomen. (pp. 37-38)

It is these differences at the ends of the con-tinuum that seem to be highlighted in research.Given the evidence shown earlier, there is surelya general contrast that may be unmistakable atthe ends of these bell curves, but to focus exclu-sively on this is to miss vast areas of overlap.

Another key thing to notice is that the sexual-ities of men are decidedly not all cut from thesame cloth. Indeed, many of the studies cited ear-lier, although giving prominence to what we callthe hegemonic model, also show that male sexu-alities do vary according to class backgrounds,positions in the age cycle, ethnicities, relation-ships with peers, wider cultures, and personali-ties. Men are manifestly not all the same. Manymen, then, are decidedly not like the conventionalportrait. Just as Connell (1995) recognizes thatthis is not the full story for men in general (thereare many “masculinities”), so, too, we may besure that there are many male sexualities. Weneed only look around to see that many of themen we know do not (at least on the surface)seem to follow the standard model. Despite thepopular adages, all men are not rapists; all menare not demons. Following Connell’s line of argu-ing, there may be many different responses tohegemonic male sexualities. Some may be com-plicit (different from hegemonic but in support ofthem, e.g., in marriage); some may be subordi-nated (practices that expel some men, such asgays, from a “circle of legitimacy” [Connell,1995, p. 79]); some can be very different—emphasizing femininity, or homosexuality, or

being highly resistant to gender; and others maybe marginalized (e.g., those patterns outside ofauthorization).

Third, we do need to realize that humansexualities are forms of social actions. That is,people compose their sexual lives—their feel-ings, actions, talk, identities, even body work—out of the social resources at hand. Sexualitiesare messy and ambiguous social practices, notfixed and straightforward “drive releases.” It istrue that the hegemony can provide guidelinesfor many men across the world, centrally,because it enhances their power, but it is neverjust a straightforward matter; it always has to beworked at. This means that much sexual actionwill take different pathways from that of thehegemonic model.12

THE NEW THEORIES OF SEXUALITIES

All this is to enter what has been called “the newtheories of sexualities” (Plummer, 2002). Whensociologists, historians, feminists, and anthro-pologists started to study human sexuality, theysoon realized that it was often profoundly unlikethat found in other animals. Of course there is abiological substratum that connects us to all ani-mal life, but what is distinctive about humansexuality is that it is both (a) symbolic andmeaningful and (b) linked to power. In all ofthis, we see that the simple study of sex as sex,of sex sui generis, has gone from the agenda.Human sexuality is always conducted at anangle: It is never “just sex.” There is no straight-forward (male) drive pressing for release; sex isnot a simple property of people (or men); it doesnot exist in a social vacuum but is flooded withthe social. Human sexualities are interactive,relational, structural, embodied, and organizedwithin a broad template of power relations.They connect to identities, interactions, andinstitutions. They are fashioned by patriarchalrelations, sex negativism, homophobia, and het-erosexism, as well as by continuums of sexualviolence. People “do” sexualities as well astelling stories about them. As such, human sex-ualities are far from biologically fixed. Theseare the wisdoms of the new sexualities theories(although the theories themselves come in manyforms). A key feature of much of this new theo-retical work is to locate sexualities within



frameworks of scripts, discourses, stories, andmale power (e.g., Foucault, 1976; Gagnon &Simon, 1973; Jackson, 1999; Plummer, 1995).

In general, these new social accounts offer upmore modest accounts of sexualities than thosefound in the sexological world. They throw intodoubt any “grand narratives” of sexuality (suchas that of an essential male sexuality) that havehaunted much of the modern world’s analysisof sexuality. “Sex” is no longer the source of atruth, as it was for the moderns with their strongbelief in science. Instead, human sexualitieshave become destabilized, decentered, andde-essentialized: The sexual life is no longer seenas harboring an essential unitary core locatablewithin a clear framework (such as the nuclearfamily), with an essential truth waiting to be dis-covered. There are only fragments. There is anaffinity here with some versions of postmod-ernism, and links can be made to the growinginterest in queer theory. One of the key tenets ofa postmodern approach to the world is to high-light the dissolution of any one grand account,narrative, or story of the world. In effect, thismeans that much of what has been presumedabout sexuality, or gender, or intimacy in thepast simply no longer holds. The “grand story”of male sexuality—that hegemonic male sexual-ity described in the opening sections of thischapter—does, of course, continue. But it isnow challenged from many sides. The idea ofany fixed, essential, or dominant version of menand their sexualities becomes weakened, frag-mented, and deconstructed, and we are leftwith multiple tellings and more fluid patterns(Halberstam, 1998). Of course, this also meansthat what it is to do sexualities at the start of the21st century is altogether less clear, and thisbrings anxieties with it. This is also what queertheory aims to do: It seeks to persistently sub-vert and deconstruct commonly held polarities,categories, and ideas about sexuality andgender. Postmodern and queer thinking seek bothto find new ways of thinking about sexual cate-gories (and hence male sexuality) and to recog-nize that a new kind of society may be in themaking in which new patterns of sexuality maybe starting to emerge (and, hence, changingforms of male sexualities) (Simon, 1996).

Some researchers have already suggested anarray of discourses or scripts that help fashionsexualities. Wendy Hollway (1996) saw threegendered sexualities discourses. Apart from the

hegemonic male sexual drive discourse, shealso saw a “have-hold” discourse (linked tomonogamy, partnership, and family life, withinwhich women are more likely to experience sexas a lack and move on to mothering and emo-tional bonding) and a permissive discourse(within which women are more likely to becoopted into the male drive model). Althoughthere is a clear recognition that “the male sexdrive discourse” is dominant and hegemonic(Hollway, 1996, p. 85), there is also space forother patterns of sexualities to emerge forwomen. In contrast, Matt Mutchler (2000), inhis study of young gay men, sees a wider rangeof scripting for men. Four dominant genderedsexual scripts among young gay men are high-lighted: romantic love, erotic adventure, safersex, and sexual coercion. These are hybridmodels, as, traditionally, romantic love is seenas the main script for women and erotic adven-ture as the main script for men, but young gaymen navigate their way through a mix of both.13

Although recently there has been a greatdeal of talk about “New Men” and “masculinityin crisis,” much of this can be seen as backlashagainst women in general and feminism inparticular, and much of it is not even new(Whitehead, 2002, pp. 54-59). Much of it seeswomen and feminism as a threat and proceedsto assert some kind of new essential man as aresponse to it. My view, however, is that sim-ultaneously (maybe more slowly than somesuggest), we are moving into a new set of rela-tionships in what might be called postmoderntimes (for some at least), where certain worldsare becoming less sure of themselves, morefragmented and shifting, pluralistic, and so on.It is a world I have described elsewhere, of post-modern intimacies, which brings a whole arrayof new conflicts and problems (Plummer, 2000,2003). It touches on shifts in gender, bodies,relationships, eroticism, identities, and families.In its wake, it brings massive anxieties: As a 44-year-old client of the therapist Zibergeld puts it,

The one sure thing I know about life right now isthat it’s bewildering. It’s not clear what it means tobe a man or a woman, how to have a relationship,or even how to act in bed. I see lots of people try-ing to get clear by reading John Gray’s books, butI don’t think it helps. Things are in flux; there areno answers. While I know that’s the truth, I wishit were otherwise. It’s so much hassle the way it is.(“Z,” in Zilbergeld, 1999, p. x)



For Zilbergeld, the traditional or fantasymodel of sex is being replaced by a “new modelof sex” (p. xiv) that is no longer focused on apressurized male performance but insteadfocuses on “pleasure, closeness, and self andpartner enhancement rather than performanceand scoring” (p. xiv). He suggests there arenow “whole menus of choices.” I think he isright. What we are seeing is a progressive post-modernization of sex that brings an array ofnew sexual stories, new options for living, anda series of continuing dialogues, all of whichare likely to change the workings of male sexu-alities in the future, possibly rendering themmore diverse and less open to hegemonic malesexuality. I stress that they are dialogues ratherthan monologic assertions. They harbor con-flicts and potentials for disagreements throughwhich new sexualities will be negotiated. Thus,for example, we have the growing impact ofnewish forms of cybersexualities on our lives,and we have the increasing linkages betweensexualities and other spheres of life—fromconsumption to work (Hearn & Parkin, 2001).To briefly conclude, let me suggest just a fewof these new, storied dialogues that are nowopening up.

NEW STORIED DIALOGUES FOR

RETHINKING MALE SEXUALITIES

The Family-Heterosexuality Dialogue

The traditional order of family life is chang-ing as we enter a period of postmodern familiesand “families of choice” (Weeks, Donovan, &Heaphy, 2001; Weston, 1990). In the recentpast, families have been predominantly het-erosexual and so have child rearers. But now,even as many elect to stay with traditionalpatterns, there are large numbers exploringmany newer forms of living together and childraising: assisted conception, cohabitation, livingalone, single parenting, same-sex partnerships,divorce, stepparenting, serial relationships,polyamory—and all the new patterns of rela-tionships that these bring. Words have not yeteven been invented for some of these new“familial” roles, and they pose challenges forconventional ways of thinking about sexualitiesand gender. But as the new stories of these waysof living come more and more to the forefront

and are placed in dialogues with other stories, sothe possibility of shifts in male sexualities startsto be extended.

The Deconstructive-Renarrating Dialogue

One of the ways in which radical dialoguesover the nature of sexualities have beenproceeding in recent years can be found inthe stories of deconstruction that pit them-selves against the idea of language as a naturalreflection of sexual life and of sexuality as agiven, unchanging essence. In his telling studyof male sexual language, for example, PeterFrancis Murphy (2002) shows that malesexuality is often trapped in a discourse ofmachines, sports, and bodies that work tomake sexuality for men appear more driven.Once we become aware of these linguisticstrategies that “assemble” male sexualities, thepossibilities of changing them and creatingnew ones can become more possible. Anotherstudy, by Annie Potts (2002), draws togethermuch of this deconstructive work to show howmale-female heterosexualities are drenched ina language that gives priority to orgasm andthe penis, an outer world of men and an innerworld of women. She argues the case for“deprioritizing coital sex” as the cornerstoneof sexuality and suggests this may have posi-tive impacts:

A cultural deprioritization of penile vaginal sexwould profoundly alter the relevance of contem-porary constructions of male and female so-calledsexual problems. . . . Men may no longer have toconform to a phallic ideal, and women’s bodiesmay no longer be the targets of their penetration.(Potts, 2002, pp. 260-261)

She also argues (as many recently have) for achallenging of the masculine (active)–feminine(passive) dichotomy and for a search for alter-native versions of sexuality from women(which, by implication, will start to rewrite thescripts of male sexualities as well).14 What isrequired is a concern with the building of newnarratives of sexuality that are much more open,pluralistic, diverse, and hence that may createthe possibility for future change.

One way of sensing this change and workingwith it is to listen to what may be called the“deep, thick stories” of sexualities. Elsewhere,



I have made a number of claims about theimportance of story work in both understandingsexualities and in bringing about politicalchange (Plummer, 1995, 2001). I see deepstories as a little like Geertz’s (1973) “thickdescription”—they are the very rich, deep,extended stories people tell of their sexual lives.They contrast with shallow, brief, quick, linearstories. Deep storytelling is encouraged ina postmodern or queer world and enables usto see more clearly that lives are not simplystraightforward in their genders, bodies, sexual-ities, or relationships. We may dwell in simplepolar categorizations, but lives are usuallymuch messier than this. To get at a person’ssexual story requires burrowing deep down.The stories men tell of their sexualities maylook straightforwardly hegemonic, but menmay also negotiate with their stories, resistthem, or even transgress them in multiple ways(Geertz, 1973).15

The Women’s Sexuality Dialogue

There has been a striking attempt to breakdown the representations of what it means tobe a woman, and under this guise now manywomen appear to be at least as sexual as men.Watch any “reality show” that has anythingto do with relationships (usually youthful),and you will see women behaving in ways thatmirror the male hegemonic model: They areassertive, objectificatory, lustful—not only dothey want to have fun, they also want to fuck.Likewise, the whole issue of women’sagency—of their acting sexually in the worldand of having rights to sexuality—has beenplaced on the agenda in ways it was not beforethe latter part of the 20th century. Of course, itis always true that some women (often on themargins) have “liked to fuck” (Vance, 1984),but the idea that women have gone activelyin pursuit of their men (or women) withoutstigma or shame seems somewhat recent. It ispart of what Ehrenreich, Hess, and Jacobs(1984) have dubbed “the feminization of sex”in their account of this change during the mid-1980s. In all, women are repositioning them-selves in relation to power and being undercontrol, and this, in turn, pushes the definitionsof male sexualities (often rendering them lesssure and stable).

Sexual Violence andNew Men’s Groups Dialogue

Although it is true that there are few signs ofany decrease in violent male sexualities acrossthe world, it is likely that there has been a grow-ing awareness of them and of what needs to bedone. Not only have laws and policies changed,giving credence to the need for hegemonic malesexualities to change (debates over rape in mar-riage, sexual harassment, date rape, child abuse,and hate crimes, all linked to the rise in thenumber of women’s shelters, rape hot lines, andthe like), so too has there been a heightenedawareness of the role of media representationsof masculinities of this kind. It has made somemen very aware of the problematic nature oftheir sexualities vis-à-vis women, and men’sgroups have consequently been set up that workto challenge the hegemony.16 Thus we have MenAgainst Pornography, Men Against Rape, andthe broader men’s Anti-Sexism Movement. Atits most extreme, perhaps, are the men like JohnStoltenberg (1990), who argue the case for asexuality that is consensual, mutual, andrespectful—one not shaped by the images ofpornography, not molded by drugs, and not“fixated on fucking” (pp. 36-39).

The Gay Dialogue

Gay men also raise issues about sexualitiesand men. At one extreme is the situation inwhich gay men have friendships and relate toeach other in nonsexual ways (Nardi, 1999).17

At the other, as we have seen, gay men paradethe importance of sex—and not just sex, butwide-ranging sexualities that can range fromanal sex to what might best be called “sleazysex.” For many, there is a pure delight in uncon-strained bodily lust. One of Dowsett’s (1996)respondents has 10,000 partners, and many havea parade of partners each night. Often they losethemselves to kinds of sex that take over theirwhole body: Men in this situation may wantto turn themselves into sex objects, gear them-selves into being desired rather than simplydesiring. Indeed, Leo Bersani (1988) accusesgay male sexuality and writings about it ofbeing too frequently merely conventional,whereas he himself looks for the “redemptivereinvention of sex” (p. 215). In this he seeks theradical potential that actually comes from being



fucked (with the loss of a presumed manhood,the loss of self, the engulfment). Gay male sex-ualities may have potential for transgressing themale hegemony in major ways.18

The Identity Dialogue

Social identities designate the ways we defineourselves, and they change a lot over time (bothhistorically and biographically). In the past, iden-tities were often just given and taken for granted;they were unproblematic. In the modern world,they become more self-conscious and worked—less taken for granted than invented. In the post-modern–late modern world, identities proliferateand have become much less stable and coherent.Identities mark out a past; create boundaries inthe contemporary world of who we are and whowe are not; and anticipate a future, laying guide-lines down of how we should behave to be con-sistent with our self-created identities.

The model of male hegemonic sexualitytends to presume the idea of a male heterosexualidentity. This, in turn, implies some sense ofsameness, commonality, and continuity. If notactually present, the search is nevertheless atleast on for an identity—a project of knowingwho one is as a man. The category behind theidentity is presumed and is often stridently clear.Being a man often means adopting the hege-monic identity; a man’s identity may be definedthough his sexuality. Postmodern queer theorysuggests that this world of presumed and clearsexual identities (invented during the 19th and20th centuries [Foucualt, 1976]) is being chal-lenged and is starting to break down. The cate-gories and narratives of the modernist era areunder threat in postmodern times. As grandstories of sexual lives break down, identitiesnow become unsettled, destabilized, and opento flux and change. Indeed, queer theorists oftensuggest that sexual identities are becomingpermanently unsettled, destabilized, underprovisional construction, very much a projectand never a thing. This renders the whole ideaof male sexualities much less clear and sure.(Although even in this most extreme form itmay well have to continue to recognize the needfor and the power of categories and boundariesin the organization of the social. It is just thatthese continuities and samenesses are muchmore pluralized, shifting, and fragmented thanthey were previously thought to be.)

Past thinking on sexual identities hasdepended on a rather crude binary system, butthis is starting to change. At the very least, inthe modern Western world, new identities maybe starting to appear: the “S&M,” the fetishist(e.g., foot fetishist, underwear fetishist, armpitfetishist), the macho gay, the passive gay, thechubby gay, the “buff” gay, the queer, thevanilla gay, the hypersexual, the man who isnot really interested in sex, the sex crazed, the“chicken hawk,” the “bear,” the jock, the goodhusband, the voyeur, the heavy pornographyuser, the masturbator, sugar daddies, rent boys,the polyamorous—to name only a few. Startto put adjectives in front—sexy, unsexy, attrac-tive, unattractive, rough, tender, insatiable,dysfunctional, impotent, normal, abnormal,assertive, expressive, caring, single, philander-ing, serial killer, aging, married—and a fur-ther world of proliferating sexual identitiesopens up. Use the world “sexual” to identifythe kind of body you have—beautiful, macho,thin, sick, fragile—and whole new embodiedsexual identities appear. Put them alongsideother categories—man, woman, Asian, Chicano,African American, Japanese—and anotherworld of “hyphenated” sexual identities startsto appear. New dialogues work to splinter andfragment any one unitary model of the malesexuality.

IN CONCLUSION: AN AGENDA

FOR QUEERING MALE SEXUALITIES

Hegemonic male sexuality is, by definition,pervasive and dominant. It has a long historyand wide support. Some new developments—from Viagra to evolutionary psychology—maywell reinforce the immutability of male desires.At the same time, we are also entering a (post-modern) era in which a plethora of new possi-bilities are opening up. Hegemonic sexualitymay continue to dominate or be negotiated (as itoften has in the past), but it may also be increas-ingly resisted and even transgressed. Takingseriously the view that people are not justregulated by hegemony but are also actorswho transform their social worlds, the secondhalf of this chapter has looked at a few of thedialogues in the making that suggest changesfrom a penis-centered model of male sexuality.



Thus we have seen, inter alia, attemptsto make male sexualities less penis centered andto weaken the link between sex and orgasms.We have seen analyses of the connectionbetween masculinities and sexual violence andhow possibly the enhanced understanding ofthis may lead to changes. We have sensed thegrowing awareness of the diversities of malesexualities across cultures, classes, ages, ethnic-ities, and so on. We have seen how queer theoryand feminism work to challenge the polaritiesand dualities of men-women, gay-straight, andothers. We can increasingly appreciate howmale insecurities, especially in adolescence andearly manhood, can harden hegemonic malesexuality. And most of all, we have seen how itis in the creation of new stories, narratives, anddialogues regarding men’s different sexual livesthat we can start to glimpse the potential forchanging the hegemony.

NOTES

1. There are a number of studies on male sexu-ality, but many of them, such as Larry Morris’s(1997) The Male Heterosexual, have a tendency todepict the sexuality of men as unproblematic and tosee it passing through various key stages: from earlyacts of penetrative sex through marriage, fatherhood,and divorce. My article treats the whole idea asdeeply problematic.

2. There have been a number of histories of thepower of the penis and the phallus across society. See,for example, Klaus Theweleit (1987, 1989). It posesfor me the interesting question: Could male sexualityexist without the penis?

3. There is not space to review all the new writ-ing usually associated with names such as Foucault,Butler, Weeks, and others. For some overviews andsamples, see Lancaster and di Leonardo (1997),Jackson and Scott (1996), Parker and Aggleton (1999),Williams and Stein (2002), and Plummer (2002).

4. The recent use of the term derives, of course,from Gramsci. Blye Frank introduced the idea of“hegemonic heterosexual masculinity” in 1987. Thework of Bob Connell takes it further.

5. Although David and Brannon’s listing is old,has become more nuanced, and links to a rather old-fashioned role theory, it still serves well as an open-ing set of images of hegemonic male sexuality.

6. In a recent but already classic study,McKinlay and Feldman (1994) report on 1,290 menfrom 40 to 70 years old: 17% found themselves “min-imally impotent,” 25.2% “moderately impotent,” and

9.6% “completely impotent.” At the same time, itshould be noted that the “men in their sixties reportedlevels of satisfaction with their sex life and partners atabout the same level as younger men in their forties”(p. 272).

7. A good ethnography to look partially at thisis Elijah Anderson’s (1999) Code of the Street (seeChapter 4).

8. Initials indicate the ethnic location. ACmeans African Caribbean; ESW, English, Scottish,Welsh; A, African.

9. Zilbergeld’s (1999) model is entirely hetero-sexual—he does not discuss gay sex, gay relations, orthe homophobia that underpins much male sexuality.Missing out on this is a serious weakness for a bookcalled The New Male Sexuality!

10. Even though the work of Duncombe andMarsden (1996) suggests that many women find itunfulfilling.

11. During the 1970s, at least one pronouncedsector of gay culture came to organize itself around“lust” and “desire,” which became graphically por-trayed in novels such as Larry Kramer’s Faggots(1989), nonfiction such as Rechy’s (1977) The SexualOutlaw and White’s (1980) States of Desire, in filmssuch as Taxi Zum Klo (Ripploh, 1981), and in more“academic” texts, such as Lee’s (1978) Getting Sex orDelph’s (1978) The Silent Community. A set of localesand spaces emerged where sex became the centralrationale, and in these locales, thousands of menwould gather for millions of sexual excitements. In thebathhouse, the back room, the club, or the cruisingground, a large number of men could be found whohad organized themselves around their desires.

12. This is, of course, part of the famous debatein sociology between action and structure: The mostrecent discussants of this include Anthony Giddens,Margaret Archer, and Rob Stones. This is not theplace to consider this debate, except to say that thereis room to develop some of these ideas in the field ofsexuality—a task I start in a minimal way in the intro-duction to Sexualities: Critical Assessments(Plummer, 2002).

13. Michelle Fine (1988) also suggests four maindiscourses: those of “silence, danger, desire, and vic-timization.” Much of this is fully supportive, how-ever, of what I am calling hegemonic male sexualityand does not anticipate radical changes.

14. Likewise, Philaretou and Allen (2001) haveshown how an essentialist or masculine scripting is atwork that “signifies the beginning of the heterosexualact with male erection and its end with ejaculation”(p. 303). As I have suggested earlier, much researchand thinking reinforces this masculinist model of anatural sexuality.

15. A small sample of 55 stories by men of theirdifferent sexualities can be found in Kay, Nagle, andGould (2000).



16. Kenneth Clatterbaugh (1997) has outlined aspectrum of positions of the Men’s Movement—notall are sympathetic to the critique of hegemonic malesexuality.

17. Peter Nardi has provided the most compre-hensive discussion of gay men’s friendships and howthey usually do not intersect with sex. He discussesmany possible permutations (Nardi, 1999, p. 80; seehis Figure 4.1). Although for many, sex is off theagenda, for those who do have sex with a close friend,it seems to be a quick sexual fling that then getsdefined into a friendship. It is widely perceived thatsex complicates things too much—even if there is littleactual evidence for this!

18. John Alan Lee (1979) suggests that in general,“sex is an artificially scarce resource in our society”but that one group of people—modern male homo-sexuals—have been able to develop gay connectionsthrough an urban gay community that enable them toenjoy “considerable sexual opportunities at any hour ofthe day or night.” They are usually “inexpensive orfree,” “convenient and accessible” (p. 175).

19. A useful bibliography on male sexuality, “TheMen’s Bibliography: A Comprehensive Bibliographyof Writing on Men, Masculinities, Gender, andSexualities,” compiled and recently updated byMichael Flood, is available on the Internet at http://www.xyonline.net/mensbiblio/

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196

12MEN, MASCULINITIES, AND CRIME

JAMES W. MESSERSCHMIDT

I n recent years, there has emerged a new andgrowing interest in the relationship amongmen, masculinities, and crime. Since the

early 1990s, numerous works have been pub-lished, from individually authored books(Collier, 1998; Hobbs, 1995; Messerschmidt,1993, 1997, 2000; Polk, 1994; Winlow, 2001),to edited volumes (Bowker, 1998; Newburn &Stanko, 1994; Sabo, Kupers, & London, 2001),to special issues of academic journals (Carlen &Jefferson, 1996). This is not the first timecriminologists have been interested in mas-culinity and its relationship to crime. Suchluminaries as Edwin Sutherland and AlbertCohen can be credited with actually placingmasculinity on the criminological agenda byperceiving the theoretical importance of thegendered nature of crime. Yet these criminolo-gists understood gender through a biologicallybased sex-role theory, the weaknesses of whichare now well understood: It provides no graspof gendered power, human agency, and thevarieties of masculinities and femininities con-structed historically, cross-culturally, in a givensociety, and throughout the life course (Connell,1987). Moreover, the social and historicalcontext in which Sutherland and Cohen wroteembodied a relative absence of feminist theorizingand politics and a presumed natural differencebetween women and men (Messerschmidt,1993).

The social situation today is dramaticallydifferent. Second-wave feminism—originatingin the 1960s—challenged the masculinist natureof academia by illuminating the patterns of gen-dered power that to that point social theory hadall but ignored. In particular, feminism secureda permanent role for sexual politics in popularculture and moved analysis of gendered powerto the forefront of much social thought. More-over, feminist research—within and withoutcriminology—spotlighted the nature and perva-siveness of violence against women. Since themid-1970s, feminist scholars have examinedgirls’ and women’s crime, the social control ofgirls and women, and women working in thecriminal justice system (see Daly & Chesney-Lind, 1988; Naffine, 1995). The importance ofthis feminist work is enormous. It has con-tributed significantly to the discipline of crimi-nology and has made a lasting impact. Not onlyis the importance of gender to understandingcrime more broadly acknowledged within thediscipline, but it has led, logically, to the criticalstudy of masculinity and crime. Boys and menare no longer seen as the “normal subjects”;rather, the social construction of masculinitieshas come under careful criminological scrutiny.

Feminism has exerted a major impact on mylife personally, and academically it has influ-enced me to concentrate my work on masculin-ities and crime. Two issues were critical in my


decision. First, as R. W. Connell taught us, whenwe think about gender in terms of powerrelations, as with any structure of power andinequality (such as race and class), it becomesnecessary to study the powerful (men!). It isparticularly important if we are committed toconstructing a more equal society. Indeed, wemust examine the advantaged, analyze how theyact to reproduce that advantage, and probe whatinterest they may have in changing. Thus onereason for studying differences among menand diversity of masculinities is to promotepossibilities for change.

Additionally, the gendered practices ofmen and boys raise significant questions aboutcrime. Men and boys dominate crime. Arrest,self-report, and victimization data reflect thatmen and boys perpetrate more of the conven-tional crimes, including the more serious of thesecrimes, than do women and girls. Moreover, menhave a virtual monopoly on the commission ofsyndicated, corporate, and political crime.Indeed, gender has been advanced consistentlyby criminologists as the strongest predictor ofcriminal involvement. Consequently, studyingmasculinities provides insights into under-standing the highly gendered ratio of crime inindustrialized societies and, perhaps, how toachieve a more equal society.

What follows is a “progress report” oncurrent criminological thinking about men,masculinities, and crime. I begin with a briefoutline of my initial approach to masculinitiesand crime and then critically examine severalnew directions in the criminological literature.

MASCULINITIES AND

CRIME AS STRUCTURED ACTION

In Masculinities and Crime (Messerschmidt,1993), I combined the theoretical work ofConnell (1987), West and Zimmerman (1987),and Giddens (1981) to achieve a perspectivethat emphasized both the meaningful actions ofindividual agents and the structural features ofsocial settings. Following West and Zimmerman(1987), I argued that gender is a situated, socialand interactional accomplishment that grows outof social practices in specific settings and servesto inform such practices in reciprocal relation—we coordinate our activities to “do” gender in

situational ways. Crucial to this conceptualizationof gender as situated accomplishment is Westand Zimmerman’s (1987) notion of “account-ability.” Because individuals realize that theymay be held accountable to others for theirbehavior, they configure and orchestrate theiractions in relation to how these might be inter-preted by others in the particular social contextin which they occur. Within social interaction,then, we facilitate the ongoing task of account-ability by demonstrating that we are male orfemale through concocted behaviors that may beinterpreted accordingly. Consequently, we dogender differently depending on the social situa-tion and the social circumstances we encounter.“Doing gender,” then, renders us accountable forour social action in terms of normative concep-tions, attitudes, and activities appropriate toone’s sex in the specific social situation in whichone acts (West & Zimmerman, 1987).

Nevertheless, “doing gender” does not occurin a vacuum but is influenced by the social-structural constraints we experience. Socialstructures are regular and patterned forms ofinteraction over time that constrain and enablebehavior in specific ways; therefore, social struc-tures “exist as the reproduced conduct of situatedactors” (Giddens, 1976, p. 127). FollowingConnell (1987) and Giddens (1976), I pointed outthat these social structures are neither external tosocial actors nor simply and solely constraining;on the contrary, structure is realized only throughsocial action, and social action requires structureas its condition. Thus, as people do gender, theyreproduce and sometimes change social struc-tures. Not only, then, are there many ways ofdoing gender—we must speak of masculinitiesand femininities—gender must be viewed as struc-tured action, or what people do under specificsocial-structural constraints.

In this way, gender relations link each of usto others in a common relationship: We sharestructural space. Consequently, shared blocks ofgendered knowledge evolve through interactionin which specific gender ideals and activitiesplay a part. Through this interaction, masculin-ity is institutionalized, permitting men to drawon such existing, but previously formed, mascu-line ways of thinking and acting to construct amasculinity for specific settings. The particularcriteria of masculinity are embedded in the socialsituations and recurrent practices whereby socialrelations are structured (Giddens, 1989).

Men, Masculinities, and Crime • 197


Accordingly, men are positioned differentlythroughout society, and socially organized powerrelations among men are constructed historicallyon the basis of class, race, and sexual orientation.That is, in specific contexts, some men enjoygreater power than do other men. In this sense,masculinity can be understood only as a rela-tional construct. Connell’s (1987) notion of“hegemonic masculinity” is crucial to under-standing the power relations among men.Hegemonic masculinity is the culturally idealizedform of masculinity in a given historical andsocial setting. It is culturally honored, glorified,and extolled situationally—such as at the broadersocietal level (e.g., through the mass media) andat the institutional level (e.g., in school)—and isconstructed in relation to “subordinated mas-culinities” (e.g., homosexuality) and in relationto women. Hegemonic masculinity influences,but does not determine, masculine behavior—the cultural ideals of hegemonic masculinitydo not correspond to the actual identities ofmost men (Connell, 1987, pp. 184-185). Thus,masculinity is based on a social construct thatreflects unique circumstances and relationships—a social construction that is renegotiated in eachparticular context. In this way, men constructvarieties of masculinities through specific prac-tices as they simultaneously reproduce, andsometimes change, social structures.

Following this approach, I conceptualizedmasculinity and crime in new ways—ways thatenabled criminologists to explore how and inwhat respect masculinity is constituted in certainsettings at certain times, and how that constructrelates to crime (Messerschmidt, 1993). I haveargued that one crucial way (not the only way) tounderstand the “making of crime” by men is toanalyze “the making of masculinities.” Of course,men’s resources for accomplishing masculinityvary depending on position within class, race,age, and gender relations. These differencesare reflected in the salience of particular crimesavailable as resources for accomplishing mas-culinity. Accordingly, different crimes are chosenas means for doing masculinity and for distin-guishing masculinities from each other in differ-ent social settings. My work not only criticizedtraditional criminological theory and radical andsocialist feminism but explained class and racedifferences in male adolescent crimes and in avariety of adult male crimes, from domestic vio-lence to corporate crime (Messerschmidt, 1993).

Recently, two new directions in masculinitiesand crime literature have emerged: (a) psycho-analysis and (b) difference, the body, and crime.I discuss each of these directions in turn.

PSYCHOANALYSIS

Tony Jefferson (1996b, p. 340) noted 8 yearsago that contemporary work on masculinityand crime fails to address a crucial crimino-logical question: “why only particular menfrom a given class or race background (usuallyonly a minority) come to identify with thecrime option, while others identify with otherresources to accomplish their masculinity”(p. 341). More recently, John Hood-Williams(2001, p. 43) echoed Jefferson by observingthat most crime is not committed by men but,rather, by a “highly specific sub-group of thecategory ‘men’”—even though the group’smembers do not form a unified subgroup. Thushe asks this question: Why is it that “only aminority of men need to produce masculinitythrough crime rather than through other, non-criminal, means?” (p. 44). Both are fair andprovocative questions. Hood-Williams did notoffer an argument to resolve these questions, butJefferson, in sketchy form, has advanced whathe calls a “psychosocial theory.” Let us thenscrutinize Jefferson’s perspective.

Jefferson combines the postmodernist notionof discourse with such psychoanalytic conceptsas anxiety and the alleged unconscious defensesof “splitting” and “projection” to understand thediscursive positions adopted by individuals.1

Jefferson (1996b, p. 341) argues that socialstructures are “dissolved into a plethora of dis-courses” and criticizes postmodernism for mak-ing the individual an effect of discourse, as thissimply reproduces the determinism of structur-alism. In contrast, Jefferson contends that to breakfrom this “deterministic impasse,” criminologymust conceptualize how individuals positionthemselves in relation to the discursive choicesfacing them and how they come to adopt partic-ular positions and not others: “how peoplebecome invested in, motivated by, or identifiedwith particular [discursive] positions” (p. 341).

A return to psychoanalysis, Jefferson main-tains, would allow such an understanding of therelationship among subjects, discourses, mas-culinity, and crime. Jefferson turns to the work



of the Austrian child psychoanalyst MelanieKlein (1882-1960) on how behavior allegedly isrelated to unconscious defenses against anxiety.Following Klein, Jefferson argues that the keyto understanding the discursive choices made byindividuals—which are choices that collectivelyconstitute a person’s “identity”—is “to be foundin the defensive attempts people make to wardoff anxiety, to avoid feelings of powerless-ness” (Jefferson, 1996a, p. 158). Application ofthis perspective has involved deconstructions ofvarious journalistic accounts of sensationalcrimes, as well as interviews with men andwomen on the fear of crime, highlighting howanxieties result from feelings of powerlessnessand, thus, how individuals choose masculine“subject positions” that permit them to gainsufficient power over other people to protecttheir anxiety-driven, insecure selves.

The world heavyweight boxing championMike Tyson, and his involvement in crime asa young boy, is a case in point. In a numberof papers, Jefferson (1996a, 1996c, 1997b,1998) examined the life of Tyson from a “littlefairy boy” to “the complete destroyer.” AlthoughJefferson provides an account of Tyson’s lifefrom childhood to boxing career, our interesthere is his analysis of Tyson’s eventual involve-ment in youth crime. Thus what follows is abrief synopsis of Jefferson’s account of Tyson“becoming delinquent.”

Jefferson (1996a) reports that as a child,Tyson experienced chronic poverty, emotionalmalnourishment (his father was absent andhis mother drank, fought with her boyfriend,and eventually could not cope), “and a geneticendowment that gave him a body and a head toobig and bulky for either his years or his soft,lisping voice, the kind of combination that madehim a constant target of bullying” (p. 155). It isnot surprising that for most of his childhood,Tyson was passive and withdrew into a less-threatening “inner world,” but that withdrawaldid not save him from continued peer abuse.One particular bullying incident was a turningpoint in Tyson’s life. One day an older localbully assumed Tyson was a safe target for abusebecause of his reputation for passivity and, con-sequently, the bully proceeded to rip the headoff one of Tyson’s beloved pigeons (which hekept as pets). In this specific situation, Tyson didnot remain docile as he had in the past; not onlydid he choose to fight back, he was successful in

physically defeating the older bully. From thattime on, Tyson no longer was compliant andreserved in interaction with his peers, and heeventually became a “badass” member of theJolly Stompers, a Brooklyn street gang. Howdoes Jefferson explain this movement from“little fairy boy” to “badass” gang member?Because Tyson now embraced a “tough guy”discourse that denoted the ability to survive onthe street through the capacity to meet and resistphysical challenges. Not explaining why Tysonat this particular time chose to favor this specificdiscourse—nor if the endorsement of thisdiscourse was prior to or after the successfulassault of the bully—Jefferson (1996c, p. 102)does argue that, given Tyson’s powerless posi-tion, based on his own unique biography, such adiscourse offered Tyson an attractive masculinesubject position because it protected him fromthe anxiety of powerlessness and vulnerability.As Jefferson (1996c) notes, Tyson’s childhoodexperiences were “symptomatic of an unhealthylevel of anxiety for a young child” (p. 94).Consequently, these “anxiety-inducing” dis-courses became the object of splitting and pro-jection. In other words, the “little fairy boy” is

split off and projected outwards, onto the newvictims who then become despised (hence legiti-mate victims) for “possessing” the bad, weakparts which had become too painful for Tyson toaccommodate in himself. This bullying, and theaccompanying crime, took Tyson from the ghettoto the reformatory and, we can assume, new anxi-eties. But, rather than “own” these, his recidivismand growing reputation as a hardcore delinquentsuggests a continuation of the splitting. (p. 102)

In sum, Tyson experienced a specific set ofsocial and psychic consequences that “add upto a compelling satisfaction in or desire to inflictpunishment and thereby triumph over the threatof having it inflicted” (Jefferson, 1998, p. 94).

Jefferson’s psychosocial theory of masculin-ity and crime clearly has intuitive appeal andis a provocative contribution to the literature.Nevertheless, serious problems seem inherent inhis perspective. Let me highlight a few.

Although Jefferson (1997b) acknowledgesthat “the social world is traversed by relationsof power (class, gender, race, etc.)” (p. 286),such power relations quickly vanish fromJefferson’s analysis because allegedly they“can only signify, and hence be understood by



individual subjects, through available discourses.”Consequently, in Jefferson’s theory of mas-culinity and crime, there is scant discussion ofgendered power relations (either between menand women or among men) and how such poweris connected to race and class and, eventually,crime.

Because of this lack of theoretical attentionto power, Jefferson argues that social meaningis only and always the product of availablediscourses, not social structures. Indeed, forJefferson, social structures disappear into anoverabundance of discourses. Jefferson is inter-ested in how individuals allegedly positionthemselves in relation to all of the so-called dis-cursive choices facing them—that is, how theycome to adopt particular “subject positions” andnot others. The problem with this theoreticalbeginning is that we never learn from where allthese alleged discourses come and, therefore,never learn of all the so-called available subjectpositions. In other words, what is the empiricalbase of discourse? In the Tyson example, wheredid the “tough guy” discourse originate?Jefferson ignores the fact that discourse is con-structed through practice, is structurally con-nected with other practices, and has much incommon with other forms of practice (Connell,1987). Jefferson’s perspective seems unable todemonstrate—indeed, is glaringly uninterestedin—the source of the discourse in relation towhich individuals allegedly position themselves.This is a major difficulty, because without suchempirical verification, literally anything couldbe defined as discourse, depending on how thetheorist chooses to interpret it.

Even within individual case studies such asthat of Tyson, we do not learn specifically howthe particular individual becomes “invested in”or “identified with” a certain discourse but notothers or when that investment or identifica-tion takes place. What does it actually mean tobecome invested in or identified with a particulardiscourse? How does this investment or identifi-cation actually occur? What is the particularprocess? Because Tyson is part of the “specificsub-group of the category ‘men’” that engages incrime, it seems imperative to grasp the variousdiscourses available to the adolescent Tyson andwhy, when, and how he chose the “tough guy”discourse and rejected others. However, there isnothing built into Jefferson’s perspective thatpermits selection among the various possibilities

of discourse in a particular social situation orwhen or how the subject invests or identifieswith such discourses.

I agree that it is important to explain whyparticular men identify with the crime optionand other men, from similar milieux, do not.Given Jefferson’s parallel concern with thisissue, one would expect this to be a priority inhis research agenda. Surprisingly, he makes noattempt to address this topic. Other than hisefforts at theory construction (e.g., Jefferson,1994), in all of his published work to date, weare simply provided with individual case studiesof boys’ or men’s involvement in crime, specifi-cally, interpersonal violence. Consequently,Jefferson is unable to explain why individualswith very similar backgrounds—that is, posi-tioned similarly with regard to available discur-sive choices and suffering similar anxieties—chose not to engage in crime. In other words,following the logic of Jefferson’s perspective,it is not sufficient to point out that Tyson, forexample, is anxiety driven and chose to adoptthe “tough guy” discourse—it is necessary tospecify why people in the same milieu as Tysonresponded to similar anxieties in noncriminalways. Fortunately, the vast majority of maleyouth in the ghetto who suffer similar biograph-ical powerlessness and emotional malnourish-ment do not join gangs or engage in violence.Why don’t they? What discourse do they adopt,and why did Tyson not adopt that alternativediscourse? In short, Jefferson fails to investigatethe effects of childhood powerlessness andemotional malnourishment on nonviolent boysand men, and he simultaneously ignores therange of masculine paths in Tyson’s childhoodmilieu and the interconnections among thesediffering masculinities. Indeed, masculinity canonly be understood in relation to the variety ofmasculinities in each social situation.

An additional problem is the psychoanalyticangle Jefferson attaches to discourse. As withhis conception of discourse, he does not subjectthe “unconscious” process by which individualsallegedly split and project to empirical verifica-tion; he simply infers it. How then do we knowthat such splitting and projection take place?The only possible answer is that Jeffersonsays so. Arguably, such so-called psychicprocesses as the “unconscious,” “splitting,” and“projection” can never be the objects of directobservation. Therefore, these concepts can be



constructed only by Jefferson, who, by giving aname and form to them (following Klein), doesnot discover them but simply creates them.Thus, as with most psychoanalytic theories, thealleged psychic processes can, for Jefferson,only be hypothetical and speculative, and there-fore their validity is highly questionable. It isJefferson who imagines (and thus contrives)what the empirical evidence cannot supply:that anxious individuals—like Mike Tyson—“unconsciously split and project.” In short,Jefferson’s identified psychoanalytic terms arenonmeasureable, and, consequently, his theoryis nonfalsifiable.

Moreover, because (according to Jefferson)anxieties result from feelings of powerlessness,it should not be surprising to find that when hediscusses men, he examines only those who atsome point in their lives experienced extrememasculine powerlessness and subsequentlybecame involved in interpersonal violence ratherthan those who experienced feelings of power-fulness and subsequently became involved ininterpersonal violence. Because Jefferson con-centrates on powerlessness (but, as stated earlier,ignores a reciprocal conception of power), hisperspective is unable to account for boys andmen who do not fit this stereotype—the power-ful male who is full of self-confidence (and doesnot “feel” powerlessness) yet also engages inviolence. Research shows that certain forms ofviolence may be associated with, for example,threatened egotism: “highly favorable views ofself that are disputed by some person or circum-stance” (Baumeister, Smart, & Boden, 1996,p. 5). When individuals who regard themselvesas “superior beings” are challenged in someway, they may respond with physical violence.As Baumeister and colleagues (1996) haveshown,

Aggression emerges from a particular discrep-ancy between two views of self: a favorable selfappraisal and an external appraisal that is muchless favorable. That is, people turn aggressivewhen they receive feedback that contradicts theirfavorable views of themselves and implies thatthey should adopt less favorable views. More tothe point, it is mainly people who refuse to lowertheir self-appraisals who become violent. (p. 8)

Consequently, although perhaps unintention-ally, Jefferson’s work reads as though no suchself-confident males exist and therefore appears

to assume that only certain males are “deviantly”anxiety driven, and that it is “those guys” whocommit violence. Jefferson asks us to assumethat all crimes committed by boys and menresult from splitting and projection because ofanxious powerlessness. In doing so, he reifiesmasculinity by arguing that it results from anx-ious powerlessness common to all violent men.Clearly, a satisfactory theory requires a morethoroughgoing appreciation of the varieties ofmasculinities and their relation to violence.

Moreover, Jefferson’s concentration exclu-sively on interpersonal violence is problematic.Other crimes that are predominantly “male”—such as robbery, burglary, syndicated crime, andthe varieties of corporate and political crimes—are underrepresented and therefore undertheo-rized in Jefferson’s work. Thus, one is left withthe impression that masculinity (and thus gender)matters only in crimes involving interpersonalviolence. Or are we to assume that boys and meninvolved in crimes other than those involving inter-personal violence similarly experience anxiouspowerlessness and subsequently split and projectprior to committing such crimes?

In addition, Jefferson only speaks of menand masculinity, ignoring the reality that womenand girls sometimes do masculinity (as well asviolence). As Hood-Williams (2001) asks, “Arewe to believe that the genders really do consti-tute coherent, uniform categories whose socialand psychic consequence is a perfect, homoge-nous binary?” (p. 39). In other words, there isnothing built into Jefferson’s perspective thatallows for the conceptualization of women, girls,masculinities, and crime. Consequently, his per-spective reifies gender difference.

Finally, although Jefferson attempts a psy-choanalytic interpretation of masculinity, theconcepts he uses to analyze “unconscious”psychic processes—anxiety, splitting, andprojection—have nothing to do with gender(Hood-Williams, 2001). As Hood-Williamspoints out, there is “nothing in the character orstructuring of the psyche that explains sexualdifference. That must come from elsewhere”(p. 52). And that elsewhere is, according toHood-Williams, found in the social realm:Masculinity “does not express an inner, psychic,core” but is the “performative work of acts,gestures, enactments” and, consequently, “thismeans recognizing that masculinity must beunderstood phenomenologically” (p. 53).



Jefferson (2001) most recently recognizedthat the Kleinian concepts he employs aregender-neutral terms, and, as he states, this forceshim “into the realm of the social to explainsexual difference, but without denying the (irre-ducible) significance of the psyche” (p. 11). Toconnect psychic processes with the performanceof masculinity (which means, for Jefferson,masculine practices by men, not by women),Jefferson initially turns to the work of NancyChodorow (1978) on the differential signifi-cance of maternal separation for boys and girls.Chodorow argues that because women typicallyare the primary caretakers of children—becauseof the unequal gender division of labor in childcare—both boys and girls develop early, intenserelations with the mother. When the time comesto separate from her, however, this separationprocess occurs in different ways for boys andgirls. According to Chodorow, girls remaincloser to the mother than do boys and, therefore,girls do not experience a sharp break fromMom. Consequently, girls achieve femininity bybeing like their mothers and internalize “femi-nine” characteristics, such as a capacity forempathy with, and dependence on, others—firsttheir mother, later their spouse. For boys, becom-ing masculine requires their becoming differentfrom mother and separating completely fromher by repudiating all that is feminine. Conse-quently, boys fail to learn empathy for othersand become fearful of intimacy and depen-dence. Boys’ psyches, then, are well suited tobeing achievement oriented; girls’ psyches arewell adapted to emotional work. In this way, thegender division of labor in parenting is repro-duced as boys become the breadwinners andgirls become the primary caretakers of children.The unequal gender division of labor in parent-ing is reproduced in the psyches of individuals,and masculine dominance is reinforced.

Feminists have criticized Chodorow’s thesisfor being ahistorical, for falsely universalizingchildhood experience, for ignoring differencesof race and class, and for being incomplete asa theory of women’s subordination because itdoes not explain how the gender division oflabor in parenting emerged (Jaggar, 1983). Inaddition, Connell (1998, p. 457) points out thatthe reasons for the reproduction of this specificdivision of labor probably have little to do withpsychology; more likely, they involve the eco-nomic costs to families from the loss of a man’s

wage. Connell goes on to point out—as hasChodorow (1994, 1999)—that a gender divisionof labor in parenting does not necessarily pro-duce dichotomous gender patterns in later life.

It is perplexing why Jefferson now suddenlysupports Chodorow’s thesis. As is evident,Chodorow’s work is a theory of the reproductionof a specific social structure and has nothing tosay about discourse. This is particularly prob-lematic because Jefferson, as stated earlier,argues that social structures disappear into anoverabundance of discourses. Additionally,Jefferson (1998, p. 92) had previously rejectedChodorow’s position as a much too general andsociological account of gender formation eventhough it retained psychoanalytic terminology.Although Jefferson (2001) more recently agreedthat Chodorow’s thesis is reductive and general-izing, he nevertheless feels that as “an internalprocess early psychic separation provides the(psychic) preconditions for entry into the (social)world of male domination” (p. 12). In an attemptto save his theory by overcoming the reductivecharacter of Chodorow’s perspective, unexpect-edly, Jefferson turns to the work of JessicaBenjamin (1998) rather than Chodorow’s (1999)most recent reformulation of her thesis.2

Benjamin (1998) argues that separation frommother into masculine dominance is but onepath the boy may take, and it must be supple-mented by an account of the father and thechild’s identification with him: “This redefinesthe preoedipal position as one characterized bymultiple identifications with both mother andfather (or substitutes) and what they symbolize”(Jefferson, 2001, p.13). The universal task ofthe child now is not one-dimensional, but ratherinvolves

separating from a particular mother (and her par-ticular relationship to gender) and learning toshare her with a particular father (and his partic-ular relationship to gender) against a backdrop ofmanaging the inevitable excitement and anxietygenerated by loving attachments, both the desirefor (object love) and the desire to be like (identi-ficatory love). The timing and management ofthese universal tasks will determine how any par-ticular individual relates to questions of sexualdifference. (p. 13)

Curiously, Jefferson’s perspective abruptlyends here without showing how such “timingand management” of the so-called “universal



tasks” result in different types of masculinityand how such masculinities eventually arerelated to crime. Moreover, Jefferson seems toassume a unilateral influence from individualparental figures in childhood to specific con-structions of gender without providing any the-oretical space for influences outside the familycontext—such as peers and teachers—or whatagency the infant has in this interaction. Indeed,Jefferson neglects research on agency thatspecifically shows how infants are born into aworld populated by self-regulating participantsin the interactional achievement of masculinitiesand femininities. For example, this researchsuggests that through interaction with others,infants are exposed to gender “contingencies ofreinforcement” and, as a result, infants exhibitspecific but differentiated patterns of genderedbehavior (Cahill, 1986, p. 170). In other words,for some time, research has explained early gen-der development in infancy not through separa-tion anxiety but as a reflexive process betweenthe infant and others’ (parents’, children’s, andadults’) mutual reinforcement.

Consequently, Jefferson’s psychosocial theorybegs the question: Does a psychoanalyticdimension add a necessary explanatory level toour understanding of masculinities and crime?Because of its sketchy and incomplete nature,as well as the numerous inherent problemsassociated with his perspective, as outlined, wecan only conclude that it does not. (Indeed,Jefferson’s [2003] most recent statement ofhis theory ignores gender altogether.) Instead, asatisfactory theory of masculinities and crimerequires an understanding of the meanings boysand men attach to their social actions and howthese actions are related to conscious choice andspecific social structures in particular settings. Itis to the latter that we now turn our attention.

DIFFERENCE, THE BODY, AND CRIME

Despite the problems inherent in psychoanaly-sis, Jefferson raises an important limitation ofpast masculinity and crime research: the failureto inquire why some boys and men engagein crime and other boys and men from thesame milieu do not, and why those who doengage in crime commit different types ofcrimes. In addition, Collier (1998) pointed to asecond oversight: the importance of the body

and its relation to crime. To these beneficialcriticisms, it should be added that earlier workon masculinities and crime has not addressedadequately the relationship among masculini-ties, race, and class. In other words, to under-stand crime, we must comprehend how gender,race, and class relations are part of all socialexistence and not view each relation as extrin-sic to the others. Because crime operatesthrough a complex series of gender, race, andclass practices, crime usually is more thana single activity. In this final section, then, Idiscuss some recent criminological work thathas begun to address these criticisms.

For some time, criminologists have beenattempting to conceptualize the “intersection”of gender, race, class, and crime. For example,8 years ago, an edited volume by Schwartzand Milovanovic (1996) examined, as the titlesuggests, Race, Gender, and Class in Criminol-ogy: The Intersection. As well, Marino Bruce’s(1997) work on youth crime specifically inves-tigated the interrelation of race and class withthe construction of masculinities by delin-quent lower working class boys. Similarly,Mark Lettiere’s (1997) ethnographic study ofmasculinities among African American, white,and Latino men in a homeless heroin-addictcommunity showed how “doing begging” and“doing crime” are resources for “doing” differ-ent racialized masculinities and thus for con-structing a power hierarchy among these men.Most recently, Barak, Flavin, and Leighton(2001) show how gender, race, and classaffect the nature and functioning of the criminaljustice system, and Jurik and Martin (2001)demonstrate historically how gender, race,class, and sexuality frame and organize work,specifically in policing and corrections. One ofthe difficulties criminological theorists haveexperienced is conceptualizing how gender,race, and class are linked or how they actuallyintersect. The attraction of Jurik and Martin’s(2001) work is that they have shown con-clusively how workplace social interactionconstructs and reaffirms gender, race, and classdifferences.

A specific method for connecting socialinteraction with gender, race, class, and crime isthe life history. The life history is an importantqualitative method because it necessitates aclose consideration of the meaning of social lifefor those who enact it as a way of revealing their



experiences, choices, practices, and socialworld. No other social science method providesas much detail about social development andchange as does a life-history study of practicesover time.

In Crime as Structured Action (Messer-schmidt, 1997), I explore, for example, thechanges in Malcolm X’s masculinities within arange of race and class social contexts: a child-hood in which he constantly battled for accep-tance as a young man; a zoot-suit culture thatembraced him without stigma as a “hipster” and“hustler”; and a spiritual and political move-ment that celebrated him as father, husband, andnational spokesperson. Across these sites andthrough shifting currencies of his sense of gen-der, race, and class, Malcolm X moved in andout of crime. Malcolm X simply appropriatedcrime as a resource for doing masculinity ata specific moment in his life, a period whengender, race, and class relations were equallysignificant. In this way, the life-history methodprovides data not only about why people engagein crime at certain stages of their lives but howthat engagement relates to the salience of vari-ous combinations of gender, race, and class.3

My most recent research involves life-historyinterviews of violent and nonviolent boys andaddresses the following questions: Why is itthat some boys engage in violence and someboys do not? and Why do the boys who engagein violence commit different types of violence?(Messerschmidt, 2000). The goal of each inter-view was an attempt to reflect the situationalaccomplishment of masculinities and the even-tual use of violence (or nonviolence) as an out-come of specific choices in a subject’s personallife history.

Because of space constraints, I cannotdiscuss all of the life stories. However, for ataste of the data, I present the life stories oftwo of the boys interviewed—Hugh andZack—who simultaneously lived in the sameworking class neighborhood and attended thesame high school, yet took different paths: Onebecame a sex offender and the other anassaultive offender. These two cases, then, arejuxtaposed nicely because they report data as towhy boys from the same social milieu come toengage in different types of violence. What fol-lows is a brief outline of their life stories andhow their differing forms of violence are relatedto their body, structured action, and masculinity.

Both boys grew up in working class homesthat articulated for them a practiced definition ofmasculine power. In their separate families,Hugh and Zack found themselves in milieux inwhich they were attached to an adult male—Hugh to his grandfather and Zack to his uncle—who both emphasized hegemonic masculinitythrough practice. This attachment led both boysconsciously to undertake to practice what wasbeing preached and represented. Connell (1995)defines this proactive adoption of “familyvalues” (such as manual and athletic skills andmale power and control of others) as the“moment of engagement” with hegemonic mas-culinity, “the moment at which the boy takes upthe project of hegemonic masculinity as hisown” (p. 122). Although constructed in differentways, such moments of engagement occurred inboth boys’ lives through interaction—junctureswhen the individual boys consciously choseto engineer a newly professed masculinity.Moreover, for both Hugh and Zack, an impor-tant part of this engagement with hegemonicmasculinity entailed a commitment to the “familyvalue” that use of physical violence is an appro-priate means to solve interpersonal problems. Inother words, both boys chose to embrace thepractice (constructed within their families andthe school attended) that physical violence is thefitting and well-chosen masculine response tothreat—a “real man” was obligated to respondin this fashion.4 Although both boys were similarin the sense of accepting that the legitimateresponse to threat is physical retaliation, thedifferences between them surfaced during inter-actions at school.

We begin our examination of these differ-ences with the case of Hugh, an assaultive, tall,and well-built 15-year-old. Hugh was rewardedwith favorable appraisal from others for hisphysicality—at home from his grandfather, atschool from other kids, and from his peers in thegang he joined. Consider the following dialogueabout Hugh’s fighting ability at school:

Q. What did the other kids think about you fighting?

A. Since I was a good fighter, everybody my agelooked up to me, you know. I wasn’t afraid tofight. I liked it. I was the only one my age whofought the older kids.

Q. How did that make you feel?

A. Better than the others.



Q. Why?

A. Always, ever since I can remember, I’d say Iwasn’t going to let anybody push me around. Iwas going to be like Gramps—a force in thisworld.

Q. Did you want to be like Gramps? Was he aforce?

A. Yeah. He didn’t let people push him around.

Q. Did the other kids think of you as a force?

A. They looked up to me, as I said. Because itwasn’t about beating the older kids up or thembeating me up. It was that I held my own. Ididn’t let people walk all over me. And theythought that was cool.

Q. Did you develop a reputation?

A. Yeah. I became that force, you know. In the backof kids’ minds it would always be like, “Man, isthis kid going to hit me?” So they didn’t messwith me. I was strong and good with my fists,you know. (Messerschmidt, 2000, p. 53)

This dialogue discloses the intricate inter-play of Hugh’s body with the social processes ofbecoming a “force” at school. The social require-ment to validate one as a masculine force—thatis, physically fighting—is an embodied practicethat connects specific bodily skill and compe-tence (“good with my fists”) with a predictableconsequence to that practice (“they looked up tome” and “they thought that was cool”). Hughconsciously responded to masculinity challengesby constructing a bodily presence in school(“I held my own”) that was revered by hisclassmates.

This construction of being a “force” eventu-ally led Hugh to attacking teachers physically.Hugh expressed to me that the physical powerhe exerted on the playground gave him theconfidence to challenge a teacher’s power inthe classroom under certain conditions. I askedHugh for an example of when such violencemight occur:

The teacher told me to do my work and I’d say: “Idon’t want to do my work.” And then the teacherwould say I had to, and then I’d throw my desk athim. I couldn’t stay in class and do what I had todo. I was always getting in trouble. I was the onegetting detention and stuff. I’d throw my desk andwalk out, sayin’ “Fuck you.” (Messerschmidt,2000, p. 54)

When I asked Hugh how it made him feel torespond that way, he stated,

It felt good. It was a sense of retaliation, youknow. I was doing something about it. And afterI got out of the principal, kids would pat me on theback. They all wanted to be my friend, you know.I had a reputation of not being pushed aroundby teachers, and I liked that. So I did it more.(Messerschmidt, 2000, p. 54)

Being tall and muscular for his age, Hugh’sbodily resources empowered him to implementphysically confrontational practices when heencountered masculinity challenges. His bodyserved, in part, as agent and resource in his prac-tice of embodied force; thus, Hugh embodiedpower at school through a calculated effort topresent his body in a specific way.

For Hugh, then, his body facilitated mascu-line agency. In the face of masculinity chal-lenges from other students and teachers, hesuccessfully constructed himself as a “toughguy” who was “superior” to his victims—hisassaultive acts enforced and shaped masculineboundaries. Indeed, his physical ability to fightwhen provoked convinced him of his own emi-nent masculine self-worth. His bodily resourcesempowered him to implement a physically con-frontational masculinity, permitted him to resistthe school physically, and enabled him to con-struct specific behavior patterns—acting out inclass, bullying other students, and assaultingstudents and teachers. Thus, within the socialsetting of the school, Hugh’s body became hisprimary resource for masculine power andesteem and simultaneously constructed hisvictims as subordinate.

In certain ways, Hugh was following thebodily dictates of the school social structure inwhich he was embedded. Research shows thatin junior high and high school, the tallest andstrongest boys are usually the most popular,admired by peers (and parents and teachers) fortheir size and athletic prowess (Thorne, 1993).In the context of school, a boy’s height andmusculature increase self-esteem and prestige,thus creating a more positive body image(Thorne, 1993). Research on male adolescentdevelopment reveals that boys are acutelyaware of the changes in themselves duringpuberty, as well as other people’s responses tothose changes (Petersen, 1988). Boys who par-ticipate in sports, for example, state that “they



take pleasure in their agency and their bodiessimultaneously. They feel like they accomplishthings in their bodies and in their lives”(Martin, 1996, p. 55).

As the testimonial indicates, Hugh had a verysimilar response to his embodied practices.Most of the time, Hugh’s attention did not focuson his own embodiment; it was simply taken forgranted. However, in times of verbally antag-onistic and physically confrontational inter-actions at home and school—that is, duringmasculinity challenges—the body now becamethe central aspect of Hugh’s attention and expe-rience. Indeed, for Hugh, the body seized centerstage and acted—because of its physical size,shape, and skill—according to his chosen mas-culine goal of being a force in the world. Inother words, during these interactions entailingmasculinity challenges, both gender and bodywere highly salient—they became the object ofhis practice. Moreover, his body facilitatedmasculine social action—it was a successfulmasculine resource—by creating boundariesbetween Hugh and his numerous victims.

Additionally, the embodied practices ofHugh show that such practices are intersub-jective. That is, the space in which Hugh’sassaultive actions occurred was occupied byothers; and it is these others, in part, towardwhom the assaultive actions were intended.As Crossley (1995) argues, embodied socialaction is “other oriented” and derives its senseor meaning from its participation in shared sit-uations: Embodied action is “not only acting-towards-others; it is acting-towards-others ina way that is acceptable to others (in general)by virtue of its reliance upon commonly heldrules and resources, and its observance of ritualconsiderations” (pp. 141-142). Hugh’s assaul-tive actions, then, were accomplished in accor-dance with a shared masculine subjectivity ofothers who populated the same school andhome space where the assaultive actionsoccurred.

But boys unlike Hugh—specifically, boyswho do not possess the appropriate body shapeand size and thus are unable to use their bodiesin the physical ways proposed by the schoolsocial structure—frequently experience distress(Petersen, 1988). In the teen world, bodies aresubject increasingly to inspection and surveil-lance by peers; and less muscular, nonathleticboys are often labeled “wimps” and “fags”

(Kindlon & Thompson, 1999). In junior highand high school, masculine social hierarchiesdevelop in relation to somatic type. Suchsomatic differentiation affirms inequalityamong boys, and in this way, diverse masculin-ities are constructed in relation to biologicaldevelopment (Canaan, 1998; Connell, 1987,1995; Thorne, 1993). The relationship amongthese masculinities forms a specific socialstructure within the social setting of the school.For example, in most secondary schools, we arelikely to find power relations between hege-monic masculinities (i.e., “cool guys,” “toughguys,” and “jocks”) and subordinated mascu-linities (i.e., gay boys, “wimps,” and “nerds”).Ethnographies of secondary education inBritain, Australia, and the United Sates consis-tently report such masculine power relation-ships, which construct a specific socialstructure in secondary schools (see Connell,1996, for a review). In short, today the bodyincreasingly has become crucial to self-image,especially among teenage youth. Through inter-action at school, adolescents make bodiesmatter by constructing some bodies as moremasculine than other bodies; thus, social struc-tures are embodied.

Although Hugh’s embodied practices repre-sent hegemonic or exemplary masculinities atschool, I found subordinate school masculinitiesin several of the adolescent male sex offendersI interviewed. Consider the case of Zack, whowas 15 years old when I interviewed him. Whenhe was in third grade, he gained a considerableamount of weight, and other students consideredhim “fat,” as did he. The “cool guys” at schoolconsistently verbally and physically abusedZack: “They’d call me ‘fatty,’ ‘chubby cheeks,’‘wimp,’ and stuff like that. I got pushed down alot and stuff. I got beat up a lot in the school-yard” (Messerschmidt, 2000, p. 42). The abusefor being overweight and the constant physicalassault extended through grade school andmiddle school. Unlike some other kids at school,Zack chose not to respond physically to thesemasculinity challenges because he felt he wouldbe “beat up.” As Zack stated,

I felt like I was a “wimp” ’cause I couldn’t do whatother boys did. I never could in my life. I couldn’tdo anything. Other people always told me what todo, I never told anybody. I felt pretty crappy aboutmyself. (Messerschmidt, 2000, p. 43)



Consequently, the peer abuse at schoolexerted a masculinity challenge, and, subse-quently, Zack attempted to invalidate his statusas a “wimp” by joining the junior high footballteam. As Zack stated, “It would make me feellike I was actually worth something, like otherguys, you know” (Messerschmidt, 2000, p. 43).However, during the summer, between fifth andsixth grades, Zack broke his wrist whileattempting to “get in shape.” He remained over-weight, and although he tried out for the team inhis sixth grade year, he was soon cut.

Also during his sixth grade year, Zackdeveloped a sexual interest in girls. He learnedthis not from the adults in his life but throughinteraction at school. Because of the frequent“sex talk” at school, Zack wanted to experiencesex to be like the other boys. Because Zackhad never been able to arrange a date, he feltextremely “left out” and identified himself as a“virgin.” The continual rejection by girls madeZack feel discontented: “I didn’t really likemyself ’cause girls didn’t like me. I was fat andI just didn’t seem to fit in. Like I’m the onlyvirgin in the school.”

Q. Did you want to fit in?

A. Yeah. And I tried really hard. I tried to play foot-ball so the popular guys would like me. I tried todress differently, dress like they [popular kids]did. I tried going on diets. I tried to get girls.(Messerschmidt, 2000, p. 45)

Prior to the masculinity challenges he facedat school, Zack did not think much about hisbody. However, Zack’s body became much morea part of his lived experience. This resulted inhis body becoming a site of intersubjective dis-dain through interaction at school that ledinevitably to his negative self-conceptualization.In turn, Zack made the conscious choice—tohelp fulfill his goal to be masculine—to attemptto “fit in” by reconstructing his body: He tried toget into shape to play football, dress “cool atschool,” and go on diets. In other words, Zack’sbody became an object of his practice as a resultof its socially constructed subordinated pres-ence. Zack actively worked on his body in anattempt to mold it into an “appropriate” gen-dered body for the particular school setting.Thus, his physical sense of masculinity was inpart derived from his attempt to transform hisbody through social practices (Connell, 1987).

In addition to this disciplined management ofhis body, Zack consciously attempted to obtainheterosexual dates. In all such attempts, how-ever, he failed miserably.

Unable to be masculine like the “cool guys,”the masculinity challenges exerted greaterpressure on Zack, and he eventually turned toexpressing control and power over his youngestfemale cousin through sex. During his sixthgrade year—a time when he experienced thedistressing events just described and “discov-ered” heterosexuality—Zack consciously choseto seek out his cousin: “I wanted to experiencesex, like what other boys were doing. I wantedto do what they were talking about but I wasrejected by girls at school” (Messerschmidt,2000, p. 46). Zack sexually assaulted (fondlingand oral penetration) his youngest cousin over a3-year period by using a variety of seeminglynonviolent manipulative strategies. I asked Zackhow it made him feel when he manipulated hiscousin, and he stated, “It made me feel realgood. I just felt like finally I was in control oversomebody. I forgot about being fat and ugly. Shewas someone looking up to me, you know. If Ineeded sexual contact, then I had it. I wasn’t avirgin anymore” (Messerschmidt, 2000, p. 47).

Zack saw himself as not “measuring up”physically to the school view of the ideal mas-culine body. Consequently, his body was arestraint on his agency—he could not do themasculine practices the “cool guys” were doing,including “fighting back” when bullied andengaging in sex with peers. Moreover, hisimmediate situation at school was seen by himas a dangerous place, as he inhabited the mostsubordinate position in the masculine powersocial structure of the school. Consequently, theembodied practices activated by the contextualinteractions at school could be directed onlyoutside the school situation. Zack’s bodybecame party to a surrogate practice thatdirected him toward a course of social actionthat was physically and sexually realizable. ForZack, then, the dominant masculine practices inschool were not rejected. Rather, physical andsexual subordination directed Zack toward con-sciously fixating not only on his body, but on aspecific site (the home) and a particular form ofembodied conduct (sexual violence) where suchmasculine practices could be realized. Giventhat Zack was removed from any type of recog-nized masculine bodily status in school, the



available sexual “outlet” at home was especiallyseductive and captivating, became an obsession,and was a powerful and pleasurable means ofbeing masculine. In attempting to masculinizeand heterosexualize his body within the capti-vating conceptualization of “cool guy” mas-culinity, Zack engendered a powerful sense ofself by consciously “taking charge” at home andconquering his cousin’s body through sexualviolence. The choice to be sexually violent,then, was a situational masculine resource inwhich Zack could be dominant, powerful, andheterosexual through bodily practice. Thus, itwas in this way that Zack’s body shared in hissocial agency by shaping and generating hiscourse of action toward sexual violence.

For Zack, then, the peer abuse and inabilityto “be a man” according to the social structureof the school brought about an absolute splitbetween his subordinate masculinity and themasculinity of other boys—in particular, the“cool guys”—at school. Such, however, is notthe case for Hugh. Although engaging inassaultive violence—as Hugh did—placed thebody at center stage, it did not disrupt hismasculine reality but rather confirmed it; hisbody was a superordinate masculine presenceat school. Indeed, within the social context ofHugh’s and Zack’s school, such practicesas physically fighting are experienced as partof masculine life, not placed outside it.Consequently, these acts maintain intentionallinks with other boys and reproduce the mas-culine school social structure of power—theirsuccess at assaultive actions enforced theboundary between hegemonic and subordinatemasculinities. In contrast, Zack’s habitual mas-culine world was disrupted and correlated witha new relation to his body—it now became asubordinate masculine presence at school. Thus,although Hugh’s embodied violent actions areinterwoven with others in a common masculineproject, Zack constituted embodied subor-dination in the masculine power hierarchy atschool. The result is that Zack experiencedsocial isolation and a telic demand to be freefrom his subordinate masculine situation—which he “satisfied” through sexual violence.

In short, the interactions experienced byHugh and Zack at school were situationalmoments marked by masculinity challenges inwhich each boy was defined as a rival to otherboys, entailing a socially distant, hostile, and

power relationship among them. For Zack,however, heterosexual meanings added to thepower divide among boys. Yet in the brief,illusory moment of each sexually violentincident—in which the sex offender practicedspatial and physical dominance over hiscousin—Zack was a “cool guy”; the subordinatewas now the dominant.

CONCLUSION

Psychoanalysis provides little help in under-standing these life stories and embodied prac-tices. The goal for both Hugh and Zack washegemonic masculinity and being a “cool guy”who could solve problems through inter-personal violence. In Sartre’s (1956) words,this was their “fundamental choice,” or thegendered attitude they took toward the world.Accordingly, both boys engaged in a consciouschoice to pursue hegemonic masculinity(defined by the practices in their particularmilieu of home and school) as their project, orthe fundamental mode by which they chose torelate to the world and express themselves in it.Hugh and Zack’s behavior, then, is best under-stood from the point of view of their sociallystructured, consciously chosen project ratherthan from some alleged yet spurious “uncon-scious” motivation. To appreciate why Hughand Zack engaged in violence, we must firstdiscover the planned project for both. This isthe basic difference between the methodemployed here and that of Jefferson. Jeffersonattempts to comprehend the person in light of“unconscious” antecedents; following Sartre(1956, 1963), I understand the person in lightof his conscious choices—in particular, socialsituations—as he pursues future-orientedprojects.

Additionally, the case studies of Hugh andZack demonstrate that the materiality of bodiesoften matters in the pursuit of a project. Bodiesparticipate in social action by delineatingcourses of social conduct: “Bodies in theirmateriality have both limits and capacitieswhich are always in play in social processes”(Connell, 1998a, p. 6). Indeed, our bodies con-strain or facilitate social action and thereforemediate and influence social practices. It is notsurprising that it was through masculinitychallenges—that is, when both body and gender



became highly salient as organizing principlesof interaction—and subsequent bodily andsexual subordination (Zack) or superordination(Hugh) that choice and behavior becamefocused in the specific direction of sexual vio-lence (Zack) or assaultive violence (Hugh). Themasculine social structure of the school eachboy attended defined both physical and sexualperformance as essential criteria for “doingmasculinity.” Thus, these dominant criteria—within the context of a body either able orunable to construct such criteria—directed theboys’ ultimate choices of a specific type of vio-lence and victimization. Nevertheless, both boysviewed their bodies as instruments—weapons inthe service of a desire to dominate and controlanother body through a particular type of inter-personal violence. Accordingly, these two casestudies help us understand the relationshipamong the body, masculinities, and differingtypes of violence.

Although not generalizable, these two casestudies provide additional justification for struc-tured action theory. It was the social structuralpower relations among differing masculinitiesat school that made the masculinity challengesand differing forms of violence possible, butnot necessarily inevitable. The agency of Hughand Zack, their interactions within that structure,and their ultimate conscious choices made themasculinity challenges and interpersonal violencehappen—which, in turn, reproduced that mas-culine power social structure. Indeed, one waygender is built into institutions—such as schools—is through hierarchical divisions of masculinepower. This particular power hierarchy was aregular and patterned form of interaction thatconstrained and channeled how the two boysconceptualized and chose to practice masculin-ity. The school masculine power relationsbecame a constitutive principle of their masculine“identity” through being adopted as a personalproject. Thus, the masculine personality of Hughand Zack existed only as social actions fashionedin accordance with the school power hierarchy.Hugh reproduced a specific form of hegemonicmasculinity through assaultive violence. Zack,although choosing to passively maintain his sub-ordinate status within the confines of the school,actively attempted to invalidate that status forhimself through sexual violence at home.

In closing, let me suggest some avenues forfuture research.

First, the current movement in criminologytoward conceptualizing the interrelationshipamong gender, race, class, sexualities, andcrime is an important direction for futureresearch. Structured action theory provides oneway to examine that interrelationship. Otherswill emerge. Moreover, we need a variety ofmethodological approaches, from historical anddocumentary research to ethnographies and lifehistories, to examine how gender, race, class,and sexuality differently affect crime.

Second, I do not suggest that the body isalways salient to the commission of crime.Thus, we should investigate empirically whenthe body becomes salient to crime and when itdoes not. In other words, an important questionfor future research is, What is the relationshipamong the body, masculinities, and crime?

Third, because Connell (2000) correctlynotes that “gender is social practice that con-stantly refers to bodies and what bodies do, it isnot social practice reduced to the body” (p. 27),it follows that masculinities occasionally areenacted by girls and women. Consequently, animportant research direction is the relationshipbetween masculinities and crime by girls andwomen. Indeed, Jody Miller’s (2001) importantbook One of the Guys points in this direction byshowing how some gang girls consider the ganga “masculine enterprise” in which they partici-pate in practices similar to those of the boys.5

Fourth, a new area of criminological studyis globalization and crime. Criminologicalresearch on gender can contribute to this subjectmatter by examining how masculinities arerelated to crime in different societies and howthey are linked to historical and contemporaryconditions of globalization. Moreover, under-standing masculinities and crime in industrial-ized societies (such as the United States) can beenhanced through a conceptualization of howglobalization affects social conditions and thuscrime in such societies. Simon Winlow’s (2001)book, Badfellas, which examines the changes inmasculinities and crime in the northeast ofEngland since the 1880s and how those changesare related to globalization, has initiated theresearch in this area.

Fifth, how gender is constructed by criminaljustice personnel is essential to understandingsocial control in industrialized societies. Jurikand Martin (2001), for example, have beenprominent in this regard by showing specifically



how the transformation of policing andcorrections into professional occupationsevinces a modification of hegemonic masculin-ity from being interpersonally and physicallyaggressive to wielding control through technicalexpertise. Moreover, in the important new bookPrison Masculinities, Sabo et al. (2001) demon-strate, through the words of prisoners and aca-demics, the varieties of masculinities constructedwithin that closed social setting.

Sixth, postmodern feminist criminologistshave disclosed the importance of discourseanalysis to the understanding of cultural con-ceptions of gender and crime (Collier, 1998;Young, 1996). The results of these researchesare important, but it is essential to recognize,as stated earlier, that discourse is the result ofpractice. The work of Gray Cavender (1999)is prominent in this regard. For example, in“Detecting Masculinity,” Cavender (1999)shows how masculinities are constructed differ-ently in feature films by reason of historicalcontext—1940s versus 1980s—and discoursesthat male actors practice as “detectives” in eachof the films. We need more research that is sim-ilarly sensitive to how practice in particularsocial settings constructs discourse.

Finally, it is important to examine why somepeople engage in crime and others do not. A sig-nificant task, then, for future research is to dis-cover what type of masculinity people constructwho do not commit crime and how it is differentfrom the gender of those who do commit crime.

In short, I recommend these as the chief areasof focus for those working in the area of mas-culinities and crime. All such studies seek toengage the demanding empirical inquiries thatconfidently will lead to theoretical reappraisaland, inevitably, to advances in theory.

NOTES

1. For a postmodern position on masculinitiesand crime, see Collier (1998). For a critique of thisposition, see Messerschmidt (1999).

2. Either Jefferson does not know about thiswork or he rejects it simply because Chodorow iscritical of discourse analysis.

3. Crime as Structured Action discusses numer-ous cases in which race, class, and masculinitiesaffect crime. Additionally, the chapter on “lynchers”is unique in criminology through its examination ofthe role “whiteness” may play in crime.

4. “Violence to solve problems” clearly is adiscourse but is rooted—for Hugh and Zack—in thestructured actions of home and school.

5. See Messerschmidt (2004) for an examinationof the similarities and differences of violent and non-violent masculinities by both boys and girls.

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13MASCULINITIES IN EDUCATION

JON SWAIN

213

Boys negotiate and perform differentversions of masculinity in a range ofsocial and cultural situations, such as

families, neighborhoods, schools, sport, popularmedia and culture, commodified style cultures,labor markets, and so on, and each of these sitesoffers boys ways of constructing appropriateways of being male and possibilities for formingviews of themselves and relations with others.The meanings, ideas, attitudes, and beliefs thatare generated in each area interrelate and arecarried over to the others, but this chapter setsout to consider the education system and, in par-ticular, how school processes and the meaningsand practices found within the school settingcontribute to, and help form, young boys’ mas-culinities. Many researchers writing on adoles-cent boys in secondary school have played downthe role of schooling in the formation of mas-culinities for men (see, for example, Connell,1989; Walker, 1988). Indeed, for Connell (1989),the “childhood family, the adult workplaceor sexual relationships (including marriage)”(p. 301) are more important influences, but,as Skelton (2001) persuasively points out,these last two areas have far less immediaterelevance for younger children, and so it ispossible to conclude that the school plays arelatively more prominent role in the con-struction of identity for boys in primary andearly secondary schooling.

This chapter argues that schooling affordsboys a number of different opportunities to con-struct different masculinities that draw on thelocalized resources and strategies available. Iexamine current theories of masculinities andthe powerful influence of boys’ peer groups anddiscuss issues of subordination and homopho-bia, boys’ relations with girls, and the place ofthe body in the enactment of masculinity.

The English public schools of the early 19thcentury were set up with the express intentionof teaching boys about how to be male and howto become a (Christian) man (Connell, 2000;Heward, 1988). Until the last 50 years or so,these schools were unconcerned with meritoc-racy or academic qualifications and saw theirmain function as the preparation of a high pro-portion of their pupils for the armed services orthe financial world of the city. Schooling in for-merly British colonies has also been profoundlyinfluenced by English models. In countries suchas Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the UnitedStates, India, and South Africa, systems ofschooling (at least for the elite) were consciouslybased on the English public school design, andthis produced boys in the image of the metropol-itan gentlemen with all the failings of misogyny,homophobia, and emotional repression (Epstein,1998a; Morrell, 1994). Mass systems of school-ing for the indigenous or colonized people werealso modeled on metropolitan designs. In some


places, educational experiences (such as the“Bantu Education” introduced in South Africain 1955) were unfulfilling and violent, withan authoritarian pedagogy underwritten withcorporal punishment. This produced patternsof masculinity that promoted toughness, genderinequality, and repression (Hyslop, 1999;Morrell, 2001).

Despite the fact that schooling has, histori-cally, been connected with gender, the issue ofgender in schools was largely ignored until thesecond wave of feminism in the 1980s (Rendel,1985), when it came onto the agenda as anequity issue. Skelton (2001) points out that earlystudies of boys and schooling in the late 1970stended to emphasize gender as differencebetween girls and boys, and it has only beensince the late 1980s that researchers have begunto focus on the multiple differences within eachgender group.1 Since then, there has been agrowing body of research into the effects andimpact of masculinities in educational settingsacross both phases of schooling,2 although themajority of these studies tends to focus onadolescent males in secondary schools. Thesetexts provide us with a series of well-argued the-oretical frameworks that allow us to both under-stand and explore how masculinities suffuseschool regimes and recognize how schoolingnot only reproduces but also produces genderidentities, although not always in ways that areeither straightforward or transparent. Somewriters describe schools as a “masculinityfactory” (Heward, 1996, p. 39), or as “masculinity-making devices” (Connell, 1989, p. 291; Haywood& Mac an Ghaill, 1996, p. 59), where boys learnthat there are a number of different, and oftencompeting, ways of being a boy and that someof these are more cherished and prestigious, andtherefore more powerful, than others (Kenway &Willis, 1998).

We live in an unequal society, and schoolingis a political issue that plays a role in widersocial developments. Schools exist, of course,within their own structural contexts, includingthe structure of their national education system,and these pressures have a profound influenceon schools’ policies and organizations, as“macro” interactions are enacted on the “micro”stage. For instance, in poorer countries, manyschools are severely underresourced, access canbe limited, and absenteeism high. Schooling israrely free, making it difficult for lower income

groups to attain competitive levels of education,and it is also gender biased in the sense thatboys are likely to get more schooling, and beeducated to higher levels, than girls (Pong,1999). In 1999, 120 million primary school–agechildren were not in school, 53% of them girlsand 47% of them boys (UNICEF, 2001, p. 10).Schools may also have a curriculum hostile tolocal knowledge and culture, and the labor mar-ket has a greater purchase on what is taught andon how the schools function. Indeed, in manydeveloping countries (and in some industrial-ized countries as well), child labor is a seriousproblem that severely limits children’s educa-tional opportunities.3

DISCURSIVE FIELDS IN U.K. EDUCATION

In the case of the United Kingdom, the centraltenet of the postwar educational consensus wasthat the function of the education system was forthe development of economic growth, to regulateand maintain the status quo, and to produce citi-zens fit to take their place in society; but therehas also been a movement that emphasizesschooling for the purpose of delivering emanci-pation and producing social change toward afairer, more equitable society (see Gordon,Holland, & Lahelma, 2000; Haywood & Mac anGhaill, 1996). These expectations can overlapand be contradictory, but in recent years, therehas been a fundamental restructuring of U.K.state schooling; in the New Right agenda thatcame to the fore in the early 1980s, the schoolhas found itself located in and incorporated intoa competitive marketplace (Power & Whitty,1999).4 When I came into teaching in 1979, myfirst school was still dominated by the child-centered discourses popular in the late 1960sthrough the late 1970s. There was an ideologicallanguage that Alexander (1988) refers to as “pri-maryspeak” (p. 148), and it was used as a powerbase for heads and advisers. It exerted a subtlebut irresistible pressure, and you needed to learnand use its slogans and shibboleths to gain legit-imacy and, dare I say, promotion. Some of themost salient pedagogic terms were (in alphabet-ical order) activities, apprenticeship, choice,cooperation, curiosity, developmental, display,facilitator, fascination, flexibility, freedom,group work, growth, in depth, integrated day,5

natural, nurturing, Piaget, potential, progress,



quality, stage of development, understanding,and workshop.

Twenty years later and schools are nowpervaded by an alternative and powerful dis-course of competitive corporate management.The dominant educational phrases of the late1990s through the early 21st century are “schooleffectiveness” and “raising school standards”(Weiner, Arnot, & David, 1997). Again, it may beinteresting to examine more closely some of theother terms and phrases that have infiltrated thelanguage of education and schooling, takingnote of the “bellicose” language and imagery(Raphael Reed, 1998). For example (and again inalphabetical order), achievement, accountability,action zones, assessment, attainment, best prac-tice, boys’ underachievement, comparisons, com-petition, effectiveness, evaluations, examinations,hit squads, improvement, inspection, learningopportunities, learning outcomes, measurement,monitoring, National Curriculum, OFSTED,6

outcomes, performance, performance-relatedpay, planning, results, rigorous, SATs,7 setting,shame and blame, standards, streaming, targetsetting, testing, 3 Rs,8 whole-class teaching,whole-school approach, and zero tolerance.9

Under the current discourses of “school effec-tiveness” and “raising standards,” Pollard andFiler (1999) point out that the assumption is thatif standards are to rise, the curriculum must betaught more effectively, and there is little attemptto engage with pupils as learners per se. All thetalk is of “better teaching” and a “better deliveryof the curriculum,” and in this account, the pupilis like a commodity with a relative value. Pollardand Filer (1999) contend that “education . . . issomething which is done to children, not withchildren, and still less by children” (p. 21).

SCHOOLS AS INSTITUTIONS

Hansot and Tyack (1998) maintain that tounderstand gender in school, we need to “thinkinstitutionally” (see also Salisbury & Jackson,1996). For Connell (1996), “gender is embed-ded in the institutional arrangements by whicha school functions” (p. 213), which Kessler,Ashenden, Connell, and Dowsett (1985) refer toas the school’s gender regime:

This may be defined as the pattern of practicesthat constructs various kinds of masculinity and

femininity among staff and students, orders themin terms of prestige and power, and constructs asexual division of labor within the institution. Thegender regime is a state of play rather than a per-manent condition. It can be changed deliberatelyor otherwise, but is no less powerful in its effectson pupils for that. It confronts them as a socialfact, which they have to come to terms withsomehow. (p. 42)

Schools are invariably hierarchical andcreate and sustain relations of domination andsubordination; each orders certain practices interms of power and prestige as it defines its owndistinct gender regime. Although schools arelocated and shaped by specific sociocultural,politicoeconomic, and historical conditions,individual personnel, reproduced rules, routinesand expectations, and the school’s own use ofresources and space will all have a profoundimpact on (and can make a substantive differencein) the way in which young boys (and girls) liveand experience their lives at school. This meansthat there are different options and opportunitiesto perform different types of masculinity in eachschool; in other words, there are different alter-natives, or possibilities, of doing boy that arecontingent to each school setting, using themeanings and practices available. Some of theseways will be easier (or more open) to achievethan others, some less easy (or more restricted),and others almost impossible to access (closed).For example, sporty types of masculinity will beeasier to achieve and perform in a school thatsanctions competitive sport than in a school thatbans, say, football; the opportunity of accruingprowess through wearing the latest trainingshoes will be virtually eliminated in a schoolthat enforces a strict uniform policy.

MASCULINIZING PRACTICES

To understand the range of processes and prac-tices involving the ways that boys are able toconstruct their masculine identities, someresearchers have identified and differentiatedbetween the official or formal and the unoffi-cial or informal cultures of the school (see,for example, Connell, Ashenden, Kessler, &Dowsett, 1982; Gordon et al., 2000; Pollard,1985), although they define them in slightly dif-ferent ways. These two layers are intertwined in

Masculinities in Education • 215


everyday school life and are not fixed but,rather, messy and shifting. The formal schoolculture is laid out in documents of the schooland state and includes the teaching and learn-ing; the pedagogy; the disciplinary apparatus;and the policy, organizational, and administra-tive structures. The informal school culture is notintended to be in binary opposition, for it isdifferent from, rather than a reaction to, and isin continual negotiation with, the formal schoolculture. Although it also has its own particularhierarchy, rules, and criteria of evaluation andjudgement, and many of its parameters are setby the formal regime, it has a whole life andmeaning all its own: It includes not only therelations and interactions between the pupils,but the informal relations between pupils andteachers outside of the instructional relationshipand relations between teacher and teacher andbetween pupils, teachers, and other groups inthe school, such as support staff of various typesand descriptions.

We also need to examine how particular setsof practices and the available story lines withinschools are articulated and related to genderrelations, and we will find that some are moreobvious and conspicuous than others. Betweenthem, Connell (1996) and Gilbert and Gilbert(1998) identify four key areas of “masculinisingpractices,” which are concentrated at particularsites and include management, policy, and orga-nizational practices (including discipline); thecurriculum; sport and games; and teacher-and-pupil relations. Perhaps we should also addpupil-to-pupil relations, as the closed culturalcircle of the peer group has become increasinglyrecognized as a key area of influence in mas-culinity making.

School policies and organization, and themanagement practices that constitute them, area key part of the gender regime and are visiblein such practices as academic competition andhierarchy, constant testing, team games, a strictcode of dress or uniform, divisions of labor, pat-terns of authority, a strict discipline (often frommale teachers), and so on. In many countries,schools still rely on harsh, authoritarian systemsof discipline, which undoubtedly influenceconstructions of masculinity. For instance, anattempt in 1996 to ban corporal punishment inSouth Africa failed to end its use in all schools.Although there are signs that more consensualmodels of discipline are being introduced,

corporal punishment continues to be widelyused in the township schools, particularlyamong male learners, where its use in the homegives it legitimacy (Morrell, 2001).

The relations between teachers and pupilshave been thoroughly documented: Teachersmake gender distinction a central element ofpupil identity, and it has been shown how theyare similar to parents in that they tend to treatboys and girls according to gendered stereo-types (see Alloway, 1995). There is a tendencyfor the questions they ask, the manner of theirresponses, and the systems they use for rewardsand sanctions to be influenced by assump-tions about gender differences. For instance,Walkerdine (1989) shows how teachers aremore likely to attribute boys’ academic successto their natural ability but girls’ to hard work,and Cohen (1998) has traced the history of thispredilection back to the 17th century. Moreover,as Haywood and Mac an Ghaill (1996) pointout, styles of teaching are also affected by con-nections of masculinity with power, authority,and competence, and they argue that “signs ofweakness” are often associated with femininity.

The curriculum itself is the product of partic-ular political developments, which need to belocated historically and with regard to particularinterest groups and ideologies. Many writers(see, for example, Connell, 1996; Gilbert &Gilbert, 1998; Gordon et al., 2000; Haywood &Mac an Ghaill, 1996; Salisbury & Jackson,1996) have pointed out that the curriculum canbe seen as an area of strategic importance in theproduction of masculinities. With its institution-alized patterns of knowledge, the curriculumis associated with the Foucauldian disciplinarytechniques of hierarchical (academic) classi-fication, normalizing judgments, and the exam-ination, and masculinities emerge throughthe pupils’ relationship with it. The curriculumoffers boys a resource to use in developing par-ticular patterns of masculinity through a rangeof responses to it (Haywood & Mac an Ghaill,1996), and although many are able to use it toestablish status through teacher approval andtest results, some boys actively resist schoollearning and expectations and look for alter-native resources of prestige to validate theirmasculine identities (Connell, 1989). Practicesof “setting” and “streaming” also produceexplicit divisions between pupils, thereby creat-ing different types of masculinity, and so the



ways in which the pupils are organized inrelation to the curriculum are at least as impor-tant as, if not more important than, the curriculumcontent itself (Skelton, 2001).

Another site is sport and games, andeven though there has recently been a generalreduction in the amount of school time given tosport and games in the United Kingdom, theystill have a great significance in the cultural lifeof many schools, engaging the school popula-tion as a whole in the “celebration and repro-duction of the dominant codes of gender”(Connell, 1996, p. 217). School sport is notmeant to be some kind of innocent pastime butis used to create a “top dog” model of masculin-ity that many boys try to aim for and live up to(Salisbury & Jackson, 1996, p. 205). Typically,top sporty boys have a higher status, particularlyin the informal peer group. Sport is also inextri-cably connected with the body. Boys learn aboutthe need to exert bodily power and the necessityof hardening their bodies to prepare them forphysical challenges and confrontations. Schoolsport embodies violent practices, and thelanguage is often connected to the languageand metaphor of war (Gilbert & Gilbert, 1998;Salisbury & Jackson, 1996).

Thus we can see that the school’s role in theformation of masculinity needs to be understoodin two ways, for as well as providing the settingand physical space in which the embodiedactions and agencies of pupils and adults takeplace, its own structures and practices areinvolved as institutional agents that producethese “masculinizing practices.” In some ways,the coeducational system makes the differencesbetween gender even more conspicuous than insingle-sex schooling, and these differences canbe seen in terms of segregated toilets and chang-ing facilities, school uniforms or codes of dress,practices such as lining boys and girls up sepa-rately, designated seating arrangements in class,and so on. However, we should not forget thatmany educational practices actually ameliorategender differences, and many are as much aforce for gender equity as they are for inequity.By restricting pupils’ choice, the NationalCurriculum has helped reduce gender differenti-ation: Boys and girls share the same timetable inthe same classroom, and they follow the samedaily routines. As Connell (2000) says, “schoolsmay be having a gender effect without produc-ing gender difference” (p. 152).

THE POWER OF THE PEER GROUP

Some of the most important contributions to theunderstandings of masculinity in schools havecome from a series of ethnographic studies ofboys’ own cultures and their interpersonal rela-tions at the micro level. The boys’ peer group isone of the most important features of school asa social setting, for peer-group cultures are alsoagents in the making of masculinities; theyhave a fundamental influence on the construc-tion of masculine identities, and there are con-stant pressures on individuals to perform andbehave to the expected group norms (see, forexample, Adler & Adler, 1998; Connell, 2000;Connolly, 1998; Gilbert & Gilbert, 1998;Harris, 1998; Kenway, 1997; Mac an Ghaill,1994; Pollard, 1985; Walker, 1988; Woods,1990). Each peer group has its own culturalidentity, which can be said to refer to a “wayof life” (Dubbs & Whitney, 1980, p. 27) withshared values and interests, providing boyswith a series of collective meanings of what itis to be a boy. Harris (1998) argues that the peergroup actually has more influence on childrenthan their parents in the formation of their iden-tity, of who they are now, and who they willbecome and is the main conduit by which cul-tures are passed from one generation to another.Thus the construction of masculinity is, primar-ily, a collective enterprise, and it is the peergroup that is the main bearer of gender defini-tions, rather than individual boys (Connell,2000; Lesko, 2000). This may help to explainwhy some boys, who may be disruptive andtroublesome when part of a group, are sensitiveand amenable when on their own.

For many pupils, the safest position to aimfor in the formal school culture is to be “aver-age,” for although, in some schools, boys haveto be careful not to show they are working toohard, they do not want to be thought of as dupes,and this can require careful negotiation. Inthe informal pupil culture, the aim is to be the“same as the others,” for this provides a certainprotection from teasing and, perhaps, even sub-ordination (Gordon et al., 2000). In fact, it is aparadox that although pupils attempt to con-struct their own individual identity, no oneaspires to be, or can afford to be, too different,and they are conscious that they need to be “nor-mal” and “ordinary” within the strict codes setby their own peer group.



One of the most urgent dimensions of schoollife for boys is the need to gain popularity and,in particular, status (see Adler & Adler, 1998;Corsaro, 1979; Weber, 1946): Indeed, the searchto achieve status is also the search to achievean acceptable form of masculinity. Boys’ notionof status comes from having a certain positionwithin the peer group hierarchy that becomesrelevant when it is seen in relation to others. It isnot something that is given but is often the out-come of intricate and intense maneuvering andhas to be earned through negotiation and sus-tained through performance, sometimes on analmost daily basis. Ultimately, a boy’s positionin the peer group is determined by the array ofsocial, cultural, physical, intellectual, andeconomic resources that he is able to draw onand accumulate.

Although some of the most esteemedresources will generally be an embodied formof physicality (sportiness, toughness, etc.),others may also be intellectual (general aca-demic capability and achievement), economic(money), social and linguistic (interpersonal),or cultural (in touch with the latest fashions,music, TV programs, computer expertise, etc.).Of course, ultimately, these resources are allsymbolic in that their power and influencederives from their effect and from what theyare perceived to mean and stand for. Theseresources will also always exist within determi-nate historical and spatial conditions; moreover,the resources that are available will vary withindifferent settings, and some may be easier todraw on than others at particular times and inparticular places. This means that the boys whouse a set of resources and interactional skillsto establish high status in the dominant pupilhierarchy in one school will not necessarily beable to sustain this position in another.

LEARNING TO BE A SCHOOLBOY

In many parts of the world, pupils’ experienceof school is unfulfilling, inhospitable, andunremitting. Far from being safe places of learn-ing, schools can be sites of bullying, sexualharassment, abuse, and homophobia, and, withinstitutional, sanctioned violence in the formof corporal punishment, boys’ masculinity canoften reflect this experience (Hyslop, 1999;Morrell, 2001).10

However, wherever children go to school,they will learn how to become “pupils,” andthis involves acquiring a considerable variety ofskills. These include understanding the basicfeatures of the pedagogic process, the hierarchi-cal relations within the school, and the appro-priate rules and conventions outside as wellas inside the classroom. Pollard (1985) main-tains that the two major sources of support forpupils come from their peers and their teachers,and to enjoy their time at school, pupils need tonegotiate and manage skillfully “a satisfactorybalance between the expectations of these twosources” (Pollard & Filer, 1996, p. 309), whichoften exert contradictory pressures. Many boysexperience a tension between what the teachers(representing the school) expect from them aspupils and the expectations that they have them-selves about what they think it means to be aboy. Woods (1990, p. 131) points out that thiscan involve a delicate balance of affiliation or“knife-edging” as boys learn to become school-boys, but boys’ (and girls’) options and strate-gies in their relations to the formal schoolauthority are actually quite restricted: They caneither conform and comply, challenge andresist, or, like the majority, they can pragmati-cally negotiate a path that best satisfies theirinterests (see, for example, Connell et al., 1982;Gilbert & Gilbert, 1998; Pollard, 1985; Pollard& Filer, 1996; Woods, 1990).

Most boys will actually employ more thanone strategy at different times and in differentcontexts, especially when they are with differ-ent teachers, and the majority forms a prag-matic accommodation with the formal regime(Gilbert & Gilbert, 1998), negotiating whatPollard (1985) refers to as a “viable modusvivendi” (p. 194). Although boys tend to tellresearchers that they go to school to have agood time and to be with their friends, manyare aware that, ultimately, school means doingschoolwork, and they are able to balance thesetwo commitments most of the time. Certainly,my own research into 10- and 11-year-old boysduring their last year of primary school (Swain,2001) revealed that many boys understood thatgood teacher reports and examination successwere a desirable requirement for secondaryschool and future careers. Although many ofthe boys told me that they enjoyed most oftheir classwork, the great majority said thatthey worked hard for instrumental reasons:



They wanted to get on and do well in theirSATs and recognized that there was a linkbetween good qualifications and job and careerprospects with their material remuneration.In other words, they had a utilitarian view ofschool and used it as a resource that provided ameans to an end.

Some boys told me that they did not derive anyenjoyment from their work, although in this nextinterchange there is also a hint of the parentalinfluence on their superficial conformity:

JS: Do you think you need to pass exams toget a good job?

Vinny: Yeah.

Hussein: Yeah, definitely.

Vinny: It will go on your record. . . .

Hussein: If you get 2, 2, 2 [levels in the SATs] andyou get expelled after, you end up being arubbish man or unemployed.

Vinny: That’s what my mum says.

JS: So you really need to work? How much ofthe work do you do because you have topass the SATs and how much do you dobecause you enjoy it?

Hussein: Basically we don’t enjoy any of it, we justget it because we’re going to get some-where with it in life. . . . We’re goingto get a job, earn a living. (Swain, 2001,p. 212)

Although it can be possible (depending onthe school culture) for boys to work hard andgain academic success without damaging theirmasculine status in primary school, it seemsharder to achieve this balance when they moveon to secondary school, where constructionsof masculinity and femininity become increas-ingly polarized around sport and work (Frosh,Phoenix, & Pattman, 2002). Although learningat primary school is also often feminized andequated with being a sissy, this becomes farmore pronounced between 11 and 16 years old,at which point some boys’ constructions as “reallads” are formed in relation to the feminizedworld of schoolwork and are characterizedby toughness, sporty prowess, and resistanceto teachers and education (Frosh et al., 2002;Jackson, 1998; see also Connell, 1989; Mac anGhaill, 1994; Martino, 1999). Although someboys manage their academic careers carefully,

avoiding an open commitment to work andoften being able to negotiate a “cool cleverness”that allows them to work without being teasedand victimized (Bleach, 1996), in general,securing male esteem and being attentive toschoolwork are regarded as fundamentallyincompatible.

Of course, this is hardly a new phenomenon,and, indeed, those boys who resist schoolworkand reject school values are the most studiedgroup of masculinities in schools (Delamont,2000). See, for example, Willis (1977) with the“lads,” Kessler et al. (1985) with the “bloods,”Walker (1988) with the “footballers” and the“competitors,” Mac an Ghaill (1994) with the“macho lads,” Parker (1996a) with the “hardboys,” and Sewell (1997) with the “rebels.”Although some of these groups are less hostileto school than others, they all pursue a continu-ous, belligerent and recalcitrant style of con-duct. One of the most comprehensive picturesof this type of masculinity is Willis’s (1977)study, and, indeed, Gilbert and Gilbert (1998)argue that it has acted as a prototype forothers.11 The “lads” renounced the mental forthe manual, and the teachers, who had littleknowledge of the world the boys respected,were dismissed as “wankers.” Nearly 20 yearslater, Mac an Ghaill’s (1994) influential studysaw a group of boys that he called the “macholads” who felt dominated, alienated, and belit-tled and consequently consciously decided toreject the school system (the curriculum, rules,and regulations) in favor of being tough and“hard,” which for them involved “fighting,fucking, and football.”

We also need to be aware that lying behindthese masculine identities is the powerful vari-able of social class. The middle classes havelong recognized the link between examinationsuccess and improved career opportunities andgenerally have higher expectations of accom-plishment.12 Parental dispositions to educationare important, and these are evident in a gener-ally more calculative attitude toward long-termcareer goals from boys in middle class schools,who also tend to show greater levels of supportof the school authority. Indeed, the inequality ofattainment between social classes is one of thelongest established trends in education: Putsimply, on average, the higher a child’s socialclass, the greater his or her attainments arelikely to be (Gillborn & Mirza, 2000, p. 18).



SOCIAL THEORIES OF MASCULINITY

In every setting, such as a school, there will bea hierarchy of masculinities, and each will gen-erally have its own dominant, or hegemonic,form of masculinity, which gains ascendanceover and above others; it becomes “culturallyexalted” (Connell, 1995) and personifies what itmeans to be a “real” boy. Many academic papersand empirical studies use the concept of hege-monic masculinity (Carrigan, Connell, & Lee,1985), and within the last decade it has emergedas a central reference point for understandingmasculinity and male dominance;13 indeed,Kerfoot and Whitehead (1998) argue that theconcept has gained such an ascendancy in aca-demic writings that it has come to represent itsown hegemony. However, the inherent weak-nesses and limitations of the notion of hege-monic masculinity have been raised by anumber of writers (see, for example, Donaldson,1993; Edley & Wetherell, 1995; Haywood &Mac an Ghaill, 1996; Kerfoot & Whitehead,1998; MacInnes, 1998; Whitehead, 1999).Whitehead (1999) argues that hegemonic mas-culinity can only explain so much, that itsown legitimacy becomes weakened once themultiplicity of masculinities and identities arestressed, and that it is unable to reveal “thecomplex patterns of inculcation and resis-tance which constitute everyday social action”(Whitehead, 1999, p. 58).14

Nevertheless, and despite Connell’s recon-textualization of hegemony from macro classrelations into the micro interpersonal relationsin the school, I still find many of his argumentson hegemonic masculinity highly persuasiveand regard it as a major analytical device, use-ful in conceptualizing masculine hierarchies.The hegemonic masculine form is not necessar-ily the most common type on view, and may becontested, but although it is often underwrittenby the threat of violence, it generally exerts itsinfluence by being able to define “the norm,”and many boys find that they have to fit into,and conform to, its demands. Most signifi-cantly, it prefers to work by implicit consent,for, after all, the easiest way to exercise powerand to gain advantage over others is for thedominated to be unaware of, and therefore becomplicit in, their subordination. In manyways, the less resistance, the more effective thehegemony. The hegemonic form may differ in

each school, and, depending on the featuresof the formal culture, it may be either morestable or unstable, more visible or invisible,more passive or violent, more conformist orresistant to the formal school authority, and,although some forms may be created by schoolpractices, others will be invented by the boysthemselves. However, despite not being a“fixed character type” (in the sense of characterbeing impervious to change), the hegemonicform generally mobilizes around a number ofsociocultural constructs such as physical andathletic skill, strength, fitness, control, compet-itiveness, culturally acclaimed knowledge,discipline, courage, self-reliance, and adven-turousness. These attributes are also indicativeof a masculinity that is associated with, orimplicated with, violence (Hearn, 1998; Mills,2001). Indeed, in many settings, the features ofthe hegemonic form are actually quite narrow,and this can be a problem for boys wishing toconstruct alternative forms. In fact, the domi-nant patterns of masculinity are often linkedto the physical capital of the body, and for manyboys, the physical performative aspect of mas-culinity is seen as the most acceptable anddesirable way of being male (Gilbert & Gilbert,1998). I will return to a discussion on embodi-ment later in the chapter.

Of course, there will also be other patterns ofmasculinity that are actually produced at thesame time as the dominant or hegemonic form(Connell, 2000). The number of boys actuallyable to practice the hegemonic pattern contain-ing every feature is usually quite small, andthere will often be other aspirant forms of mas-culinity that are peripheral, or liminal, and areconfined to the margins. The boys who repre-sent this form would like to be like the leadingboys but lack a sufficient number of resourcesto be fully accepted. Indeed, in my ownresearch, the boys that I have classified exhibit-ing this form could often be seen hangingaround the edges of the dominant group watch-ing the action; in the term used by Adler andAdler (1998), they were “wannabes.” There arealso other boys who join in with, and are closelyconnected to, the boys in the top group; theyembody many of the qualities and traits of the“idealized” form without ever quite being oneof the “frontline troops” (Connell, 1995, p. 79).Unlike the wannabes, not all of these boys wantto be leaders, but they are complicit with the



dominant form and content to benefit frommany of the advantages that stem from it, or, inConnell’s (1995) term, its “patriarchal dividend”(p. 79).

However, just because there is a culturallyauthoritative form of masculinity within eachsetting, it does not automatically follow thatall boys (or men) will attempt to engagewith, aspire to, or wish to challenge it. Some,of course, are simply unable to do so. Forexample, they may have a deficit of the neces-sary physical attributes and resources (in termsof body coordination, shape, strength, force,speed, etc.). However, this does not necessarilymean that these boys (or men) are inevitablysubordinated, or that they have any desire tosubordinate others. These alternative masculineways of being a boy coexist alongside the dom-inant form and have been recognized anddescribed by other researchers as being “softer”and more “transgressive” (see Frosh et al.,2002; Pattman, Frosh, & Phoenix, 1998); I haveclassified them as “personalized” (Swain, 2001).In one of the schools in my own research (anindependent, private school), the hegemonicform was constructed around the ideal of thetop sporty boy. However, I found that themajority of the boys had formed themselvesinto a series of small, well-established friend-ship networks with boys who had an array ofsimilar interests, such as in computer games;they were popular within their own peer cliquesand were generally nonexclusive and egali-tarian, without any clearly defined leader.Although they may have been pathologized bya few of the top sporty boys and even, at leastimplicitly, by the formal school culture, theyposed no threat to the hegemonic regime and sowere generally accepted and not picked on byany of their peers. Although their nonoppositioncan be seen as an expression of consent to thehegemonic form, in many ways, they coexistedalongside the hegemonic form. I found no evi-dence that they had any feelings of envy towardthe sporty boys, and they appeared to have nodesire to challenge them. In many ways, thesepersonalized groups seemed to have a highdegree of social security and regarded them-selves as different rather than inferior. Theywere not complicit in any subordination; nordid they, in general, feel an imperative to sub-ordinate anyone else. If, at this school, topsporty boy equated with “real” boy, these other

boys seemed to feel no less “real” for not beingable to demonstrate sporting excellence.

SUBORDINATION

In direct contrast to hegemonic masculinity aresubordinate modes of masculinity, which arepositioned outside the legitimate forms of male-ness as represented in the hegemonic form andwhich are controlled, oppressed, and subjugated.As all forms of masculinities are constructed incontrast to being feminine, those that are posi-tioned at the bottom of the masculine hierarchywill be symbolically assimilated to femininityand tend to have much in common with feminineforms (Gilbert & Gilbert, 1998). The variousstrategies of subordination used in schools aregenerally constructed under the two genericheadings of difference and deficit (or deficient).Being different from the majority is often anunenviable position for boys (and girls) to be in.The powerful pressures to conformity that char-acterize peer group cultures mean that a boy hasonly to look, and be, slightly different from thenorm to be accorded inferior status. Under therubric of difference, boys can be subordinatedfor associating too closely with the formalschool regime (such as by working too hard,being too compliant or overpolite, by speakingtoo formally or correctly or being “too posh,” orby looking different—aberrant physical appear-ances and differences in body language arekeenly scrutinized and commented on. Themajor material bodily difference often comesfrom the impression of being overweight, andthe data from my own study are littered with dis-paraging references directed to boys and girlsbeing “a big fat blob,” “fat boy,” “too fat,” “sofat,” “really fat,” and so on. It is a serious handi-cap to boys’ (or girls’) attempts to establish peergroup status, and boys need to use other strate-gies and resources to compensate for it.

As we have already seen, boys have to workhard at learning the appropriate peer groupnorms, and to be included, they have to be whatThornton (1997) calls “in the know”: that is,they need to be able to talk about the right sub-jects, use the right speech (using the same styleand vocabulary), wear the right clothes, play theright playground games, and move (sit, walk,run, catch, throw, kick, hit, etc.) in the “right”way, the way that being a boy demands.



Under the heading of deficit, subordinationcan come through perceived exhibitions ofimmature and babyish behavior (doing “silly”things, playing infantile games, or associatingtoo closely with younger children); displayinga deficit or deficiency of toughness (such ascrying, showing fear, not sticking up for yourself,or acting “soft”); being too passive and gener-ally not active enough during both school sportsand informal playground games; and showing adeficit, or lack, of effort (usually connected to asporting context). Boys are also subordinatedfor the perception that they are deficient in cer-tain culturally acclaimed traits, particularly withembodied forms of physicality and athleticism(such as skill, strength, fitness, speed, etc.) andin areas of locally defined class norms of aca-demic achievement (which may include pupilson the school’s register for “special” educationalneeds). Subordination can also accrue fromdeficiency in locally celebrated knowledge—forexample, in the latest culturally hot topics, suchas a TV program; in the technical language offootball; or in unfamiliarity with the latest com-puter games—and this can render a boy silentand be used as a marker of difference. It is alsoimportant for a boy to be able to show a com-mitment to his adolescent future by being “inthe know” regarding the meaning of certainswear words and matters of sexuality. Some ofthese themes are illustrated in the followingexchange, taken from my own study, in whichtwo boys are explaining to me why they havebeen calling another boy, Timothy, a girl.

Sinclair: He doesn’t like football, he doesn’t likeany sports apart from golf . . .

Calvin: He’s different from everyone else.

JS: Yeah, but—

Derek: He’s just one person . . .

Calvin: And he likes to be by himself very often.

JS: What do you mean, he’s like a girl?

Sinclair: Well . . .

Calvin: Well he does everything—

Derek: Well he doesn’t really act like a boy. . . .He’s quite scared of stuff as well, likescared of the ball in rugby—

Sinclair: Yeah I remember in football, there weretwo people running for the ball andTimmy sort of like backed away.

Derek: And when the ball is coming at him [inrugby] he just drops it and . . .

Sinclair: Yeah he can’t kick it you know . . . it waspainful to watch yesterday.

Calvin: He’s like a boy yeah, he’s like. . .

Sinclair: He’s a boy but he, like, wants to be a girl.

Calvin: Well he doesn’t want to be, I think like, hebacks away from everything, and he’slike . . . if someone has a go at us . . . ifsomeone pushes us we’ll push them back,this is a simple way of saying it: if some-one pushes us, we’ll push them back.(Swain, 2001, p. 328)

HOMOPHOBIA

Some of the main defamatory aspersions usedto equate too close a conformity with theformal school regime include “goody-goody,”“teacher’s pet,” “boff,” and “swot.” “Wimp,”“sissy,” and particularly “girl” and “gay” are fre-quently used interchangeably to confirm hege-monic masculinity as exclusively heterosexualand to position boys as different and attack theiridentity. Research has shown that homophobiais an enduring constituent of the peer group cul-ture at school; in fact, the word gay is probablythe most common word of abuse and is usedto describe anything from not very good toabsolute rubbish. Many researchers (see, forexample, Connell, 1992; Epstein, 1996; Epstein &Johnson, 1998; Gilbert & Gilbert, 1998;Johnson, 1996; Mason, 1996; Redman, 1996)argue that dominant masculinity sees homo-sexuality as a threat and so attempts to distanceitself by vilifying and oppressing it throughhomophobia. By doing so, boys are making thepoint that their own sexualities are entirely“straight” and unfeminine in every way, and “ina doubly defining moment the homophobic per-formance consolidate[s] the heterosexual mas-culinity of Self and the homosexual femininity ofOther” (Kehily & Nayak, 1997, p. 82). Hence it canalso be argued that by subordinating alternativemasculinities or sexualities, these performancesalso, by default, subordinate femininities—which, therefore, include all girls.

Epstein (1996) maintains that homophobiaalso plays a fundamental role in regulating andconstructing heterosexual masculinities inschools: Masculinity and heterosexuality are



entwined, and thus to be a “real” boy (or girl) isto be heterosexual. Parker (1996a) asserts thatthese homophobic insults should be conceptu-alized, at least implicitly, “in terms of gender asopposed to sexuality” (p. 149, my italics), andthat they therefore imply being “nonmasculine”and “effeminate” rather than homosexual.However, the essential point is that homophobiais used to police and control the general behav-ior of boys and their sexuality and is used as astrategy to position boys at the bottom of themasculine hierarchy.

RELATIONS WITH GIRLS

Difference from girls is an integral componentin the construction of dominant masculinity, foralthough the experiences of gender for boys canbe complicated, and these experiences changebetween settings, masculinity is always con-structed in relation to a dominant image of gen-der difference and ultimately defines itself aswhat femininity is not. Indeed, it can be arguedthat the boys’ construction of girls as “other” isa way of expelling femininity from within them-selves (Mac an Ghaill, 1994). Thorne (1993)calls the interactions between boys and girlson the playground “border work,” although sheemphasizes that this often highlights and rein-forces gender differences just as much as itreduces them. From an early age, boys learn thatthey risk derogation if they associate too closelywith girls, and they have to work hard to provethat they have the right masculine credentials asheterosexual boys. In one of the interviews frommy research, a boy whom I called Fred told meof a conversation he had had with Jinesh (oneof the class leaders) that had arisen after some ofthe boys had been calling him “Barbie” (afterthe Barbie doll). This had happened because hewas perceived to be fraternizing too closely withthe girls. The following quotation shows Jineshclearly defining the normative boundaries.

Fred: I mean, [I said to him] “It’s nice to be popularwith girls, like with the boys,” and he [Jinesh]went, “No it isn’t, I like to play with the boys,and if you’re a boy you’re like a sissy if youplay with the girls.” (Swain, 2001, p. 240)

This knowledge regulates and prevents boysfrom associating too closely with girls (or,

indeed, any “other”); in other words, the “other”is always present and acts to control boys’behaviors even when the real other is not there.Given the choice, few boys or girls ever chooseto sit next to each other, and most try hard toavoid it. However, this is not to say that all boysfeel the need to secure their sense of malenessby traducing all things feminine and female,especially when they feel that their masculinefoundations are relatively stable and secure.Although boys construct girls as different, theydo not necessarily categorize them as beingoppositional, and often the most common feel-ing is one of disinterest.

There has recently been a growing number ofstudies considering the heterosexual positionsof boyfriend and girlfriend, particularly at theupper end of the primary school around the agesof 9 through 11 years old (see, for example,Adler & Adler, 1998; Epstein, 1997; Renold,2000; Thorne, 1993; Thorne & Luria, 1986),although Connolly (1998) found that 5- to7-year-old boys were also able to gain a signifi-cant level of status by having a girlfriend. Someresearchers, such as Renold (2000), find that“having a girlfriend” is a common occurrence inboys’ peer group culture and creates an “accept-able and assumptive” status (p. 319) thatemanates from the need to reinforce dominantversions of heterosexual masculinities. How-ever, in the vast majority of cases, boys want todo little more than possess a girl like a trophy, touse as a status symbol, and it is the ability to beable to claim the relationship that is the mainobjective. In secondary schools, Frosh et al.(2002) found that boys evaluate differentaspects of femininity differently at differenttimes and differentiate girls by liking and desir-ing some and not others. As boys get older, moreare able to take the risk of crossing the genderdivide, although many are still wary of beingseen spending too much time with girls. Boysalso begin to look to have physical relationshipswith girls, although few boys actually have agirlfriend, and it is unusual for boys to want girl-friends as “friends.”

THE BODY

Masculinity does not exist as an ontologicalgiven but comes into existence as people act(Connell, 2000). That is, the social and material



practices through which, and by which, boys’masculine identities are defined are generallydescribed in terms of what boys do with or totheir bodies, and a number of writers haveembraced the concept of embodiment (see, for,example, Crossley, 1996; Light & Kirk, 2000;Lyon & Barbalet, 1994; Shilling, 1993; Synnott,1993; Turner, 2000). Although there are anumber of ways of defining embodiment, itneeds to be understood as a social process(Elias, 1978). Although bodies are located inparticular social, historical structures andspaces, boys are viewed as embodied socialagents, for they do not merely have a passivebody that is inscribed and acted upon; they areactively involved in the development of theirbodies throughout their school life (and, indeed,for their entire life span). Thus, as Connell(1995) argues, we should see bodies as both the“objects and agents of practice, with the practiceitself forming the structures within whichbodies are appropriated and defined,” and hecalls this “body-reflexive practice” (p. 61). Boysexperience themselves simultaneously in and astheir bodies (Lyon & Barbalet, 1994, p. 54), andin this respect, they are bodies (Turner, 2000).They can be seen being consciously concernedabout the maintenance and appearance of theirbodies; they can be seen learning to control theirbodies, acquiring and mastering a number oftechniques, such as walking, running, sitting,catching, hitting, kicking, and so forth; and theycan be seen using them in the appropriate waysthat being a boy demands. Moreover, they areaware of the body’s significance, both as a per-sonal (but unfinished) resource and as a socialsymbol, which communicates signs and mes-sages about their self-identity.

Foucault (1977) gives us the useful notionof “biopower,” which he sees as a form of socialcontrol that focuses on the body. In schools,institutionalized practices involve knowledgeof, and power over, individual gestures, move-ments, and locations: these can be used to pro-duce (or attempt to produce) “docile” bodiesthrough techniques of discipline, surveillance,classification, and normalization (Foucault,1977) that can be regulated and controlled andthat are generally acceptable to adults. Schoolrules and regulations prescribe what is and whatis not allowed in school, which includes howbodies are to behave and how they are allowedmove and act in space (Nespor, 1997).

Bodies in schools can be seen collectively orindividually, but the school tries to control andtrain both. However, a body that can be trainedcan also be contested. All schools contain rela-tions of (teacher) control and (pupil) resistance(Epstein & Johnson, 1998), and there is theongoing tension between the body as object andas agent, which, in many ways, is about thestruggle for the control of the boy’s body. Infact, boys’ bodies are often far away from the“docile,” passive bodies that the school attemptsto produce; they are full of energy and action,and, especially in the context of playgroundgames and activities, boys’ bodies become bod-ies in motion, literally and metaphorically. As inConnell’s (1995) conception, they are both theobjects and agents in the performances andpractices in which their bodies and identitiesbecame defined and appropriated by others as“skillful,” “fast,” “tough,” “hard,” and so on.

For much of the time, boys define theirmasculinity through action, and, as I havealready stated, the most esteemed and preva-lent resources that boys draw on to establishstatus are physicality and athleticism, which areinextricably linked to the body in the form ofstrength, toughness, power, skill, fitness, andspeed. Boys are classified and divided by theirphysicality by both formal and (their own)informal school cultures, where the other bodiesaround them provide them with a differentialreference point for their own bodily sense ofself. Sport provides a way of measuring boys’masculine accomplishment not only againsteach other, but also against the wider world ofmen. Sporting success (particularly in football)is a key signifier of successful masculinity, andhas been recognized by a number of writers:15

Typically, high performance in sport and games(both on the field and in the playground) is thesingle most effective way of gaining popularityand status in the male peer group.

Calvin: If you’re not good at football you’re notfriends with anybody who’s good at foot-ball, all the people who are good at footballare the best people, like the most—

Josh: Popular.

Calvin: Yeah, popular.

JS: [To Josh and Patrick] True?

Josh: Very true!



Patrick: Yeah.

Josh: We’re sporty people.

Calvin: And the sporty people are much preferredthan the people who are much more brainy.(Swain, 2001, p. 257)

Gilbert and Gilbert (1998) maintain thatmost boys realize that they are either good orincompetent at sport by the time they are 9 or 10years old, and I would suggest that this actuallyhappens a good a deal earlier. I wish to argue,therefore, that, although bodies have agency,many of the opportunities to achieve peer groupstatus in boyhood (and also in later life) arelargely conditioned by the shape and physicalattributes of the body.

CONCLUSIONS

The journey from boy to man is unpredictable,disorderly, and frequently hazardous, with mul-tiple pathways shaped by social class, ethnicity,and sexuality. This chapter has shown that theeducational setting furnishes boys with anumber of different ways of doing boy and thatthere is diversity not just between settings butwithin settings. To understand how mascu-linities are made in the school setting, I haveneeded to examine the school as an institution,to look at its gender regime, and to differentiatebetween the layers of the formal and informalpeer group cultures. Both the individual schooland the boys themselves are agents in theproduction of masculinities, and identities areconstructed using the localized resources andstrategies available. Formal school policiesand practices can either open, restrict, or closedown opportunities, but it is the peer group thatis the greatest influence on the formation ofmasculinities, for much of the informationabout how to be like a boy (and future man)comes from being with other boys in groups.Rather than the passive one-way process oflearning the norms, as suggested by sex-roleand socialization theories, the construction ofmasculinity is the result of active, skillful nego-tiation and manipulation. The body is a keysignifier of how boys understand themselvesas gendered and is entwined with the performa-tive nature of masculinity. Boys use a variety ofstrategies and draw on a series of resources

to gain status, but although the resources ofphysicality and athleticism are generally theprinciple material symbols of successful mas-culinity, they may be articulated in differentways within each school context. Althoughhegemonic modes of masculinity in schoolhave a tendency to be rather narrow and restric-tive, it is important to remember that, as mas-culinity is constructed and socially situated, itis also open to change. This provides opportu-nities for schools to identify the dominantimages of masculinity (often containing associ-ations with violence, misogyny, and homopho-bia) operating in their own setting and thenintroduce specific programs of interventionoffering alternative forms.

NOTES

1. Many of these theories are feminist or femi-nist inspired and are influenced by poststructuralism.

2. See, for example, Askew and Ross (1988);Heward (1988); Walker (1988); Connell (1989,1996); Davies (1989); Woods (1990); Holland,Ramazanoglu, and Sharpe (1993); Thorne (1993);Mac an Ghaill (1994); Jordan (1995); Haywood andMac an Ghaill (1996); Salisbury and Jackson (1996);Kehily and Nayak (1997); Warren (1997); Epstein(1997, 1998b, 1998c); Skelton (1996, 1997, 2000);Renold (1997, 1999, 2000); Adler and Adler (1998);Benjamin (1998, 2001); Connolly (1998); Gilbert andGilbert (1998); Lingard and Douglas (1999); Martino(1999); Francis (1998, 2000); Gordon, Holland, andLahelma (2000); Lesko (2000); Swain (2000, 2002a,2002b); Frosh, Phoenix, and Pattman (2002).

3. The International Labour Organisation’sBureau of Statistics estimates that the number ofworking children between 5 and 14 years old is atleast 120 million (cited in Mansurov, 2001, p.149).

4. Similar changes have also occurred in therest of Europe, the United States, Australia, andNew Zealand (Francis, 2000). Moreover, Skelton(2001) points out that the discourses of managementand marketization have been so powerful and effec-tive that, despite changes in government, many ofthe policies and practices of the New Right havebeen incorporated by the new governments in thesecountries.

5. An “integrated day” is one in which pupilsare working on more than one curriculum area at anyone time.

6. OFSTED is the Office for Standards inEducation, officially the Office of Her Majesty’s ChiefInspector of Schools in England. It was set up in 1992and is a nonministerial government department.



7. SATs are Standard Assessment Tasks (tests),which pupils take in English, mathematics, andscience when they are 7, 11, and 14 years old.

8. The expression “3 Rs” dates back to the 19thcentury and refers to the traditional core subjects ofreading, writing, and arithmetic.

9. “Zero tolerance” means that no concessionsfor failure will be permitted.

10. An underresearched area is the effect thatHIV/AIDS will have on schooling in the Third World,particularly in Africa. For instance, in South Africa(using 1990 estimates), almost a quarter of the popu-lation is infected, and children are being infected atthe rate of 50,000 a year (McGreal, 2000). As yet, wedo not know how this might affect gender relationsand masculinity, but there are already some indica-tions that resulting deaths and loss will shape con-structions of gender identity (Morell, Unterhalter,Moletsane, & Epstein, 2001).

11. However, it should be noted that at the time,Willis saw the main focus of his study as class, hencethe title (alluding to “working class kids”); it is inretrospect that he and other writers have recognizedit to be about masculinity.

12. Connell (2000) points out that middle classmasculinities also tend to emphasize the acquisitionof knowledge and expertise.

13. See, for example, Benjamin (1998, 2001);Brown (1999); Connell (1990); Connolly (1998);Fitzclarence and Hickey (2001); Gilbert and Gilbert(1998); Kenway and Fitzclarence (1997); Lee (2000);Light and Kirk (2000); Mac an Ghaill (1994);Martino (1999); Parker (1996a); Renold (1997, 1999,2001); Skelton (1997), Swain (2000).

14. Skelton (2001, p. 52), however, also pointsout that much of the criticism directed against hege-mony is caused by writers’ lack of understanding andloose application of the concept.

15. See, for example, Kessler et al. (1985);Messner and Sabo (1990); Whitson (1990); Mac anGhaill (1994); Connell (1995, 1996, 2000); Parker(1996a, 1996b); Bromley (1997); Renold (1997);Fitzclarence and Hickey (1998); Gilbert and Gilbert(1998); Lingard and Douglas (1999); Martino (1999);Skelton (2000); Swain (2000).

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230

14BOYS AND MEN IN FAMILIES

The Domestic Productionof Gender, Power, and Privilege

MICHELE ADAMS

SCOTT COLTRANE

The title of this chapter suggests atroubling contradiction: Whereas boysand men “come from” or “have” families,

they often experience profound difficultiesbeing “in” them, insofar as they typically seemincapable of offering the emotional intimacy orproviding the personal care that have becomethe hallmarks of modern family life. Popularculture tends to assume that families needfathers and that men and boys need families, butwhen we look closely at ideals about expressingboyhood or achieving manhood, it is clear thatnotions of masculinity have much less to dowith everyday life in domestic settings than theydo with accomplishments in extrafamilial arenassuch as business, sports, or politics. In this chap-ter, we explore how putatively separate public(i.e., work or politics) and private (i.e., family)spheres reflect and reproduce gender differencesand perpetuate gender inequality. To illustrate,we review scholarship on the social construction

of gender in families, with special attention tothe trials and tribulations of boys in the UnitedStates during the late 20th century. We also dis-cuss how patterns of courtship, sexuality, mar-riage, divorce, housework, parenting, and familyviolence mirror gender inequities in the largersociety and set up dilemmas for men, who arerarely equipped to be full participants in every-day family life. Finally, we suggest that struc-tural and social constructionist theories ofgender and society offer the best prospectsfor understanding how and why men and boysmaintain ambivalent connections to families.

INTERROGATING

“FAMILY” AND “MASCULINITY”

Ideas like “family” or “masculinity” are socialconstructions because they make sense only in

Authors’ note: A portion of an earlier version of the first half of this chapter was published in Scott Coltrane’s Families andSociety: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Adams & Coltrane, 2004).


terms of historically and culturally specificshared understandings (Coltrane, 1998). Socialconstructionist approaches to studying cultureand society have a long and varied historywithin philosophy, sociology, anthropology, andsocial psychology (e.g., Berger & Luckmann,1966; Blumer, 1969; Garfinkel, 1967; Geertz,1973; Goffman, 1967; Mead, 1934; Schutz,1970). Using a social constructionist approachto study boys and men in families allows us toexplore how these concepts and the relationsamong them have changed and are likely to con-tinue to change. Combining a social construc-tionist perspective with a sociological, or socialstructural, approach enables us to show howstrong economic and institutional forces alsoshape people’s lives. Only by looking at thestructural constraints people face—things likeaccess to education or jobs—can we understandhow and why cultural definitions and practicesgoverning men inside and outside families havedeveloped. And only by combining a socialconstructionist approach with a social structuralapproach can we evaluate the prospects forpatterns of family life changing in the future(Coltrane, 1998).

Most people take for granted what “family”means, but it is not a term with a definite orstable meaning (Gubrium & Holstein, 1990;Levin & Trost, 1992; Stacey, 1996). The word“family” (or its equivalent) has meant differentthings in different times and places. In ancientGreece, “family” (oikos) referred to the house-hold economy—including the land, house, andservants belonging to the household head. Inmedieval Europe, peasants who lived on feudalestates were considered part of the lord’s“family,” and the lord was called their “father”(pater) even though they were not related to himby blood (Collins, 1986). In many countries,such as Mexico, godparents (compadres) aretreated as family members and act as coparentstoward the children, disciplining them and pro-viding financial or emotional support, eventhough they have no direct biological relation-ship to them (Griswold del Castillo, 1984).Similarly, in contemporary Native Americanfamilies, the terms used to describe family rela-tionships are more encompassing than narrowEnglish usage would imply: A “grandmother”may actually be a child’s aunt or grand-aunt,and “cousin” may have variable meanings notnecessarily based on birth and marriage

(Yellowbird & Snipp, 1994). To understandfamilies and the specific social relations theyrepresent, we must therefore recognize that theterm and the idea are socially constructed; thatis, the meaning of “family” changes in responseto a wide variety of social, economic, political,cultural, and personal conditions (Coltrane,1998). Just as there is no stable definition offamily, the definition of masculinity is alsovariable (Connell, 1995; Hearn, 1992; Kimmel,1996; Lorber, 1994; West & Zimmerman,1987). Treating masculinity as socially con-structed leads us to focus on the social con-ditions that promote different versions of it, aswell as implying that change in masculinity ispossible and desirable. In this chapter, we focuson changes in family practices and ideals ofmasculinity that have the potential to affectsocial reproduction (Laslett & Brenner, 1989)across many generations.

THE CULTURAL

IDEAL OF SEPARATE SPHERES

According to the ideal of separate spheresthat emerged during the Victorian era, menand women are part of diverse social worlds:Men inhabit the public sphere, and women, theprivate (see Bose, 1987, and Hearn, 1992, forcritiques of the “dual spheres” perspective).Nineteenth-century biological derivatives ofthis social scheme assumed that male andfemale reproductive capacity substantiated thisdivision and illuminated supposed inherentpsychological differences between the sexes:The “FEMALE detaches genetic cells thatremain more or less stationary, while the MALEdetaches cells that go more or less at large”(Searcy, 1895, as cited in Hughes, 1990, p. 53).Thus, according to popular cultural ideals thatemerged at about this time, males were activeand independent, whereas females were passiveand were dependent on males for completion.Moreover, these highly differentiated repro-ductive and psychological competencies sup-posedly propelled men “to excel in competitive,aggressive life” and women to become skilled in“home duties and not in competitive and aggres-sive life” (Searcy, 1895, as cited in Hughes,1990, p. 53). Although subsequent economicand social changes thrust women into the

Boys and Men in Families • 231


paid labor force, gutting the reality of separatespheres, and advances in biological understand-ings of reproduction gave females a more pro-active role than Dr. Searcy’s comments wouldallow, the ideology of separate spheres hasremained resistant to change. Indeed, social the-orist Jeff Hearn (1992) stresses the continuingneed to question the accuracy of the concept,noting that “an important aspect of the powerof the public domains and of public men is thenormalization, rather than problematization, ofthe public/private divisions” (p. 7).

Nevertheless, despite evidence to the con-trary, most societies continue to subscribe tothe notion that men and women have distinctlydifferent, and generally opposite, psychologicaland behavioral tendencies. And although cross-cultural variation in the actual content of genderroles is enormous, families generally teach usthat women and men should occupy differentplaces in the social order. Relying on the ideol-ogy of separate spheres, families continue toraise children “to be” masculine or femininebased on the reproductive equipment with whichthey are born. Furthermore, the ideology of sep-arate spheres has been elevated to the very struc-ture of society, where its gender prescriptionsand proscriptions organize schools, workplaces,laws, religions, and other social institutions,making it difficult, if not impossible, to escape.By institutionalizing gender differences, wehave also institutionalized gender hierarchy andthe power of men, who have historically shapedinstitutions to reflect their own interests. “In aworld dominated by men,” according to MichaelKaufman, “the world of men is, by definition, aworld of power” (1999, p. 75). As the chaptersof this handbook attest, that world is shaped by,and in turn shapes, what it means to be mascu-line. However, as Kaufman further suggests(1999), men’s power is also tainted, reflecting“a strange combination of power and privilege,pain and powerlessness” (p. 75). As we discussbelow, these contradictory experiences play outin men’s ambivalent relations to family life.

The combination of male power and power-lessness is reflected in the fact that we don’tquite know what to do about the problems cre-ated (for girls, women, boys, and men) whenwe privilege the masculine ideal of indepen-dence over connection. As we raise boys to bemasculine men, we often end up with troubledboys. Snips, snails, and puppy dog tails, little

boys are noisier, more active, more competitive,and more aggressive than little girls, accordingto research and popular cultural stereotypes.They reject (as they are taught) their mothers,their families, and adults in general. Some-times they grow up to join gangs, assaultyoung women, attack other young men, orcommit suicide. At some (often indeterminate)point, they cross the cultural boundary betweenboyhood and manhood and become menwho are unemotional, withdrawn from theirfamilies, aggressive, or violent. The troublewith boys is that they learn the lesson well andassume the cultural mantle of masculinity. “Thetrouble with boys,” according to one Britishresearcher, “is that they must become men”(Phillips, 1994, p. 270).

In this chapter, we look at how boys becomemen within the context of the family, and how, aspart of that process, gender inequality is sus-tained and reproduced. We first examine how thecultural concept of masculinity is based on a pro-scription against being feminine. Noting howboys and girls are raised differently from thebeginning of their lives, we observe how mascu-line ideals project boys out of and away from thefamily, whereas feminine ideals enmesh girlswithin it. We also point out the troubles faced byboys as they attempt to become men by incorpo-rating ideals of dominant masculinity into theirown gender schema. We then follow these boys-turned-men as they confront problems feeling“at home” in family environments. Here we seethat the dilemmas men face reconciling theirideals of masculinity with their positions as hus-bands and fathers are part of a larger set of socialproblems that stem from separate spheres ideol-ogy and structural gender inequality in thesociety at large. We conclude by suggestingsocial and individual changes that might helpattenuate the alienation that appears to be theplight of men living in today’s families.

IDEALS OF MASCULINITY AND FEMININITY

Ideals of masculinity and femininity, passeddown from 19th-century notions of separatespheres, assume that boys and girls are intrinsi-cally and unalterably different in terms of per-sonality and, therefore, behavior. Men, orientedto the public sphere, are understood to be active,strong, independent, powerful, dominant, and



aggressive, with masculinity signifying “beingin control” (Kaufman, 1993). Women, associ-ated with the private sphere, are seen as passive,weak, dependent, powerless, subordinate, andnurturing. While social, economic, demo-graphic, and cultural contexts have changedsince the 19th century, idealized perceptionsof masculinity and femininity have remainedremarkably consistent. Even today, the notionof separate spheres and attendant sex differ-ences in temperament are invoked to substanti-ate gender stratification institutionally (see, forinstance, Bose, 1987; also Brush, 1999), as wellas to privilege male power and interests in thehome (Jones, 2000; Kimmel, 2000). Besidestheir prescriptive elements, these idealized gen-der differences in temperament are proscriptiveas well, for “an essential element in becomingmasculine is becoming not-feminine” (Maccoby,1998, p. 52). Taken as a whole, the mandate forboys to be not-feminine, unlike (and in directopposition to) the mandate for girls to be femi-nine, is a mandate that drives them away fromfamily relations, particularly relations with theirmothers (Silverstein & Rashbaum, 1994).Although assumed to be a baseline requirementfor boys’ achievement of manhood, this culturalmandate can cause problems for them whenthey mature into men. As men, they will havelittle ideological precedent for living harmo-niously in a family environment, especially onethat is increasingly predicated on ideals ofdemocratic sharing. By continuing to followthe dictates of separate spheres, we may becreating manly men, but we are also cripplingmen emotionally and creating husbands andfathers who are destined to be outsiders ordespots in their own families.

SOCIALIZATION:BOYS (AND GIRLS) IN FAMILIES

Society can work only if its members “organizetheir experience and behavior in terms of sharedrules of interpretation and conduct” (Cahill,1986, p. 163). All societies socialize children tointernalize the shared rules and norms that drivecollective behavior, thereby allowing them tobecome self-regulating participants in society.More formally, socialization is the processthrough which “we learn the ways of a given

society or social group so that we can functionwithin it” (Elkin & Handel, 1989, p. 2); whereasolder notions of socialization suggested that theprocess began and ended in childhood, accordingto more recent theories, it is a lifelong processthat allows us to move in and out of various socialgroups our entire lives. Part of this processinvolves gender socialization; that is, learningsociety’s gender rules and regulations (typicallydichotomized as either masculine or feminine)and becoming adept at behaving in accordancewith the socially accepted gender patterns associ-ated with our sex (male or female). Gender, thatis to say, is not the same thing as sex, whichgenerally groups people into categories basedon their biologically given reproductive equip-ment. Gender, on the other hand, is a socialconstruction, emergent, dynamic, variable withinand across cultures, and historically situated, butalso reflecting certain patterns within a givensociety (Coltrane, 1998; Connell, 1987). Accord-ing to sociologists Candace West and DonaldZimmerman (1987), we “do gender” by actingout our culture’s perception of those patterns thatreflect what it is to be a man or a woman.

The family typically is considered the maininstitution for both production and reproductionof polarized gender values. Although individualsare socialized in many different contexts through-out their lives (school, neighborhood, community,peer group, workplace, church, polity), familytends to be the primary initial socialization agent,acting as a microcosm of society and providing achild’s first exposure to interaction with others.It is generally in the family that children firstacquire enduring personality characteristics,interpersonal skills, and social values (Maccoby,1992). It is also in the family that children gettheir first look at what gender means, to them andto others, as they interact in daily life (Coltrane &Adams, 1997; Connell, 1987; Hearn, 1992).Specifically, it is in the family that boys firstcome to understand their privileged status and theways in which male privilege equates to power.Finally, it is often in the family that these boys,grown into men, later come to understand thecontradictions inherent in that power (Coltrane,1996; Kaufman, 1999).

Early Gender Differentiation

Gendered parents transmit gender-ladenassumptions and values to their children, starting



before the children are born. Procedures such asamniocentesis and sonograms allow parents tofind out the sex of their unborn child so that theymight plan early for gender-appropriate nurs-eries and infant wardrobes, as fashion- (andgender-) conscious parents would be loathe, forinstance, to bring their newborn son home in apink or flowered cozy. Knowing the sex of aninfant before birth can have other more sinistereffects. In some countries, such as India andChina, the traditional bias toward males isreflected in a prevalence of sex-selective abor-tions, as well as female neglect and infanticideafter birth (Balakrishnan, 1994; Chunkath &Athreya, 1997; George, Rajaratnam, & Miller,1992; Weiss, 1995). In rural Bangladesh, tradi-tional son preference drives the use of contra-ceptives by women in their childbearing years(Nosaka, 2000). Furthermore, research hasshown that more family resources, such as foodand medicine, are allocated to sons, whoserate of survival is, thus, higher than that ofdaughters (Bhuiya & Streatfield, 1991; Chen,Huq, & D’Souza, 1981). These gender prefer-ence practices, some more extreme than others,are part of patriarchal societies where the notionprevails that sons have more value than daugh-ters. Even in societies such as the United Statesand Canada, where disappointment over thebirth of a girl may be more reserved, technolo-gies allowing for “prenatal discrimination” arebecoming more widely accepted (Bozinoff &Turcotte, 1993). In industrialized societies, aswell as in less developed ones, notation ofdifference between boys and girls before birthsignals the privilege and power that boys, andlater, men, will experience in their lives.

Once the baby arrives, new parents advertisethe sex of their infant so that no mistake can bemade as to its traits or prospects for success: Isit a future president or a future wife and mother?Announcements and banners proclaim “It’s aboy” or “It’s a girl,” giving admirers the gendercontext to remark on the baby’s characteristicsand potential. Mothers attach cute little pinkbows to the bald heads of baby girls to set themapart from the supposedly rough-and-tumbleboy babies (who, it turns out, are not only visu-ally indistinguishable from girl babies but alsoslightly more fragile medically). The baby boyis housed in a nursery painted in bold colors ofblue or red and outfitted with sports and adven-ture paraphernalia; the infant girl is treated to a

pink boudoir with plenty of dolls and soft thingsto cuddle (Pomerleau, Bolduc, Malcuit, &Cossette, 1990). If a boy, the newborn is dressedin blue and is given gifts of tiny jeans and bold-colored outfits; if a girl, she is outfitted in pinkand receives ruffled, pastel ensembles (Fagot &Leinbach, 1993). Moreover, research shows thatbased on what they are told the newborn’s sexis, people (including strangers and especiallychildren) tend to characterize infants, seeingthose they are told are boys as stronger, bigger,noisier, and (sometimes) smarter than girls,even when the same baby is represented as maleto some observers and female to others (Coltrane,1998; Cowan & Hoffman, 1986; Stern &Karraker, 1989). That is, people draw on a cul-tural overlay of gender stereotypes to make theirfirst assessment of a baby’s personality andpotential. Parents also use gender stereotypeswhen assessing the behavior and characteristicsof their newborns (Rubin, Provenzano, &Luria, 1974) and interact with them based onthese stereotyped preconceptions. For instance,parents (particularly fathers) tend to react totheir infant boys by encouraging activity andmore whole-body stimulation and to their girlswith more verbalization, interpersonal stimula-tion, and nurturance (Fagot & Leinbach, 1993;Stern & Karraker, 1989).

Fathers tend to enforce gender stereotypesmore than mothers, especially in sons. This ten-dency extends across activities and domains,including toy preferences, play styles, chores,discipline, interaction, and personality assess-ments (Caldera, Huston, & O’Brien, 1989;Fagot & Leinbach, 1993; Lytton & Romney,1991). Although both boys and girls receivegender messages from their parents, boys areencouraged to conform to culturally valuedmasculine ideals more than girls are encouragedto conform to lower-status feminine ideals.Boys also receive more rewards for gender con-formity (Wood, 1994). Because society placesgreater emphasis on men’s gender identity thanon women’s, there is a tendency for more atten-tion to be paid to boys, reflecting an andro-centric cultural bias that values masculine traitsover feminine characteristics (Bem, 1993;Lorber, 1994).

Paradoxically, masculine gender identity isalso considered to be more fragile than femininegender identity (Bem, 1993; Chodorow, 1978;Dinnerstein, 1976; Mead, 1949), and it takes



more psychic effort to maintain because itrequires suppressing human feelings of vulner-ability and denying emotional connection(Chodorow, 1978; Maccoby & Jacklin, 1974).Boys, therefore, are given less gender latitudethan girls, and fathers are more intent thanmothers on making sure that their sons do notbecome sissies. Later, as a result, these boys-turned-men will be predisposed to spend consid-erable amounts of time and energy maintaininggender boundaries and denigrating women andgays (Connell, 1995; Kimmel & Messner,1998). Nonetheless, fathers’ role in sustaininggender difference is neither fixed nor inevitable.Mothers’ relatively lax enforcement of genderstereotypes relates to the amount of time theyspend with children. Because they perform mostof the child care, mothers tend to be more prag-matic about the similarities and dissimilaritiesbetween children, and their perceptions of anindividual child’s abilities are somewhat lesslikely to be influenced by preconceived genderstereotypes. Similarly, when men are singleparents or actively coparent, they behave more likeconventional “mothers” than standard “fathers”(Coltrane, 1996; Risman, 1989). Involvedfathers, like most mothers, encourage sons anddaughters equally, utilizing similar interactionand play styles for both. They also tend to avoidboth rigid gender stereotypes and the single-minded emphasis on rough-and-tumble playcustomary among traditional fathers (Coltrane,1989; Parke, 1996). As a result, when fathersexhibit close, nurturing ongoing relationshipswith children, those children develop less stereo-typed gender attitudes as teenagers and youngadults (Hardesty, Wenk, & Morgan, 1995;Williams, Radin, & Allegro, 1992).

Different treatment of newborn boys andgirls, based on their sex, is a product of thebehavior of gendered adults (family membersand strangers) and institutionalized expectationsabout gender derived from society as a whole(Coltrane & Adams, 1997). According to psy-chologist Sandra Bem (1983), gender is notsomething that is naturally produced in the mindof the child but instead reflects the gender polar-ization prevalent in the larger culture. Moreover,gender-differentiated treatment continues as thechild grows up; gender-appropriateness is rein-forced through toys (trucks, sports equipment,and toy guns for boys; dolls, tea sets, and toystoves for girls), as well as expectations for

behavior that result in praise and reinforcementfor “correct” (gender-appropriate) behaviorand reprimand and punishment for “incorrect”(gender-inappropriate) behavior. For instance,taking into account the masculine imperative foremotional distance, studies analyzing a numberof northern European countries, as well as theUnited States, find that parents tend to activelydiscourage displays of emotion in boys by pres-suring them not to cry or otherwise express theirfeelings (Block, 1978, as cited in Maccoby,1998, p. 139). Girls, in contrast, are not onlyencouraged to express their emotions but alsoare taught to pay attention to the feelings ofothers.

It is not just birth parents and stepparentswho socialize children with gendered expecta-tions, but also grandparents, extended familymembers, fictive kin, teachers, and other adultswho are part of children’s lives. Althoughresearch on such relationships is still rare, moststudies find that grandparents, uncles, and otheradult men are more likely to relate to boys thanto girls, and to demand more gender conformityfrom children than do their female counterparts(grandmothers, aunts, etc.).

The result of this indoctrination is that, asthey become developmentally able, boys andgirls incorporate the gendered messages andscripts that parents, grandparents, and other sig-nificant adults have communicated to them intotheir own version of an age-appropriate genderschema (Bem, 1983). A gender schema is a cog-nitive way of organizing information, a sort of“network of associations” that “functions as ananticipatory structure” ready to “search for andto assimilate incoming information” in terms ofrelevant schematized categories (Bem, 1983,p. 603). A kind of perceptual lens, a genderschema predisposes a person to see the worldin terms of two clearly defined “opposites”—male and female, masculine and feminine.Accordingly, children develop gender schematawithout even realizing that the culture in whichthey live is stereotyped according to gender.Developing networks of associations that guidetheir perceptions, children come to see the worldin gender-polarized ways and live out the genderpolarization that they have learned to make theirown. Children then go about re-creating, accord-ing to their own developmental ability, a worldin which boys/men and girls/women are notjust different but polar opposites, and where



boys/men are generally powerful and privileged.As they grow up, moreover, they come to under-stand that although most men are more powerfulthan most women, not all men are equally pow-erful, and that some (hegemonic) masculinitiesentail more privilege than other (subordinated)masculinities (Connell, 1987, 1995, 2000; Hearn,1992).

Children’s Agency andthe Construction of Gendered Behavior

We see evidence of the ways that childrencreate their own gendered worlds in the factthat, from the time they are about 3 years old,they begin to associate consistently withsame-sex playmates, generally without directprovocation or instigation from adult caretak-ers (Howes & Philipsen, 1992; Maccoby, 1998;Thorne, 1993). In this way, children begin toinstitute at an early age the gender segregationthat traverses adult society. Noting this ten-dency, sociologist William Corsaro (1997) seeschildren as “active, creative social agents whoproduce their own unique children’s cultureswhile simultaneously contributing to the pro-duction of adult societies” (p. 4). Moreover,forays into cross-gender territory generallyherald advances toward a heterosexual roman-tic culture rather than enduring friendships thatcross gender lines (Adler & Adler, 1998;Eder, 1995; Thorne, 1993). As these social sci-entists suggest, romantic “crossings” (Thorne,1993) strengthen traditional gender boundariesand behaviors while reinforcing the gendersegregation evident in same-sex friendshipgroupings.

Boys’ play groups and girls’ play groupsexhibit distinctive styles of play. One significantdifference between them is that boys appear tobe more separated from the world of adults(Maccoby, 1998), a tradition that begins in thefamily when boys, between 24 and 36 monthsof age, begin to invite less contact fromtheir mothers (Clarke-Stewart & Hevey, 1981;Maccoby, 1998; Minton, Kagan, & Levine,1971). What is unclear about this “separation” isexactly how much is initiated by the child, andhow much is initiated by the child’s mother orparents, who feel that “too much” mothering canbe dangerous to a boy’s masculinity (Silverstein& Rashbaum, 1994). This impulse also conformsto the cultural mythology of “mother-blaming,”

reminding us (in movies, on television, and innovels) of the overinvolved, domineering motherwho emasculates her son, makes him into a“sissy,” and leaves him unfit and unable to takehis place in the patriarchal scheme of oppression(Silverstein & Rashbaum, 1994). This separationfrom the adult world takes the form of increasedmischievousness at home, in direct opposition tomaternal direction (Minton et al., 1971), andless sensitivity to teachers (Fagot, 1985). Boysalso play more roughly than girls, with theirinteraction frequently bordering on aggression,if not outright violence (Maccoby, 1998). Boys’rough-and-tumble play appears to be designed tocreate a dominance hierarchy and to mitigate apresumption of weakness (Jordan & Cowan,1995; Maccoby, 1998; Petit, Bakshi, Dodge, &Coie, 1990); girls, on the other hand, do selectleaders, but they draw on leadership qualitiesother than physical dominance (Charlesworth &Dzur, 1987; Maccoby, 1998). There is even adifference in styles of discourse, with girlsnegotiating to keep interaction going, while boyssimply command and demand, thus stoppingeffective interaction (Maccoby, 1998, p. 49).Finally, boys’ play groups involve more compe-tition than girls’, with boys spending much moretime playing competitive games and girls focus-ing on recreation that entails taking turns(Crombie & Desjardins, 1993).

That these tendencies of boys in their same-sex play groups reflect parentally encouragedand socially approved masculine ideals is appar-ent, as boys display masculinity by withdrawingfrom adults (mothers, in particular) and bybeing dominant, competitive, aggressive, and(over)active. Because we take for granted thatmasculinity is a positive cultural and institu-tional ideal, we don’t tend to view masculinityper se as a negative factor that can cause prob-lems for boys as they negotiate their genderperformance against a backdrop of broader prin-ciples of social order. Most of the time, whenboys’ behavior runs counter to social norms, wechuckle that “boys will be boys.” When thatbehavior reaches beyond the acceptable, how-ever, we begin to acknowledge that living up tomasculine ideals can, indeed, cause trouble.

Boyhood Troubles

The way we raise boys in our society notonly reinforces masculine personality ideals but



also encourages behavior that reflects thoseideals. We valorize manhood and start, from thebeginning of their lives, to transmit that val-orization to our children. Children realize, earlyon, that if they are fortunate enough to be bornwith the legitimating penis, then they are likelyto receive the rewards, rights, privileges, andentitlements that come along with it, althoughthe amount of those rewards is premised onother social factors as well. On the other hand,if they are female, they realize that they are des-tined to help provide those rewards to their moreprivileged brothers. That is, children begin toincorporate these ideals into their own percep-tions and behaviors and begin to “act out” thegender scripts that they have learned.

Moreover, as gendered parents and grand-parents, we expect and encourage boys to pursueour cultural ideals of masculinity. From early intheir youth, we teach them (through, for instance,toys and sports) to symbolically correlate compe-tition, violence, power, and domination withmasculinity. Finally, we actively insist on theirseparation from mothers (in effect, their separa-tion from anything feminine that might sullytheir budding masculinity). In short, by definingmasculinity as “anything not feminine” and bydefining femininity in conjunction with thefamily and domesticity, we are, in effect, definingboys and men away from the family and outsideit. When the proscription against feminine behav-ior is translated into behavior attenuated by devel-opmental stage, boys often end up in trouble—overactive and inattentive in school (the classclown), competitive and aggressive, even violent.Studies show that elementary school–aged boysare up to four times as likely as girls to be sent tochild psychologists, twice as likely to be consid-ered “learning disabled,” and much more likely(up to 10 times) to be diagnosed with emotionalmaladies such as attention deficit disorder(Kimmel, 2000, p. 160; Pollack, 1998). Studiesalso show that “problem behaviors” of adolescentboys (including school suspension, drinking, useof street drugs, police detainment, sexual activity,number of heterosexual partners, and forcingsomeone to have sex) are associated withtraditional masculine ideology (Christopher &Sprecher, 2000; Hearn, 1990; Pleck, Sonenstein, &Ku, 1994; Schwartz & Rutter, 1998).

Aggression has become a touchstone forAmerican adolescent boys, and violence amongthem is epidemic. Kaufman (1998) noted that

men construct their masculinity amid a triadof violence: men against women, men againstmen, and men against themselves. Hearn (1990)added another dimension to this triad, pointingout how men’s normalized, institutionalizedpower and violence (reflected, for example, inbusiness, sports, and even the historical “socialrelations of paternity”) not only contribute tobut also become child abuse and exploitation.Thus, men’s violence applies even to adolescentboys, and it results, at least in part, from theirinternalizing the masculine ideal and attemptingto live up to its precepts; as Hearn (1990, p. 85)points out, the problem lies not in “dangerousmen” but in the “state of ‘normal masculinity.’”Normal masculinity is evident in young men’sviolence against women, which Kaufman(1998, p. 4) suggests represents both an indi-vidual “acting out” of power relations and anindividual’s enactment of social power relations(sexism); it plays out in instances of rape(acquaintance and stranger) and sexual harass-ment, and it is perpetrated in all-male enclavessuch as fraternities (Lefkowitz, 1997; Sanday,1990) and athletic teams (Benedict, 1997).Research analyzing rape figures between 1979and 1987 shows that youths 20 years old andyounger accounted for 18% of single-offenderand 30% of multiple-offender rapes (Kershner,1996); the FBI reports, moreover, that adoles-cent males accounted for the greatest increase inarrested rape perpetrators in the United Statesduring the early 1990s (Ingrassia, 1993; see alsoKershner, 1996).

Male youth violence against other males isextensive, creating battlefields out of city parksand school playgrounds. Gangs of all racial andethnic groups flourish in urban areas as adoles-cent boys attempt to create “family” with toolshoned to incorporate ideals of manhood. In1997, it was estimated that there were 30,500youth gangs and 815,896 gang members activein the United States (National Youth GangCenter, 1999). Among youth, teenaged boystend to be both the most frequent perpetrators ofviolent crimes and, as a group, the most frequentvictims of such crimes. Although preteen boysand girls are equally as likely to be homicidevictims, once children reach their teen years,boys are significantly more likely than girls tobe murdered (Snyder & Sickmund, 1999). Theyare also more murderous than young women,representing 93% of known juvenile homicide



offenders between 1980 and 1997. During thesame time period fewer than 10 juvenile homicideoffenders per year were age 10 or younger,and 88% of these offenders were also male(Snyder & Sickmund, 1999, pp. 53-54).

Of late, young men’s violence has spilledover into more traditionally “safe,” institution-alized space. In the United States, the schoolshootings of the 1990s (carried out overwhelm-ingly by boys, most of whom were from “good”[i.e., unbroken] homes) further attest to the lackof fit between how boys are learning to be menand the men that society wants. Disturbingly, anumber of these rampages were orchestratedby boys who were seen by their peers not asbullies (the masculine ideal) but as bullied (thefeminine counterpart), thus highlighting thedesperate actions sometimes undertaken byyoung men to prove their “normal” masculinityagainst the public threat of being viewed asfeminine.

Men’s violence against themselves also canmanifest itself in adolescence. One of the waysmen do violence against themselves is by “stuff-ing” their emotions, in pursuit of a traditionallymasculine ideal that reflects dread of femininehyperemotionality. Young men are encouragedto avoid displays of emotion, as are young boys;we even tend to “see” male newborns as lessemotional than their female counterparts, read-ing onto them the expectations of masculinenon-emotionality. As boys grow up, they “oftenfail to learn the language with which they coulddescribe their feelings, and without language itis hard for anyone to make sense of what hefeels” (Phillips, 1994, p. 67). One articulation ofthis problem is the preponderance of suicidecommitted by male adolescents. In 1996, forexample, 2,119 suicides in the United Statesinvolved youth under the age of 19, 80% ofwhom were male (Snyder & Sickmund, 1999,p. 24). Male youth suicide is a trend thatextends beyond the United States: A Finnishstudy of adolescent males who committed sui-cide, for instance, showed that, compared withthose with psychiatric disorders, those suicideswith no diagnosable psychiatric disorders (thatis, the “normal” boys) came from less disturbedfamilies, were less antisocial, and used healthcare and social services less often (Marttunenet al., 1998, p. 669). Moreover, they had com-municated intent to commit suicide for the firsttime shortly before actually taking their own lives,

suggesting a lack of emotional communicationto those who might otherwise have providedhelp to them (Marttunen et al., 1998).

Boys Into Men:Preparation for Family Life

Just as boys are expected to reject theirmothers and leave their families (physicallyand emotionally) in order to achieve manhood,so, too, they are expected to return to familylife after a period of time to create and leadfamilies of their own. By the end of adolescence,these young men have been socialized into, andhave internalized, the norms, values, and enti-tlements of the masculine ideal on a personallevel, largely through interaction with gender-conscious parents and kin, as well as throughinvolvement with same-sex school peer groups.As they leave adolescence, in the interimbetween being banished from and returning tofamily life, however, boys-becoming-men areoften subjected to a higher level of initiation intomanhood involving male bonding and solidifica-tion of the collective practice of masculinity;these initiation rites tap into interests that extend,moreover, to corporate, state, and even globallevels (Connell, 1987, 1990, 1998, 2000; Hearn,1990, 1992; Kimmel, 1996) and affect the waysmen later interact in families. If athletic, youngmen join male-only football, basketball, or base-ball teams; at college they are encouraged tobelong to all-male fraternities; in the army, navy,marines, or air force, they are enlisted in theranks of a group that, if not all-male, is over-whelmingly so; and in the workplace, they entersex-stratified occupational organizations. Eachof these male-dominated associations has itsown rituals that involve strengthening masculineideals and notions of entitlement, already inter-nalized at a personal level, at an abstract levelthat makes them appear to be, more than ever,part of the “natural” gender order. Full initiationinto such groups usually involves some type ofwoman- and/or gay-bashing activity that accen-tuates the boundary between male and not male,masculinity and femininity, heterosexuality andhomosexuality. These activities entail a “linkbetween personal experience and power rela-tions” (Connell, 1990, p. 507), or, more specifi-cally, collective male experiences and power.Through such fratriarchal (Remy, 1990) activi-ties as college fraternity pranks (Lyman, 1998),



collective condoning of gang or individualrape (Lefkowitz, 1997; Sanday, 1990), corpo-rate victimization (Szockyj & Fox, 1996), andsexual harassment of women and homosexuals(Connell, 1992, 1995; Morris, 1994), these orga-nizations inaugurate boys into “real” manhood ata social level (Hearn, 1992). With inaugurationinto the collective production of oppression, menbecome participants in and supporters of, to agreater or lesser extent based on cross-cuttingissues of race and class, social institutions ofinequality such as sexism, racism, classism, andhomosexism (Hearn, 1990).

Historically, war also has been a fertileinitiation ground for the collective practice ofmanhood; as sociologist Michael Kimmel(1996) noted, “All wars . . . are meditations onmasculinity” (p. 72). As traditionally masculineenterprises, wars tend to institutionalize certainhegemonic ideals of masculinity, “distin-guish[ing] ‘more manly’ from ‘less manly’groups” (Connell, 1998, p. 13). For example,the recent “war on terrorism” has reinvigorated acertain image of “real” men as “[b]rawny, heroic,manly” (Brown, 2001, p. 5), at the same timeconnecting those images to gendered sex roles:“In contrast to past eras of touchy-feeliness(Alan Alda) and the vaguely feminized, rakishman-child of the 1990s (Leonardo DiCaprio),the notion of physical prowess in the service ofpatriotic duty is firmly back on the pedestal”(Brown, 2001, p. 5). State-sanctioned violenceand aggression are once again being linked tomasculinity through wartime imagery and dis-course, for “without war, he [the male citizenwarrior] would not know who he was or whatthe world was about” (Gibson, 1994, p. 308; seealso Miedzian, 1991). Generally speaking, then,the collective practice of masculinity serves,both directly and indirectly, the interests of thestate (and its corporate arm), which needs menwho are aggressive, prone to violence, unemo-tional, patriotic, competitive, and somewhatdistanced from family. Theoretically, the inter-ests of the state (as the “general patriarch” [Mies,1986, p. 26]) can also be seen as supportingthe interests of the husband (as the “individualpatriarch” [Connell, 1990, p. 507]), a collabora-tion apparent, for instance, in the lack of concernhistorically displayed by the state in intrudingon a husband’s “right” to batter or rape hiswife (Caulfield & Wonders, 1993; Hearn, 1990;Mies, 1986).

MEN’S PRIVILEGED STATUS IN FAMILIES

Eventually, the boys that their families havesocialized to be unemotional, violent, self-centered manly men tend to make their way backinto families. Having internalized personal inter-pretations of masculine ideals and subsequentlyexperienced valorization and reinforcement ofthose ideals in institutionalized settings, youngmen are expected to (re)turn to the family settingto prove their maturity (Ehrenreich, 1983) andenact what they have learned about being men.Although their social status changes at marriage,young men’s personalized gender regimes(Connell, 1987) do not, and they often findthemselves “force-fitting” their masculine idealsinto the domestic sphere, a setting that is, by def-inition, feminine. Thus, rather than participatingin families through caring, nurturing, and serv-ing, men generally try instead to mold families toconform to their own sense of masculine entitle-ment, expecting that family members, particu-larly their wives, will care for and serve them.Historically, getting married signaled becominga “respectable family man” and was “set againstand constructed in relation to what were per-ceived to be the extra-familial and ‘dangerous’masculinities of the undomesticated male”(Collier, 1995, p. 220). Scholars have docu-mented how industrialization and urbanizationundermined traditional social controls in societyat large, raising fears among the growing middleclass about the licentious sexuality and violenceof lower-class men and recent immigrants.Hearn (1992), Collier (1995), Connell (1990),Kimmel (1996), and others have shown how thebifurcation between the dangerous and the famil-ial emerged as Victorian ideals of separatespheres institutionalized new forms of publicmasculinities. Hearn (1992, pp. 81-82) sug-gested that in complex and historically specificways, public domains were constructed by mento secure power from women. Men’s separationfrom the birth process, and from the emotionalcare and child rearing that became associatedwith private families, in conjunction with thegrowth of industrial capitalism and more com-plex states, drove them to establish new forms ofpatriarchy. Fraternal recreation and social orga-nizations, fratriarchal dominance of publicspace, and continued sexual exploitation of mar-ginalized women coexisted with newer forms ofmasculine power and control, including a special



form of technical rationality associated withcorporations and bureaucracies. Inside families,men continued to exercise power and controlover women sexually, socially, and physically,though often under the name of a religiouslysanctioned paternal authority. Feminist theoristshave long suggested that both public and privateforms of patriarchy were developed by men sothat they might control women’s reproduc-tive power (e.g., Hearn, 1987; O’Brien, 1981;Rubin, 1975; Sanday, 1981).

Marriage and family laws (until recentlydeveloped solely by men) generally encouragedcontinuity of male privilege between the publicsphere and the home (see Collier, 1995; alsoGrossberg, 1990). For example, the common-law doctrine of coverture, which essentiallymade the wife not only the property but also theperson of the husband, was officially abandonedonly in the mid-19th century (Grossberg, 1985).The ideal of a wife giving up her identityto her husband continues to pervade thesymbolic meaning of marriage, illustrated bywomen adopting the surname of their husbandwhen they marry (Goodman, 2001; Johnson &Scheuble, 1995). Moreover, the traditional(albeit unwritten) marriage contract making thehusband the head of, and responsible party for,the household and making the wife responsiblefor domestic services and child care (Weitzman,1981) continues to provide ideological sup-port for maintenance of a traditional man-as-provider, woman-as-family-caretaker modelof family life. This ideological (and legal)model, in turn, allows a husband to be cared forand nurtured, even while sustaining his image ofhimself as independent and autonomous, that is,masculine.

This traditional family picture may work fora man as long as he has a traditional wife will-ing both to care for him and to deny that she isdoing so, thus shoring up his fragile masculineimage that revolves around “resist[ing] theregressive wish to be cared for” (Nock, 1998,p. 47). Some researchers suggest that “norma-tive” family life is good for men; according tosociologist Steven Nock (1998), married men“earn more, work more, and have better jobs”(p. 82) than their nonmarried counterparts. Menalso tend to benefit more from marriage than dowomen (Bernard, 1972; Fowers, 1991), report-ing greater marital satisfaction and rating theirmarriages more positively in terms of finances,

parenting, family, friends, and their partner’spersonality (Fowers, 1991). Finally, marriedmen are less depressed and have lower ratesof mental disorder than do married women(Busfield, 1996; Horwitz, White, & Howell-White, 1996; Marks, 1996). In short, traditionalmarriage appears to be a good deal for men.

The Gendered Domestic Division of Labor

One of the main reasons men benefit frommarriage is the unequal and taken-for-granteddivision of domestic labor. Research showsthat women historically have shouldered theoverwhelming bulk of responsibility for doinghousehold labor, spending three times theamount of time as men doing routine everydayhousehold tasks (for a review, see Coltrane,2000). Moreover, even though in recent decadeswomen have increasingly entered the paid laborforce and share, more than ever, the burden ofproviding financially for the family, men con-tinue to do significantly less than their equalshare of housework, claiming disinterest, disin-clination, or general lack of aptitude (Deutsch,1999). Along this line, doing household laborhas been equated with doing gender; women doit and men don’t, and disruptions in this patterncan be threatening to a family’s gender order.

Proving that housework is not inherentlygendered, studies show that men do morehousework before they are married than they doafter. Once married, however, they have theopportunity to denote most domestic chores as“women’s work” and turn them over to their(less powerful) wives. Research does show that,overall, American men have begun to do agreater share of housework in recent decades,although much of this gain is the result ofwomen doing less (Robinson & Godbey, 1999).In general, married men tend to create the needfor more housework than they perform (Col-trane, 2000). Although some social scientists hailthe relatively slight increase in men’s houseworkperformance as highly significant, others suggestthat this small change “should be better under-stood in terms of a largely successful male resis-tance” (McMahon, 1999, p. 7). Why are menresisting? The short (and short-term) answer isthat it is in men’s interest to do so (Goode, 1992;McMahon, 1999), because it reinforces a separa-tion of spheres that underpins masculine idealsand perpetuates a gender order privileging



(some) men over women and over (some) othermen. On the whole, we raise boys to expectmothers to wait on them and nurture them, andwe raise girls to help their mothers perform theendless family work that is necessary for main-taining homes and raising children. It is no sur-prise that after being propelled away fromfamilies for a time, most young men come backto family life with a sense of masculine entitle-ment, expecting to be served by women and notnoticing the myriad details of family life thatdemand someone’s attention (Pyke & Coltrane,1996).

Although family living has been found to bea protective factor for men with respect to somerisky behaviors (Nock, 1998), attempting to liveup to masculine ideals can put men at risk insidefamilies as well as outside them. The psycho-logical and emotional energy exerted to be incontrol, unemotional, independent, and unin-volved affects men’s relations with their wivesand children, as well as having deleterious medicalconsequences for the men themselves (Sabo,1998). One of the most consistent problemsidentified by women with respect to marriage istheir husbands’ lack of communication and emo-tional expression (Coltrane, 1998; L. B. Rubin,1983). This gender-stereotyped division ofemotional labor even pervades men’s friend-ships with women: One woman in L. B. Rubin’s(1985) study of friendship commented, “I haveone man friend I love very much, but I don’trelate to him like I do to a woman. I can’t talkto him the same way, and when I try, I’m disap-pointed. Either we’re talking about him and hisproblems and I’m sort of like a mother or bigsister, or it’s all so heady and intellectual-ized that it’s boring” (p. 160). Finally, men’srelationships with their children suffer to theextent that they adopt emotionally remote andinexpressive styles of masculinity. A typicalresponse to an emotionally absent father comesfrom one 17-year-old, interviewed by clinicalpsychologist William Pollack: “[M]y father islike his own father. He’s not very communica-tive. I don’t care if he coaches my soccer teamfor nine years in a row; I would rather he justtalked to me once in a while” (Pollack, 2000,p. 238).

The shortcomings of men in families are notlimited to inattention or emotional remoteness.Aided by governmental neglect and protectedby the privacy of their homes, men have long

been expected to “keep women and children intheir place” with the threat and use of physicalforce; moreover, to the extent that this expecta-tion is normalized as a symbol of masculinity,violence and the threat of violence become oneand the same (see Hearn, 1990). In the UnitedStates alone, estimates range up to 4 millionwomen per year who are physically abused bytheir male partners (Greenfeld et al., 1998). Fartoo many women and children will continue tobe the victims of domestic terror; as Kaufman(1993) noted, “all women, directly or indirectly,experience at least the potential of domination,violence, coercion and harassment at the handsof men” (p. 44).

MEN IN TRADITIONAL

FAMILIES—A CATCH-22

For a number of reasons, men’s experiences infamilies have been problematized within the lastseveral decades, primarily at the instigation ofthe second wave of the women’s rights move-ment, which started in earnest in the late 1960s.Feminism began largely as a movement aboutfamilies and about the need for change infamilies; much of that need revolved aroundmen’s involvement (or lack of involvement) inthose families. As women became more com-mitted to breadwinning, they began to see them-selves as more than “helpmates” for men; theybegan to envision a public life of their own and,as a result, a larger, more involved role in familyfor their male partners. While the relationalaspects of traditional notions of genderdemanded that a man could “only be a ‘realman’ if someone is around being a ‘realwoman’” (Kaufman, 1993, p. 47), it becameclear that many women no longer had the timeor the inclination to be “real women” in thatsense, shielding their husbands from the contra-dictions of power and helplessness inherent inmasculine ideals.

Women’s new roles and self-images asfamily providers made them less inclined toplay at “fascinating womanhood” (Andelin,1974), living only for and through “their men.”As women’s collective consciousness wasraised, men began to find themselves face-to-face with their own alienation from families.More important, feminism gave men a new van-tage point from which to view their position in



the family. As feminists introduced the politicsof the personal, men came to see home as morethan their castle and as, instead, a place wheretheir children were growing up under their nosesand without their involvement. Men in families,or more appropriately, outside families, began torecognize the emotional costs of chasing mascu-line ideals.

Economic structural shifts also affectedmen’s sense of family involvement. The globaland national economic transition from industryto service, “or from production to consumption,is symbolically a move from the traditional mas-culine to the traditional feminine” (Faludi, 1999,p. 38). As heavy manufacturing was replacedby the information economy, men began to findtheir masculine ideals less serviceable. Women’sworkforce participation and associated wageshave increased gradually over the decades,whereas men’s wages and job stability have sta-bilized or declined (Coltrane & Collins, 2001).As men have been economically “downsized”and as their wives have taken their own places asfamily providers, it has become harder to justifymasculine entitlement.

Although these are not the only precipitatingfactors, they certainly have helped to problema-tize men’s place in families and caused them toreexamine their taken-for-granted assumptionsregarding the benefits of living up to a hege-monic ideal of masculinity. Structurally, psy-chologically, and relationally, these issues pointto the tensions present for men in family life,tensions exacerbated by the felt need to live upto certain ideals of manhood that make themoutsiders to the family. On one hand, hegemonicmasculine ideals have provided them withpower and privilege, in the home and in societyat large. On the other hand, men have begun torealize the cost of their alienation from familylife. In many ways, this tension represents a“line of fault” or “rupture in consciousness”(Smith, 1987, p. 52) between the ideals of mas-culinity and the experience of family life that isexpressed in “feminized” terms of nurturance,caring, self-sacrifice, and dependence. This faultline has been articulated as a crisis of masculin-ity (Connell, 1995; Messner, 1997).

Attempts at Resolution

Various social and personal attempts havebeen made to resolve the rupture between men’s

experience in families and their masculineideals, but most have failed because they continueto advocate for a masculinity that is defined inopposition to femininity. The 1980s ushered inthe mythopoetic men’s movement, which pro-moted a drum-beating, chest-thumping returnto wildness in an attempt to reclaim the “‘thedeep masculine parts’ of themselves that theybelieved had been lost” (Messner, 1997, p. 17).Far from being a radical departure from thestatus quo, this movement championed thesearch for some mythical quintessential mas-culinity that could overcome the “mother-sonconspiracy” that was evicting fathers and femi-nizing sons, making them “soft males” (Bly,1990, pp. 2, 18).

The 1990s brought the neoconservative,religiously oriented Promise Keepers, fillingfootball stadiums across the United States (andother parts of the world) with “born-againChristians who interpret the bible literally andbelieve that men are ordained to serve God andlead their families” (Coltrane, 2001, p. 403).Promising to be better husbands and fathers,these men commit to being “servant leaders” inthe home and to bond emotionally with othermen in support of this goal; their wives, onthe other hand, are encouraged to make a sortof “patriarchal bargain” (Anderson & Messner,1997; also see Kandiyoti, 1988) and graciouslysubmit to their husband’s leadership in thehome in exchange for his being a better familyman. Other religiously based marriage pro-ponents have joined political forces with con-servative think tanks and communitarian socialscientists to forge a public relations campaignpromoting marriage and “responsible father-hood” in the United States. These “family val-ues” movements reflect the patriarchal ideal ofseparate spheres by insisting that fathers are thenatural “head” of the family and rejecting thenotion that women and men should participateequally in housework, child care, and economicprovision.

Finally, many men have simply opted out offamily life. Barbara Ehrenreich (1983) attributesmen’s lack of family commitment to a break-down in the breadwinner ethic; encouraged towork and earn a “family wage,” many mensimply have chosen not to share that wage witha family. Other fathers will, after divorce, makemonetary support payments but essentially dis-appear from their families’ lives, abstaining from



involvement with their children that requiresa direct investment of their time; still otherscontribute neither financial nor nonfinancialsupport (Goldscheider, 2000, p. 532; Teachman,1992). Even when contact is maintained ini-tially, children’s involvement with nonresidentfathers tends to decline over time, especiallyfor children whose fathers left when they werequite young. Although organizations promotingfathers’ rights have had some success in pro-moting joint custody in divorce cases involvingchildren, the rate of postdivorce father-childcontact has been increasing very slowly(Bertoia & Drakich, 1993; Coltrane & Hickman,1992). Despite massive efforts to increase childsupport payments from absent fathers, recentimprovements in the amount collected havebeen modest (Coltrane & Collins, 2001). Thesevarious attempts to deal with men’s alienationfrom families only tend to reinforce aspects ofmasculinity that contributed to men beingfamily outsiders in the first place. The meninvolved in these movements generally fail toembrace and incorporate ideals of nurturing,emotionality, and service to others that mighthelp resolve some of the contradictions theyface as family members.

RESOLVING THE LINE OF FAULT

Our discussion has focused on the ways thatthe social construction of separate spheres andpublic masculinities in the 19th and 20th cen-turies has created dilemmas for boys and menin families. Our account draws on a historicalunderstanding of developments in the UnitedStates and, to a lesser extent, England and othercapitalist industrial countries (see, for example,Hearn, 1992). The broad outlines of our thesis,however, may apply more broadly. Researchon nonindustrial societies suggests that if menand women share domestic tasks, they are alsomore likely to share wealth, property, and polit-ical decision making (Coltrane, 1989, 1992;Johnson, 1988; Sanday, 1981). There is a directcorrespondence between sharing power in morepublic domains and sharing the care anddrudgery of domestic life in the family domain.

We have argued that men’s exercise ofauthority in public realms through the institu-tion of social patriarchy both enables and under-mines men’s family experiences. Private

patriarchy, or the power and authority thatmen exercise within family settings, is bothenhanced and subverted by social patriarchy.Women’s entry into paid labor, along withtheir modest gains in terms of career mobilityand earnings potential, has weakened socialpatriarchy, causing new tensions to emerge infamilies. Whereas women previously weredependent on marriage for economic security,they may now survive apart from men. Men areno longer afforded the unpaid services of a wifein return for being an economic provider. Thismakes marriage more optional and contingentfor both women and men. We are currently wit-nessing emergent forms of marital negotiationand sharing not contingent on the economic andpolitical dominance of men. To be sure, menstill enjoy earnings and career advantages, andcultural and political arenas still tend to privi-lege men’s needs over women’s. Nevertheless,men increasingly are being challenged to sharein the nurturing and emotional labor that isessential in the raising of children and the main-tenance of family life. Men are resisting, butsome are learning how to share in the everydaytasks of cooking and cleaning, and many aredeveloping the emotional capacities and under-standings that enable them to share in theupbringing of the next generation. More sharingin the family (however limited) mirrors moresharing in the public realms of politics andoccupations.

When families work well, they provide secu-rity, a sense of self, a heightened understandingof others, and an atmosphere of caring, loving,and nurturing. Social animals that we are,families provide the first, and most basic, socialgrouping for our survival and can sustain us inour darker moments of solitude. But families arechanging. The end of the 20th century witnesseda remarkable increase in family diversity asfamilies took on more and different forms andfunctions. Along with the proliferation ofdiverse types of families, we have been intro-duced into new ways of “doing family”(Gubrium & Holstein, 1990), with the older tra-ditional ways becoming harder and harder tosustain, both physically and psychologically.We can’t go back to the separate spheres ideal ofthe Victorian era or the nostalgic Ozzie andHarriet family of the 1950s where “men weremen” and “women were women,” and never thetwain would meet (Coontz, 1992, 1997). Nor



should we want to go back. Promoting familylife where men hang onto stereotypes of man-hood that leave them distant and unattached out-siders or dominating patriarchs has proven to beboth uncomfortable and unworkable. In suchfamilies, “masculinized” men find themselves“missing something” as human beings. Womenfind themselves struggling with the “secondshift” of housework and child care. Both findthemselves losing out on the emotional connec-tions that companionate marriage ideals havepromised, and children find themselves withfathers who are absent emotionally, even whenphysically present.

In this chapter, we have examined how wepush boys, both interpersonally and institution-ally, to follow an abstract dominant ideal ofmasculinity that instructs them that, in order tobe masculine, they must avoid the feminine. Wealso have seen how living up to masculine idealscan result in men’s contradictory experiences ofentitlement and alienation, privilege and pain,which in turn causes problems for women andchildren. How can this dilemma be resolved?As optimists, we believe that feminism hasgiven men the tools to resolve this disjuncturebetween ideals and experience, entitlement andalienation, but to do so requires getting rid ofthe assumption that masculinity is the antithesisof femininity, and that to be a man, one has toprove that he is not a woman. Without the bur-den of this supposition, boys would no longerneed to be torn from their mothers and familiesin order to make them “real men.” They couldthen incorporate the virtues of nurturing, caring,service, and emotional involvement that providethe underpinnings for successful family func-tioning. Without laboring under the abstractionof dominant masculinity, men would be freed tobecome family insiders and full participants,rather than outsiders and tyrants. Such changeswill not be easy, nor will they be welcomed bythose who feel more comfortable with separategender spheres. But the structural and culturalforces promoting more egalitarian genderrelations undoubtedly will increase some men’sparticipation in family life and will continueto promote diversity in forms of cohabitation,marriage, and child rearing. These develop-ments will create further pressures for change inmasculine ideals throughout society. We wonder,however, if such pressures will grow strongenough to overcome long-standing military,

economic, political, and psychological interestsin creating men who conform to and reproducepatriarchal masculinities. We can only raisethe question here; the answer, however, couldchange the world.

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15FATHERHOOD AND MASCULINITIES

WILLIAM MARSIGLIO

JOSEPH H. PLECK

249

Much has been learned about thevarious dimensions of fatherhoodduring the past few decades, as is

documented in several recent and expansivereviews (Lamb, 1997; Marsiglio, Amato, Day, &Lamb, 2000; Parke, 2002; J. H. Pleck, 1997).These diverse emotional, psychological, andbehavioral dimensions involve men’s attitudesabout and experiences with being fathers priorto conception, during pregnancy, and through-out their children’s lives (with behavior oftenbeing referred to as involvement or investment).Most of this scholarship has focused on fathersliving in various Western industrialized coun-tries (Hobson, 2002; Lamb, 1987), althoughresearchers have studied fathering in Asiancultures such as China (Ho, 1987; Jankowiak,1992) and Japan (Ishii-Kuntz, 1992, 1993,1994; Shwalb, Imaizumi, & Nakazawa, 1987)as well as numerous nonnindustrialized soci-eties around the world (Coltrane, 1988; Engle &Breaux, 1998; Hewlett, 1992, 2000; Tripp-Reimer & Wilson, 1991). Another noteworthycomparative study examined fathering behaviorsin a diverse mix of 18 countries (Mackey, 1985).

Students of gender also may be interestedin historical analyses of fathering that gobeyond the scope of our review (Griswold,1993; LaRossa, 1997; LaRossa & Reitzes,1995; E. H. Pleck & Pleck, 1997).

Our primary aim in this review is to examinescholarship on fatherhood from a gendered andcritical perspective. Although the literature thatspecifically addresses the relationship betweenmasculinities and fatherhood is sparse, it issufficient in scope to warrant a review and toallow us to propose a forward-looking researchagenda. We supplement our review by incorpo-rating literature that may not be informedexplicitly by a critical gender perspective, butwhich still contributes to a gendered understand-ing of fatherhood. Our scope, however, doesnot allow us to discuss recent work on culturalrepresentations of fatherhood in entertainmentmedia and social marketing promoted by orga-nizations with interests in fatherhood, and howgender displays are intertwined with the mes-sages being conveyed (Coltrane & Allan, 1994;LaRossa, Gadgil, & Wynn, 2000; Lupton &Barclay, 1997).

Authors’ note: Part of the work reported here was supported by the Cooperative State Research, Education and ExtensionService, U.S. Department of Agriculture, under Project No. ILLU-45–0329 to Joseph H. Pleck.


At the outset, we focus on debates aboutwhether men as fathers can uniquely affecttheir children. We then consider how the styleof men’s fathering contributes to genderedsocial inequalities within and outsidefamilies/households. At numerous points, weaccentuate how men’s participation in systemsof gendered social relations—both between andwithin genders—shapes their fathering opportu-nities, attitudes, and behavior. Next, we under-score how fathering occurs in various settingswhere circumstances associated with age, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and sexual ori-entation come into play. When viewed througha gender lens, we can see how these contextscreate different opportunities and struggles formen as they think about and attempt to act asmale parents. We conclude by suggestingavenues for future research that would advanceour understanding of fatherhood from a criticalgendered perspective.

As we take stock of the relevant literature, weemphasize several themes. Most important, wehighlight the intersection among the mainstructures of social inequality—gender, race/ethnicity, and social class—while clarifyinghow these three factors affect the social con-struction of fatherhood images and the waymen experience their lives as fathers. Consistentwith recent theoretical work in the area of menand gender (Connell, 1995, 2000), fatheringcan be studied in connection to hegemonicmasculinity as well as alternative constructionsof masculinities that give meaning to men’severyday lives in diverse situations.

Just as it is critical to acknowledge the impli-cations of multiple masculinities, we pay partic-ular attention to the dual concerns of men asbreadwinners and nurturing parents whilefocusing on the initial phases of the fatheringlife course. Fathers and their children typicallyspend three to six overlapping decades in theirrespective roles, but most fatherhood scholar-ship is restricted to the first 18 years of this jointfather-child experience (but see Pillemer &McCartney, 1991; also Pfiefer & Sussman,1991). Our review emphasizes fathering duringthese early years, although we suggest howfuture research can address a wider range ofissues across the fathering life course.

Efforts to study fatherhood and promotefather-relevant social policies have gone globalin recent decades. Capturing the full breadth and

depth of these initiatives is beyond our limitedscope here. While we selectively review andintegrate cross-cultural materials from industri-alized and nonindustrialized societies into ourassessment of the literature, much of what wecover is most salient to a U.S. context. In broadterms, the cross-cultural literature teaches us thatthere is considerable variation in how men act asfathers, that children can flourish in societieswhere different types of paternal models andexpectations of children exist, and that genderas a social organizing principle is implicated invarious ways throughout the world in structuringthe opportunities for fathers to interact with andinvest in their children. Hearn (2002) providesa useful review of men, fathers, and the statewithin an international context while advancinga critical perspective on studying men.

Finally, our review accentuates how knowl-edge about fathering is produced, disseminated,and evaluated. We take our cue from Stacey andBiblarz (2001), who showed how the productionof knowledge can be assessed in a controversialarea like sexual orientation and parenting. Beingattentive to the social construction of knowl-edge about fathering is vital because, as thoseworking closely in the field know, there are sev-eral hotly contested research and policy issuesthat challenge individuals to navigate the watersthat muddle theory, research, and propaganda.Those debates that are most contentious focuson whether (and how) fathers matter to theirchildren in unique and meaningful ways, thepresumed positive value of marriage in fathers’lives, nonresident fathers’ financial and inter-personal commitments to their children, and thepotential danger that stepfathers may pose fortheir stepchildren. Not surprisingly, those whoresearch and/or debate these issues often practicegender politics and swear allegiance to variousbrands of feminism, family and/or religiousvalues, theoretical perspectives, or modes ofscientific inquiry (Blankenhorn, 1995; Daniels,1998; Dowd, 2000; Popenoe, 1996; Silverstein,1996). Those stakeholders who are most effectivein framing the key issues and paradigms in theminds of the research community, the generalpublic, and policymakers can in various waysinfluence what is generally “known” about howfathers feel, think, and act. They do this by shap-ing the types of questions that researchers ask,the way research is conducted, and how researchis presented, interpreted, and used by researchers,



policymakers, social service professionals, andthe general public alike. A critical review of thefield, then, should pay attention not only to howfathering experiences are influenced by andshape gendered social structures and relations. Itmust also draw attention to the gender-relatedand ideological struggles among the knowledgeproducers that can confound research and politi-cal agendas within the field itself.

IS FATHERING “ESSENTIALLY”DIFFERENT FROM MOTHERING?

One highly politicized issue central to a dis-cussion linking fathering and masculinitiesrevolves around the debate whether fathers, asmen, are uniquely equipped with characteristicsthat differentiate their parenting styles and con-tributions to children from those of mothers.This debate is often couched in terms of essen-tialist (Silverstein & Auerbach, 1999) and socialconstructionist approaches (Brandth & Kvande,1998, Lupton & Barclay, 1997; Marsiglio, 1995,1998) to fatherhood. These discussions gainpolitical and theoretical visibility becausethey are often associated with the illusiveand controversial concept of “fatherlessness”(Blankenhorn, 1995) and the championing ofevolutionary psychological approaches to under-standing parenting (Popenoe, 1996).

In gender studies, the critique of “essential-ism” has been an important recent theoreticaldevelopment (Coltrane, 1994; Hare-Mustin &Marecek, 1990). Essentialism provides a con-ceptual rubric under which to discuss severalaspects of fatherhood that are fundamental toconsider from a gender perspective. Silversteinand Auerbach (1999) identified and criticallyanalyzed three component beliefs in an implicit“essentialist paradigm for fatherhood”: (a) genderdifferences in parenting are universal and biologi-cally based; (b) fathers’ uniquely masculine formof parenting significantly improves developmen-tal outcomes for children, especially for sons;and (c) the context in which fathers are mostlikely to provide for and nurture young childrenis heterosexual marriage. Their analysis causedquite a stir and was vigorously challenged in thepopular press (Chavez, 1999; Horn, 1999).

As Silverstein and Auerbach noted, theessentialist view of fatherhood, particularly as

expressed by Blankenhorn (1995) and Popenoe(1996), underlies recent neoconservative policyinitiatives to promote marriage. This view alsois reflected in organizations such as the PromiseKeepers (Brickner, 1999; Claussen, 2000) andthe National Fatherhood Initiative (Horn, 1995).The enormous empirical and theoretical litera-ture relevant to these three beliefs is beyond thescope of this chapter to review in any depth.Thus, we will discuss only selected issues, espe-cially ones Silverstein and Auerbach did notaddress and those that enable us to highlight thelarger context within which knowledge in thisarea is socially constructed.

THE UNIVERSALITY

AND BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF

GENDER DIFFERENCES IN PARENTING

The hypothetical universality of gender-differ-entiated parental rearing of the young—that is,fathers being less involved—has been con-sidered both across nonhuman primate speciesand cross-culturally among human societies.For the former, both Lamb, Pleck, Charnov, andLevine’s (1985) and Silverstein and Auerbach’sreviews suggest that gender-differentiatedparental rearing of the young is far less univer-sal than is popularly believed. Smuts andGubernick (1992) provided evidence that thisinterspecies variation can be explained by a“reciprocity hypothesis,” holding that fathersinvest more in the young when females havemore to offer fathers. For example, in specieswith multimale family groups, in which femalestherefore choose which males to copulate with,fathers invest more in the young than in specieswith one-male groups (Silverstein, 1993; seeBelsky, 1993, for a critique). Though provoca-tive, inferences to human populations based onthese findings should be made cautiously.

Mackey (1985), drawing on his extensiveobservational and comparative work on humanfathers in 18 countries, concluded that it is harderto stimulate men to be caregivers for children.Mackey noted, however, that once fathers beginto respond, they do so in a manner similar towomen. Mackey additionally noted that whentwo or more men are in an all-male group, it isharder to motivate simultaneous caregivingresponses from them than is the case when two

Fatherhood and Masculinities • 251


or more women are in an all-female gathering.Scholars also agree that there is actuallysignificant variation across the world societiesstudied by anthropologists in fathers’ level ofinvolvement relative to mothers’ (Hewlett,1992; Mackey, 1985; Silverstein & Auerbach,1999), a finding inconsistent with the essential-ism perspective. Silverstein and Auerbachargued that this cross-cultural variation can beexplained by the reciprocity hypothesis.

Those who conduct naturalistic observationsof fathers living in nonindustrialized societiesconceptualize fathers’ behavior in terms ofparental “investment,” referring to activities thatpromote their offspring’s survival. This con-struct is rooted in evolutionary and biosocialframeworks that emphasize ties between biol-ogy, gender, and reproductive strategies. Theseapproaches recognize biology’s role in shapingpaternal behavior while attempting to explaindiversities and commonalities in paternal expe-rience between different societies. Although theanthropologists who use these frameworks tendnot to refer explicitly to “essentialism,” theirmodels are consistent with at least some essen-tialist thinking. Many anthropologists, thoughreluctant to use these models, still view gen-der as a significant factor affecting paternalbehavior because of its role in how cultures aremodified to create various types of parentingopportunities and expectations. Without explic-itly invoking the essentialist paradigm, Hewlett(1992) reviewed research based on naturalisticobservation and concluded,

While cross-cultural studies question some of theEuropean and American research, this does notmean that all aspects of fathers’ role are culturallyrelative. Fathers in all parts of the world do sharecertain characteristics: fathers provide less directcaregiving than mothers (but there may be somefathers within a culture that take on primary care-giving), fathers are expected to provide at leastsome economic support for their children, andfathers are expected to support the mother eco-nomically and/or emotionally. (p. xii)

He goes on to add that it is assumed that“fathers from all parts of the world are likely tohave similar concerns about the safety, health,and tradeoffs between spending time with theirchildren and doing things that attract and keepwomen (e.g., working to increase status, pres-tige or wealth)” (p. xv).

FATHERS’ UNIQUE

CONTRIBUTIONS TO CHILD DEVELOPMENT

Central to the essentialist conception of father-hood is the proposition that fathers, as men, con-tribute to the development of their children in aunique way. This idea has generated contentiouscontroversy, informed by research on the con-sequences for children of “father absence” (orgrowing up in a single-parent female-headedfamily) as well as research about the effects onchildren of variation in fathers’ characteristicsand behavior in families with fathers present.The scholarly disagreements over the meaningof the research are considerable. Widespreadsocial concern about the large and perhapsgrowing number of fathers who are discon-nected from their children has led to a broader,highly politicized public debate about fatherabsence and father involvement. Differentstakeholders—conservatives, feminists, fathers’rights groups, policymakers concerned with teenpregnancy and other issues, and researchersof different persuasions—advance radicallyconflicting positions.

Father “absence.” In discussions of fatherabsence, several issues have emerged as partic-ularly important. First, the concept is ill-definedboth conceptually and operationally. The obvi-ous, but deceptively simple, approach focuseson whether the child’s father lives in the house-hold or not. Because fathers’ potential residenceor nonresidence occurs from birth to late ado-lescence, the length of time the father lives ordoes not live with the child should of course betaken into account. But exactly how long doesthere need to be no father in the household for achild to be “father absent”? Does absence occur-ring for any reason count, or only for some rea-sons? Should a father’s being away from homefor a year because of military reserve service, orhis being away from home 2 weeks out of 3because he is a long-distance trucker or a salesrepresentative, be considered father absence?How do we classify the child who lives with herfather every other weekend and 2 summermonths out of 3, and with her mother the rest ofthe time? What about the child of a teen fatherwho lives nearby, visits his child frequently, andcontributes economically to her upbringing? Andis it only the residence or nonresidence of thebiological father that is important?



In research, respondents usually will providean answer when asked whether they grew up ina two-parent or single-parent family. However,this does not mean their answers correspond tosomething that can be clearly defined or reliablymeasured. Readers of Blankenhorn’s (1995),Horn’s (1995), and Popenoe’s (1996) compendi-ums of the negative outcomes occurring morefrequently among children of absent fathersmay be impressed by the length of their lists, butthey may not ask how meaningful it really is toreduce the diversity of children’s living arrange-ments over time to the simple dichotomy offather presence or absence. If one broadens theconcept from physical to psychological fatherabsence, it becomes even more difficult todefine and measure reliably.

Even if these difficulties could be set aside,the results of existing research on father absencedo not unequivocally establish the detrimentaleffects often claimed. The context in whichfather absence occurs can be critically impor-tant. There is evidence, for example, that theoutcomes associated with father absence in thechildren of adult single mothers often aremarkedly more positive than those occurring forchildren of teen single mothers, who tend tohave less human capital (Edelman, 1986). Thepotential problems of father absence in the con-text of teen parenthood are, nonetheless, inap-propriately generalized to father absence in allcircumstances. Other scholars have noted thatthe consequences of father absence depend onwhether social supports are present or absent(Wilson, 1989).

In addition, father absence typically co-occurswith, and its effects are thus confounded by, othercircumstances such as teen parenthood, divorce,and in particular low income. Simply comparingfather-absent and father-present groups can thusbe misleading. An analogy is that university-affiliated teaching hospitals have markedlyhigher rates of cesarean sections than communityhospitals, but when risk factors (e.g., poor health)are controlled for, university hospitals’ rate ofC-sections is no higher. In many studies, similarly,controlling for family income and other factorsmarkedly reduces the apparent negative corre-lates of father absence. Blankenhorn (1995),Horn (1995), and Popenoe (1996) make theircase entirely with simple comparisons betweenfather-present and -absent groups, without con-trolling for or acknowledging the potential

confounding effects of other differences betweenthe two groups.

Among more sophisticated analyses,McLanahan and Sandefeur’s (1994) GrowingUp With a Single Parent is the recent large-scaleempirical study of father absence most widelycited. Using data from four different nationalsurveys, these authors found, with race, mater-nal education, and number of children in thefamily included in their statistical models, thatfather absence has marked negative effects oneducational outcomes, early childbearing, andemployment. Although family income is con-trolled in other studies, it is not controlled here.McLanahan and Sandefeur hold that potentialconfounding variables should be controlled onlywhen they represent “selection” factors forfather absence (i.e., factors helping explain whyfather absence occurs, but which cannot be“caused” by father absence, like race and lowmaternal education). They argue that conditionspotentially caused by father absence, such aslow income, should not be controlled; doing sowould underestimate the extent to which fatherabsence actually leads to negative child out-comes. Given the difficulties in creating policiesto provide adequate incomes to single-parentmothers, their argument has some pragmaticmerit—and McLanahan and Sandefeur’s focusclearly is on the social policy implications offather absence, not on evaluating the essentialistargument that fathers have a unique positiveeffect on child development. However, theessentialist position implies that father absenceshould have negative consequences even whenthe lower family income associated with it istaken into account. The supporting evidence forthis claim is weak.

Fathering in two-parent families. Other rele-vant research concerns the effects on childrenresulting from variation in fathers’ character-istics and behavior in families with fatherspresent. Considerable research in the 1950s and1960s examined how paternal characteristicssuch as “sex typing” (the degree to whichfathers have “masculine” personality character-istics, for example, ambitious, dominant, self-reliant), warmth, and control were related tochildren’s gender identity, school achievement,and psychological adjustment. The influence offathers’ sex typing was of particular interestbecause fathers were thought to be crucial in



promoting the development of children’s, andespecially sons’, gender identities (J. H. Pleck,1981). These studies generally find that afather’s masculinity is much less important thanhis warmth and closeness with his child. Inaddition, the same characteristics in mothers areassociated with positive outcomes in children.Thus, although this research finds that positivedevelopment is correlated with father behaviors,it does not suggest that development is associ-ated with behaviors in fathers that are unique tomale parents (Lamb, 1987).

More recent research focuses on the conse-quences for children of fathers’ degree of contactwith their children, more broadly termed“involvement” by Lamb, Pleck, Charnov, andLevine (1985, 1987; J. H. Pleck, Lamb, & Levine,1985). Involvement is defined as “the amountof time spent in activities involving the child”(Lamb et al., 1985, p. 884) and includes threecomponents: (a) engagement with the child (in theform of caretaking, or play or leisure), (b) acces-sibility to the child, and (c) responsibility for thecare of the child, as distinct from the performanceof care. Although Palkovitz (1997) has criticizedLamb et al. for assuming that father involvementmust have positive effects on children, Lamb et al.explicitly argued that involvement might havepositive effects on children only in specific con-texts; for example, both mother and father wantthe father to be involved.

More recent work on the consequences ofpaternal involvement has shifted focus fromsimply the amount of involvement, implicitly“content-free,” to the nature and quality of theinvolvement. In most research that finds a rela-tionship between involvement and positive childoutcomes, the involvement measures actuallyemphasize positive forms of interaction suchas shared activities and helping children learn.Consequently, J. H. Pleck (1997) concluded thatthe concept of father involvement should bereplaced by the concept of positive fatherinvolvement, as defined from the child’sperspective. Amato and Rivera’s (1999; seealso Marsiglio et al., 2000) documentation ofgood childhood outcomes linked to positivepaternal involvement illustrates two additionalmethodological improvements. Because paternaland maternal involvement may correlate, mater-nal involvement needs to be controlled for whentesting relationships between father involvementand child outcomes. In addition, for associations

between involvement and child outcomes to beconvincing, the two variables should be assessedby different observers, rather than relying onfathers’ reports of both. In relationships betweenchildren and nonresident fathers as well, fathers’feelings of closeness to their child and authori-tative parenting (defined as the combination ofclear discipline, monitoring, and emotionalsupport), but not simply amount of contact, arepositively related to children’s grades and nega-tively associated with children’s externalizingand internalizing symptoms (Amato & Gilbreth,1999). Other recent research suggests positiveeffects associated with fathers’ breadwinning(Amato, 1998). These effects, however, are mod-est in magnitude.

The essentialist argument holds that fathers’positive effects on children are independent ofmothers’, which this research supports.However, the essentialist argument also requiresthat fathers’ effects be gendered, specificallymale effects. The finding that the dimensions ofpaternal and maternal behavior that influencechildren positively are the same seems inconsis-tent with this premise (Lamb, 1986; Amato &Rivera, 1999). The comparison betweenchildren raised in mother-father families andthose growing up with two lesbian parents pro-vides another kind of evidence. This researchprovides little indication that those childrenwhose two parents include a male are better offin terms of psychological or social adjustmentthan those whose two parents are both females.In fact, Stacey and Biblarz (2001) argue thatresearchers have defensively downplayed theevidence in these studies that the children of les-bian parents are better off. As we show later,some research suggests that compared withheterosexual fathers, gay fathers are more likelyto be nurturing and less likely to be traditional intheir parental style.

Most contemporary developmental researchersare skeptical of the idea that fathering (or anyother single factor) is “essential,” in the literalsense, to human development, as assessed byoutcomes such as school performance and goodsocial relationships. Their view is that develop-ment is impaired by “cumulative” risk, not by anyone risk factor. A good illustration is Sameroff,Seifer, Barocas, Zax, and Greenspan’s (1987)study of the association between risk factorssuch as low birth weight, poverty, having a singleparent, poor schools, and the like, and adolescent



IQ. Rather than focusing on specific factors, theresearchers simply tabulated the total number ofrisk factors each individual experienced. Littledifference was found in average IQ amongchildren who experienced only one or two ofthese risk factors, compared with those who hadnone. For each additional risk factor beyondtwo, however, average IQ was 7 to 12 pointslower. The general principle here is that theimpact of any one factor, positive or negative,depends on the other factors present. This prin-ciple makes it more understandable whyresearch generally finds that positive fatherinvolvement has only modest beneficial effectsand that measures of father absence have onlylimited negative statistical effects.

MARRIAGE AND OTHER

RELATIONSHIP CONTEXTS FOR FATHERING

When considering the essentialist view onfathering, the question of whether hetero-sexual marriage is the “best” context for fathersto rear children typically is asked in terms ofchildren’s well-being (see Amato & Gilbreth,1999, Marsiglio et al., 2000, and Stacey &Biblarz, 2001, for relevant reviews). Recentresearch has begun to explore whether biologi-cal (particularly married, coresidential) fathersinteract with and contribute to their childrendifferently from men who act as father figuresin other types of contexts (Anderson, Kaplan, &Lancaster, 1999; Buchanan, Maccoby, &Dornbusch, 1996; Hofferth & Anderson, 2003)and whether there are differences in how step-fathers and nonresident fathers affect theirchildren (White & Gilbreth, 2001). Althoughthis research tends to support the assumptionthat children fare better on average when theylive with a mother and biological, residentfather, stepfathers (including cohabiting fathersin some cases) also can make meaningful con-tributions to children’s well-being.

A related question, one more central to ourreview, is whether men reap positive benefits bybeing fathers (Nock, 1998) or by increasingtheir involvement with their children (Lamb,Pleck, & Levine, 1986), especially in a maritalcontext. Numerous commentators have arguedthat marriage and having children helps to civilizeand/or give meaning to men’s lives, thereby

affording children and men their best option forexperiencing positive outcomes. Snarey (1993,p. 98) suggests that fathers are more likely toexpress their capacity for “establishing, guiding,or caring for the next generation” in thecommunity at large, separate from their ownchildren. Men’s transition to parenting andactive involvement with their children can helpmany men develop more nurturing personalitytraits (Hawkins & Belsky, 1989). Finally,although some studies show that positivepaternal involvement can lead men to experienceconflict, stress, and a lower self-esteem (espe-cially with sons), these patterns do not appearto affect men’s satisfaction with fathering(J. H. Pleck, 1997). Unfortunately, answers tothese questions based on solid research are moredifficult to come by than some persons eitheranticipate or are willing to admit.

One of the most widely discussed and politi-cized issues within the U.S. context involvesnonresident fathers’ financial and interpersonalcommitments to their children (Griswold, 1993;see also Seltzer, 1998). Feminists, members offathers’ rights groups, persons who espouse tra-ditional family ideologies, and others haveweighed in on child support and visitationissues. Because the vast majority of nonresidentparents are fathers, much of the debate aboutnonresident parents’ responsibilities and rightshas evolved around the issues of gender equitywithin a male-dominated economic system.Many believe that nonresident fathers in largenumbers have reneged on their paternal bread-winning responsibilities. Other scholars, though,have struggled to refocus and sharpen the debatewhile raising public awareness about what theyperceive to be a pervasive and distorted stereo-typical image of “deadbeat dads” (Braver &O’Connell, 1998; Braver et al., 1993; Nielsen,1999; Parke & Brott, 1999). These commenta-tors are quick to stress mothers’ gatekeepingroles; they suggest that many nonresidentfathers are pushed away and often kept awayfrom being involved with their children whilebeing pressured to fulfill a detached bread-winner role.

Another controversial issue involvesassertions about nonbiological fathers’ treat-ment of their partners’ children. It has becomecommonplace to assert that “stepfathers”and boyfriends are more likely to abuse thechildren of their romantic partners physically



and sexually than are the children’s biologicalfathers (Blankenhorn, 1995; Booth, Carver, &Granger, 2000; Daly & Wilson, 1998). Some goso far as to say that “stepfathers are far morelikely than [biological] fathers to do so [sexuallymolest children]” (Blankenhorn, 1995, p. 40).Although it appears that a majority of studiesfind that stepchildren are at greater risk of abuse(Giles-Sims, 1997), various researchers havechallenged the validity of these claims (Malkin &Lamb, 1994; Sedlak & Broadhurst, 1996; seealso Silverstein & Auerbach, 1999). The scien-tific jury is still out as to whether stepfathers’hypothesized lower incentive to invest in theirnonbiological children, according to an evolu-tionary perspective, explains any of the possibledifferences between biological and nonbiologi-cal fathers’ abuse patterns in a societal contextwhere men’s involvement with children gener-ally is not valued. This is one area where lessrhetoric and more careful analysis and soberdiscussion clearly are needed. Exuberant ideo-logical support of heterosexual marriage ismisleading when based on muddled findingsregarding nonbiological fathers’ mistreatment ofchildren. At the very least, such an argumentoverlooks the reality that domestic violence andsexual abuse would be higher if women andtheir children were encouraged to stay in “bad”or abusive marriages.

Turning to outcomes for men, Nock (1998)recently analyzed U.S. national survey data toexamine the relationship between differentfeatures of a prevailing normative conceptionof marriage and men’s public achievements.Consistent with Gilmore’s (1990) cross-culturalanthropological work on the culture of manhood,Nock suggested that adult men are expected toachieve their masculinity by being fathers to theirwives’ children, providers for their families, andprotectors of their wives and children. Accordingto Nock, his analyses support Gilmore’s thesisbecause they show that married men fare betterthan their nonmarried counterparts when assessedon the basis of what he calls three traditionaldefinitions of adult male achievement (income,weeks worked, and occupational prestige). Hefound that becoming a father in a marital contextwas associated with a slight increase in men’sincome levels with no additional changes due tosubsequent children, an increase of 2 additionalweeks of work (only for the first child), and asmall increase in occupational prestige, with a

slight decline when men have four or morechildren. An alternative reading of these datasuggests that the changes are so slight as to benegligible, and they are open to other interpreta-tions. For example, the small increase in incomeprobably is more than offset by the additionalexpenses associated with having children. Fur-thermore, his analyses ignore the complex andalternative expressions of masculinity that haveexisted in U.S. culture in recent decades and haveinfluenced growing numbers of men’s andothers’ perceptions of manhood and success(Ehrenreich, 1983).

Fatherhood and Gender Inequality

The critical analysis of gender views familiesas an important locus in which gender inequalityis created and maintained (Fox & Murry, 2000;Thompson & Walker, 1995). When fatherhoodis viewed through the lens of gender, the mostimportant question about it is “How is father-hood linked to gender inequality?” We considerthis question in two contexts: within marriageand cohabitation, and outside co-resident rela-tionships where strong romantic commitmentsare less likely (divorce, unmarried parenthood).

Marriage and Cohabiting Relationships

Feminist analyses of families identify men’slimited performance of domestic family respon-sibilities relative to women’s as a manifesta-tion of broader gender inequality (Coltrane,1996; Ferree, 1990; McMahon, 1999; Osmond &Thorne, 1993). The extent to which marriedmen do less in the family has been documentedin “time diary” and other time-use studiesbeginning in the 1960s (J. H. Pleck, 1985).In addition to showing that married men per-form substantially less housework and childcare than married women, they demonstratedthat married men also did no more of thesefamily tasks if their wives were employed thanif their wives were not employed. In addition, intwo-earner families, wives’ time in these familyactivities and paid work combined was consid-erably greater than their husbands’, a phenomenonsometimes called employed wives’ “secondshift” (Hochschild, 1989).

Focusing more specifically on gender inequal-ity and fathering (implicitly in the context oftwo-parent families), Polatnick (1973-1974)



argued that because women are the rearers ofchildren, they are powerless vis-à-vis men, andbecause women are powerless, they are rearersof children. As a result of men doing so little inthe family, some wives do not take paid employ-ment, and those who are employed tend togive their family responsibilities higher prior-ity. This contributes to the barriers preventingwomen from advancing occupationally and fromgetting the benefits potentially accruing fromemployment in terms of economic independence,pension rights, social valuation, and self-worth.In addition, because fathers encourage mascu-line behaviors in sons and feminine behaviorsin daughters more than do mothers (Crouter,McHale, & Bartko, 1993; Lytton & Romney,1991), the way that fathers socialize theirchildren may reproduce gender inequality.Thus, fatherhood is a key element in the “genderpolitics of family time” (Daly, 1996).

Recent work relevant to fatherhood andgender inequality in two-parent families makesevident several developments. Lamb et al.’s (1985)construct of paternal involvement has become adominant concept used in describing whatfathers do compared to mothers. Scholars havecontested the level of fathers’ involvement andthe extent to which it is changing in married-parent families. Some researchers find thatfathers’ time spent with their children is not triv-ial and is greater than often thought. Averagingacross 13 national or smaller-scale studiesbetween the mid-1980s and the late 1990s, andexpressing fathers’ time as a proportion ofmothers’ time, married U.S. fathers averaged44% of mothers’ engagement time and 66% ofmothers’ accessibility time (J. H. Pleck, 1997).In children’s time diaries in a 1997 nationalstudy, fathers were engaged with their 3- to5-year-old children an average of 79 minutesper day on weekdays and 215 minutes on week-end days; fathers were accessible an additional68 minutes per weekday and 184 minutes perweekend day. Corresponding averages foryounger children were higher, and for olderchildren only slightly lower (Yeung, Sandberg,Davis-Kean, & Hofferth, 2001).

Some evidence also suggests that marriedU.S. fathers’ engagement and accessibility haveincreased in recent decades. For example, in 11time-use studies conducted between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s, fathers averagedabout one third of mothers’ engagement and half

of their accessibility, both lower than the 44%and 66% noted above for the mid-1980s to thelate 1990s (J. H. Pleck, 1997). Fathers’ time withchildren also has increased in absolute terms(J. H. Pleck, 1997). Yeung et al. (2001) hold thatbecause other factors besides gender influencepaternal involvement, “a simple gender inequal-ity theory is not sufficient in explaining thedynamics of household division of labor intoday’s American families” (p. 136).

Other scholars contest these interpretations.Hochschild’s (1989, p. 4) report that time diaryresearch showed that the average U.S. fatherspent only 12 minutes per day with his childrenreceived great play in the mass media (e.g.,Skow, 1989), although this figure actually con-cerned fathers’ time only on weekdays and wasderived from 1965 data (J. H. Pleck, 1997).LaRossa (1988) evaluated the evidence forfathers’ increased involvement as unconvincing,as did McMahon (1999), who went further toargue that this claim is complicit in maintainingmale privilege.

Yet other scholars have assessed the constructof paternal involvement to be limited because,they argue, it is rooted in feminist-derived gen-der equity assumptions (Hawkins, Christiansen,Sargent, & Hill, 1993). These critics hold thatinvolvement is defined implicitly as the waythat mothers are involved with children, imply-ing a “deficit perspective” for fathers (Palkovitz,1997; see J. H. Pleck & Stueve, 2001, for a res-ponse). Taking a cross-cultural perspective,others observe that viewing fathers’ involvementas a critical social indicator of gender equalityis highly subject to cultural context, in effectassuming a Western/industrialized perspec-tive (Hewlett, 1991). Clearly, father involve-ment in relation to gender inequality is subjectto multiple interpretations.

Finally, research relevant to fathering andgender inequality has expanded its focus beyondmarried biological fathers to include both step-fathers and cohabiting biological fathers. Dataon whether stepfathers are less involved thanbiological married fathers are at present some-what inconsistent (Cooksey & Fondell, 1996;Hofferth, Pleck, Stueve, Bianchi, & Sayer,2002; Marsiglio, 1991). As part of the growingrecognition of “families formed outside of mar-riage” (Seltzer, 2000; Smock, 2000), cohabitingfathers (i.e., unmarried biological fathers resid-ing with child and mother) are also beginning to



receive attention. In the limited data available,cohabiting U.S. fathers show lower averagelevels of engagement with their children thando married biological fathers, but cohabitingfathers are similarly accessible (Hofferth et al.,2002). If these findings are replicated, they raisethe possibility that cohabitation accentuatesparental gender inequity, consistent with otherfeminist concerns about cohabitation.

Fathering OutsideCo-Resident Relationships

Divorced fathers. Divorce and its aftermathrepresent an important arena in which fathers’behavior potentially both reflects and contributesto gender inequality, one explored in numerousqualitative and other studies (e.g., Arendell,1992, 1995; Braver & O’Connell, 1998; Braver,Wolchik, et al., 1993; Catlett & McKenry, in press;Emery, 1999; Maccoby & Mnookin, 1992;see Griswold, 1993, pp. 260-265 for a historicalperspective). In the last two decades, joint legalcustody has become the statistical norm. In9,500 divorce settlements in Wisconsin, it rosefrom 18% in 1980 to 81% in 1992, with abouthalf the latter being 50/50 splits and the remain-der ranging from 30/70 to 49/51. However, jointphysical custody increased over this period from2% to only 14%. Divorced fathers’ rate of solelegal and physical custody has remained stableat about 10% (Melli, Brown, & Cancian, 1997).Some researchers, noting that when custody iscontested, it is resolved in favor of the fatherbetween one third and one half of the time, haveconcluded that fathers have a gender-basedadvantage in getting custody (Polikoff, 1983).However, these statistics pertain to the smallsubset of divorces in which custody is contested,which overrepresents situations where the fatherhas a good “case.” As court-mandated mediationhas become increasingly common in divorce,debate also has arisen about the extent to whichit might privilege fathers (Okin, 1989). At thesame time, mediation is associated with greaterfather contact as long as 9 years postdivorce(Dillon & Emery, 1996).

The majority of U.S. divorced fathers haverelatively little contact with their children. Datafrom the 1981 National Survey of Childrenshowed that half of all children from divorcedfamilies had not seen their father in the past year,and only one child in six saw their father once a

week or more (Furstenberg & Cherlin, 1991).More recent data, from the 1992-1994 NationalSurvey of Families and Households, based onnonresident fathers’ reports and not controllingfor whether the father had been married to thechild’s mother, revealed that 24% had been withtheir child only once or not at all in the last year,and 23% saw the child at least weekly (Manning& Smock, 1999). There is vehement debateabout the extent to which these low average ratesof contact result from mothers’ “gatekeeping”versus fathers’ own loss of interest (Braver &O’Connell, 1998; Braver et al., 1993; Doherty,Kouneski, & Erickson, 1998; Ihinger-Tallman,Pasley, & Buehler, 1993; Walker & McGraw,2000). One factor is fathers’ formal visitationrights. According to a 1996 federal survey of anational sample of custodial mothers (includingnever-married as well as divorced mothers), onein four fathers had no legal right to see theirchildren (joint legal or physical custody, or visi-tation privileges). Among those with joint cus-tody, 85% saw their children in the last year, andamong those with visitation rights, 75% did(U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1999). In addition,about one third of nonresident fathers havechildren in new families.

Fathers’ payment or nonpayment of childsupport has profound implications for genderequality. Unfortunately, data on child supportcompliance often are summarized withoutdistinguishing between divorced fathers andnonmarried fathers. Detailed tabulations fromthe 1996 federal survey indicate that amongdivorced fathers subject to support awards, 73%paid some child support in that year (Graham &Beller, 2002; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1999),and this percentage has risen slowly but steadily.However, only 68% of divorced fathers wererequired to pay support. Taking this into account,48% of all divorced mothers received any childsupport. Among divorced mothers receivingany support, the average amount received wasrelatively low, $4,046. Some assume that if allfathers paid the full child support they areordered by the court to pay, the proportion ofsingle-parent female-headed families living inpoverty would be reduced dramatically; how-ever, this may not be the case. As Krause (1989)put it, “while very impressive progress in childsupport collection from absent parents has beenmade, the very progress seems to have led us tooverestimate, and consequently overemphasize,



the financial support that can be obtained fromabsent parents” (p. 398).

Unmarried, nonresident fathers. In the UnitedStates over the last two decades, there has beenheightened concern about the rising numbers ofunmarried mothers. Although an increasing per-centage of these mothers are adults, social con-cern focuses predominantly on teenage mothersraising children on their own (Luker, 1996). Thefathers of the children of teenage mothers haveless contact with their children and pay lesschild support than other nonresident fathers(Graham & Beller, 2002). These patterns maycontribute to higher levels of gender inequalityin these situations.

Lerman and Ooms (1993) and others usethe term “young unwed fathers” rather than“teen fathers” to describe the procreating part-ners of teenage mothers because in a high pro-portion of cases, these men are 20 years of ageor older. From a critical gender perspective, thisfinding raises an important question: When thefather is older than the teenage mother, howoften is sexual coercion involved? Although theanswer to that question is unclear, the data doreveal that the average age difference is smalland only a small proportion of these relation-ships involve persons who are more than 2 yearsapart in age (Darroch, Landry, & Oslak, 1999;Lindberg, Sonenstein, Ku, & Martinez, 1997).

GENDERED FATHERING CONTEXTS

When men conceptualize fatherhood, becomefathers, and act as fathers, they do so withinlarger social and cultural contexts, many ofwhich intersect with systems of gender rela-tions. These specific settings are influenced bymen’s human capital and personal characteris-tics as well as others’ interpretations of them. Inthis section, we briefly review how fatheringexperiences are connected to factors such asage, race/ethnicity, economic standing, and sex-ual orientation. These factors can affect men’sopportunities to achieve particular masculineideals associated with fathering.

Being “Too” Young

Many males who become fathers as teenagersor young adult men come face to face with their

inability to live up to being a family breadwinner,a crucial component for most models of adultmasculinity (Marsiglio & Cohan, 1997). Thosewith limited education and work experience oftenstruggle with feeling disconnected from theirfather identities and children because of theirpoor economic prospects for the foreseeablefuture (Achatz & MacAllum, 1994; Kiselica,1995). This pattern is exacerbated for AfricanAmerican and Hispanic young males, whose edu-cational credentials and employment opportuni-ties tend to be less promising than those forwhites in the U.S. context. Males tend to feelmore inadequate when their children’s mothersand maternal grandparents voice their dissatis-faction with their meager financial child support(Furstenberg, 1995). Adolescents who becomeyoung fathers also quickly discover that their cur-rent masculinity assets (e.g., physical appearanceand prowess) are of little use as they make thetransition to the adultlike status associated withbeing a father.

In addition, as young men they are unlikelyto possess many of the parental and inter-personal skills, such as “emotional literacy,” thatwould enable them to confront successfullythe challenges of caring for their children andmanaging their relationships with their part-ners (Brody, 1985; Goodey, 1997). Althoughthe culture of boyhood for the most part doesnot encourage males to develop parental skillsand effective interaction styles for their roman-tic relationships, some boys and young men arestill able to develop these skills and incorporatethem into how they treat their children and part-ners. Several small-scale studies have shownthat some young fathers are clearly committedto being involved with their children in positiveways (Allen & Doherty, 1996; Christmon, 1990;Rivara, Sweeney, & Henderson, 1986).

Although some research finds that a small per-centage of young men see paternity as an emblemof masculinity (Sonenstein, Stewart, Lindberg,Pernas, & Williams, 1997), many young menapparently recognize that being a “man” involvesmore than siring a child. For example, one quali-tative study reported that young men who were16 to 30 years of age were often quick to assertthat any man can make a baby, but males whoreally want to demonstrate their manhood do soby assuming financial responsibilities for theirchildren and are involved in their everyday lives(Marsiglio & Hutchinson, 2002).



MEN OF COLOR

Circumstances associated with race and ethni-city in the United States may affect how menview fatherhood and are involved with theirchildren, although rigorous research in this areais rather limited and the confounding of socio-economic status and race/ethnic variables is acommon shortcoming within this research area(Mirandé, 1991). Cochran (1997) suggests that“fatherhood for African American men cannotbe separated from their shared culture andsociohistorical background, institutional racism,and the marginal status of African Americanmales” (p. 343). Meanwhile, during the pastseveral decades the stereotypical image ofmachismo has been advanced and challengedas an important factor affecting Latino men’sinvolvement in family life (Carroll, 1980;Mirandé, 1991; Zambrana, 1995). Researchexploring the possible connections betweenother race/ethnic categories and fathering withinthe United States is sparse.

Viewed through a gender lens, perhaps themost significant contextual issue for under-standing African American men’s approach tofatherhood is that black men, on average, repre-sent a relatively disadvantaged subpopulation.Proportionately speaking, they are more likelyto be unemployed, be imprisoned, have pooraccess to health care and a shorter life expec-tancy, be victims of fatal crimes, and have lesseducation than their white and Latino coun-terparts (Majors & Gordon, 1994). BecauseAfrican American men are disproportionatelydisadvantaged, with fewer opportunities toachieve and display their manhood using main-stream strategies, they are more likely than theirwhite counterparts to rely on risk-taking behav-iors and the “cool pose” (Majors & Billson,1992) to express their male identities. The diffi-culties they encounter in fulfilling the familyprovider role are related in complex ways toassuming full-time parenting roles (Hamer &Marchioro, 2002) and psychosocial functioningproblems (Bowman & Sanders, 1998). Thestrategies they adopt to confront their role strainmay shift across the life course. Though lesspronounced, relatively similar patterns anddynamics may be a part of Latino men’s lives(Mirandé, 1997). Not surprisingly, some men ofcolor who feel marginalized within society seecreating children as one of the few legal ways

they can achieve an adult masculine status(Majors & Billson, 1992).

Available research does not allow us to saydefinitively whether men of color interact withtheir children in unique ways that are truly inde-pendent of their socioeconomic status and familystructure circumstances. It does seem apparent,though, that men of color have unique opportu-nities to mentor their children into a social wordtainted with prejudice, a world, for example,where being young, African American, and maleis often associated with negative stereotypes andsuspicion. Thus, men’s paternal role as teacherof race/ethnic relations may be especially salientto fathers’ interactions with their sons. Educatingsons on what it means to be a black or Latinoman in a white society where hegemonic formsof masculinity reign is an experience that speaksto how fathers’ experiences can be affecteddirectly by their race/ethnic identity. Unfortu-nately, this question has not received systematic,scholarly attention.

Social Class

Most research on fathering that addressessome aspect of social class deals with men whoare financially disadvantaged, although severalstudies have attempted to show how other facetsof social class may be related to men’s livesas fathers (Erickson & Gecas, 1991). As we’vealluded to above, when men are unemployed orunderemployed, they often find it difficult to feelgood about themselves as fathers because theprovider role continues to be an important featureof hegemonic images of masculinity and men’sfathering experience (Bowman & Sanders, 1998;Christiansen & Palkovitz, 2000). Although povertyissues disproportionately influence men of colorand are therefore intertwined with subculturalissues, numerous white fathers also deal withfeelings of inadequacy as breadwinners.

Having money is important not only for thosefathers who are living with their children; men’ssocioeconomic standing also can influence howfathers negotiate and manage their fatheringexperience during those times when they liveapart from their children. Money begets power,and those men fortunate enough to have ade-quate incomes are better positioned to orches-trate their paternal identities, fathering activities,and family arrangements so they can displaytheir masculinity vis-à-vis their contributions to



family life. For example, in their qualitativestudy of divorced fathers, Catlett and McKenry(in press) found that those men with the highestincomes were best equipped to achieve the oftenconflicting outcomes of being an adequateprovider and a nurturing caregiver. Maintainingthese dual roles was essentially impossible forthe poorest fathers and quite difficult for themiddle-income fathers as well. Middle-incomefathers may actually experience more tensionpostdivorce than low-income fathers becausethe former experience a steeper decline in theirability to perform the provider role postdivorce.

Along a somewhat different line, Cooper(2000) provided an intriguing qualitative analysisof what she termed a “nerd masculinity” that hasrecently emerged in connection to the work stylesfound within the Silicon Valley economy. Toachieve this new type of gendered subjectivity,

men must be technically brilliant and devoted towork. They must be tough guys who get the jobdone no matter what. Fathers so identify withthese qualities that their desire to work all the timeis experienced by them as emanating from theirown personality traits rather than from co-workeror management expectations. (p. 403)

Her analysis shows that this new masculinityoperates as a “key mechanism of control in high-tech workplaces that rely on identity-basedforms of control and that the enactment of thisnew masculinity impacts the way fathers thinkabout, experience, and manage their work andfamily lives” (p. 379). In practical terms, fatherswho embrace this nerd masculinity adopt work-family practices in which they do not talk aboutwork-family conflicts in order to give theimpression—not always the reality—that workis their top priority. Fathers also allow theirworker mentality as a “go-to guy” to influencethe way they think about and experience theirlives at home. This can be seen in “their use ofmarket language to make sense of their personalrelationships as well as their desire to fit familyneeds within a capitalist paradigm” (p. 403).

BEING GAY

Given the centrality of heterosexuality to hege-monic masculinity, public perceptions of father-hood typically emphasize a heterosexual bias as

well. A fundamental challenge to this mainstreamconception of masculinity is instigated by biolog-ical fathers who self-identify as gay. Similarly,anecdotal evidence of how gay step- and adoptivefathers are viewed by the general public suggeststhat these men are performing roles inconsistentwith mainstream notions that masculinity can beachieved through fatherhood.

The largest category of gay fathers includesmen who have had children within marriagesbut are now divorced (Green & Bozett, 1991).However, a growing percentage of gay menappear to be pursuing parenthood after they havealready established their gay identities (Patterson,2000). This latter trend implies that as the socialstigma associated with same-gender partnershipscontinues to lessen, future cohorts of gay menmay be less inclined to pursue the maritalemblem of masculinity, and some will still wantto experience fatherhood. Given the financialcosts and practical hurdles that unmarried gaymen will encounter in trying to achieve bio-logical fatherhood, the overall proportion ofgay biological fathers may actually declineover time (Stacey & Biblarz, 2001).

Patterson and Chan’s (1997) recent review ofthe gay fatherhood literature shows that researchin this area is rather sparse and largely basedon highly restricted samples of white, well-educated, affluent men living in large cities.Interpreting these studies’ findings must occur infull view of the complex reality that “sexualdesires, acts, meanings, and identities are notexpressed in fixed or predictable packages”(Stacey & Biblarz, 2001, p. 165). Unfortunately,little of this research focuses directly on mas-culinity themes. The research that does haveimplications for gender research tends to con-sider whether gay fathers treat their childrendifferently than either heterosexual fathers orlesbians, and whether children’s attitudes andbehaviors related to gender are affected. Oneunderlying question guiding this research is this:To what extent and in what ways does genderand sexual orientation affect how gay menparent?

Although the limited research has not founddrastic differences in the ways heterosexualfathers and gay fathers “do fathering,” someresearch suggests that gay fathers may be morenurturing and less traditional in their parentingin general (Bigner & Jacobsen, 1989, 1992;Scallen, 1982, cited in Flaks, 1994). In light of



these tentative findings, Patterson and Chan(1997) speculated that gay fathers may haveparenting styles that are more consistent withauthoritative parenting. In one study comparinggay and lesbian parents, gay fathers were morelikely to encourage their children to play withsex-typed toys (Harris & Turner, 1985/1986).

Although most research focuses on biologicalgay fathers, Crosbie-Burnett & Helmbrecht(1993) studied 48 gay stepfamilies that includedthe father, his male lover or partner, and at leastone child who cohabited or visited the house-hold. These researchers found that whereas 96%of gay fathers indicated that they were openabout their sexual orientation with heterosexualfriends, only 46% of their adolescent childrenreported that their heterosexual friends knewabout their father’s sexual orientation. Somechildren have shown concern that they will beperceived to be homosexual if others know abouttheir fathers’ sexual identities (Bozett, 1980,1987). The limited research from small-scalestudies attempting to show whether living in gayfathers’ households influences children’s sexualorientation does not suggest any clear-cut pattern(Bailey, Bobrow, Wolfe, & Mikach, 1995).

AVENUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

Other publications (see the citations in the open-ing paragraph) outline extensive agendas forfuture fatherhood research. Thus, we commenthere on issues directly involving a genderedapproach to fathering, while accentuatingfathers’ diverse circumstances. We stress theneed to examine if and how fathers uniquelyinfluence their children, how fathering affectsgender equity inside and outside families, andhow men’s fathering is influenced by contextualfactors. Future research, informed by theoreticaldiscussions in the fields of “men and masculin-ities” and “fatherhood,” needs to explore morefully the complex ways that gender intersectswith age, race, class, and sexual orientation toform the social landscape upon which fathersnavigate. In several places, we have highlightedhow processes associated with the production ofknowledge have influenced research on father-ing; similar concerns are vital to keep in mindwhen proposing new research.

Scholars interested in understanding fathersshould realize that within the field of family

studies, “new theoretical models conceptualizefamilies as systems affected by, and effectingchange in, reciprocal influences among social,behavioral, and biological processes” (Boothet al., 2000, p. 1018). Recent technologicaladvances allow researchers to examine in morerigorous ways these complex processes, includ-ing fathers’ potentially unique ways of interact-ing with children. Many social constructionistsand feminists are content to emphasize culturalforces inside and outside the home, downplayingpossible biologically based differences in men’sand women’s behaviors and information pro-cessing. Some fear that paradigms emphasizingeither behavioral endocrinology, behavior genet-ics, or evolutionary psychology will be used tojustify a deterministic or “essentialist” model ofparenting and gender relations. They assume thatsuch a model would provide the groundwork fora conservative political philosophy toward gen-der inequities. In our view, studying social andcultural forces will provide deeper and broaderinsights about men’s complex experiences asfathers; however, researchers would be remiss todiscourage explorations of the “possible” bioso-cial dimensions of fathering (parenting).

Recent heated debates about whether fathersprovide unique or essential contributions to theirchildren’s development focus on possible parent-ing differences between men and women. Thesedebates also draw attention to comparisonsbetween men within and outside the UnitedStates. Research on U.S. fathers shows that theytend to play differently with their children thanmothers; however, we do not yet understandprecisely why this happens. We do know thatculture plays a major role in shaping parentingstyles that vary by gender. For example, com-pared with fathers in the United States, fathersin some countries are discouraged from playingwith their children or do so in ways in which theyare less aggressive and encourage less risking(Hewlett, 1992).

One important research issue is identifyingwhy some males are more likely than others tomove beyond traditional forms of gender social-ization and become involved with their childrenand partners in ways that embrace the “nurturant”father model. Likewise, additional research isneeded to better understand how changing struc-tural, cultural, social, and psychological factorsinfluence how men and women negotiate theircontributions to parenting and domestic labor as



well as their “agreements” about child custody,support, and visitation. These negotiations haveimplications for gender equity within the diverseromantic relationships, families, and householdarrangements relevant to children’s well-being.Given the controversial nature of these value-laden issues, interested parties must be vigilantin monitoring how knowledge in these areas isproduced, disseminated, and interpreted.

Drawing on a sociological perspective, onefruitful area of inquiry could focus on howfathers’ interactions with their children areshaped by their involvement in different gen-dered organizational and social contexts. Anumber of these settings have been and will con-tinue to be affected by the debates and activitiesof the Fatherhood Responsibility Movement(Gavanas, 2002). Prime sites for such researchinclude several social movements includingPromise Keepers (Silverstein, Auerbach, Grieco,& Dunkel, 1999) and fathers’ rights groups(Bertoia & Drakich, 1993) in which genderedideologies of family life are featured promi-nently. Another intriguing site includes groupcounseling sessions for violent men (Fox,Sayers, & Bruce, 2001). Research on other set-tings flavored by a distinctive masculine culture(e.g., the military, law enforcement, prison) couldprovide valuable insights. We need to learn moreabout how fathers, as men, manage their impres-sions to others inside various organizational andsocial settings that transcend the typicalfamily/household setting (Marsiglio & Cohan,2000). Viewed in this light, father involvementcan be examined as a socially constructed per-formance that implicates how the gender orderboth supports and discourages fathers’ involve-ment with their children.

Paternity leave policies (and parental leavepolicies more generally) are an important aspectof the gender order that should generate policy-oriented research in various industrialized coun-tries (Haas & Hwang, 1995; Hobson, 2002).Policymakers in the various European countries,the United States, and elsewhere have shownsome interest in recent years in providingoptions for both mothers and fathers to leavetheir jobs temporarily to care for their newbornor sick children. Researchers should be con-cerned with what people think about thesepolicies as they relate to fathers, what factorsinfluence fathers’ use, and the consequencesfor men’s, women’s and children’s lives when

men take advantage of them (J. H. Pleck, 1993;Wisensale, 2001).

Future research targeting fathers from agender perspective should be enhanced as theamount, type, and quality of survey data con-tinues to improve (Day & Lamb, 2004; FederalInteragency Forum and Child and Family Statis-tics, 1998) and scholars advance their knowledgeabout how to conduct qualitative researchwith men as men (Schwalbe & Wolkomir, 2002)and with men as fathers (Marsiglio, 2004a;Marsiglio & Cohan, 2000). Collecting data thatcan inform a critical gender analysis of fatheringwill require researchers to sharpen their under-standing of how men’s potential interests inpresenting a “masculine self” can influence theresearch process. Researchers need to exploreways of collecting more accurate and richer dataabout paternity, nonresident fathering, child sup-port, stepfathering, child abuse, breadwinning,and other issues that challenge male researchparticipants to confront their vulnerabilities. Forexample, survey researchers should conductmethodological experiments on how men respondto using CASI (computer-assisted survey inter-view) technology. Does its use alter fathers’ will-ingness to report more accurately their attitudes,feelings, and behaviors related to fathering?Qualitative researchers who interview (orobserve) fathers and men who are thinking abouthaving children can also advance their respectivemethods for studying these populations by sharingtheir self-critiques of their research process(Marsiglio, 2004b; Marsiglio & Hutchinson, 2002).

Researchers must also address the complexrealities of contemporary men’s lives. These real-ities include the diverse and dynamic ways menmove in and out of both relationships and house-holds involving children; how gendered socialstructures (e.g., work, prison) and processes (e.g.,negotiating child care or visitation) within andoutside a family context influence how men areinvolved with their children; and how fathers’resources, perceptions, and ways of interactingwith their children may change over the durationof fathers’ and children’s shared life course.These realities call for researchers to developmeaningful ways of capturing men’s presenceand involvement in children’s lives that ensureconfidence that research findings have not beentainted by ideological or political motives.

Ultimately, if gender scholars collectivelywish to study men’s lives as fathers in a



comprehensive fashion, they should expandtheir vision of fatherhood. Men need to be stud-ied not just as fathers of minor children but alsoas gendered beings capable of imagining andcreating human life. Similarly, men interactwith, care for, and are provided care by theiradult children. Thus, focusing on how genderaffects the evolution of men’s lives as personscapable of procreation and fathering placesfathers’ lives squarely within developmental andlife-course perspectives. Those who use theseperspectives need to be sensitive to the waysthat context matters. Of course, the immediacyof certain social policy concerns about childoutcomes, as well as the selective availability offunding, will inspire most researchers to studythe types of issues that have been examinedmost frequently. Family and gender scholarsshould be encouraged, though, to expand theirvision of fatherhood and venture beyond thesetraditional agendas.

REFERENCES

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Allen, W. D., & Doherty, W. J. (1996). The responsi-bilities of fatherhood as perceived by AfricanAmerican teenage fathers. Families in Society:The Journal of Contemporary Human Services,77, 142-155.

Amato, P. (1998). More than money? Men’s contribu-tion to their children’s lives. In A. Booth &A. C. Crouter (Eds.), Men in families: When dothey get involved? What differences does it make?(pp. 242-278). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Amato, P., & Gilbreth, J. G. (1999). Nonresident fathersand children’s well-being: A meta-analysis.Journal of Marriage and the Family, 61, 557-573.

Amato, P., & Rivera, F. (1999). Paternal involvementand children’s problem behaviors. Journal ofMarriage and the Family, 61, 375-384.

Anderson, K. G., Kaplan, H., & Lancaster, J. (1999).Paternal care by genetic fathers and stepfathersI: Reports from Albuquerque men. Evolutionand Human Behavior, 20, 405-431.

Arendell, T. (1992). Father absence: Investigationsinto divorce. Gender & Society, 6, 562-586.

Arendell, T. (1995). Fathers and divorce. ThousandOak, CA: Sage.

Bailey, J. M., Bobrow, D., Wolfe, M., & Mikach, S.(1995). Sexual orientation of adult sons of gayfathers. Developmental Psychology, 31, 124-129.

Belsky, J. (1993). Promoting father involvement—Ananalysis and critique: Comment on Silverstein.Journal of Family Psychology, 7, 287-292.

Bertoia, C., & Drakich, J. (1993). The fathers’ rightsmovement: Contradictions in rhetoric and prac-tice. Journal of Family Issues, 14, 592-615.

Bigner, J. J., & Jacobsen, R. B. (1989). Parentingbehaviors of homosexual and heterosexualfathers. In F. W. Bozett (Ed.), Homosexualityand the family (pp. 173-186). New York:Harrington Park.

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270

16“GENTLEMEN, THE

LUNCHBOX HAS LANDED”

Representations of Masculinities andMen’s Bodies in the Popular Media

JIM MCKAY

JANINE MIKOSZA

BRETT HUTCHINS

Muscles are the sign of masculinity.

—Glassner (1988, p. 168)

In an article titled “Invisible Masculinity,”Kimmel (1993) made the seemingly contra-dictory comment that men had no history.

Kimmel was referring to the paradoxical situa-tion whereby (hegemonic) men have been con-spicuous as athletes, politicians, scientists, andsoldiers but largely indiscernible as men. AsKimmel (1993) noted, this veiled status is oneof the principal ingredients of men’s power andprivilege:

The very processes that confer privilege to onegroup and not to another are often invisible to thoseupon whom that privilege is conferred . . . menhave come to think of themselves as genderless, in

part because they can afford the luxury of ignoringthe centrality of gender. . . . Invisibility reproducesinequality. And the invisibility of gender to thoseprivileged by it reproduces the inequalities that arecircumscribed by gender. (p. 30)

Men’s concealed and privileged status isparticularly evident with respect to researchon representations of men’s bodies in the media.For instance, Witz (2000, p. 11) maintains thatin sociological research, men’s bodies haveinhabited an “ambiguous” and “liminal space,”[a] “borderland between female corporeality andmale sociality that, for a fleeting conceptualmoment, male bodies appear, only to disappear


immediately.” Witz argues that sociologists haveconstructed men as inherently social and womenas essentially corporeal/natural, thus grantingmen the status of what Shilling (1993) terms the“absent-presence.” However, sociologists are notthe only scholars who have been implicated indissembling research on men’s bodies. Untilfairly recently, intellectuals in the humanities andsocial sciences in general have been reluctant toengage with such an apparently biological phe-nomenon as men’s bodies. Representations ofmen’s bodies have also received little attentionfrom some intellectuals because of their disdainfor popular cultural forms, such as magazines,film, TV, and sport. A related version of this “opi-ate of the masses” thesis is the belief by somescholars that studying discursive phenomenadeflects our attention away from the materialinequalities of gender relations.

In addition to being marginalized by aca-demics, hegemonic men’s bodies havebeen positioned by the discourse of “compul-sory heterosexuality” that governs the media.Whereas the passive, seminude, and nakedbodies of heterosexual women have beenconstructed as objects for the pleasurable gazeof heterosexual male viewers, there has beena strong taboo against portraying men’s bodiesin similar ways, as this would pose a threatto the visual power of heterosexual men. Thisdichotomy is evident in a scene from the popu-lar film The Full Monty, from which we have

taken the title of this chapter. Early in thenarrative, Guy, who is auditioning for a partin a male striptease ensemble, is chosen afterdropping his trousers and revealing his largepenis to the selection panel. However, we neveractually see Guy’s penis; we are privy only tothe astonished reactions of the judges, followedby their leader Gaz’s pronouncement, “Gentle-men, the lunchbox has landed.”

These factors have meant that research onrepresentations of men’s bodies has receivedsignificantly less attention from scholars thantopics such as sexuality, violence, work, familylife, education, and health. For example, it israre for material on either men’s bodies or menand the mass media to appear in some of thewidely used academic texts on men and mas-culinities (see Table 16.1) or the two leadingmen’s studies journals (see Table 16.2).Moreover, most analyses in these forums haveeither approached the media atheoretically orsimplistically via topics such as role modelsor the effects of consuming the mass mediaon violent behavior; in the same way, mosttreatments of men’s bodies have been perfunc-tory. The specialist journal Body & Society haspublished very few articles on either men’sbodies or men and the media (see Table 16.3),and just one article on men’s bodies and two onmasculinities have been published in recentvolumes of the prestigious Media, Culture &Society (see Table 16.4).

Representations of Masculinities in the Popular Media • 271

Table 16.1 Coverage of Men’s Bodies and the Mass Media in Some Widely Used Academic Texts onMasculinity and Men’s Studies

Entry for Separate Chapter Entry for Mass Separate Chapter onText Bodies in Index? on Men’s Bodies? Media in Index? the Mass Media?

Kilmartin (2000) No No Yes No

Clatterbaugh (1997) No No Yes No

Hearn (1992) Yes No Yes No

Seidler (1991) Yes No Yes No

Hearn and Yes No No NoMorgan (1990)

Doyle (1995) No No Yes No

Connell (1983) Yes Yes No No

Kimmel and No index Yes No index YesMessner (1995)


A SELECTIVE OVERVIEW

OF RECENT RESEARCH ON THE

MASS MEDIA AND MEN’S BODIES

Although a few items on men and the mass mediawere published in the 1980s (Dyer, 1982,1986; Fiske, 1987; Neale, 1983), the first sub-stantial collection of research did not appear untilCraig’s volume in 1992. Craig’s social construc-tionist framework posed a challenge to the psy-chologically reductionist, static, and sometimesapolitical aspects of research on men that hadresulted from a miscellany of functionalistsociology, psychoanalysis, sex-role socializationtheory, content analysis, and “media effects”

research. Likewise, although some seminal pieceson men’s bodies appeared in the 1980s and early1990s (Connell, 1983, 1991; Fiske, 1987;Messner, 1990; Neale, 1983; Theweleit, 1987),Goldstein’s (1994) book was the first extensivecompilation of research on this topic.

Despite this traditional lack of scholarlyenthusiasm for analyzing relationships betweenmen’s bodies and the mass media, a sizableamount of research has started to appear inrecent years. In reviewing this research, weneed to issue the usual caveat that we had to beselective in our analysis. In sketching a generaloverview of this literature, we focused on thesubstantive topics that have been studied andthe theoretical and methodological perspectives


Table 16.2 Number of Articles in Journal of Men’s Studies and Men and Masculinities WithMedia-Relateda and Body-Relatedb Terms in the Title, Abstract, or Key Words

Both Body- and Body-Related Media-Related Media-Related

Journal Total Articles Term Term Terms

Men and 57 5 9 1Masculinities(1998–2001)

Journal of Men’s 94 4 12 0Studies(1997–2001)

a. Includes film, magazine, and Internet.

b. Includes body, bodies, embodiment, and physical.

Table 16.3 Number of Articles Published in Body & Society That Included Media-Related andMasculinity-Related Terms as Key Words or in the Title

Total Number of Articles Number of Articles That Number of Articles That Number of Articles ThatPublished in Body & Included a Media- Included a Masculinity- Included Both Body- andSociety (1997–2001) Related Term Related Term Media-Related Terms

94 9 3 0

Table 16.4 Number of Articles Recently Published in Media, Culture & Society That Included Body-Related and Masculinity-Related Terms as Key Words or in the Title

Total Number of Articles Number of Articles That Number of Articles That Number of Articles ThatPublished in Media, Culture Included a Body- Included a Masculinity- Included Both Body- and& Society (1997-2001) Related Term Related Term Media-Related Terms

141 1 2 0


that have been employed. In order to keep oursynopsis manageable, we concentrated on arti-cles that were published in major academicjournals over the past 3 years. Our rationaleis that these outlets serve as the most up-to-date forum for research. By using a combi-nation of terms that included variations onthe descriptors “men,” “male,” “masculinity,”“masculinities,” “body,” “bodies,” “corporeal,”and “media,” we conducted searches of twomajor databases in the humanities and socialsciences: Sociological Abstracts (which coversapproximately 2,500 journals) and HumanitiesIndex (which includes 345 journals). We areaware that these databases do not exhaust theliterature and also contain a strong Eurocentricbias. However, they have the advantage of sen-sitizing us to some general trends in the mostrecent publications.

The results of these searches appear inTable 16.5. However, the figures are inflated,because a search under a term like “body” occa-sionally yielded irrelevant “hits” such as “bodyof literature” or “organizational body.” Oursearches yielded a kaleidoscope of disciplines,theories, and methods across a variety of (mainlyWestern) national contexts: psychoanalysis,textual analysis, semiotics, surveys, interviews,discourse analysis, content analysis, queertheory, Foucauldian analysis, genealogy, history,communication studies, men’s studies, women’sstudies, gender studies, cultural studies, post-structuralism, postcolonialism, and postmod-ernism. Indeed, simply categorizing the articlesinto topics, disciplines, and methods presentedus with the difficult task of multidirectional andoccasionally arbitrary cross-referencing. Perhapsthis complex scenario is to be expected in an erathat is frequently understood through the lenses

of hybridity, bricolage, intertextuality, liminality,postcolonialism, and postmodernism. Despitethe diverse and fragmented nature of theresearch, we were able to discern some dominantfeatures. For example, there was a distincttheoretical divide between psychoanalysts andsocial constructionists, and textual analysis wasthe most widely used method. The topics rangedthrough alcohol, commodification, health, men’smovements, the “new man,” pornography, rural-ity, sport, sexuality, race, ethnicity, disability,violence, and myriad forms of electronic andprint media. Because an exhaustive overview ofthe articles is impossible, we will now providea brief and selective account of some of themore easily categorized ones. For analyticalpurposes, we have divided our analysis accord-ing to whether an article was predominantlyeither on the media or men’s bodies, eventhough it was not always easy to make thisdistinction.

MEN AND THE MASS MEDIA

Researchers who have studied men and themass media have used a variety of method-ological and theoretical frameworks to exploremasculinity in TV, advertising, magazines,comics, and film. One of the foremost per-spectives is social constructionism, in whichpopular texts and images are seen to be closelyconnected with wider relations of dominationand subordination both among men andbetween men and women. We now turn to aselective overview of two of the substantivetopics that typify this social constructionistapproach: sexuality and race.


Table 16.5 Number of Articles Retrieved From a Search of Sociological Abstracts and Humanities IndexAbstract of Journal Articles, 1999-2001, Containing Terms Relevant to the Media and Men’sBodies

Search Terms (Boolean) Results

(men or male or masculine or masculinity or masculinities) and (body or bodies or 19corporeal) and media

(men or male or masculine or masculinity or masculinities) and media 145

(men or male or masculine or masculinity or masculinities) and 190(body or bodies or corporeal)


Sexuality

Dworkin and Wachs (1998) analyzed howAmerican newspapers covered the disclosuresby multiple-Olympic champion diver GregLouganis (an out gay man), professionalbasketball superstar Magic Johnson, and pro-fessional boxer Tommy Morrison (the latterboth self-avowed straight men) that they wereHIV-positive. Using a combination of Foucault’smodel of the confessional and a sin-and-redemption narrative framework, they reportedthat the three athletes were constructed inmarkedly differently ways. Johnson was hailedfor his sporting achievements, cast sympatheti-cally for allegedly being infected by one of thelegion of sexually predatory women whom hehad unselfishly “accommodated,” and lionizedfor accepting his HIV-positive status so gra-ciously and raising public awareness aboutAIDS, especially among African Americanmen. Thus, Johnson was redeemed as an “unde-serving victim” of HIV/AIDS and seldom criti-cized for his sexually “promiscuous” behavior.Morrison also was depicted as a tragic victim ofsexually voracious women. Louganis, by con-trast, received little recognition for his athleticaccomplishments and was positioned as anirresponsible “carrier” who posed a risk to het-erosexuals. Dworkin and Wachs also illustratedhow the three men were positioned by theirethnic, racial, and social class backgrounds.

King (2000) analyzed media coverage ofCanadian male figure skaters who died ofAIDS-related illnesses, in the context of healthpolicy in Canada. King maintained that althoughcompassion and tolerance toward the skaterswas evident, this response also reinscribed com-monsense ideas about “at-risk” populations byenabling the public to identify with the skaters’families rather than the athletes themselves.According to King, the media’s reaction couldbe read as an attempt to construct Canada as amore compassionate and tolerant nation than theUnited States. King also argued that the mediacoverage exonerated the Canadian govern-ment’s abysmal response to people living withHIV/AIDS.

McKee (2000) conducted semistructuredinterviews with a small group of gay Australianmen in order to investigate their memories ofTV representations. Although most of the inter-viewees recalled seeing only a few gay men

on screen, they reported that these instancesgenerated strongly positive feelings about them-selves. McKee concluded that TV programmingcan be important in overcoming gay men’ssense of isolation and promoting their self-esteem, thereby contributing to a decrease in thedisproportionately high rates of suicide andattempted suicide among young gay men.Brickell (2000) analyzed electronic and printmedia coverage of gay and lesbian pride paradesand reported that a “discursive inversion” con-structed gays and lesbians as invaders ofunmarked, heterosexual public space.

Race

Coltrane and Messineo (2000) conducted acontent analysis of nearly 1,700 commercialson American TV during 1992-1994. They foundthat despite commonsense notions that marketsegmentation and narrowcasting have made TVmore inclusive, racist and sexist stereotypespersisted: Whites were shown more frequentlythan African Americans, Asians, and Latino/as;whites were shown more frequently than peopleof color in authoritative occupations; womenwere much more likely than men to be depictedas sex objects; African American men tendedto be depicted as aggressive and menacing; andLatinos were virtually nonexistent. Coltraneand Messineo argued that rather than portrayingthe diversity of American society, the “fantasy”of TV advertising served to essentialize genderand racial differences.

Brown (1999) outlined how racist discoursesthat construct Africans as having bodies but notminds have had specific consequences forAfrican American men who have been consti-tuted as physical and sexual threats, despitebeing denied access to patriarchal power underslavery and also locked out of the white powerstructure. This paradoxical status of being emas-culated but also feared, while living in culturesthat value them primarily for their physicalprowess, has resulted in African American menbeing channeled into the sport and entertain-ment industries. Brown noted that as a responseto this racist regime, African American menhave often adopted hypermasculine practicesthat unintentionally reinforce the very raciststereotypes that oppress them. Brown usedsemiotic analysis and opportunistic interviews



with fans to investigate how masculinity wasrepresented in comic books that feature AfricanAmerican male superheroes. This is an inter-esting question, given that “superhero comicsare one of our culture’s clearest illustrationsof hypermasculinity and male duality premisedon the fear of the unmasculine” (Brown, 1999,p. 31). Brown disagrees with the commoncriticism that the comics simply articulate a“chocolate-dip Superman.” Although Brownrecognized that any superhero comic book willcontain elements of hegemonic masculinity, healso argued that the narratives constituted analternative to African American hypermas-culinity, in that they “put the mind back in thebody” (Brown, 1999, p. 35) by depicting AfricanAmerican male heroes as valuing intelligence.

Adams (1999) examined the white “soft”masculine body in the American film Coplandby locating the white male body in a nexus ofrace, politics, and masculinity. Adams alsoexplored aspects of spatial and racial segrega-tion in the film: the black city versus the whitesuburbs, with the borders of the white suburbs(and thus the white male body) always beingopen to infiltration. She argued that the politicsof former U.S. president Bill Clinton (friendly,diplomatic, and thus a shift from the “hardbody” and brute force of the Reagan era) werereflected in the soft white body of the film’smale star, Sylvester Stallone. Although the filmdid not explicitly valorize the male body, Adamsnoted that we still see a white man whosemasculinity is restored through the search forjustice. She concluded that “new” forms of mas-culinity (as typified by Clinton) are not neces-sarily progressive, as they do not automaticallyentail institutional shifts. Thus, Adams arguedthat masculinity is pliable and changes in waysthat reinforce the status quo.

MEN’S BODIES

The bulk of the research on men’s bodies,especially the body image literature, tends tobe theoretically unsophisticated, uncritical, andessentialist, using frameworks such as sex role“theory” and role models or explaining theeffects of the media on men’s attitudes andbehavior in crude ways. The literature on bodiesand technology is more sophisticated and

critical, even though it tends to ignore theimportant feminist work on posthuman bodiesand cyborgs (Hables Gray, Figueroa-Sarriera,Mentor, & Haraway, 1996; Haraway, 1997;Kirkup, Janes, & Woodward, 1999; Willis,1997). We now examine two of the topics in thisarea: body image and technology.

Body Image

Using a combination of Barthes’s concept ofmyth and postmodern feminism, Pinfold (2000)argued that both the gay and feminist movementshave destabilized the traditional function of facialhair as a signifier of masculinity. Wienke (1998)discussed the centrality of muscularity in defin-ing hegemonic masculinity in American popularculture. Wienke used a narrative interpretationand conducted in-depth interviews with 20 youngAmerican men in order to investigate how theyviewed their bodies in relation to this muscularideal. Wienke reported that almost all of hisparticipants desired a mesomorphic body type.Within this overall context, the men had orga-nized their bodily practices in three main ways:reliance, reformulation, and rejection. The major-ity of the respondents had adopted a strategy ofreliance, meaning that they identified with andattempted to attain the active, muscular, and pow-erful bodies associated with hegemonic mas-culinity. The reformulators also identified withthe hegemonic male body but realized they couldnot achieve it, so developed alternative practicesthat enabled them to embody authority, strength,and self-control. Some men had rejected the mus-cular ideal of masculinity, seeing it as driven byunrealistic or outdated expectations.

Leit, Pope, and Gray (2001) analyzed depic-tions of male models’ bodies in Playgirl maga-zine between 1973 and 1997. Using height andweight information in the magazines, the authorsfound that norms of the ideal male body hadplaced increasing emphasis on muscularity.Milkin, Wornian, and Chrisler (1999) examinedthe covers of 21 women’s and men’s magazinesand reported that the former focused on improv-ing physical appearance, whereas the latter empha-sized entertainment, expanding knowledge, andhobbies. Demarest and Allen (2000) surveyed120 male and female college students in order toascertain which types of bodies were perceivedto be the most attractive. Men and women



misjudged which shapes the opposite sex ratedas most attractive. African American women hadthe most accurate perceptions of what men foundto be attractive, whereas Caucasian women hadparticularly distorted views. Men also predictedthat women would prefer bulkier shapes thanthey actually did. The authors argued that thesefindings had implications for the lower incidenceof eating disorders among African Americanwomen compared with their Caucasian counter-parts. Strong, Singh, and Randall (2000) sur-veyed an ethnically diverse group of homosexualand heterosexual men and reported that gaymales had a lower level of satisfaction with theirbodies. They suggested that gay men’s childhoodsocialization practices contributed to dissatisfac-tions with their bodies in adulthood. Oberg andTornstam (1999) surveyed more than 2,000Swedes aged 15 to 95 years about body imageand found that some assumptions about agingand bodies that pervade consumer culture werenot matched by people’s individual experiencesof their own bodies.

Technology

Clarsen (2000) analyzed relationships amonggender, bodies, and technology in early-20th-century popular narratives of automobiles inAustralia and the United States. She arguedthat although some narratives certainly could beread as articulating sexual difference, for exam-ple, by using images of Samson and Tarzandelivering technological benefits to incompetentwomen drivers, they also contained elementsof (middle-class) female technical competence.Clarsen also demonstrated how relations amonggender, bodies, and technology intersected withdivisions of race and social class.

Poggi (1997) analyzed representations ofmen’s and women’s bodies in the sculptures,paintings, novels and poems of early-20th-century, male Italian futurists. Poggi arguedthat the aesthetics of this avant-garde groupdisplayed a “system of oppositions and sub-stitutions,” with men’s bodies envisioned inNietzschean-like ways—as omnipotent, passion-less, militaristic cyborgs that conquer nature—and women’s bodies positioned by maternal,misogynistic, and erotic motifs. Poggi also drewsome parallels with Theweleit’s (1987) classicwork on the psychological and corporeal bound-aries of Fascist German soldiers.

McCormack (1999) applied a blend ofcultural geography, Foucault’s concept ofgovernmentality, and the insights of post-modern feminists to analyze the repre-sentational politics of fitness associated withNordicTrack, an American-manufactured homefitness machine that is targeted at the affluentsegment of the market. McCormack showedthat among a welter of discourses—biomedical,scientific, and engineering expertise; con-sumerism; sexual difference; occupational flex-ibilization; self-discipline; and individuation—the NordicTrack aesthetic constructed a cyborgthat was located within a “white, masculinistmyth of the Nordic superman.” Like Poggi,McCormack alluded to the Nietzschean themesthat pervaded the NordicTrack text. A usefulaspect of McCormack’s conclusion is that the“geography of fitness” connected withNordicTrack both destabilizes and rescriptsconventional dualisms such as male/female,nature/culture, and human/nonhuman.

UNDERSTUDIED AND NEGLECTED TOPICS

We noticed that many topics had been under-studied or neglected. Again, we have only enoughspace to single out a few topics for specialattention.

Cyberbodies in Cyberspace

The exponential spread of new global com-munication technologies, with features suchas “bodyless selves” and “cybersex” (Stratton,1997, pp. 30-32), has been the focus of somefascinating studies of bodies and the media.Kibby and Costello (1999) found that hetero-sexual adult video conferencing partially desta-bilized conventional discourses of sexualdisplay and voyeurism by allowing women towatch erotic images of men engaging in sexualexhibitionism. Nevertheless, some dominantcodes still prevailed: Men generally weredepicted in active roles, rarely showed theirfaces and genitals concurrently, and used nick-names that conveyed archetypal phallic size andpower. Similar themes emerged in Slater’s(1999) ethnography of how “sexpics” weretraded on heterosexual Internet Relay Chat(IRC). Despite appearing to be transgressive and



libertarian, exchanges on the sites followedtraditional heterosexual and homophobicscripts. Despite the disembodied context of IRC,real bodies still needed to be authenticated bypeople who used the sites for various purposes:

[The IRC] world looks post-war rather than post-human, with constant talk of fidelity and cheating,true love, and American high school romancelanguage of dating and going steady. . . . Onesuspects that the IRC sexpics scene is a strangehalfway house, a place where anything is possiblebut little is realized because, although themalleability of the body allows any identity to beperformed, no identity can be taken seriously,trusted or even properly inhabited without theethical weight—persistence in time over time andlocation in space—that dependable bodies arebelieved to provide. (Slater, 1999, p.116)

Further research like this is required becauseboth academic and popular claims about thealleged revolutionary effects of new communi-cation technologies usually neglect how they areusually embedded in established gender tropes.

Subordinated andMarginalized Masculinities

Some scholars have conducted insightfulresearch by analyzing interactions among hege-monic, subordinated, marginalized, and com-plicit masculinities in several contexts. Turningfirst to studies of rural masculinities, Bell(2000) argued that films such as Deliveranceand Pulp Fiction construct a binary dividebetween fashionable “metrosexuality” andunsophisticated rural homosexuality. Homo-sexual acts by the protagonists in these filmsfetishize the “rustic sodomite,” presenting ruralmen as sexually driven and socially primitive.Rural men—“hard hitting, hard riding ranch-men, cattle men, prospectors, lumbermen”—have been represented as being interested in sexwithout affection or affectation, with such dis-plays associated with “sissy” urban gay men(Bell, 2000, p. 551). In this context, sex betweenmen has been represented as a senseless andperfunctory act.

Brandt and Haugen (2000) tracked changesin the representation of masculinities in theNorwegian forestry press over a 20-year periodand observed a shift away from the traditional“macho man” toward the technically and

professionally proficient “organizational” or“management man.” They noted that despitethis change, conventional signifiers of “real”masculinity, such as physical competence,strength, and toughness, remained: “the mostrespected men seemed to be the ones who candisplay masculinities at both the forestry andmanagerial sites, men for whom both the power-saw and the time manager are important sym-bols” (Brandt & Haugen, 2000, p. 352). Liepins(2000) used Foucauldian insights to study ruralmasculinities in Australia and New Zealand.Like Brandt and Haugen, Liepins found that the“organizational man” had emerged in recentyears. The media produced by farming organi-zations in these two countries valorized ele-ments of strength and struggle against bothnature and the organizational and politicalhierarchies that regulated rural industries: therugged and active man with muscles and testos-terone who could “carry the fight” to make a“better deal for farmers” represented the “true”farmer. Contributions like these are importanton two counts: First, they challenge the implicitnaturalization of urbanized masculinities as thenorm; second, they provide useful examples ofthe importance of spatial and cultural contextsin understanding gender relations. Moreresearch like this is needed in order to under-stand constructions of rural and urban masculin-ities, particularly in nations with rich frontiermythologies like Australia, Canada, NewZealand, South Africa, and the United States.

Regarding masculinities in urban contexts,both Farrell (2003) and Pearce (2000) arguedthat The Full Monty begins by embodyingthe gendered economy of deindustrializingsocieties, with the marginal working-class menunable to cope with unemployment and disen-franchisement and the women responding in aresilient manner. However, they also claimedthat the film ends by reasserting the status quo:“Masculinity has been shored up once more, tothe exclusion of the women, who have beenreturned to their proper place. . . . Men are oncemore the powerful sex, their bodies once morethe (albeit unlikely) instruments of this power”(Pearce, 2000, p. 235). Farrell (2003) andGoddard (2000) maintained that the alleged“reversal” in the film actually reinforceshegemonic gender relations, and Farrell alsoshowed how issues of social class were omittedfrom the script. These investigations show



how even subordinated and marginalizedmasculinities can reinforce hegemonic repre-sentations of gender and conceal exploitativeclass relations among men.

At the other end of the social class spectrum,Kendall (1999) drew on Connell’s concepts ofhegemonic, subordinated, marginalized, andcomplicit masculinities to analyze representa-tions of “nerds” in American films, magazines,and newspapers, and on the Internet. She foundthat depictions of this once “liminal masculineidentity” had been partially incorporated intohegemonic masculinity and also served to per-petuate racial stereotypes. A valuable aspect ofKendall’s investigation was that she located hertexts in the economic processes by which globalcapitalism has reconstituted the cultural andeconomic capital associated with informationtechnology work. Chan (2000) also employedthe concepts of hegemonic, complicit, subordi-nated, and marginalized masculinities to exploreChinese American masculinity in Bruce Leefilms. Chan argued that Asian American mengenerally are excluded, stereotyped, and desex-ualized in the media.

Non-Western Contexts

Chan’s work reminds us that most of theresearch on the media and men’s bodiesrelates to advanced capitalist societies. A notableexception is Derne’s (1999) examination of Hindifilms and their audiences via a combination ofcontent analysis, participant observation, andinterviews. Derne argued that the eroticizationof violence against women by male heroes inthe films facilitated both the creation ofunfriendly social spaces for women—the cinemahalls—and a broader culture of harassment andviolence. Although Derne expressed reservationsabout a cause-and-effect relationship betweenthe films and wider patterns of violence, theextreme popularity of the films is compelling(some unmarried men attend the cinema 20-30times a month). Further studies of this type areneeded in other non-Western contexts in orderto shed light on the relationships among gender,the media, and bodies.

Local/Global Articulations

Although the above studies have providedvaluable insights about men and masculinities at

numerous micro levels, Connell (2000, pp. 8-9,39) has noted that it is vital to connect local cir-cumstances with global processes. The mediaare fertile sites for studying local/global linksbecause their images and texts circulate withinthe global “traffic” of cultural commodities.However, except for sex tourism (Altman, 2001;Clift & Carter, 2000; Kempadoo, 1999; Ryan &Hall, 2001), most of the literature we examinedshowed little sensitivity to articulations betweenlocal and global situations. Consequently, insuf-ficient attention has been paid to the importantissue of global ownership and control of themedia, at a time when some of the biggest finan-cial transactions in history have occurred viacorporate mergers among multinational mediaconglomerates. Virtually all the moguls whohave signed these deals and consequently exertenormous power over the global media indus-tries are privileged, able-bodied, and whitemiddle-aged men. At the level of production, wesuggest that researchers should be interrogatingthe interests of this narrow group of men whoown and control the global media industries. Itis imperative to emphasize that this is not sim-ply an “economic” question. As du Gay (1997,p. 4) argued, “The economic . . . too is thor-oughly saturated with culture . . . [and] . . .‘Economic’ practices and processes . . . dependon meaning for their effects and particular ‘con-ditions of existence.’” So rather than seeing“economic processes and practices as ‘things inthemselves,’” we should be analyzing the “‘cul-tural’ dimensions of economic activities—themeanings and values these activities hold forpeople” (du Gay, 1997, p. 3). We will revisitthese links between cultural and economicprocesses later in our analysis of magazines.

WHERE TO FROM HERE?

Our selective overview shows that researchacross a range of disciplines and topics is astrong point of research on both the mediaand men’s bodies. It also is clear that researchhas been fragmented and that there has beenlittle cross-fertilization among scholars workingin different paradigms. Thus, analyses of thespecific articulations among masculinities,media, and men’s bodies are extremely rare.On the few occasions that dialogues do occur,they either tend to be confined to the theoretical



level or rely on a restricted theoretical and/ormethodological perspective. An example of theformer is Hanke’s (1998) excellent overview ofsome of the major developments in research onthe relationships among bodies, masculinity,and the mass media. An illustration of the latteris the research on film and TV that has ana-lyzed many important topics but has doneso mainly through the perspective of psy-choanalytic theory and the method of textualanalysis (Bell, 2000; MacMurraugh-Kavanagh,1999; McEachern, 1999; Reiser, 2001; Thomas,1999). It worth noting that we found only threearticles that either mentioned both the massmedia and men’s bodies in the title, abstract,or key words and/or included them in theresearch design (Adams, 1999; Grindstaff &McCaughey, 1998; Krenske & McKay, 2000).We now suggest a framework that we believemight help scholars to study representationsof men’s bodies in a more nuanced way.

Methods

As noted, most studies of men and the massmedia have relied heavily on content analysisor semiotics. Although these techniques willcontinue to be indispensable for research in thearea, they fail to account for how audiencesdecode discourses about masculinity. Sincepublication of the highly influential work ofHall (1980) on encoding-decoding practices andMorley (1980) on audience receptions, it hasbeen axiomatic in the field of media studies thatalthough messages are always relatively “fixed,”consumers can interpret them in ways that wereunintended during the encoding process. Hence,there has been a plethora of intriguing studiesshowing how audiences “read” messages dif-ferently on the basis of gender, race, and socialclass (Ruddock, 2001). Thus, Ang (1996,p. 110), one of the most influential exponents ofaudience ethnographies, has correctly called forresearch that writes men, and especially genderas a relational phenomenon, back into studiesof the mass media. Pertinent to our interest isthe research that has demonstrated how womenreaders of women’s magazines and romancenovels use these texts in a multiplicity ofways that were unintended by the authorsand editors (Hermes, 1995; McCracken, 1993;Radway, 1984; Sheridan, 1995). This “ethno-graphic turn,” however, seems to have bypassed

researchers who have analyzed men and themedia. For instance, we found only six journalarticles that used audiences in their researchdesign (Derne, 1999; Harrison & Cantor, 1997;Hetsroni, 2000; May, 1999; Rutherdale, 1999).Jackson, Stevenson, and Brooks’s (2001) useof focus groups with men who read men’smagazines is a welcome step in this direction;their industry-text-audience nexus is also auseful template, although they did not focusspecifically on bodies.

Theory

Male bodies are there if we look for them.

—Witz (2000, p. 19)

At an abstract level, we propose thatresearch on representations of men’s bodiescould be analyzed much more productivelythrough the cultural studies model proposed bydu Gay and his colleagues (du Gay, 1997; duGay, Hall, Janes, Mackay, & Negus, 1997; Hall,1997). Du Gay et al. (1997) view culture as acircuit of meaning-making that “does not endat a pre-ordained place” (p. 185). Accordingto du Gay, the key recursive and interrelatedsocial practices through which meanings areconstructed are

• Production: how cultural objects are “encoded”from both technical and cultural viewpoints

• Representation: the signs and symbols thatselectively construct commonsense meaningsabout cultural objects

• Identification: the emotional investments thatconsumers have in cultural artifacts

• Consumption: the diverse ways in whichpeople actually use cultural objects

• Regulation: the cultural, economic, and socialtechnologies that determine how culturalobjects are both created and transformed

Although these elements can be separatedinto discrete entities for analytical purposes, “inthe real world they continually overlap andintertwine in complex and contingent ways” (duGay et al., 1997, p. 4). So, even though it isoften useful to isolate a single component, theothers all inform one another—often in contra-dictory ways. We will return to this abstractframework with a concrete example of “men’smagazines” below.



In approaching bodies through this model,we need to “look” for male bodies—to makethem visible. Therefore, studies of men’s bodieshave much to learn from the “corporeal turn” inwomen’s studies. The task here, as Witz (2000)noted, is to write men in without writing womenout. Drawing on the work of Shilling (1993),Witz suggested that by asking “Whose body?,”researchers can focus on how men’s andwomen’s bodies are differently stigmatized,celebrated, and ignored. We suggest that Fiske’s(1987) idea of inscription/exscription andBarthes’s (1973) concept of exnomination areparticularly useful in this regard, at least at thetextual level of analysis. Both of these termsrefer to how the power of hegemonic groupsis mythologized and naturalized, on one hand,and the wants and needs of subaltern groupsare marginalized and pathologized, on the other.For example, in a case study of Australiansport, McKay and Middlemiss (1995) used arelational perspective to show how a constella-tion of media metaphors, metonyms, and imagessimultaneously exnominated and valorizedmen’s bodies according to scripts associatedwith hegemonic masculinity, while inscribingwomen’s bodies in terms of the passive, sup-portive, and sexually objectified tropes ofemphasized femininity. In a similar way, Rowe,McKay, and Miller (2000) highlighted how themedia glorified men’s bodies and pathologizedthose of women in “body panics” surroundingHIV/AIDS in sport.

AN APPLICATION: MEN’S

BODIES/“MEN’S MAGAZINES”

In order to illustrate how this “circuit of culture”paradigm can be applied to a concrete context,we now analyze how the bodies of the “newman” and the “new lad” have been constructedin popular “men’s magazines.” Magazines serveas both reflectors and shapers of social relations,and they “demonstrate the potential for signifi-cant change in gender relations and identities,while simultaneously reinscribing traditionalforms of masculinity” (Jackson et al., 2001,p. 157). Because these publications are drivenby the advertising imperatives of keeping upwith both shifting marketing trends and socialtastes, a comparison between “new man” and“new lad” magazines illustrates the complex

and contradictory ways in which the media bothstabilize and disrupt representations of men’sbodies. The five elements of the “circuit of cul-ture” come into play here as we touch upon theinterrelated vectors of production, consumption,regulation, representation, and identity.

MEN’S BODIES IN POSTMODERN CULTURE

Traditionally, the imperative of “compulsoryheterosexuality” has compelled media person-nel to differentiate men from women by show-ing the former with bodies that are authoritativeand powerful in the public sphere, and portray-ing the latter with bodies that denote nurturance,domesticity, passivity, narcissism, and sexualpleasure for male onlookers. Any hint that thisbinary code has been breached still invokeshomophobic or misogynist moral panics inthe media (Miller, McKay, & Martin, 1999).However, in postmodern contexts human bodieshave become an increasingly visible locus ofthe highly personal needs and desires thathave accompanied the institutionalization ofconsumer capitalism. For instance, Featherstone(1982, p. 27) posited that traditionally ascribedbody characteristics have become more mal-leable and “a new relationship between bodyand self has developed”: the “performing self”has emerged, “which places greater emphasison ‘appearance, display and the managementof impressions.’” Featherstone (1982, p.18)asserted that our inner and outer bodies are,in fact, “conjoined” in consumer culture, withthe aim of inner body maintenance being theimprovement of outer body appearance and thecultivation of “a more marketable self.” Thus,bodies now have an important exchange value:high if they signify ideals associated with youth,health, fitness, and beauty; low if they denotelack of control or laziness (Featherstone, 1982,pp. 23-24). Featherstone (1982) suggested thatthe body has been redefined as “a vehicle ofpleasure and self-expression” (p. 18) and is “thepassport to all that is good in life” (p. 26).Moreover, men increasingly have been regu-lated by this emphasis on corporeal presentationand monitoring (Nixon, 1996, 2000). However,as Wernick (1991, p. 66) warned over a decadeago, the interpellation of man-as-narcissist bythe mass media merely signals that the arche-typal “possessive individual,” who was at the



center of early capitalism and liberal contracttheory, has metamorphosed into the “promo-tional individual”:

The equalization of gender status which is begin-ning to occur in the sphere of consumption is not inthe least the equality we might dream of: the equal-ity of free and self-determining beings in a free andself-determining association with another. It is theequality, rather, of self-absorbed, and emotionallyanxious, personalities for sale. With the makeupmirror dangled invitingly before them, men, likewomen, are being encouraged to focus their ener-gies not on realizing themselves as self-activatingsubjects, but on realizing themselves as circulatingtokens of exchange. (Wernick, 1991, p. 66)

Constructing the “New Man”

In this postmodern scenario, the mass mediaare faced with the problem of how to sell “soft”products and lifestyles to men without simulta-neously threatening the traditional bases ofhegemonic masculinity. One archetype themedia created in order to solve this conundrumwas the “new man,” which was framed in termsof classic postmodern motifs (e.g., sensitivity,self-care), as well as by essentialist messagesabout needing to “get in touch with his innerself.” Thus, during the 1990s, films, TV, andmagazines were replete with images of mencuddling their babies, playing with their chil-dren, grooming themselves, exercising theirbodies, and embracing other (heterosexual) menduring “weekend warrior” retreats. Mort (1996)noted that the British (and we would argue theAustralian) conceptions of the “new man” weredifferent from the American one, as the lattermarket responded to the women’s movement,whereas the former did not. This was due to theBritish publishers’ perception that the women’smovement was not interested in the operationsof the marketplace and “in contrast [to theUnited States], the project for masculinitychampioned in [magazines] was overwhelm-ingly commercial” (Mort, 1996, p. 44). Theemergence of the “new man” coincided with ashift toward lifestyle advertising with its atten-dant techniques of market research (Chapman,1988, p. 229). Thus, men were increasinglybeing sold images (of fashion, health, father-hood) by which they were “stimulated to lookat themselves—and other men—as objects ofconsumer desire” (Mort, 1988, p. 194).

Lifestyle magazines targeted at men havefunctions similar to those of long-establishedwomen’s magazines, in that masculinity isframed as a problem (sometimes even depictedas being “in crisis”) that requires self-regulationand improvement. Thus, these magazinesinclude instructions on how to exercise, groom,buy clothes, and perform sex. One outcome ofheterosexual men increasingly coming underthe gaze was a qualitative change in how theirbodies were framed, often represented pas-sively, a pose that is very different from tradi-tional representations of the “active man.” Theshift to grooming and health also disrupted theimage of the conventional “breadwinner” image.An important precursor to this discourse wasPlayboy, which advocated a hedonistic lifestylethat was free from marriage and children, andalso made the personal consumption of mass-produced commodities legitimate for men(Conekin, 2001; Osgerby, 2001). However, asMcMahon (1999, p. 110) pointed out, amidthis ostensible feminization of masculinity inconsumer culture, the media still have to findways of maintaining sexual difference. Inadvertising, this frequently is achieved byencoding commodities such as fragrances withterms such as “strong,” “powerful,” or “bold”and in “masculine” colors like gray or blue.Another way sexual convergence is nullified isthrough the marketing of technological prod-ucts such as computers and DVDs that rarelyappear in comparable women’s magazines suchas Cosmopolitan.

Some critics dismissed the “new man” as aninsincere “yuppie” who simply knew how toappear to be sensitive (Jackson et al., 2001,p. 35). McMahon (1999) argued that the “newman” was an artifact of the media, and despiteall the focus on “sensitive” masculinity, men’sself-interests were still being served via thesexual division of domestic labor. As Moore(1989) wryly put it, “Did anyone seriouslythink that a few skincare products were goingto cause the collapse of patriarchy?” (p. 47).Moreover, representations of this “new mas-culinity” were overwhelmingly restricted toaffluent, white, able-bodied heterosexual menand underpinned by essentialist discoursesabout gender identities and relations (McKay &Ogilvie, 1999). Thus, this allegedly “newman” constituted no real threat to the traditionalgender order:



[I]mages of the “New Man” in the media andadvertising suggest men can be caring and sensi-tive without “losing” their masculinity. But farfrom reversing institutionalized male dominationin marriage and the household, these “new” ideascan be seen as facilitating the conditions withinwhich individual men can come to acquire a fewmore masculine “brownie points” in the struggleto differentiate themselves from other men, andfrom women. Rather than overturning the unequalpower relations between the sexes in relation todomestic work or childcare, the New Man imagearguably opens up legitimate space for the colo-nization and appropriation of those aspects ofchildcare, which are the most rewarding andwhich offer immediate creative statement,couched in the language of enhancing men’s mas-culinity and social prowess. (Kerfoot & Knights,1993, p. 669)

Jackson et al. (2001, p. 12) pointed out,however, that a rather judgmental tone is appar-ent in the research and critiques of the newforms of masculinity, much of which views the“new man” as purely marketing hype or blatantpretence. They concur with Mort (1988,pp. 218-219) that there are some positiveoutcomes of these representations, especiallythe differing profiles of masculinity, with vari-ous outcomes reflecting and constituting newidentities. Young men are now carving out newspaces, representing themselves in differentways and living out fractured identities. In anyevent, just as the “new man” had become theflavor of the month, editors and journaliststurned their attention to the “new lad.”

MEN BEHAVING BADLY:CONSTRUCTING THE “NEW LAD”

When fears over male narcissism and incorpora-tion of the feminine had receded, the mediabegan to reinscribe conventional modes ofmasculinity (McMahon, 1999, p. 119). Thismove was enhanced by the criticism that the“new man” was dishonest and hypocritical.Thus, by the mid-1990s, the Australian andBritish media had switched their attention to the“new lad,” who unapologetically symbolizedthe traits associated with hegemonic masculin-ity: drinking with his mates, taking risks, tellingdirty jokes, and, most of all, looking at skimpilydressed women. Nixon (1996) argued that “new

lad” magazines marked a return to establishedmasculine heterosexual scripts (of the “hard”sexist “traditional man”) that were located insoft pornography magazines during the 1970s.This was because no new masculine repertoireswere articulated in representations in the “newman” magazines, so there was the opportunityfor traditional tropes to reemerge. Magazineslike Loaded (U.K.), Ralph (Australia), andFHM (For Him Magazine, Australia), which tar-geted young, heterosexual men, epitomized this“new laddism.” This genre of masculinity wasbased on biological assumptions (nurturing isfor women/risk-taking is for men) and alsoenunciated what it meant to be an “authentic”male (Jackson et al., 2001, p. 85), which was notto be intimidated by other men or, especially, bywomen.

The “men’s magazine” market, especially inAustralia, has always been highly contested, asmanifested in the demise of publications likeMax and GQ. The two most successful “men’smagazines” in the Australian market are FHMand Ralph. (Two homologous sport-relatedpublications, Inside Sport and Tracks, are alsopopular; see Jefferson Lenskyj, 1998, andHenderson, 1999.) The “new lad” magazines aremore akin to a male version of Cosmopolitanthan a soft-core pornography magazine suchas Playboy (Mikosza, 2003, p. 135). In fact, theAustralian version of Playboy has folded due tofalling circulation and advertisers shifting to the“new lad” magazines (Dale, 2000). The tradi-tional meaning of soft-core pornography maga-zines for men has been reinscribed by themeanings and images associated with the “newlad” in these magazines, which are highly desir-able to advertisers, with their mixture of sex,sport, alcohol, the public world, and “carefullymanaged” fashion for a heterosexual male read-ership (Bonner, 2002, p. 194). If meanings are“always made in usage” (du Gay et al., 1997,p. 85), then these magazines have come to sig-nify hedonism, risk-taking, consumerism, andvoyeurism, as well as what it is to be a youngman in Australian culture.

In terms of form and content, the glossy“new lad” magazines usually are classified aseither “men’s interests” or “general lifestyle,”even though they almost always have a womanin a bikini on the cover and FHM containselements that are commonly found in soft pornpublications. They are, however, also given a



“G” (general) rating and are policed through theappropriate national censor. They are also regu-lated in the community: Some issues of FHMhave been banned from sale in local super-market chains for being too sexually explicit.However, cultural regulation of the magazinesalso exists at the level of production andconsumption, with the editors self-censoring/regulating in different ways. An example is theexclusion of sexually explicit information on thecover that women’s magazines often incor-porate. To a lesser degree, readers also writeletters to the editors about their likes and dis-likes of the magazines, which occasionallyaffect subsequent content.

The content of these magazines rangesthrough health, grooming, exercise, alcohol,“boys’ toys,” advertisements for myriad com-modities, and, most prominent, images ofwomen, who are there to be looked at even if thecopy also subjects men to the gaze. The maga-zines sell products similar to those in “new men”magazines while adroitly distancing themselvesfrom the feminine and preempting criticism byinvoking an ironic, self-deprecating, and tongue-in-cheek style of humor. Hence, Schirato andYell (1999) noted that the editors and journalistsof these magazines appeal to media-savvy read-ers’ “knowing sexism”—an awareness of femi-nism and gay rights that is fused with anenjoyment of conventional representations ofwomen in revealing swimsuits. (Loaded carriesthe sardonic subtitle “For guys who should knowbetter.”) Schirato and Yell claimed that womenare active in the magazines and not simply thereto display their passive bodies for men to lookat. For example, Ralph magazine has a two- orthree-page photo and text spread titled “Babesbehaving badly,” in which three or more womendiscuss their likes and dislikes regarding menand sex; thus, these women are “in on the joke”about men. Using Butler’s concept of genderperformance, Schirato and Yell analyzed a storyfrom Ralph magazine and concluded that theenactment of “stereotypical” masculinity in themagazines was a “self-conscious” act that recog-nized that sexist masculinity was obsolete. Weargue, however, that the representations continueto be defined quite rigidly by conventional gen-der dualisms, with women mainly contained inpassive settings. So, when women are depictedas “agents,” as in the story above, they are invari-ably young, single, and positioned as providers

of tips to men on how to pick up women. Thebodies of the women are also posed in similarways to the bikini shots in other parts of themagazine. These representations are in linewith the magazines’ general narratives, whichare informed by an appeal to voracious maleheterosexuality.

Men’s bodies are present in various guisesin “new lad” magazines, usually in a muscularform. Whereas the eponymous Men’s Healthfocuses on improving men’s well-being(Toerien & Durrheim, 2001), FHM and Ralphconcentrate on risk-taking behavior. Althoughthese magazines do construct men in “femi-nized” ways (e.g., via male models or imagesof men exercising or grooming their bodies),predictable masculine discourses also are pres-ent. For instance, men’s bodies are almostalways depicted as active, and even whenposed in fashion shoots, are in some wayinvolved in a bonding activity with other men(e.g., playing sports or doing business), orpositioned with women in ways that assure the(assumed male heterosexual) readers of theirheterosexuality.

Men’s bodies are also constructed in “newlad” magazines as instruments that need to bemanaged through contradictory regimes of exer-cise, sex, and sometimes-dangerous practices(e.g., drinking, driving fast cars). Jackson et al.(2001, p. 94) argued that the function of healthadvice sections in these magazines is to preventanxiety and insecurity surrounding the decliningand aging male body. Thus, magazines such asFHM also have sections on bodily care, health,and grooming. So, in a similar way to the con-tradictory nature of women’s magazines (withstories on being happy about your body shapepositioned next to a feature on a new diet), themagazine constructs a paradoxical frameworkof men’s interests. In summary, the media, andespecially “men’s magazines,” position them-selves for various audiences; as Gauntlett (2002,p. 255) notes, the media

are far more interested in generating “surprise”than in maintaining coherence and consistency.Contradictions are an inevitable by-product of thedrive for multiple points of excitement, so theyrarely bother today’s media makers, or indeedtheir audiences.

We are not suggesting that this circuit-of-culture model can or should be applied



mechanistically to every research site. Weargue, however, that it is a useful theoreticaland methodological “toolbox” for conductingresearch on the links between men’s bodies andthe media. First, it alerts us to the fact that themedia both reinforce and destabilize everydayunderstandings of men’s bodies in multifariousand paradoxical ways. Thus, the media can cre-ate contradictory images about “lads” whilesimultaneously breathing new life into the “newman.” The most recent rearticulation of thelatter archetype is the “metrosexual,” epito-mized by soccer player David Beckham, whosestatus as a globally recognized sports star tradi-tionally has been associated with “the frontlinetroops of patriarchy” (Connell, 1995, p. 79)rather than the “new man” (Cashmore & Parker,2003; Simpson, 2002; Whannel, 2001). Second,it sensitizes us to the close connections amonggender and the cultural economy of the globalentertainment, advertising, and marketingindustries. For instance, FHM can now bepurchased in 16 countries, meaning that it isimportant to investigate how local practicesarticulate with the generic formula (e.g., insome countries, women’s nipples are notallowed to be shown through swimsuits, so areairbrushed out). Third, it underscores the needfor relational research on gender. For instance,the magazines we analyzed ostensibly are aboutand for men, but women also are involved asexecutives, producers, photographers, journal-ists, and consumers, and little is known abouttheir roles in this gender regime. Moreover,there are several admirable analyses of men’sor women’s magazines, but no one has conducteda comparative study of men’s and women’smagazines. Finally, it allows researchers tostudy the various “moments” of the circuit ofmeaning-making, as well as illuminating howproduction, consumption, regulation, repre-sentation, and identity are mutually constitutiveof one another.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

Whatever happened to Gary Cooper,the strong, silent type? That was anAmerican. He wasn’t in touch with hisfeelings. He just did what he had to do.See, what they didn’t know is that oncethey got Gary Cooper in touch with his

feelings, they couldn’t get him to shut up.It’s dysfunction this, dysfunction that.

—Mafia boss Tony Soprano to hisfemale psychiatrist in the first episode

of the critically acclaimed The Sopranos

Heterosexuality and homophobia arethe bedrock of hegemonic masculinity.

—Donaldson (1993, p. 645)

The politics surrounding representations ofmen’s bodies is of particular importance to gen-der studies scholars and activists because themedia are deeply implicated in literally embody-ing hegemonic forms of masculinity, albeitin selective, uneven, and contradictory ways.At the beginning of a new millennium, the intri-cate nexus of desires, pleasures, and powersurrounding men’s bodies in the mass media isundoubtedly much more intricate than, say, inthe 1950s, when, as Pomerance (2001, p. 7) putit, Hollywood films did “describe and reflectthe social world” in a relatively seamless fash-ion. As the spectacle of a corpulent mob bossin therapy on a popular TV program indicates,the sheer plurality of representations of men’sbodies that circulate in the contemporary massmedia means that hegemonic masculinity is lessculturally secure than hitherto. Nevertheless, it isimportant not to overemphasize or romanticizethe subversive potential of alternative representa-tions, on one hand, and to underestimate theresilience of hegemonic modes of masculinity,on the other. As Hall (1985) emphasized, socialtexts, identities, and practices are always rela-tively anchored. In the case of gender, we arguethat although hegemonic masculinity is not asrigid as it once was, given the fragmented andcontradictory representations of masculinities inthe contemporary media, it remains powerful(both materially and symbolically) through theinterdependent and mutually reinforcing struc-tures of heterosexism and homophobia alludedto above by Donaldson. Tony Soprano mightbe a caring family man who is in therapy, butreminiscent of how the hypermasculine ArnoldSchwarzenegger was reconstituted in Terminator2, he also is “softened and sensitized into a manwho can both kill and care” (Pfeil, 1995, p. 53).

Thus, at one level, we would agree withboth Bordo (1998) and Pearce (2000) thatThe Full Monty destabilizes the stereotypical



mise-en-scène whereby women take off theirclothes for the pleasure of heterosexual maleviewers, as well as posing an alternative to theviolent, spectacular, and mesomorphic bodies ofArnold Schwarznegger, Bruce Lee, and WesleySnipes that traditionally have been valorized inthe cinema. After all, who can forget the film’sdenouement, where Gaz and his troupe ofembattled working class men with mainly unim-posing bodies throw their hats into the audience,thereby appearing fully naked? Yet, in keepingwith the strong taboo on exposing the penis thatwas also evident in the scene with Guy wealluded to earlier, it is instructive to note that wesee their naked bodies only from behind. As filmhistorian Peter Lehman commented on the film,“It is still a moment of shockingly great signifi-cance when they show the penis. They can’t justshow it in a casual manner, and that is still quitedifferent from the manner in which the femalebody is commonly shown” (quoted in Lehigh,2000, p. 13S). In summary, the time when wesee a front-on pan of a row of “full Monties” inthe popular media is still some way off.

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17MEN AND MASCULINITIES

IN WORK, ORGANIZATIONS,AND MANAGEMENT

DAVID L. COLLINSON

JEFF HEARN

289

Drawing on the important insights ofsecond wave feminism, the field of crit-ical studies of men and masculinities is

now well established, and it has become so inthe relatively short span of time of the last 20years or so. Yet, within this field, men’s relationsto work, organizations, and management havenot generally been very prominent. Despite thefact that these relations provide some of themost obvious sources of men’s individual andcollective power, there has been something of anavoidance of these issues even within the gen-eral critical field. Often informed primarily bysocial theory rather than organizational theory,studies of masculinity have tended to underes-timate or even to neglect the significance oforganizations as sites for the reproduction ofmen’s power and masculinities. This is eventhough key workplace issues such as organiza-tional power, control, decision making, remu-neration, cultures, and structure typically reflectand reinforce masculine material discursivepractices in complex ways.

It is as if the very obvious associations ofmen with work, organizations, and manage-ment, at both the material and ideological levels,have meant that a “fresh start” has had to beattempted. This might be seen as a reversal ofthe now well-drawn tendency to explain men’sbehavior with reference to job, occupational,and organizational positions, in contrast withexplanations of women’s behavior in relation tothe family (Feldberg & Glenn, 1979). Thus, this“fresh start” might involve seeing men in termsof family, friends, health, body, emotions, sexu-ality, violence, and so on. Important thoughthese and other long-neglected aspects are,work, organizations, and management continueto be major forces in the construction of men,masculinities, and men’s power.

With these considerations in mind, here wepresent a “return to work,” specifically the orga-nizational workplace, but in a rather differentway from those simple, usually implicit associ-ations of men and “work” that often have beendominant in both substantive social milieux and


academic studies. Here we seek to make theconnections between men, work, workplaces,organizations, and management more explicitlygendered, and thus subject to more criticalanalysis. This chapter reviews recent develop-ments in the critical study of men and mas-culinities, in relation to work, organizations, andmanagement, including the strengths and weak-nesses of some major concepts that have influ-enced the literature.

The chapter comprises three main sections.It begins by considering the meaning of work,organization, and management. This focus onthe multiple meanings of terms like “work,”“organization,” and “management” then leadsinto a consideration of “multiple masculinities,”a conceptual framework that has been highlyinfluential within debates on critical studies ofmen and masculinities. Despite its valuablecontribution, this approach contains various con-ceptual difficulties. The third main section there-fore critically evaluates a number of these recentconcerns (and also challenges some of the crit-ics). The chapter concludes by discussing likelyfuture analytical directions, including trans-national organizations, and the impact of newinformation and communication technologies, asin the development of virtual organizations.

WHAT ARE WORK,ORGANIZATIONS, AND MANAGEMENT?

Work

In the light of this initial discussion, it isimportant to ask what is meant by the basic con-cepts of work, organizations, and management.

First, “work” is a socially contextualizedphenomenon. The meaning and naming of workis heavily linked to broad societal organization.It does not only mean organizational, paid,employed work in formal organizations in thepublic sphere. Feminist studies have been highlyinfluential in naming domestic labor as work.They have highlighted the importance of unpaiddomestic labor as an important site of gendered“work” and of men’s domination of women.Indeed, the home is still often not seen as aworkplace at all. For women, this is one of themany ways in which they and their work remainless visible and undervalued. In many societies,women are mainly or solely responsible for three

quarters of all housework; there are also majordifferences between the kinds of domestic tasksperformed by men and women. The former tendto “specialize” in putting children to bed, takingout and playing with children, waste disposal,household repairs, and do-it-yourself projects.Such tasks generally are preferred by men overthe much more time-consuming, supposedlymundane, and indeed socially subordinated tasksof cleaning, daily shopping, washing, ironing,cooking, and the routine care of infants andchildren (Oakley, 1985).

There is now a good deal of evidence to showthat, on average, women work much longerhours than men when the full allocation of bothpaid and unpaid work is taken into account. Ina sample of eight developing countries, 34% offemales’ time was spent on SNA work (Systemof National Accounts) and 66% on non-SNAwork, compared with 76% of males’ time onSNA work and 24% on non-SNA work (53% oftotal performed by males and 47% of total byfemales). In a sample of seven industrial coun-tries, the equivalent figures were 34% and 66%for females, and 66% and 34% for males (51%of total performed by males and 49% byfemales) (United Nations Development Pro-gramme, 1996). This remarkable persistence ofglobal inequality in gendered distributions ofpaid and nonpaid work and time use sits along-side the material differences between the moreand less wealthy parts of the world.

Hence, “work” also encompasses domestic,unpaid, nonemployed labor outside formal orga-nizations in the private sphere. It includes whathave come to be called reproductive labor(Hearn, 1983, 1987; O’Brien, 1981, 1986), care-work (Beams, 1979), sexual work/labor (Hearn& Parkin, 1995), people work (Goffman, 1961),emotion work (Fineman, 1993; Hochschild,1983), childwork (Hearn, 1983), solidary work(Lynch, 1989), and unspoken work (Reis, 2002),as well as other often unrecognized forms oflabor. O’Brien (1981) in particular provides anexemplary political philosophy of reproductivelabor, inverting the Marxist placing of reproduc-tion as superstructure upon the base of produc-tion (also see Hearn, 1987). Furthermore, workis organized across these boundaries of publicand private, paid and unpaid, within what hasbeen called the total social organization of work(Glucksmann, 1995). This is most clear in theorganization of work within socioeconomic



systems that are characterized by the blurringof the public-private divide, such as householdproduction systems and family businesses.Work clearly is not only a matter of labor undercapitalist systems; it also includes work underslavery, feudalism, socialism, communism, andvarious other hybrid economic systems.

Work is socially, indeed societally, organized,according to what generally has come to becalled the sexual division of labor, althoughthe term “gender division of labor” probably ismore accurate. It has often been argued thatin many societies, there is a tendency for menmore often to do strenuous, dangerous manualwork (Murdock, 1937). However, things are notalways what they seem. Even Murdock’s classicsurvey of 224 tribes from around the worldfound that there was an even distributionbetween those societies where agriculture tendedto be defined as “women’s work,” as againstthose where it tended to be defined as “men’swork.” An excellent critical review of this kindof literature, problematizing many of these basicassumptions both theoretically and empirically,was produced by Margrit Eichler (1980).

The gender division and distribution of laborhas real, societally variable, effects on womenand men. Brettell and Sargent (2000) observe thatwomen’s status is highest in societies in whichthe public and domestic spheres are only weaklydifferentiated. Thus, the most egalitarian soci-eties are those where men participate in thedomestic sphere (Pease & Pringle, 2001, p. 6).This matches well with Coltrane’s (1996, 1998)analysis of “premodern” societies in Africa, Asia,the Middle East, and the South Pacific. He con-cludes that more gender-balanced parenting wasrelated to greater gender equality in other areas oflife and in social power. Other connections mightbe made, more generally still, between the genderdivision of labor and patterns of violence. Forexample, Howell and Willis (1980) found thatin those societies where men were permitted toacknowledge fear (as is more likely when, forexample, men specialize in fighting, killing, anddangerous work), levels of violence were low(Kimmel, 2001, p. 35) (also see Sanday, 1981).

In such ways, constructions, definitions, andunderstandings of work are themselves bothmaterial and ideological. What “work” is consid-ered to be—both in practical everyday life and inresearch—is itself gendered and contested. Inthis chapter, we focus on work in organizational

workplaces, while also seeking to be aware ofthe interconnections of work in organizationsand in the home. Work in the family is discussedin other chapters in this volume (especiallyChapter 14, by Adams and Coltrane, andChapter 15, by Marsiglio and Pleck).

Organizations

The notion of organization is complex, prob-lematic, and gendered. Feminist analyses havesignificantly extended understandings of themeaning of organization. Organizations mayappear to be neutral obvious ways of organizing,but they are historical, variable, and usuallypremised on other, often unpaid, unrecognized,invisible labor elsewhere—in the home, infamilies, in other parts of the world, in “non-organizations,” by unknown others. Organiza-tions are those particular social collectivitiesthat result from those acts and processes, butorganizations are not to be thought of as merestatic outcomes. Instead, they should be under-stood as shifting social processes that are in astate of becoming something else.

At its simplest, the notion of an organiza-tion conjures up the highly tangible picture ofa church, a factory, an office, a prison, a stateapparatus, or even a university—something thatcan be seen, something that appears to functionwithin four walls. But such an idea of an orga-nization is increasingly a fantasy. Although it isprobably misguided to search for the origins of(an) “organization,” there are many strong con-tenders from the growth of religious, monarchic,and state organizations, whether in their ancientor medieval forms (see Burrell, 1997; Ezzamel &Hoskin, 2002). More recently, much of theideal-typical picture of the visible organizationdoes not even come from the heyday of theIndustrial Revolution; it stems if anywhere fromthe 18th century, with the relatively isolatedindustrial mill that could be seen. It was with thepassing of this organizational form to the multi-ple-unit “organization” that could not be fullyseen that, rather paradoxically, the idea of theorganization, and thus organization theory,became constituted and more popularly avail-able. By the height of the 19th-century Indus-trial Revolution, the isolated organization wasalready to a considerable extent decomposingand anachronistic. Its decomposition was accom-panied by its diffusion and expansion.

Work, Organizations, and Management • 291


As organizations grew in size and becamemore consolidated, and indeed more powerfulconcentrations of resources, they also becamemore diffuse and less concentrated at particulartimes and places. Part of the reason for this wasthe mode of expansion of some organizations.Their expansion was not just upward and out-ward on the same site (within four walls orexpanding those four walls); it was also throughhorizontal and vertical connection and integra-tion, and above all geographical and temporalexpansion and diffusion. The organization wasno longer a simple place—or indeed a simpletime. The notion of organizations has thusbecome progressively more complex. It stillrefers to the individual organization, but it alsoencompasses conglomerations of organizations,as in multi-organizations, such as the state andtransnational corporations. Within each organi-zation (within such multi-organizations) thereare, of course, further smaller subunits thatmight often reasonably be called organizationstoo. The number of virtual organizations andcyberorganizations also is increasing, a topic towhich we return in our concluding discussion.

Thus organizations, and indeed actionswithin organizations, are always embodiedin social contexts. This context-embeddednessmeans that it is necessary in conceptualizing,analyzing, and writing about organizations tobear in mind that attempts to characterize orga-nizations are limited and provisional. One com-plication is that organizations are both socialplaces of organizing and social structurings ofsocial relations and practices whose inter-relations are historically dynamic and shifting.Another is that organizations are not collectivi-ties formed simply by the individual, intentionalaction of their founders and members. Rather,organizations occur in the context of preexisting(organizational) social relations. The search forany tabula rasa is in vain. To paraphrase Marxand Engels (1970), “organizations make historybut not in the conditions of their own choosing”(Hearn & Parkin, 2001, p. 2).

In many societies, the form organizationstake is intimately bound up with the relationof the public and domestic spheres. As DavidMorgan (1992, 2001) has shown, there are com-plex historical interconnections between “work”and “home” both before and since the IndustrialRevolution. The relations of men to home andwork have shifted through traditional, early

modern, late modern, and postmodern historicalperiods. These various changes produceddifferent meanings around the family/workplace nexus for men and masculinities(D. L. Collinson, 1998). Indeed, in many waysorganizations and organizational workplaces arebuilt upon the unpaid labor of the domesticsphere (Hearn, 1987). Gender dominationwithin organizations often is paralleled by thedominant gendered valuing of the public sphereover the domestic sphere; hence, we may recog-nize a dual-gendered domination in the con-struction of organizations.

All these complex historical changes havehad major implications for men and construc-tions of masculinity. Men and masculinitieshave been formed and constructed in workplaceprocesses of, for example, control, collaboration,innovation, competition, conformity, resistance,and contradiction. Equally, particular groups ofmen have been prominent in the formation,development, and transformation of (differentforms of) organizations. As entrepreneurs, inno-vators, leaders, owners, board members, man-agers, supervisors, team leaders, administrators,manual workers, and even unemployed workers,men have crucially shaped the trajectory andnature of organizational progress, especiallysince the Industrial Revolution and the complexelaboration of public patriarchies.

Management

The notion of “management” also raises anumber of conceptual challenges. It refers eitherto those people who work as managers or tothose aspects of organizational structuring andprocesses that are significantly involved in themanagement—that is, the control and coordi-nation—of organizations. The “elite” and domi-nant conception of management typicallyincludes several different hierarchical layersof the authority structure (from junior to execu-tive boardroom levels) and various specialties(e.g., production, service, accounting, humanresources management, and marketing). “Profes-sional” managers within these specialties areemployed to make decisions, create workplacestructures and cultures, and solve organiza-tional problems using “scientific” and “rational-analytical” practices. A wider and more socialconception of management (D. L. Collinson,1992) recognizes that “all human beings are



managers too; people struggling to cope, tomanage, to shape their destinies” (Watson, 1994,p. 12). Although this alternative view raisesimportant issues, for the purposes of the currentanalysis, we adhere to the dominant “elite”conception of the professional managementfunction.

Typically, it is with the managerial functionthat organizational power formally resides, anddecision making is a key aspect of managerialauthority. In most contemporary organizations,managerial prerogative in “strategic” decisionsremains the taken-for-granted norm. Yet, as weelaborate below, this assertion of managerialprerogative, and the managerial power andauthority that it reflects and reinforces, tends tobe not only hierarchical but also gendered. Inmost organizations, industries, and countries, it isstill men who predominate in senior managerialpositions (D. L. Collinson & Hearn, 1996a). Thisis clear with the growth of the historical develop-ment of the management function within militaryand paramilitary organizations, for example, inthe concept of the military general staffs (Gooch,1974; Hearn, 1992b) and other military innova-tions (Hoskin & Macve, 1988, 1994).

Similarly within capitalist organizations, facil-itated by the separation of ownership and control(Berle & Means, 1932), the growth of manage-ment as a professional, elite occupation has beenone of the most significant features of large-scalemodern organizations (Chandler, 1977). Morerecently, the strict separation of ownership andcontrol has become problematized in someorganizational forms. The emergence of manage-ment as the central organizational activity of20th-century corporations is reflected in the hugeliterature that explores the function’s assump-tions, responsibilities, and practices (e.g.,Drucker, 1979; M. Reed, 1989; Stewart, 1986).Yet despite, and possibly even because of, thefrequently pervasive association between men,power, and authority in organizations, the litera-ture on management has consistently failed toquestion its gendered nature.

Many studies of managers and management,ranging from textbooks (e.g., Rosenfeld &Wilson, 1999) to detailed empirical studies(e.g., Watson, 1994) to biographies of famousmanagers (e.g., Geneen, 1985; Iacocca, 1984),can be re-read as implicit accounts of men,men’s practices, and their masculinities. Thisungendered tendency can also be seen in the

development of management theory, fromscientific management to human relations,systems and contingency theories, and, morerecently, population ecology and institutionalperspectives. For example, Mintzberg (1989)examined the political alliances and strategiesplayed out by managers in their search forpower, influence, and organizational security.His accounts do not seem to recognize thatwithin, between, and across managerial andorganizational hierarchies, masculine discoursesand practices are often crucial bases foralliances and conflicts between men in seniorpositions. Although critical studies examinemanagement’s overriding concern with thecontrol of labor and the extraction of profit(Alvesson & Willmott, 1996), even these rarelyattend to the continued predominance of menin managerial positions and the gendered pro-cesses, networks, and assumptions through whichwomen are intentionally and unintentionallyexcluded, subordinated, or both.

So, whether they adopt prescriptive, descrip-tive, or critical perspectives, most studies ofmanagement have failed to question the highlymasculine images that typically characterize theirrepresentations of middle and senior managers.

MULTIPLE GENDERINGS OF MEN AND

MASCULINITIES IN THE WORKPLACE

Many studies of work, organizations, and man-agement, as well as those on related areas suchas leadership, industrial relations, the state, andpolitics, have long assumed that their subject isboth male and neutral. Men often have beenstudied without realizing that this was the case,or men have been studied without attending tothe gendering of the men in question in any crit-ical detail. This is so in a number of classic stud-ies, such as Men Who Manage (Dalton, 1959),The Organization Man (Whyte, 1956), and TheMan on the Assembly Line (Walker & Guest,1952). However, in great swaths of studies andresearches—in business studies, managementtheory, international business, industrial eco-nomics, marketing, and so on—there is not eventhe beginning of recognition of the relevance ofthese things. A blissful ignorance remains. Whilemost mainstream fields studying organizationsand management continue to be neglectful, asmall number of critical textbooks do address



workplace gender relations (for example, Fulop &Linstead, 2000).

Recent years have seen the growth of a widerange of studies that seek to make explicit thegendering of men and masculinities in work,organizations, and management. In some ways,this development can be understood as conso-nant with the move to more differentiated, his-torically specific analyses of patriarchy (Hearn,1987, 1992b; Walby, 1986, 1990). Emphasizingthe importance of paid work as a central sourceof men’s identity, status, and power, feministorganizational studies (e.g., Cockburn, 1991;Pringle, 1989) have demonstrated how “mostorganizations are saturated with masculinevalues” (Burton, 1991, p. 3). They have criti-cally analyzed the continued centrality of themasculine model of lifetime, full-time, continu-ous employment and revealed the embed-dedness of masculine values and assumptionsin organizational structures, cultures, and prac-tices. For many men, employment providesinterrelated economic resources and symbolicbenefits that mutually reinforce their position ofpower, authority, and discretion both at “work”and at “home.” Men have been shown to exer-cise workplace control over women in manyways; for example, through job segregation, sexdiscrimination, “the breadwinner wage”/payinequities, and sexual harassment.

Initially, most critical empirical research onmen and masculinities in organizations concen-trated on those in subordinate positions generallyand manual workers in particular. A number ofU.K. studies revealed how workplace power rela-tions can be crucially shaped by masculinities.Willis (1977) described how working class ladsconstructed countercultures that “celebrated”masculinity and the so-called “freedom” and“independence” of manual work, only to realizethe reality of class subordination once theyreached the factory with no educational qualifica-tions and little chance of escape. Cockburn’s(1983) study of printers illustrated how skilledmanual work could be defined by men as theirexclusive province (also see Gray, 1987; Tolson,1977). D. L. Collinson (1992, 2000) showed howmale manual workers construct organizationalcountercultures and working class masculineidentities based on the negation of “others” suchas management, office workers, and women.

Together, these studies revealed the symbolicand material significance for (male) manual

workers of specific forms of masculine practicesand identity work for making sense of their(relatively subordinated) lives. They graphicallydemonstrated that informal shopfloor interactionbetween male manual workers is often deeplymasculine, being highly aggressive, sexist andderogatory, humorous yet insulting, and playfulbut degrading (Ackroyd & Thompson, 1999).New members can be teased incessantly andtested to see whether they are “man enough” totake the insults couched in the humor of “pisstaking” and the embarrassment of highly explicitsexual references (D. L. Collinson, 1988;Hearn, 1985). Such studies of working class lifeare usefully read alongside others focusing onmen’s family relations, including those thathighlight the impact of uncertain employmentand unemployment on women and children (forexample, Clarke & Popay, 1998; Waddington,Critcher, & Dicks, 1998). Equally, these workingclass masculinities are increasingly vulnerable tochallenge and change with the coming of globaleconomic restructuring and other transformations(Blum, 2000).

The analytical importance of multiplicity hasbeen particularly evident in these recent studiesand debates on men in organizations. This fol-lows well-established pluralist and Weberiantraditions in industrial sociology and industrialrelations. However, in some ways, more radi-cally, poststructuralist feminism has increas-ingly recognized men’s and women’s diverse,fragmented, and contradictory lives in andaround organizations. Attention has focused ongendered subjectivities and their ambiguous,discontinuous, and multiple character withinasymmetrical relations (Henriques, Hollway,Urwin, Venn, & Walkerdine, 1984; Kondo, 1990).Informed by these ideas, the concept of “multi-ple masculinities” (Carrigan, Connell, & Lee,1985) has become one of the most influentialterms in analyzing men at work and in organi-zations and management over the past fewyears. It has been used to represent the variousways that specific forms of masculinity maybe constructed and persist in relation both tofemininity and to other forms of masculinity.Masculinity or masculinities can be understoodas those combinations of signs that say andshow someone is a man. Difference and thesocial construction of difference (such as thatwhich differentiates men and masculinitiesaccording to religion, age, size, class, sexuality,



ethnicity, occupation, and so on) are importantbases through which gendered asymmetricalpower between men, and between men andwomen, are often constructed and reproduced.

This growing interest in “masculinities” hasfacilitated new ways of understanding work-place power relations. Within these debates, animportant distinction has been made betweenhegemonic, complicit, and subordinated mas-culinities (Connell, 1995). It has been arguedthat some masculinities (for example, white,middle-class, middle-aged, heterosexual/homo-phobic, Anglo-Saxon, Christian, Western, able-bodied) often dominate others (for example,working class and gay). These former masculin-ities tend to predominate, at least at the level ofideology, in powerful organizational positionssuch as middle and senior management, whileother masculinities (for example, black, work-ing class, and homosexual) are relatively subor-dinated. On the other hand, the U.K. Gay andLesbian Census (ID Research, 2001) found thatalthough 15% of lesbians and gay men in theworkplace who responded believe their sexual-ity has hindered their job prospects, a surpris-ingly large proportion—43%—have managerialroles. These figures are not fully representative,as they do not take account of individuals whoare not “out” in the workplace.

In rejecting sex-role theory with its emphasison masculinity in the singular, critical writershave argued that these material and symbolicmultiplicities and differences are very impor-tant in explaining the reproduction and shift-ing nature of gendered power asymmetries. AsConnell (1995) argues, masculinities are notfixed, but may shift over time and place. Theyare historically, culturally, and temporally con-tingent. This focus on multiple masculinities(Carrigan et al., 1985; Connell, 2000) has beenparticularly helpful in naming and examiningthe shifting nature of (asymmetrical) powerrelations not only between men and women, butalso between men, in organizational workplacesand management. It also begins to recognizethat gendered power relations can simultane-ously both change (in character) yet remainbroadly the same (in structure).

The multiplicity and diversity of masculini-ties is also partly shaped by the different formsand locations of workplaces—the sites of workand of masculinity (D. L. Collinson & Hearn,1996b). These sites are likely to vary, for

example, according to occupation, industry,culture, class, and type of organization. Accord-ingly, the dominant masculinities evident insmall and family-run businesses may be signifi-cantly different from those that pervade largemultinational corporations. Multiple masculini-ties are likely to interconnect with multiple sitessuch as the home, the shop floor, the office, andthe outlet or branch. Barrett’s (2001) study ofU.S. male Navy officers illustrates how multiplemasculinities can coexist in an organization. Hefound that aviators emphasized their masculinityin terms of risk taking, surface warfare officersprioritized their endurance, and supply officersprided themselves on their technical rationality.Barrett’s study also identifies some of the simi-larities that characterize these multiple mascu-linities. He shows how the Navy reproduces adominant masculinity taking multiple forms thatvalue physical toughness, perseverance, aggres-siveness, a rugged heterosexuality, unemotionallogic, and a stoic refusal to complain. This mili-tary culture of masculinity constructs itself inopposition to that which it is not, namely womenand gay men, who are deemed to be physicallyweak and unable to do what (heterosexual)men do. They serve as the differentiated others,against which heterosexual men construct, pro-ject, and display a gendered identity. Barrettshows how Navy officers attach themselvesto one of these hegemonic masculinities as ameans of self-differentiation and elevation fromcolleagues.

Multiple workplace masculinities may alsobe shaped by different national cultures(Hofstede, 1980). For example, Woodward(1996) reveals how international organizationslike the European Commission are also gen-dered bureaucracies in which the “male” normis dominant and masculine practices of resis-tance to female leadership persist. In the light ofchanging forms and practices of managementworldwide, interrelations of men, masculinities,and management in contemporary organiza-tions are likely to become even more important.Connell (1998) has spelled out the form oftransnational business masculinity that, he argues,is increasingly hegemonic and is directly con-nected to the patterns of world trade and com-munication that are dominated by the North.This is a dominant masculinity marked byegocentrism, highly precarious and conditionalforms of loyalty, and a declining sense of



responsibility (also see Hearn, 1996a). This“fast-capitalist entrepreneur” is also increasinglylibertarian in regard to sexuality, staying in hotelsaround the world that provide businessmen withpornographic videos and even well-developedprostitution networks.

Recently, there has been growing interest inthe analysis of men and masculinities in man-agement and leadership. This increasing interestsheds new light on the analysis of workplacepower relations (D. L. Collinson & Hearn,2000a). Relevant studies include those on thehistorical development and association of menand management (Hollway, 1996); the place ofmen and management in reproducing patriar-chy (or patriarchies) (Hearn, 1992b); transfor-mations in forms of managerial masculinities(Roper, 1991, 1994); the relationship of bureau-cracy, men, and masculinities (Bologh, 1990;D.H.J. Morgan, 1996; Sheppard, 1989); the con-tinuing numerical dominance of men, especiallyat the highest levels; the reconceptualizationof management-labor relations in terms ofinterrelations of masculinities (D. L. Collinson,1992); the actions and reactions of men in bothmale-dominated and “female-concentrated”organizations (Lupton, 2002, Nordberg, 2002);processes of managerial identity formation(Kerfoot & Knights, 1993); and the use ofmasculine models, stereotypes, and symbols inmanagement.

As noted earlier, men continue to dominatebusiness management, constituting about 95%of senior management in the United Kingdomand the United States. This is especially so atthe very top and more highly paid levels of thebusiness sector, where men compose as much as98% of top managers. Davidson and Burke(2000) reported that “in the European Unioncountries fewer than 5 per cent of women are insenior management roles and this percentagehas barely changed since the early 1990s”(p. 2). Men’s domination is even more pro-nounced in the boards of directors of large com-panies. The 1998 UK Institute of Managementsurvey found that 3.6% of directors werewomen (Institute of Management/RemunerationEconomics, 1998; also see D. L. Collinson &Hearn, 1996a). This compares with a figure of17% of directors who were women on the 114Finnish stock exchange–listed companiesin 1995 (Veikkola, Hänninen-Salmelin, &Sinkkonen, 1997, pp. 83-84). Two of these

companies had women CEOs. More recently, asurvey of the largest 100 Finnish corporationsshowed that overall, there is 1 woman on theboard for every 9 men, and in top managementthe ratio is 1 woman for every 9.4 men (Hearn,Kovalainen, & Tallberg, 2002). There is someevidence of increases in women in middle man-agement and small business ownership, and thusmanagement overall (Davidson & Burke, 2000;Vinnicombe, 2000). However, at the highestexecutive levels and for directorships, thenumbers may actually be declining, static, orincreasing very slowly indeed (Institute ofManagement/Remuneration Economics, 1998;Veikkola et al., 1997).1

Although various masculinities frequentlyshape managerial practices, managerial prac-tices also can affect the emergence of specificmasculinities. For example, pervasive anddominant managerial masculinities might takethe form of different workplace control prac-tices such as authoritarianism, careerism, pater-nalism, and entrepreneurialism (D. L. Collinson &Hearn, 1994, 1996b). Roper (1991, 1994)describes how British male managers in thepostwar era frequently identified strongly withmachinery and products. Undervaluing the roleof labor in the manufacture of products, malemanagers tended to fetishize the masculine selfthrough the idolization of products. Kerfoot andKnights (1993) contended that paternalism andstrategic management are concrete manifesta-tions of historically shifting forms of masculinity.Arguing that these managerial approaches bothreflect and reinforce “discourses of masculin-ism,” they suggested that “paternalistic mas-culinity” and “competitive masculinity” havethe effect of privileging men vis-à- vis women,ranking some men above others, and maintain-ing as dominant certain forms and practices ofmasculinity. Managerial masculinities might thusbe understood as form(s) of (different) hegemonicmasculinities.

In our own work, we have examined the waysthat (men) managers can routinely discriminateagainst women in selection (D. L. Collinson,Knights, & Collinson, 1990, Hearn & Collinson,1998; also P. Y. Martin, 1996, 2001) and canmismanage cases of sexuality and sexual harass-ment (D. L. Collinson & Collinson, 1989, 1992;M. Collinson & Collinson, 1996). In addition,we have considered the ways that men managersas (working) fathers can frequently “distance”



themselves from children and family responsi-bilities (D. L. Collinson & Hearn, 1994, 2000b).Within organizations, such “distancing” strate-gies are often seen as evidence of commitmentto the company, yet these kinds of pressurescan significantly reinforce stresses, genderedstresses, within families, which have their owngendered power relations (D. L. Collinson &Collinson, 1997). The potential development ofmen’s nonoppressive, even profeminist manage-ment and leadership also has been explored(Hearn, 1989, 1992a, 1994).

There are also innumerable ways in which theauthority and status of managers can signify“men” and, indeed, vice versa, just as there aremany signs that can simultaneously signify thepower of both “manager” and “men.” These cul-tural processes of signification include the sizeand position of personal offices; office furnitureand the display of pictures, paintings, and plants;the use or control of computers and other tech-nological equipment; and, of course, the choiceof clothing. Although business suits appear tohave a transnational significance, their particularstyle, cut, and cost are also important, not leastas a means of managing impressions through“power dressing” (Collier, 1998; Feldman &Klich, 1991). The color and style of shirts,braces, shoes, and socks, as well as the size andpattern of ties (see Gibbings, 1990), can carrytotally embodied and context-specific meaningsfor both managers and men that may reflect andreinforce their organizational hegemony.

Managerial masculinities are also hege-monic within organizations in the sense that thosein senior positions enjoy comparatively highsalaries and ancillary remuneration packagesthrough secretarial support, share options, com-pany cars, pensions, extensive holiday entitle-ments, and other material and symbolic benefits.Even when they are dismissed, managers mayreceive substantial “golden handshakes,” andpoor performance does not seem to preventreemployment in other lucrative, high-statusmanagerial positions (Pahl, 1995). On the otherhand, there is also some movement toward a“proletarianization” and reduced security forsome managers, as in delayering and businessprocess reengineering. This is an importanttrend that might signal a fundamental historicalshift in the class and gender relations of bothnonmanagers and managers, especially those atthe less senior levels.

Kanter (1977, 1993) used the term“homosocial reproduction” to describe theprocesses by which senior male managersselected other male managers in ways that repro-duced an all-male managerial elite. Typically,men were appointed to managerial positionsbecause they were perceived to be more reliable,committed, and predictable, as well as free fromconflicting loyalties between home and work.Although Kanter’s study usefully describes howelitist practices can characterize management, itis less valuable in analyzing the gendered natureof these persistent interrelations and networks(see also Acker, 1989; Pringle, 1989; Witz &Savage, 1992). Kanter contended that whatappear to be differences between men andwomen in organizations are related not to gen-der, but to work position and the structure ofopportunity. In seeking to deny difference, shefailed to recognize fully how organizationalpower relations are frequently heavily gendered.Her concern to separate “sex” from “power”inevitably neglects the way that particular mas-culinities may be embedded in and help toreproduce and legitimize managerial power andauthority (see D. L. Collinson & Hearn, 1995).

In organizations where the manager is alsothe owner, power relations can be especiallyasymmetrical and gendered. The ways inwhich the ownership of many businesses is stillpassed on from one generation to the next con-stitutes a vivid example of “patriarchy inaction.” In the majority of these cases, it is theson who inherits the firm from his father, thusensuring the reproduction of patriarchalauthority, both in the workplace and at home.Highlighting the gendered nature of the so-called “self-made man,” R. Reed (1996) con-trasted the lives of David Syme (1827-1908),the Scottish-born Australian publisher of TheAge newspaper, and Rupert Murdoch, the con-temporary Australian-born international mediaentrepreneur. Whereas Syme conformed to theWeberian image of the sober, self-made mod-ern capitalist who adopted a paternalistic anddutiful approach to management, Murdoch’sstyle is adventurist and more akin to premod-ern forms of capitalism and management.Studies of entrepreneurialism also reveal theinterdependence between men’s organizationalpower and the family. For example, Mulholland(1996) conducted research on 70 of the richestentrepreneurial families in a Midlands county



of England. She found that although menconsistently claimed the credit for their businesssuccess, in practice their capital accumulationwas highly dependent on the hidden household(and workplace) services provided by wives/women. Other studies report similar dynamicswhereby men’s careers are constructed throughthe invisible support of women as secretariesand wives (for example, Finch, 1984; Grey,1994; Reis, 2004).

There is a growing interest in leadershipdevelopment as the “solution” to many con-temporary organizational problems (Deal &Kennedy, 2000). In the United Kingdom,“heroic,” “strategic,” and “visionary” leaders arestill often seen as the key to organizationalsuccess in both the private and public sectors.Charismatic leadership was also a key theme inthe 1980s discourses on corporate culture.Psychologists (e.g., Schein, 1985) and manage-ment consultants (e.g., Peters & Waterman,1982) emphasized corporate leaders’ responsi-bility for “managing meaning” (G. Morgan,1997) and establishing strong organizationalcultures (Deal & Kennedy, 1982). Writers suchas Peters and Austin (1985) presented long tax-onomies of prescriptions on how to be a vision-ary leader who, above all else, can and mustmanage and manipulate organizational culture.Such charismatic leadership styles are deeplymasculine in their assumptions and images(Hearn & Parkin, 1988). The popular emphasison the power and impact of individual “greatmen,” especially CEOs, stands in contrast tothe current broader research-based, though virtu-ally always ungendered, focus on upper echelonmanagement and management teams (Goines,2002; Hay Group, 2001; Surowiecki, 2002;Weisbach & Hermalin, 2000).

In sum, the term “multiple masculinities” hasemerged as an important concept that helps todemonstrate the pervasive, diverse, and shiftingcharacter of men’s hegemonic power, culture,and identity in contemporary organizations.Certain masculinities usually predominate andare privileged in organizations and manage-ment, but they can take different forms at differ-ent times in different organizations and withindifferent strata of an organization. The term“multiple masculinities” helps to illustrate howorganizational and gendered power relations canshift in detail while simultaneously remainingasymmetrical in overall structure. It begins to

address the ways that men’s power, cultures, andidentities can change yet remain ascendant incontemporary organizations. This is an impor-tant, apparent paradox. On one hand, genderrelations are changing; women and men areapparently changing. Yet on the other hand,there is an intractability and tenacity in men’sdominant organizational position. Indeed, oneof the key issues to address is the paradoxicaland contradictory ways in which asymmetricalpower relations simultaneously change yetremain broadly similar. Analyses need toaddress the flexible, shifting, and often ambigu-ous nature of gendered power relations in gen-eral and men’s power, cultures, and identities inparticular.

THE LIMITS OF

HEGEMONY AND MULTIPLICITY

As the foregoing discussion suggests, there havebeen significant developments in the analysis ofhegemony and multiplicity in relation to menand masculinities within organizational work-places and management. Recently, however,there also have been a number of concernsexpressed about these key concepts within criti-cal studies on men. Among other recent cri-tiques, it has been argued that masculinities, asa theoretical concept, is (a) unclear in meaning,(b) too descriptive, (c) overly negative, (d) obso-lescent, and (e) oversimplifying in its construc-tion of power relations. We now turn to thesedebates and discuss each of these criticisms inturn, emphasizing their implications for theanalysis of men in work, organizations, andmanagement.

Meaning?

First, it has been argued that although theterm is now well established, the meaning of“hegemonic masculinity/multiple masculini-ties” (HM/MM) remains somewhat unclear,vague, and imprecise, lacking in definition(Donaldson, 1993). Does “masculinity” in thiscontext refer to men’s behaviors, identities, rela-tionships, experiences, appearances, images,discourses, or practices in workplaces? If itincludes all of these, precisely how does it doso? If one means men’s work practices, bothcollective and individual, then it would be



simplest to say so. Also, if there is hegemonicmasculinity, it would be reasonable to look forresistance to hegemonic masculinity, in orga-nizations and management, as elsewhere (Don-aldson, 1993). Equally, if the term can also beused to describe some women’s behavior, thenits meaning becomes even more flexible, vague,and difficult to specify.2

Other related criticisms include its possibleethnocentrism, lack of historical/spatial/culturalspecificity, and false causality (Hearn, 1996b).Wetherell and Edley (1999) showed that theterm “masculinities” is rather vague, sketchy,and imprecise, especially when one researches atthe micro level of talk and conversation. Morebroadly still, the focus on masculinities mayfacilitate a possible psychologism (McMahon,1993), and thus neglect asymmetrical genderstructural relations, within patriarchy or patri-archies (Hearn, 1992b). A growing number ofstudies in this area have emphasized the discur-sive, ideological, and symbolic aspects of hege-monic masculinity, thereby rejecting essentialistor deterministic perspectives. A minority havealso focused on the material and economicdimensions of men’s power and identity in orga-nizations. An adequate account needs to examineboth the material and discursive features of mas-culinity, within the context of patriarchal socialrelations (D. L. Collinson, 1992; Hearn, 1992b).

Some writers have been unwilling to providea single definition of masculinity/ies. Connell(1995), for example, is reluctant to offer such adefinition because he wants to emphasize theshifting and contingent character of masculinity.Others, however, have tried to define the centralmeanings of “masculinity” and/or “hegemonicmasculinities.” For example, Kerfoot andKnights (1996, 1998) examined the privilegedform of masculine identity associated with dom-inant management practice—abstract, rational,calculating, highly instrumental, controlling ofits object, future-oriented, strategic, and, aboveall, masculine and wholly disembodied. Thesemasculine managerial subjectivities typicallyare expressed in aggressive and competitivepractices concerned to succeed, master, anddominate. Kerfoot (2001) argued that contem-porary managerialist masculinity is character-ized by the instrumental search for control, theelimination of uncertainty, and the intense goal-driven pursuit of “performance” and “success.”For managerial masculinities, noninstrumental

forms of relationship—especially those involvingspontaneity, ambiguity, and intimacy—are to beavoided because they involve “letting go” of thebarriers of predictable scripts and revealing vul-nerability. Whitehead (2001) argued that genderchange will occur only when men adopt a moreself-reflexive approach to their own genderedidentity. Based on his research in the furthereducation sector, he contends that many menremain “the invisible gendered subject,” unableto understand the gendered realities surroundingthem.

Bird (1996) argued that through malehomosocial, heterosexual interactions, hege-monic masculinity is maintained as the norm towhich men are held accountable. For Bird, malehomosociality (conceptualized as the nonsexualattractions held by men) is about emotionaldetachment, being highly competitive, andviewing women as sexual objects. These inter-related values perpetuate hegemonic masculin-ity, suppress subordinate masculinity, andreproduce a pecking order among men. Simi-larly, Kimmel (1994) contended that dominantmasculinity is best understood as “homopho-bia,” that men’s fear of other men is the “ani-mating condition of the dominant definition ofmasculinity in America” (p. 135). He is partic-ularly concerned with “marketplace masculinity,”which he describes as the normative definitionof U.S. masculinity. This includes the character-istics of aggression, competition, and anxiety.The (work-related) “marketplace” is the arena inwhich manhood is tested and proved. This defi-nition of “hegemonic masculinity” sets the stan-dard against which all men are measured andagainst which other forms of manhood are eval-uated, a notion of manhood that is equated withbeing strong, successful, capable, reliable, andin control. Kimmel argues that masculinity is “adefence against the perceived threat of humilia-tion and emasculation in the eyes of other men”(p. 135). In this sense, dominant cultural defini-tions of masculinity are strongly related tothe place of men and men’s practices in work,employment, and organizations, and thus in somecases management. The economic “marketplace”is held to produce the cultural.

Hence, there has been a revitalized searchto conceptualize masculinity, to focus on theshared commonalities and gendered featuresthat define or encapsulate contemporary “man-hood.” These concerns are partly related to



growing interest in the ways that subjectivitiesinteract with power relations, a developmentwhich we see as productive and valuable. Thisapproach is informed in particular by recentpoststructuralist developments in studies of bothmanagement and gender that emphasize theneed to recognize that workplace power rela-tions are multiple, ambiguous, and frequentlycharacterized by contradictory outcomes. Post-structuralist analyses are keen to avoid theessentialism that tended to characterize earlierattempts at defining masculinity.

Descriptive?

Second, the term “multiple masculinities” hasbeen criticized for being merely descriptive anddocumenting various differences and “types.” Itis indeed possible that a focus on differencecould collapse into a taxonomy of masculinitiesand a list of objectified categories of men. Amore sophisticated critique might also observethat constructing typologies may itself constitutea masculine and/or managerial preoccupationwith the control of the world and the meanings init; a totalizing exercise intended to achieve akind of closure. Work and organizations provideclear opportunities for such evaluative, hier-archizing processes. Categorization fails toaddress either men’s lived social experience “asmen” or the fluidity, shifting, and changing char-acter of all social relations, identities, and prac-tices, as examined by Kondo (1990) at work. Itmay also pose difficulties in acknowledging thesheer complexity of the very large number ofpossible permutations and interrelations of typesof men in organizations. The numerical combi-nations are themselves complicated by the diver-sity of ways, at work and elsewhere, in whichinterrelations can exist and develop.

In our view, the emphasis on multiplemasculinities is much less about categorizingdifferences between men than about criticallyexamining power differences between men aswell as between women and men. Studies thathighlight the diversity of men’s workplace power,status, and domination seek to analyze the multi-ple, shifting, but tenacious nature of genderedpower regimes. This approach has the potential toexamine and understand the often contradictoryorganizational relations through which men’sdifferences and similarities are reproduced andtransformed in particular practices and power

asymmetries. For example, just as a major issuewithin feminism has been the relation of com-monalities and differences between women, somen can be analyzed usefully in terms of com-monalities and differences, within the contextof patriarchy. In organizations, there are oftentensions between the collective power of men andthe differentiations between them (D. L. Collinson& Hearn, 1994, 2000b).

Men’s power is maintained partly throughtheir commonalities with each other. Typically,men are bound together, not necessarily con-sciously, by shared interests and meanings (forexample, sport), dominant sexuality, socio-economic-political power, and representationalprivileging. Men’s collective power persistspartly through the assumption of hegemonicforms of men and masculinities—often white,heterosexual, and able-bodied—as the primaryform, to the relative exclusion of subordinatedmen and masculinities. Different men, dominantor otherwise, are reproduced in relation to othersocial divisions. Indeed, in many social arenasthere are tensions between the collectivepower of men/masculinities and differentiationsamong masculinities, defined through othersocial divisions such as age, class, family, status,generation, race, and sexuality (Hearn &Collinson, 1994).

Within critical studies on men and masculin-ities, there is often an unresolved tensionbetween the analysis, on one hand, of multiplic-ity and diversity, and on the other, of men’sstructured domination, their shared economicand symbolic vested interests and sense of unity.We refer to this somewhat polarized debate asthe unities and differences between men andmasculinities (Hearn & Collinson, 1994). Here,a particularly important question is whether theunities or differences should be attributed ana-lytical primacy. Furthermore, how are they to berelated? We argue for the need to examine boththe unities and the differences between men andmasculinities as well as their interrelations. Byexamining these processes simultaneously, wecan develop a deeper understanding of the gen-dered power relations of organization; the con-ditions, processes, and consequences of theirreproduction; and how they could be resistedand transformed. It is important to take accountof both the unities and the differences betweenmen and masculinities as well as the ways thatthese may overlap in specific organizational



processes. The increasing emphasis onmultiplicity and differentiation needs to be com-bined with a consideration of men’s unities andtheir interrelations. This approach can con-tribute important insights into the conditions,processes, and consequences of gendered powerrelations in organizations and the ways thatthese may be reproduced, rationalized, and/orresisted.

Negative?

A third criticism of HM/MM is that it pre-sents an overly negative orientation toward menin the workplace. For example, the recurrentmessage from a recent book by Alvesson andDue Billing (1997) is that established theoriesof gender and organizations are rather exagger-ated and too critical (sic) of men and masculin-ity. These writers question the perspectivesof radical feminists and “masochistic” (p. 32)men that, in their view, construct a world of“innocent” (p. 200) and “good” (p. 203) womenand “nasty” (p. 200), “evil” (p. 30), and “bad”(p. 203) men. Alvesson and Due Billing arehighly critical of what they see as “gender over-sensitivity,” referring to a tendency to usegender as a totalizing explanation, treating itas relevant and decisive everywhere. For them,many feminist studies exaggerate the impor-tance and asymmetry of gender in organizationsand focus on “misery stories.” Alvesson andDue Billing argue that gender patterns are com-plex, often ambiguous, and contradictory, andare likely to vary in rich and crucial ways overtime and space.

We agree with Alvesson and Due Billing thatorganizational life cannot be reduced exclusivelyto processes of gender, and indeed, we previ-ously have written to that effect (D. L. Collinson& Hearn 1996a, 1996b). Equally, we accept thatthere can be important positive aspects of somemen’s masculine identities. While we can behighly questioning of many “heroic” ideologiesthat elevate corporate leaders, there is a need torecognize that acts of male altruism, heroism,care, and courage certainly do occur and thatthese can be informed by traditional masculinevalues and priorities. Masculine identities canindeed inform acts of great sacrifice for others.For example, Baigent (2001) critically examinedthe ways in which firefighters construct andreproduce specific masculine cultures and

identities, and their multiple motives in firefighting. They were concerned to “get in” toextinguish fires; uphold their professional/humanitarian ethos in efficient and effectiveservice for the public (for example, to be calmunder pressure, brave but modest); experiencethe “adrenaline rush” of successfully undertak-ing dangerous, life-saving work; and maintain anidentity as a “good firefighter.”

However, Alvesson and Due Billing failedto locate the studies they criticized in theircontext, and they did not always read very care-fully those that they critiqued. Many of the stud-ies they criticized were written against thebackdrop of both mainstream and critical litera-tures that have treated gender as largely irrele-vant. Equally, men’s exercise of power andauthority can in certain times and places haveseriously negative effects not only for womenand children, but also for other men and for menthemselves. In their concern to highlight nega-tivity and oversensitivity, Alvesson and DueBilling tended to underestimate the potentialdetrimental processes and consequences ofdominant masculinities in the workplace,including the effects on women, both at homeand in organizations. For example, the Chal-lenger space shuttle disaster illustrates thepotentially disastrous consequences that hege-monic masculinities can have on key managerialdecisions where high-risk decisions areinformed by managers “doing masculinity” bysuppressing doubt, fear, and uncertainty (Maier& Messerschmidt, 1998; Messerschmidt, 1996).

Obsolescent?

A fourth, and in some ways related, critiqueof this literature has been outlined by MacInnes(1998, 2001), who contends that we are witness-ing “the end of masculinity.” For him, mas-culinity is not only limited as a term butalso actually becoming obsolete as a way ofdescribing contemporary social structures andprocesses, including in work and organizations.Masculinity can be seen as “the last ideologicaldefence of male supremacy in a world that hasalready conceded that men and women areequal” (2001, p. 326). Accordingly, he suggeststhat critical studies of masculinity, or what heterms “the politics of identity approach to mas-culinity” (2001, p. 323), which focus on men’s“emotional inarticulacy,” are misleading. He



suggests that they assume that only men can bemasculine and that masculinity can become “ageneral term for anything we don’t like” (2001,p. 324). He argues that if gender is socially con-structed, then we must accept that women alsocan be masculine. Equally, MacInnes arguesthat such studies of masculinity tend to presenta psychological focus on masculine identity tothe extent that the impact of social structures,including work and organizational structures,is underestimated or neglected. In his view, thisapproach confuses symptom and cause, suchthat the term masculinity “obscures the analysisof social relations between the sexes” (2001,p. 327). Consequently, he rejects the interest incritiquing and transforming masculinity as away of struggling for greater gender equity infavor of a shift toward the pursuit of equal rightsfor women and men.

In our view, MacInnes is too hasty in sug-gesting that masculinity has outlived its rele-vance. His account also tends to dismiss issuesof subjectivity entirely in precisely the way thathe complains that those interested in masculinityneglect social structure. By contrast, an interestin subjectivities in relation to power asymme-tries does not necessarily constitute a collapseinto psychologism and the neglect of structure inthe ways that MacInnes suggests. Rather, it cansignificantly enhance the analysis of workplacepower relations by illuminating the processesthrough which structures are negotiated, repro-duced, and resisted. For an understanding ofmasculinity, we believe that it is important toexamine the interplay and the interconnectionsbetween social (and work and organizational)structures and subjectivities. The analysis ofsubjectivities can assist understanding of howorganizational structures are reproduced andmaintained in particular practices. More specifi-cally, an awareness of the multiple sources ofidentity (and the ways that these may be in ten-sion) can assist the identification of the crosscut-ting nature of workplace power relations andthereby produce more complex accounts of“hegemonic/multiple masculinities” that recog-nize ambiguity, simultaneity, and contradiction,as we discuss below.

Oversimplification?

A final area of concern is the issue ofworkplace power relations. “Hegemonic” and

“multiple masculinity/ies” can be criticized foroversimplifying workplace power relations andfor neglecting their simultaneous, counter-vailing, and potentially contradictory character.For example, men managers’ power is not onlyabout gender but also about hierarchy, bureau-cracy, class, age, ethnicity, payment systems,and so on. Rarely, if ever, is it possible to reducecomplex organizational processes and powerrelations exclusively to issues of gender and/or masculinity. Teasing out the relationshipbetween masculinities and other key featuresof organizations and, in particular, other socialdivisions and inequalities requires further atten-tion. Managerial control and labor resistance,for example, might in certain cases be shapedby specific masculinities, but they will not betotally determined by them. To focus only ongender or men and masculinity may not providea complete account of these complex processes.Equally, though, their neglect often renders crit-ical analyses of power relations fundamentallyflawed.

In emphasizing HM/MM, there is a dangerof excluding other social divisions and powerinequalities in organizations and of failing toappreciate the interrelations of these divisionsand inequalities. On one hand, it is importantto acknowledge the way in which masculinitiescan change over time; be shaped by underlyingambiguities and uncertainties; differ accordingto class, age, culture, ethnicity, and similar fac-tors; and also be central to the reproduction ofother social divisions. On the other hand, thisemphasis on hegemony and multiplicity oughtnot to degenerate into a diversified pluralismthat gives insufficient attention to structured pat-terns of gendered power, control, and inequality.As Cockburn (1991) wrote, a focus on multiplemasculinities should not “deflect attention fromthe consistency in men’s domination of womenat systemic and organizational levels, from thecontinuation of materials, structured inequali-ties and power imbalances between the sexes”(p. 225). She argues that this increasing empha-sis on plurality and multiplicity needs to retain afocus on the structured asymmetrical relationsof power between men and women.

Different social divisions can cut acrossasymmetrical power relations in multiple, mutu-ally reinforcing or counterposing ways. So, forexample, white, male-dominated shopfloormasculinities may be hegemonic in terms of



gender, ethnicity, or sexuality but simultaneouslysubordinated with regard to class, hierarchy, andworkplace status (D. L. Collinson, 1992). Men’scontrol and authority as managers may be morecontradictory, precarious, and heterogeneousthan often it at first appears. For example, therecent delayering and intensification of manage-rial work, particularly through measurement andevaluation, significantly problematizes the viewthat management constitutes the most clear-cutform of hegemonic masculinity (D. L. Collinson& Collinson, 1997). The hierarchical and gen-dered power of male managers is by no meanshomogeneous, monolithic, or inevitable. Powerrelations are complex and shifting (Kondo,1990), sometimes mutually reinforcing but onother occasions crosscutting, with countervailingand contradictory effects.

Hence, when we try to apply notions of“hegemonic” or “multiple” masculinities toorganizational issues, their meanings are notalways obvious. Masculinities (for example,white, gay masculinities or black, middle-classmasculinities) can carry internal contradictionsbetween elements confirming or underminingpower and identity. Indeed, it may be difficultto address these contrary processes throughthe notion of “hegemonic masculinities.” Otherconcepts, such as manliness, maleness, andmanhood, may be more appropriate in differenthistorical and cultural contexts. On one hand,men often seem to collaborate, cooperate, andidentify with one another in ways that reinforcea shared unity between them. On the otherhand, these same masculinities also can becharacterized simultaneously by conflict, com-petition, and self-differentiation in ways thathighlight and intensify the differences anddivisions between men. Accordingly, the unitiesthat exist between men should not be over-stated. They are often precarious, shifting, andhighly instrumental. Herein may lie the seedsof change, as illustrated in the classic Marxistaccount of class conflict, class struggle, and the“fundamental contradiction” of capital andlabor, and feminist accounts of the contra-dictions, and hence dynamics of change, ofpatriarchy. Indeed, classic Marxist, many neo-Marxist, and many other accounts of classstruggle and economic class relations can them-selves be reformulated as gendered accounts,privileging men and certain masculinities (seeMorgan, Chapter 10, this volume).

An important contradictory feature ofhegemonic and multiple masculinities in organi-zations is the intense competition that typicallycharacterizes relations between men. The highlycompetitive nature within and between hege-monic and multiple masculinities appears to befueled by a concern to display dominance andvalidate identity. Yet, the competitive practicesof other men may actually render the searchfor dominance at best highly precarious andat worst an impossible long-term goal, by rein-forcing the very insecurity competition wasintended to overcome. Competitive workplacecultures may therefore reproduce the material(for example, wages, job security) and symbolic(status, reputation, and identity) insecurities thatindividuals seek to overcome through compet-ing successfully.

Men frequently invest their identities inparticularly individualized, competitive work-place projects, such as the search to validatemasculine identity through career progress thatinevitably intensifies competition within orga-nizations. A “successful” career may be animportant medium through which men seek toestablish masculine identities in the workplace.Upward mobility can be a key objective in thesearch to secure a stable, middle-class mascu-line identity and to embellish the male ego.For those who are promoted into management,such identities are reinforced by the remunera-tion, status, and perks of most senior positions.Competitive career strategies often reflect theway in which men are still, in many cultures,positioned as the privatized breadwinnerswhose primary purpose is to “provide” for theirfamilies. Yet, particularly in the current con-ditions of “delayering,” widespread redundan-cies, and extensive career bottlenecks, thereare considerable contradictions associatedwith such orientations. Committed to upwardprogress, men often feel compelled to worklonger hours, meet tight deadlines, travel exten-sively, participate in residential trainingcourses, and move house at the behest of thecompany. These work demands are likely to beincompatible with domestic responsibilities andcan contribute to the breakdown of marriages.Equally, as men grow older, they are likely toslow down and thus be less able to competeeffectively with their younger, more “hungry”and aggressive male colleagues. Hence, in theshort and/or long term, career competitiveness



is unlikely to achieve the kind of security atwork for which men often strive.

Given the socially constructed, multiple,and shifting character of identities and powerasymmetries, these attempts may actually rein-force the very uncertainty and ambiguity theyare intended to overcome (D. L. Collinson &Hearn, 1994, 2000b). Equally, men’s masculineidentities can be further threatened by social andeconomic forces such as increasing femaleemployment, new technology, unemployment,feminism/equal opportunity initiatives, anddomestic and marriage relations, as well as byclass and status divisions. Men’s search toconstruct masculine identities in the eyes ofcolleagues (and themselves) appears to be anongoing, never-ending project that can becharacterized by ambiguity and contradiction.Like all identities, masculine selves constantlyhave to be constructed, negotiated, and achievedboth in the workplace and elsewhere throughsimultaneous processes of identification anddifferentiation. Barrett (2001) argues thatmasculine identities in the U.S. Navy are con-structed by differentiating the self through out-performing, discounting, and negating others.Underpinning these concerns, he suggests, is anenduring sense of subjective insecurity that isnot resolved but reinforced by these processes.Accordingly, these masculine identity strategiesreproduce insecurity and competition, which inturn reinforce the perceived need for identity-protection strategies.

Such men’s gender identities are constructed,compared, and evaluated by the self and othersaccording to a whole variety of criteria indi-cating personal “success” in the workplace. Thistendency to become preoccupied with seekingto define coherent identities through identifica-tion and differentiation may further reinforce,rather than resolve, the very sense of insecuritythese strategies were intended to overcome(D. L. Collinson, 1992). The dual experienceof “self” and “other” is a central and highlyambiguous feature of human subjectivity, oftenreinforced by the multiple nature of identitiesand the asymmetrical nature of conventionalgendered power relations. When attempts toconstruct and sustain particular identities try todeny this ambiguity and uncertainty, they arelikely to be unsuccessful.

To summarize, this section has considered anumber of issues in relation to hegemonic and

multiple masculinities; two interrelated andcentral concepts in the literature on critical stud-ies of men. While recognizing the validity ofseveral of these concerns, we have also chal-lenged those writers who appear to reject theconcern to develop a critical approach to under-standing men and masculinities in organiza-tions. Rather than try to deny the significance ofa critical approach to men and masculinity/ies,we view the primary and pressing issue as theneed to develop more sophisticated understand-ings of these very important concerns that haveimpacts in many, if not all, organizational andsocial settings.

CONCLUDING DISCUSSION

This chapter has overviewed recent debates inthe critical literature that seeks to make explicitthe gendering of men and masculinities in work,organizations, and management. The emphasisin recent critical studies on “hegemonic” and“multiple” masculinities raises important ques-tions regarding the contemporary analysis ofworkplace power relations as well as the prac-tices through which they are reproduced andcontested. Many of the more or less criticalstudies of “men”/“masculinities” and “work”/“organization”/“management,” discussed in thischapter, are part of the general deconstruction ofthe unified, rational, transcendent subject ofmen. This critical approach facilitates a chal-lenge to men’s taken-for-granted dominantmasculinities. This, in turn, could facilitate theemergence of less coercive and divisive organi-zational structures, cultures, and practices; afundamental rethinking of the social organiza-tion of the domestic division of labor; and atransformation of “men at work.”

Although hegemonic masculinity and multi-ple masculinities are useful concepts in thecritical analysis of gender relations in the work-place, more theoretical and empirical workis necessary to develop these ideas. Severalconceptual and theoretical problems remainunresolved (see also D. L. Collinson & Hearn,1994, 2000b; Hearn, 1996b). First, the concep-tualization of “masculinity/ies” requires furtherclarification. For example, how do the ideologi-cal/discursive and symbolic features of mas-culinities interrelate with economic, material,and physical aspects? Second, the ways in



which masculinities relate to other elements ofpower, culture, and subjectivity in organizationsneed greater consideration. For example, inwhat ways and with what consequences aremultiple masculinities embedded and inter-woven in other workplace practices, such ascontrol, consent, compliance, and resistance?There needs to be greater focus on the inter-connections, tensions, and contradictions withinand between these different aspects of work-place power, culture, and subjectivity. Third,while recognizing a multiplicity of possiblemasculinities and workplace sites, analysesalso need to retain a focus on the structuredasymmetries of gendered power relations.

Finally, there is a need, both theoretically andempirically, to take regard of the changing shapeof organizations and managements. Whereaspreviously most organizations could be relativelyisolated geographically, this is increasinglybecoming problematic, as organizations are reor-ganized across time, space, and even cyberspaceand cybertime. The place of the notion of organi-zation in relation to transnationalism, globali-zation, glocalization (Robertson, 1995), and theimpact of new information and communicationtechnologies is becoming progressively morecomplex. This means that the rather rapid changein the relationship of time and space makes itincreasingly necessary to question the equationof organization, work, and place (see Hearn &Parkin, 2001; Connell, Chapter 5, this volume).

The nation-state is no longer necessarily themost important economic or political unit. Thedominance of local and national organizationsand nation-states is problematized by thegrowth of transnational organizations andcorporations, as part of globalizing processes.Transnational corporations constitute collectivesocial actors that may transcend the nation,being in some cases larger in size than individ-ual nations. Their growing importance stemsparticularly from their operation across nationalboundaries, rather than simply within one or afew nations, and their recent overall expansion.The GNP of some nation-states is exceeded bythe assets of many supranational corporations.Of the 100 largest economies, half are corpo-rations and half are countries. The world’s 500largest industrial corporations, which employonly 0.05% of the world’s population, control25% of global economic output and 42% of theworld’s wealth (Korten, 1996, 1998, p. 4).

Moreover, changes in internal structures oftransnational corporations and organizationshave implications for gender relations therein.Relations between companies within largertransnational corporations may have furtherimpacts, depending on whether they are highlyintegrated and strongly centralized globally, orlocal networks. Strongly centralized transna-tional corporations contrast with polycentrictransnational corporations, with looser guide-lines for subsidiaries on, for example, corporateequal opportunities policies. Centralized trans-national corporations may be more likely todevelop consistency in such policies, even iftheir local impact is variable. Decentralizedtransnational corporations may be more likelyto develop more autonomous, variable struc-tures in local or functional units.

Organizations—that is, gendered organiza-tions—need to be understood as a shorthandfor a wide range of social connected structuresand processes, including multi-organizations,transnational organizations, interorganizationalrelations, network organizations, Internet organi-zations, and virtual organizations. These chang-ing historical conditions, in turn, create manymore possible positions of power, hegemony,and multiplicity for men and masculinities, andhence many more ways for men, organizations,and managements to be reciprocally formed, inthis late modern, glocalizing world (Hearn,1996a; Connell, 1998). Such possible powerpositions are themselves still made possible bythe organization of unpaid work and the totalsocial organization of labor (Glucksmann,1995).

NOTES

1. Studies of women managers’ coping strategiesalso reveal the persistence of “hegemonic” managerialmasculinities. For example, J. Martin (1990) showedhow senior men expected women managers to orga-nize cesarean operations to fit in with the launch ofnew products. Sheppard (1989) found that womenmanagers’ strategies of resisting or trying to blend into the dominant male culture were both ineffective(see also Scase & Goffee, 1989). Frequently experi-encing a “no-win” situation (Cockburn, 1991), womenmanagers may decide to resign, possibly to becomeself-employed (Kanter, 1993). This was the casein Marshall’s research (1995), in which womenmanagers frequently felt isolated, excluded, and



continuously tested on masculine criteria of successsuch as toughness, political skill, and total commit-ment. Pierce (1996) argued that in the U.S. courtroom,with its adversarial model of dispute resolution, malelawyers act as “Rambo litigators” seeking to dominatethrough intimidation and “strategic friendliness.” Shefound that those women litigators who adopted simi-lar strategies were denigrated, whereas women whowere more supportive were seen as “too soft” andcompliant. In the United Kingdom, Wajcman (1998)found that the very few women in her study who“made it” into senior management felt compelled to“manage like a man,” working long hours, beingtotally committed to the organization, and being“tough,” “hard,” and at times aggressive. Althoughfemale managers had to abandon aspects of their fem-ininity to develop attributes more typically associatedwith male executives, systematic gender inequalitiesensured that women’s experience in managementcould not be the same as that of men. Wajcman con-cluded that, because these female managers are inmost respects indistinguishable from their male coun-terparts, there is no such thing as a “female” manage-ment style (also see Boulgarides, 1984; Eagly &Johannesen-Schmidt, 2001; Powell, 1993).

2. Indeed, another area of critique follows fromthe question of whether masculinities are irreduciblyrelated to men or instead are discourses in whichwomen can also invest. It could be argued thatwomen in organizations behave in similar ways tomen, invest in equivalent discourses, and engage inanalogous strategies of power and identity (Wajcman,1998). On all-female shop floors, for example, researchsuggests that women often swear and participatein aggressive and sexualized forms of behavior (e.g.,Pollert, 1981; Westwood, 1984). Such practices doindeed display similarities to those of men in all-maleshopfloor settings. Because issues of gender are by nomeans exhaustive of the social relations and practicesin which they are embedded, it seems reasonable toassume that certain commonalities may exist betweenmen’s and women’s experience of and response tosubordination, for example in relation to class andcontrol. Yet, these femininities are also likely to beshaped by the gender division of labor both at homeand in organizations, and by the gendered nature ofspecific workplace cultures.

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PART IV

BODIES, SELVES, DISCOURSES



18STILL A MAN’S WORLD?

Studying Masculinities and Sport

MICHAEL A. MESSNER

313

Recently, two sports events stirred enoughcontroversy to spill the stories off thesports pages and into wider public

discussion and debate. First, in 2002-2003, theU.S. Secretary of Education formed a commis-sion to evaluate Title IX, the popular 30-year-old law that is credited by women’s sportsactivists as a primary force behind the dramaticgrowth of girls’ and women’s sports. By almostany measure, men’s sports still receive far moremoney, scholarships, attention, and adulationthan do women’s sports, yet critics blame TitleIX for a kind of “reverse discrimination” thatthey claim has threatened or eliminated ath-letic opportunities for boys and men. Around thetime of the commission’s hearings, emotionaland sometimes vitriolic public hearings wereheld; editorials were written; and letter-writingcampaigns to the White House were organized.

The second recent event that made a largemedia splash occurred in 2003, when pro golferAnnika Sorenstam was invited to compete in aProfessional Golfers’ Association (PGA) event.That Sorenstam would become the first womanto play head-to-head in a major tournamentagainst the men since Babe Didrikson Zaharias,more than half a century earlier, was big news. It

also was controversial: Some male golfers, ledby Vijay Singh, snarled at her inclusion, implyingthat it insulted the integrity of the game to includea woman. Other male golfers were openly sup-portive of her inclusion. Similarly, some mediapundits criticized her inclusion as “inadequate”and “awful,” while others wrote in admiration ofSorenstam’s skill and courage. Sorenstam’sinclusion in the PGA event became—at least fora few weeks—one of the main topics of discus-sion on talk radio, letters to the editor, and aroundoffice watercoolers.

These two events—debates over Title IX inschool sports and debates about including awoman in a men’s pro sports event—are salientbecause they echo continuing controversies atthe heart of gender and sports. Should sport, asa social institution that is an integral part ofschools and universities, offer equal opportuni-ties? Should boys and girls, and women andmen, play sports together? Do coed sports revealhow similar we are, or do they unveil essentialdifferences between women and men? Thesedebates don’t go away or get “resolved,” andthat is because sport continues to be more than aplace to play and recreate. Sport is a key terrainof contest for gender (and race, class, sexual,


and global) relations. It is a highly visibleforum in which male and female bodies areliterally “built,” their limitations displayed,their capacities debated. As such, it is a key sitefor ideological contest over the meanings of“masculinity,” as well as “femininity.”

Both the opposition to Title IX and someof the more vitriolic opposition to AnnikaSorenstam’s competing in the PGA reprise anargument that goes back well over a hundredyears. Men, we learn from the historical andsocial scientific literature on sport, created mod-ern sport as an institution that affirms the cate-gorical superiority of male bodies over femalebodies, as well as men’s centrality in public life.The idea of sex equity in sports, as well as thereality of a woman athlete successfully compet-ing with top male athletes, directly threatens theideology of male superiority, and thus men’spositions of centrality. Fortunately, over the past30 years or so, scholars of sport, gender, andmasculinity have built a rich foundation ofresearch that now can be drawn upon to informthese public debates. In this essay, I will give anoverview of this work and point to some currentchallenges and new directions in research onsport and gender.

SPORT AS A CONTESTED TERRAIN

In the wake of the second wave of feminism,and often inspired by the nascent “men’s liber-ation movement,” a trickle of essays aboutmen, masculinity, and sport began to emergein the 1970s (e.g., Farrell, 1974; Naison, 1972;Schafer, 1975). The best of these works werecollected in Sabo and Runfola’s groundbreak-ing 1980 book, Jock: Sports and Male Identity.These works contained the kernel of what otherscholars later would develop into more sophis-ticated critiques of the sexism, homophobia,violence, and militarism at the heart of men’ssports. Many of these works, however, werejournalistic, anecdotal, and/or personal cri-tiques of sport. There were two reasons for this.First, there was as yet no systematic andtheoretically sophisticated analysis of men andmasculinities in gender studies. Most scholarlystudies of men were still mired in the largelyahistorical, static, and categorical language ofsex role theory. Related to this first limitationwas a second: In the 1970s, feminist studies of

women and sport were still in their infancy, andthey were also for the most part limited toanalysis of sex roles.

This changed rapidly in the 1980s, as thefoundation was laid for the development ofa broader and deeper scholarly study of menand sport. One layer of this foundation was builton the increasingly sophisticated works byfeminist scholars studying women and sport(e.g., Birrell, 1984; Hall, 1984; Theberge, 1981).Second, in 1985, Don Sabo systematically laidout the first programmatic statement of what aprofeminist research agenda on the topic of menand sport could look like (Sabo, 1985). Sabosketched out an array of specific research topicsand questions on boys’ socialization throughsport, competition and success, bodies, emo-tions, pain and injury, aggression and violence,sexuality, male athletes’ devaluation of women,and the possibilities for sport to develop inprogressive, profeminist directions (includingquestions about “cross-sex sport”). Over the nextdecade, Sabo and other scholars took up most ofthese questions.

Third, scholars in the late 1980s increas-ingly drew ideas from R. W. Connell’s emergenttheorization of masculinities (Connell, 1987).Connell supplied sport studies scholars with aconceptual toolbox with which to examine thecomplexities of gender dynamics in men’ssports, without falling into the traps and limita-tions of sex role theory. Scholars could see thatsport is an institutional realm in which menconstruct and affirm their separation from, anddomination over, women. But sport does notoperate seamlessly to reproduce men’s powerover women; sport also has been a realm inwhich men of dominant groups (in the UnitedStates, white, heterosexual, middle- and upper-class men) have affirmed their dominance andsuperiority over other men. Connell’s conceptsof hegemonic, marginalized, and subordinatedmasculinities gave conceptual form to the emer-gent idea of gender as multiple. These conceptsgave scholars a language with which to speakabout seemingly paradoxical gender dynamics:Hegemonic masculinity, the currently dominantand ascendant form of masculinity, is con-structed as not-feminine, but also simultaneouslyas not-gay, not-black, not-working class, andnot-immigrant. This idea is fundamental to manyof the chapters in the first scholarly collection ofworks on men, masculinities, and sport. In Sport,

314 • BODIES, SELVES, DISCOURSES


Men, and the Gender Order: Critical FeministPerspectives (Messner & Sabo, 1990), scholarscritically examined the ways that sport affirmsmen’s power over women, as well as the fissuresand contradictions (especially along lines ofrace, social class, and sexualities) within andbetween masculinities.

Historical scholarship also informed the1980s work on men and sport. Sport in industri-alizing societies developed as a “male pre-serve” separate from women’s spheres of life(Dunning, 1986). Sport also served to differen-tiate ruling men from subordinated men. In the19th and early 20th centuries, the British con-sciously developed sport in their public schoolsas a means of preparing boys to administerthe British Empire (Mangan, 1986). The Britisheventually extended their schooling system,along with sports like cricket, to the middleclasses of the colonized nations, in hopes thatthese middle-class men would adopt Britishmorality, ethics, and values and thus help tosolidify colonial control. It didn’t always workthat way. Historian and social analyst C. R. L.James (1983), in his brilliant book on cricket inthe colonial West Indies of the 1920s and 1930s,shows that the British sporting ethic tended tocut both ways. On one hand, public schools—and especially cricket—taught middle-classmulatto (mixed race) West Indian boys andyoung men the values of “Puritanism” and“moral restraint,” as well as the “general superi-ority of British culture” (James, 1983, p. 72).But because teams were strictly segregatedby race as well as nationality (British vs. colo-nized), the game provided a context in which thecontradictions of racism and colonial domina-tion were laid bare. For James and others, then,the cricket field often became an importantarena for symbolic resistance against racism andBritish domination.

In the United States, modern men’s sportwas formed during industrialization and urban-ization, in a time of shifting work and familydynamics for women and men, at the tail end ofthe first wave of feminism, and amid racist fearsof immigration (Crosset, 1990; Kimmel, 1990).At this time, sport bolstered faltering ideologiesof white middle-class masculine superiority overwomen, and over race- and class-subordinatedmen. But throughout the 20th century, sport wasa contested terrain—contested by working classwomen and men, by women and men of color,

and by feminists (Bryson, 1987; Messner, 1988;Whitson, 1990; Willis, 1983).

Based on this foundational work in genderstudies and in feminist sport studies, scholarssince the early 1990s have contributed to anexplosion of studies of men, masculinities, andsport. Critical analyses of masculinities werefundamental to empirical studies of gay maleathletes (Anderson, 2002; Pronger, 1990); thelives of male athletes of different social classesand racial/ethnic groups (Messner, 1992);African American males’ “cool pose” and sport(Majors, 1990); sexual and gender paradoxes inthe lives of male bodybuilders (Klein, 1993); thesporting culture of Australia (McKay, 1991,1997); how masculinities mesh with class poli-tics in Canadian hockey (Gruneau & Whitson,1994); the production of masculinities inMexican baseball (Klein, 2000); and the produc-tion, imagery, and consumption of the SportsIllustrated “swimsuit issue” (Davis, 1997).

The idea that sport is, on one hand, a modernbastion of patriarchal power, and on the otherhand, a terrain that has been contested continu-ally by women and by marginalized men, hasbeen foundational in studies of sport and gender.Over the past two decades, concrete studies ofgender and sport have repeatedly demonstratedhow the once unquestioned bastion of power-ful, competitive, hierarchical, and often violentheterosexual masculinity is not a seamless patri-archal institution. Rather, the very heart of thegender regime of men’s sport is contested andwrought with contradiction and paradox(Messner, 2002). These contradictions and para-doxes have been explored within a number ofthematic areas, three of which I will next brieflydiscuss: bodies, health, and violence.

Bodies

A key ideological outcome of sport hasbeen to create the illusion that masculinity natu-rally coheres to male bodies, and femininity tofemale bodies, and that these binary categoriesof male/masculinity vs. female/femininity arenaturally and categorically different (Dworkin& Messner, 1999). However, as Connell (1987)has noted, if the differences between men andwomen are so natural, then why do people putso much work and effort into creating, marking,and defending these differences? Indeed, empir-ical research into the construction of male

Studying Masculinities and Sport • 315


bodies in sport lays bare the profoundly socialbasis of categorical and essentialist gender ide-ology. Rather than revealing something abouthuman “nature,” research illuminates sport asa collective practice that constructs masculin-ity. Connell’s (1990) life history study of anAustralian “Iron Man” athlete illustrates howthe mental, emotional, and physical trainingregime involved in becoming a top competitiveathlete encourages a man to block or ignorefears, anxieties, or other inconvenient emotions,while mentally controlling his body to performits prescribed tasks. “The decisive triumph,”Connell concludes, “is over oneself, and specif-ically over one’s body. The magnificent machineof [the iron man’s] physique has meaning onlywhen subordinated to the will to win” (Connell,1990, p. 95). Similarly, Klein’s (1993) ethno-graphic study of male bodybuilders illustratesnot only the quite literal construction of hardmale bodies but also the emotional insecurities,health costs, sexual anxieties, and contradic-tions that lie beneath the layers of muscle.Athletic careers construct masculine bodies asmachines or tools, often in the process alienat-ing men from their health, feelings, and rela-tionships with others (Messner, 1992). Butathletic male bodies are not shaped only bygender; race, social class, sexual orientation,and national origin also help to shape particu-lar embodiments of masculinity in sport. Forinstance, gay male athletes may embody an“ironic” masculinity (Pronger, 1990), blackmale athletes often embody a “cool pose”(Majors, 1990), and Mexican baseball playersmay embody a combination of “toughness andtenderness” that is antithetical to simplisticstereotypes of the “macho” Latino male (Klein,2000).

If studies of men’s sports began to revealboth the constructedness of masculine bodiesand their limits, the growing body of literatureon women’s sports further shattered simplisticessentialist thinking about differences betweenwomen and men. What sport illustrates, JudithLorber (1996) concluded, is not natural categor-ical difference but social construction of such.Gendered institutions (like sport) create binarysex categories, not the opposite. Indeed, in ahighly influential article, Mary Jo Kane (1995)argued that the more we observe girls and boysor men and women running, swimming, jump-ing, and playing competitive sports, the more

we must conclude that variation among bodiesexists along a “continuum of difference.” Differ-ences between male and female bodies tend tobe average, not categorical, and there are fargreater differences among men’s bodies thanthere are average differences between womenand men. Many women are faster, stronger, andmore agile than many men. Those committed tocategorical thinking might have seen AnnikaSorenstam’s “failure” in 2003 to make the cut inthe PGA event that she played in as “proof” thatmen are better players than women. Armed withthe idea of a “continuum of difference,” wemight instead observe that Sorenstam finishedwith a poorer score than a number of men, butshe also finished with a better score than severalother men. In addition, she’s clearly a bettergolfer than more than 99% of women and menwho play golf throughout the world.

Men’s Health

Scholarly research on men and sport haspointed to another paradox concerning bodies.Popular wisdom tends to see sport as healthyactivity, and sporting bodies as paragons of fit-ness and health. But research reveals that men’ssport activity is often associated with unhealthypractices, drug and alcohol abuse, pain, injury,and (in some sports) low life expectancy(White, Young, & McTeer, 1995; Young &White, 2000). In an often-reprinted article thatdrew on his experience as a college footballplayer, Don Sabo (1994) argued that boys andmen were subject to a highly authoritariansystem of control that taught them to conformto what he called “the pain principle.” Tobecome successful athletes, Sabo argued, maleathletes tend to

adopt the visions and values that coaches areoffering: to take orders, to “take out” opponents,to take the game seriously, to take women, and totake their place on the team. And if they can’t takeit, then the rewards of athletic camaraderie, pres-tige, scholarships, pro contracts, and communityrecognition are not forthcoming. (p. 87)

This system of rewards and punishments isbacked up by a lifetime of group-based social-ization that teaches boys to “shake it off,” ignoretheir own pain, and treat their bodies as instru-ments to be used—and used up—to get a jobdone. Boys learn early on that if they don’t



conform to the pain principle, they may losetheir position on the team, or they may belabeled as “women,” “fags,” or “pussies” for notbeing manly enough to play hurt. The world ofsport clearly is one in which homophobia policesthe boundaries of acceptable masculine prac-tices, and nowhere is this more clear than in theways boys learn to be manly through risk taking.Through this social process, it eventually comesto seem “natural” for boys and men to decide toplay hurt—perhaps with the aid of painkillingdrugs—thus risking their long-term health(Messner, 1992).

Scholars view the mantra of “no pain, nogain” as paradigmatic of the health costs paidby boys and men who were socialized to nar-row, instrumental goal orientations throughsport (McKay, 1991). But male athletes’ accep-tance of pain and injury, as well as their instru-mental goal orientation concerning theirbodies, is not a phenomenon that is particular tothe world of sport. Similar, for instance, are the“workaholics” in the professional and corporateworld and the nonathlete high school boys whotake anabolic steroids mostly for cosmetic rea-sons. It may be, in fact, that athletic male bodiesare merely amplified versions of the moregeneral ways that boys and men are encour-aged to engage the world in their bodies. Thus,research on men and sport may serve as a use-ful window for scholars who are interestedin developing a more general study of men’shealth (Sabo & Gordon, 1995). This may beespecially true of studies that explore the struc-tured channeling of disproportionate numbersof men of subordinate social classes and racial/ethnic groups into the more risky and violentsports. These men’s experiences tend to mirrorand reinforce the kinds of health risks thatmarginalized groups of men face more gener-ally in the workforce, the military, the street, orprisons (Sabo, 2001).

Violence

One of the most fruitful research trajectoriesto develop from scholarly research on men andsport has focused on male athletes’ violenceagainst women (Brackenridge, 1997; Young,2002). Research suggests that far from being anaberration perpetrated by some marginaldeviants, male athletes’ off-the-field violence isgenerated from the normal, everyday dynamics

at the center of male athletic culture (Burstyn,1999). A number of studies of men’s collegeathletics in recent years have pointed to statisti-cally significant relationships between athleticparticipation and sexual aggression (Benedict& Klein, 1997; Boeringer, 1996; Fritner &Rubinson, 1993; Koss & Gaines, 1993). ToddCrosset and his colleagues surveyed 20 univer-sities with Division 1 athletic programs andfound that male athletes, who in 1995 consti-tuted 3.7% of the student population, were 19%of those reported to campus Judicial AffairsOffices for sexual assault (Crosset, Benedict, &McDonald, 1995; Crosset, Ptacek, McDonald,& Benedict, 1996). In a subsequent article,Crosset (2000) argued that researchers have beenusing too broad a brush in looking generally atthe relationship of “men’s sports” to violenceagainst women. Studies that have comparedacross various sports have found important dif-ferences: The vast majority of reported assaultswere perpetrated by athletes in “revenueproducing contact sports” like basketball, foot-ball, and ice hockey. These data, according toCrosset, should warn us of the dangers of“clumping all sport environments togetherunder the rubric of athletic affiliation” (p. 152).

Perhaps fearing that pointing the finger athigh-profile athletes will reinforce oppressivestereotypes of African American males (whomake up about 80% of the National BasketballAssociation [NBA], for instance) as violentsexual predators, activists like DonaldMcPherson (2002) prefer instead to pull maleathletes into positions of responsibility toeducate peers to prevent violence againstwomen. This question of how antisexist orga-nizing against men’s violence against womenmight fan the flames of racism is a real concernto researchers in this field. As the media frenzysurrounding the trials of Mike Tyson andO. J. Simpson (for rape and for murder, respec-tively) illustrated, American culture seemsespecially obsessed with images of whatStuart Alan Clarke (1991) called “black menmisbehaving”—especially if the alleged mis-behaviors involve a combination of sex andviolence. Racist stereotypes of black men asviolent sexual predators have historicallyserved as a foundation for institutional andpersonal violence perpetrated against AfricanAmericans. So, when data reveal that collegeathletes in revenue-producing sports have



higher rates of sexual assaults against women,there is a very real danger that the term “ath-letes in revenue-producing sports” will smugglein racist stereotypes as a thinly veiled codeword for black male athletes (Berry & Smith,2000).

Evidence suggests that the apparent overrep-resentation of black male athletes charged withsexual assault in college is due to their dramaticoverrepresentation in the central team sports offootball and basketball. When we look at highschools, where white males are more evenlyrepresented in the student athlete population,we see that white male athletes perpetratedmany of the most egregious examples of sexualassaults. When we look at Canada, where whitemen dominate the central sport, ice hockey, wesee that white males commit the vast majorityof sexual assaults by athletes (Robinson, 1998).Following this logic, we can hypothesize thatthe more salient variable is not male athletes’race or ethnicity, but their positions at the cen-ter of athletics, that makes some male athletesmore likely to engage in sexual assault thanothers.

Researchers have increasingly focused onthe group interactions that underlie male ath-letes’ violence against women. Studies of boysin sports have revealed the early development ofgroup-based dominance bonding, grounded inaggressive, homophobic, and misogynist talkand banter (Eveslage & Delaney, 1998; Fine,1987; Hasbrook & Harris, 2000). Studies of thecompetitive and sexually aggressive interactionsin men’s locker rooms (Curry, 1991; Kane &Disch, 1993), and of college men’s sexual andviolent dynamics in a sports bar (Curry, 2000),have been especially illuminating in this regard.There is no single factor that explains how maleathletes come to assault women (or other men,in some cases). Rather, a combination of severalgroup-based factors create a context that makesviolence likely: misogynist and homophobicdominance bonding, a learned suppression ofempathy for others, a “culture of silence” withinthe group, and an institutional environment thatvalorizes and rewards the successful utilizationof violence against others (Messner, 2002). Inter-vention strategies that aim to educate coachesand athletes about sexual assault, or to reformmen’s sports, attempt to confront and changethese group dynamics (Messner & Stevens,2002).

NEW DIRECTIONS IN RESEARCH

ON MEN, GENDER, AND SPORT

The first wave of studies on masculinities andsport in the late 1980s and early 1990s focusedmostly on illuminating men’s experienceswithin the homosocial “sportsworld.” Therehave been two interrelated shifts away fromthis focus in recent years. First, many scholarsare conducting studies that explore women’sand men’s relational constructions of gender insport. Second, many scholars are challengingand stretching the conventional conceptualiza-tion of “the sportsworld” as an object of study.At the heart of this challenge is a strong movetoward greater interdisciplinarity. For the mostpart, the idea of race/class/gender/sexual orien-tation “intersectionality” is built into these newdirections in research.

Gender as Relational

Because sport historically has been orga-nized as extremely sex segregated, it should notsurprise us that the first wave of studies of sporttended to focus either on “men’s sports” or on“women’s sports.” In the past decade, facilitatedby the increasing growth and integration ofgirls’ and women’s sports in communities,schools, and universities, scholars have shiftedtheir focus toward studies of boys and girls, menand women. These studies have the advantageof illustrating the relational construction of gen-der (and often, race, social class, and sexualityas well). To be sure, this shift is a matter ofdegree: The best of the earlier studies alwaysexamined men’s or women’s homosocial sportexperiences within the context of sophisticatedrelational theories of gender, race, and class.Today, we see an increasing commitment toempirical studies of gender relations in sport.

Inspired partly by Thorne’s (1993) pioneer-ing work on children’s construction of gender inschools, scholars of sport have increasinglyturned their attention to relational studies ofchildren, gender, and sport (Hasbrook, 1999).For instance, Hasbrook and Harris’s (2000)study of inner-city first- and second-gradersillustrated how athletic bodies facilitate the con-struction of race- and class-based masculinitiesand femininities in grade schools. Messner(2000) used an observation of a group interac-tion between 4- and 5-year-old girls’ and boys’



soccer teams to illuminate the structural andsymbolic context of gendered interactions.Shakib and Dunbar (2002) compared boys andgirls in high school basketball, while Labergeand Albert (2000) studied the social class impli-cations in adolescent girls’ and boys’ interpreta-tions of boys’ “gender transgressions.”

Sport has also entered public discussions ofhow to prevent youth crime and deviance. Forinstance, in the early 1990s, there was a publicdebate about creating “midnight basketball” ininner cities to keep young males off the streets,and busy with what were perceived to be posi-tive activities (Hartmann, 2001). But researchindicates that social reformers who see sport asa way to prevent youth crime should be aware ofthe limitations of what sport activities can offerchildren. Initiatives like midnight basketballalso reveal the tendency to view racialized cate-gories of “at-risk” youth (especially AfricanAmerican boys) as potential social problemswho might be rescued from criminality bysports (Coakley, 2002).

The growth of relational studies of childrenand youth in sport has been mirrored by theemergence of relational studies of adults. Inwhat is probably the most sophisticated empiri-cal application of Connell’s theory of gender,McKay (1997) compared the political and insti-tutional dynamics of affirmative action policiesin sport in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.The ways that women’s “invisible labor” oftenprops up men’s leisure and sport activities hasbeen the topic of two excellent studies. ShonaThompson’s (1999) book Mother’s Taxi illumi-nates how women’s labor facilitates children’sand men’s sport and leisure. Similarly, Boyleand McKay (1995) studied the exploitation ofolder women’s labor in men’s recreational sport.

Relational studies have also begun to reflecton health and fitness. Dworkin (2003) observedhow the gendered geography of gyms con-tributes to a “glass ceiling” on women’s muscu-lature. In addition, recent studies that draw onnational survey data shed new light on differ-ences and similarities among various groups ofhigh school athletes and nonathletes in terms ofhealth outcomes and risks among teen athletes(K. E. Miller, Sabo, Melnick, Farrell, & Barnes,2000), gender and race patterns in athletic par-ticipation and self esteem (Tracy & Erkut,2002), anabolic steroid use among adolescentmale and female athletes (K. E. Miller, Barnes,

Sabo, Melnick, & Farrell, 2002), and educationaloutcomes among various groups of boys andgirls who play high school sports (Videon,2002). All these studies challenge simplisticcategorical assumptions about boys, girls, andsports, and suggest new questions for futureresearch.

Relational studies of emergent sport forma-tions are also contributing to the broadeningof the field. Wheaton and Tomlinson (1998)observed that gendered patterns among wind-surfers do not conform to those in dominantinstitutional sports that most sport studies schol-ars have studied. This raises the question, theysuggested, of whether marginal or emergentsports might provide space for different—evenoppositional—constructions of gender. Researchon BMX bicyclists suggests further complexities:Perhaps rather than providing a space for thedevelopment of more egalitarian relations, some“extreme sports” are expressions of a backlashby white males who feel that their positions ofcentrality have been threatened by the ascen-dancy of girls and women, and by men of color(Kusz, 2003). Studies of coed sports point toadditional paradoxes: When women and menplay sports together, there are highly visiblemoments of gender transgression that challengegender ideologies. However, the formal rules ofcoed sports, as well as the ways that players “dogender,” tend to reaffirm gender boundaries andideologies of natural difference (Henry &Comeaux, 1999; Wachs, 2002, 2003).

FROM SPORTSWORLD

TO SPORTS IN THE WORLD

Recent scholars of sport, men, and gender haveincreasingly connected their analysis of sport toother (nonsport) institutional and cultural forms.This shift is a matter of degree. Sport studiesscholars have long pointed to ways that sportconnects to, reflects, and reinforces cultural valuesand power relations in nonsport institutionalspheres of life. But earlier works tended to focusmore on life inside “the sportsworld,” and thismay have contributed to a ghettoization of sportstudies. In recent years, the study of sportand gender has become more integrated withother scholarly fields. Scholars increasinglyframe their object of study not as “the sports-world,” but instead as “sports in the world.” In



particular, we see the integration of the study ofsport within broader cultural studies approachesto the mass media and consumption (McKay &Rowe, 1997; T. Miller, 2001), general culturalcritiques of race relations (Boyd, 1997;Carrington, 1998), and examinations of the gen-dered division of labor and leisure in families(Boyle & McKay, 1995).

One of the most fruitful dimensions of thisinterdisciplinary “cultural turn” in studies of gen-der and sport concerns studies of media imagery(Whannel, 2002). Drawing from the critical cul-tural studies tradition, scholars have analyzed thecultural meanings of race and gender in mediacoverage and broader cultural productions ofsport. For instance, Cole and King (1998) pre-sented a fascinating analysis of the ways thatthe popular documentary film Hoop Dreamsexpresses cultural tensions about race and genderin a postindustrial, post-Fordist and postfeministAmerica. Other studies have focused on the con-tradictory meanings of popular star athletes likeU.S. baseball player Nolan Ryan (Trujillo, 1991),and U.S. pro basketball player and MTV starDennis Rodman (Dunbar, 2000). In this samevein, a recent collection includes fascinating casestudies of athletes like basketball star and “post-modern celebrity” Michael Jordan (McDonald &Andrews, 2001), Generation X icon of whitemasculinity Andre Agassi (Kusz, 2001), andBritish football celebrity Ian Wright’s role as “themost visible postmodern black cultural icon inBritain today” (Carrington, 2001, p. 103). Thisgenre of research is increasingly global in itsscope. It also tends to challenge some of theassumptions of liberalism that underlie manyconventional sociological studies of sport. Forinstance, Brian Pronger (2000) examined thesuppression of the erotic and the narrowing ofthe concept of masculinity that has occurred inmainstream “gay sports” and asked a criticalquestion—“Who’s winning?”—when gay menembrace the very cultural forms (like mainstreamsport) that have been so much a part of their his-toric oppression.

An important backdrop for these culturalanalyses of sport is a continuing core of studiesthat document the asymmetrical quality andquantity of coverage of women’s and men’ssports in the mass media (e.g., Curry, Arriagada,& Cornwell, 2002; Eastman & Billings, 2001;Messner, Duncan, & Cooky, 2003; Messner,Duncan, & Wachs, 1996). One study of the

televised sports that boys and men watchconcluded that the multimillion-dollar “sports-media-commercial complex” supplies boysand men with a consistent set of images, whichthe authors call “the televised sports manhoodformula” (Messner, Dunbar, & Hunt, 2000).This formula is an ideological package of mes-sages that encourage boys and men to value risktaking and violence, to tolerate pain and injury,and to treat girls and women either as peripheralto men’s activities, or as sexualized objects ofconsumption. In a world of rapidly changinggender relations, the televised sports manhoodformula appears as a stabilizing force for con-ventional, asymmetrical, and unequal relationsbetween women and men. It also continuallytweaks the insecurities of boys and men, and itoffers them pseudo-empowerment through con-sumption of beer, snack foods, and auto-relatedproducts (Messner, 2002).

The “cultural turn” in sport studies mesheswell with the turn toward relational studies ofgender: Men’s homosocial “sportsworld” doesnot exist in isolation—men’s relations withinsport, and the images of masculinity projectedby the sports media, are integral parts of boys’and men’s relations with each other, and withgirls and women, in schools, families, andworkplaces. One important area in which schol-ars are beginning to explore these connectionsconcerns the connection between sports vio-lence on and off the field. McDonald (1999)explored the gender and race dynamics in mediacoverage of well-known male figures in sportwho were accused of domestic violence. In aninnovative study, Sabo, Gray, and Moore (2000)interviewed women who had been physicallyabused by their male partners during or shortlyafter the men watched televised sports. Thiskind of study begins to give researchers andactivists a handle on what the links might bebetween a man’s act of violence against awoman partner and his acts of viewing violentsports, drinking alcohol, and gambling onsports. Similarly, Wenner’s (1998) and Curry’s(2000) studies of sports bars begin to show theconstruction of (sometimes violent) masculini-ties within the context of an institution thatthrives on men’s consumption of televisedsports and alcohol.

Studies of media treatment of “sexualdeviance” by big-name male athletes have beenespecially useful in illuminating the intersections



of gender with race and sexual orientation. Forinstance, McKay (1993) reflected critically onthe ways that the media responded to basketballstar Earvin “Magic” Johnson’s revelation thathe was HIV-positive by projecting Johnson’ssexual promiscuity onto “wanton women.” AndDworkin and Wachs’s (1998, 2000) comparisonof mass media treatment of three stories ofHIV-positive male athletes showed the ways thatsocial class, race, and sexual orientation cameinto play in the media’s very different framingsof these three stories.

Although interpersonal sexual violenceperpetrated by male athletes has received a greatdeal of attention from researchers, the role ofsport in constituting or legitimizing institution-alized, often state-sponsored violence hasreceived far less attention. There are stirrings,though, of a focus on how gender and sport areintegral to emergent global formations (T. Miller,McKay, Lawrence, & Rowe, 2001). In particu-lar, researchers have examined the symbioticblurring of the language of sport with the gen-dered language and relations of warfare(Bairner, 2000; Malszecki & Cavar, 2001; Sabo& Jansen, 1994; Trujillo, 1995). These kinds oftransnational analyses of sport and militarismshould become increasingly important in thisera of apparently permanent warfare.

CONCLUSION

In this chapter, I have sketched out my under-standing of the trajectory of the past 30 years ofresearch on men, gender, and sport. My pointsof emphasis, as well as my blind spots, areundoubtedly influenced by my own interests,political perspective, and limited standpoint as aU.S. sociologist. However, the main points thatI have sketched out may be of help to currentscholars’ thinking about where the next fruitfuldirections in research might be. In particular, Ihope that the underlying question of dynamicpower relations between women and men, andamong various groups of men, will remain foun-dational in studies of sport and gender. Theextent to which sport continues to be contestedand changed by women and by marginal groupsof men, and the extent to which sport is “still aman’s game” (Rowe & McKay, 1998), shouldprovide plenty of interesting questions for futureresearchers.

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19THE STUDY OF MASCULINITIES

AND MEN’S HEALTH

An Overview

DON SABO

Scholars and researchers have begun tostudy the influences of gender on men’shealth and illness (Courtenay & Keeling,

2000; Sabo & Gordon, 1995; Schofield,Connell, Walker, Wood, & Butland, 2000). Thegrowth of women’s health movements in the1960s and 1970s fueled systematic and inter-disciplinary studies of gender and health, and bythe mid-1980s, the focus on gender had becomea recognizable aspect of epidemiology, medicalsociology, and interdisciplinary studies ofpsychosocial aspects of illness (Lorber, 1997;Stillion, 1985; Verbrugge, 1985; Waldron,1983). However, most of this early work ongender and health revolved almost exclusivelyaround women. For some men, the reconceptu-alization of gender that was initiated by feministscholars and activists became the inspiration forthe emergence of “men’s studies” in the 1970sand 1980s. As the new men’s studies took shapein men’s minds and politics, so too did some ofthese early male scholars begin to explore howconformity to traditional masculinity sometimesincreased men’s physical health risks andimpoverished their emotional lives. The theory

in men’s health studies generally followed theconceptual trajectory of interdisciplinary genderstudies and, more particularly, the study of menand multiple masculinities (Connell, 2000;Courtenay, 2000; Sabo, 1998).

Today, the study of men’s health hasexpanded from a handful of isolated scholars andactivists to an international array of researchers,health promoters, health educators, and special-ists working in world health organizations, gov-ernment programs, health care delivery systems,academia, public health offices, and community-based organizations. In academia, a nascent yetrecognizable subfield within gender studies hastaken shape. There is a growing awareness insocial scientific and biomedical circles thatmales share specific health risks and needs; forexample, a nurse working in a prostate cancerclinic thinks in terms of “men’s health” as wellas “women’s health,” and a reproductive healtheducator in Toronto, Canada, develops aprogram to teach adolescent males about safesex. “Gender-specific health” is becoming abiomedical specialty (Legato, 2000b). Mostrecently, men’s health professionals and scholars


have begun to think about their work withinglobal frameworks, communicating and net-working across national and cultural boundaries(Courtenay, 2002). This global network is morea vision than a reality, but men’s health studiespromise to expand in future decades.

This chapter renders an overview of thehistory and development of the study of men’shealth, along with providing a discussion of keytheoretical models and some of men’s gender-specific health issues. Several groups of boysand men with unique health needs are identified,and finally, some global frameworks for under-standing men’s health are presented. Thisoverview is incomplete because the subfield ofmen’s health studies has gotten too large, com-plex, and global for any one person to fully mon-itor, so my primary focus on North Americanissues and developments is evident.

ORIGINS AND HISTORY

North American research and writing on men’shealth during the 1960s generally collapsed menand masculinity into a demographic category.Biomedical researchers reported variations inmorbidity and mortality “by sex,” and diseaserates between “the sexes” were compared andcontrasted. A historical irony had unfolded. Thebulk of academic scientific medical researchafter World War II had focused mainly on menbecause most physicians were men, men domi-nated medical research, and it was men and notwomen who were selected as research subjectsfor most studies (Legato, 2000a, 2000b). Notonly did the patriarchal biases of male medicalresearchers produce myopic and sexist views ofwomen, but they also reduced the personal andcultural aspects of men’s lives to biological andstatistical categories. The gendered aspects ofboth women’s and men’s health behaviors andoutcomes were not discerned.

The growth of women’s health movementsduring the 1970s challenged the patriarchal sta-tus quo. Second Wave feminists made manyresearchers and health practitioners acutelyaware of gender relations. They decried men’sdomination of health care delivery systems,exposed sexism in the diagnosis and treatment ofwomen, and explored how women’s adoption ofcertain feminine traits and behaviors negativelyaffected physical and mental health. Women’s

pioneering analysis of the links between genderand health, however, did not include criticalscrutiny of men’s health, and only a few malewriters in the early “men’s liberation” movementalluded to men’s health issues (Nichols, 1975;Snodgrass, 1977). Some prominent writersfocused on men’s health issues such as the risksimposed by violence and overinvestment in workand career (Farrell, 1975; Feigen-Fasteau, 1974;Goldberg, 1976, 1979). Sabo (2000) describedthe thinking around men’s health in the 1970s as“exploratory,” that is, “tangentially informed byfeminist theory and politics, and conceptuallyorganized around the general premise that men’sconformity to traditional masculinity producecertain health deficits” (p. 134).

During the 1980s, male scholars elaboratedthe deficit model of men’s health with greaterzeal and detail. The emergence of profeministmen’s movements, the growth of the “new men’sstudies” (Brod, 1987) and research on “men andmasculinity,” and the rapid growth of sex roletheory in mainline social sciences formed a con-ceptual framework for explaining how confor-mity to traditional masculinity elevated healthrisks. Bravado in boys was linked to fighting andphysical injury, drinking, and automobile acci-dents, while the “demands of the male role,”stress, and symptom denial were tied to men’srisk for coronary heart disease (Harrison, Chin,& Ficcarrotto, 1992). Stillion (1985) exploreddifferences in the ways females and males per-ceived sickness and death. Sabo, Brown, andSmith (1986) documented how men’s adherenceto the traditional husband-provider role shapedtheir experiences with a female partner’s breastcancer and mastectomy. Jackson’s (1990) criticalautobiography explored how his masculine iden-tity suffused his experiences of being diagnosedand treated for heart disease. The growth of gayrights activism in the 1980s also fueled publichealth initiatives and educational efforts regard-ing gay and bisexual men. There were protestsagainst governmental and homophobic indiffer-ence to the health needs of gay and bisexualmen, and community-based awareness grewconcerning the need for safe sex and the dangersof HIV transmission. In contrast, very littleresearch or health initiatives focused on thehealth needs of poor men or men of color.

During the 1990s, the study of men’s healthgrew rapidly, integrating clinical and epidemio-logical research findings into progressively

Masculinity and Men’s Health • 327


interdisciplinary conceptual frameworks thathighlighted the workings of gender (Courtenay,2002). Analyses of men’s health closely followedtheoretical developments in what in various schol-arly circles were called men’s studies, the newmen’s studies, or critical studies of men and mas-culinity. The use of critical feminist perspectivesto analyze men, masculinity, and health emergedas “men’s health studies” (Sabo & Gordon, 1995).Building on critiques of sex role theory’s narrowfocus on gender identity, socialization, and con-formity to role expectations, critical feministthinkers argued that men’s health is profoundlyaffected by power differences that shape relation-ships between men and women, women andwomen, and men and men (Courtenay, 2000).Connell’s (1987, 1995) concept of “hegemonicmasculinity” forged a conceptualization of men’sgender identity as actively worked out, revamped,and maintained by individuals who are situated insocially and historically constructed webs ofpower relations—and it is amid these myriadwebs that health processes and outcomes wereunderstood to take shape. Critical analyses ofmen’s health increasingly recognized the “plural-ity of masculinities” and the intersections amonggender, class, race/ethnicity, and sexual orienta-tion. Men’s health behaviors unfolded within mul-tiple hierarchies composed of rich and poor men,First World and Third World men, straight andgay men, and professional men and those wholabored in factories or on farms.

Most recently, relational theories of gender andhealth have emerged that recognize that men’sand women’s health outcomes are intricatelyinterconnected (Sabo, 1999; Schofield et al.,2000). Most scholars have focused on health andillness within each sex rather than between thesexes. As Schofield et al. (2000) stated it, “A gen-der relations approach is one which proposes thatmen’s and women’s interactions with each other,and the circumstances under which they interact,contribute significantly to health opportunitiesand constraints” (p. 251). Sabo (1999) has devel-oped a model for assessing the health impacts ofvarious relationships between the sexes. Heargues that a “positive gendered health synergy”exists where the pattern of gender relations pro-motes favorable health processes or outcomes forboth sexes; for example, a husband-father’s con-tributions to child care and domestic work freeup the wife-mother to pursue a fitness agenda.In contrast, a “negative gendered health synergy”

occurs where the pattern of gender relations isassociated with unfavorable health processes oroutcomes for one or both sexes; for example, adepressed male batters his wife, triggeringphysical injury and emotional trauma.

Courtenay (2002) extends the vision of rela-tional models this way:

These models would take into account thedynamic intersection of various health determi-nants, such as those among biological functioning,environmental pollution, psychological well-being, social and cultural norms, genetic predis-position, institutional policies, political climates,and economic disparities. (p. 9)

Such “relationships,” he argues, cover a chal-lenging span of human interactions and socialstructures, including relations between men andwomen, men and men, individuals and institu-tional structures, cultures, and nations aroundthe world. (More is said about globalization andmen’s health later in this chapter.)

SIFTING THROUGH

DEMOGRAPHICS OF DIFFERENCE

Ashley Montagu (1953) long ago observed themarked differences in the mortality ratesbetween males and females. Because malesdied earlier than females throughout the entirehuman life span, from conception to old age,he argued that men were biologically inferiorto women. Epidemiological data show, forexample, that males in the United States areabout 12% more likely than females to experi-ence prenatal death and about 130% more likelyto die during the first three months of life. Table19.1 illustrates the disparities between male andfemale infant mortality rates (i.e., death duringthe first year of life) across a 50-year span of the20th century. Men’s greater mortality rates persistthrough the “age 85” subgroup and, as Table 19.2shows, male death rates are higher than femalerates for 12 of the 15 leading causes of death inthe United States (National Center for HealthStatistics, 2002).

Whereas biological differences between thesexes probably influence the variation in mortal-ity rates, social and cultural processes are also atplay. For example, women’s relative advantageover men in life expectancy was rather small in



the early 20th century (Verbrugge & Winegard,1987; Waldron, 1995). As the century pro-gressed, female mortality declined faster thanmale mortality, thus widening the gender gap inlife expectancy. While women benefited fromdecreased maternal mortality, the rise in men’s

life expectancy was slowed by higher rates ofheart disease and lung cancer, which, in turn,were owed mainly to increased smoking amongmales. In recent decades, the differencesbetween men’s and women’s mortality rateshave narrowed, partly because women have


Table 19.1 Gender and Infant Mortality Rates for the United States, 1940-1989

Year Both Sexes Males Females

1940 47.0 52.5 41.3

1950 29.2 32.8 25.5

1960 26.0 29.3 22.6

1970 20.0 22.4 17.5

1980 12.6 13.9 11.2

1989 9.8 10.8 8.8

SOURCE: Adapted from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Monthly Vital Statistics Report, 40(8, Suppl. 2), p. 41.

NOTE: Rates are for infant (under 1 year) deaths per 1,000 live births for all races.

Table 19.2 Ratio of Male to Female Age-Adjusted Death Rates, for the 15 Leading Causes of Death forthe Total U.S. Population in 2002

Number of Total Male to Female Rank Cause of Death Deaths Percentage Ratio

1 Diseases of heart 710,760 29.6 1.4

2 Malignant neoplasms 553,091 23.0 1.5

3 Cerebrovascular 167,661 7.0 1.0diseases

4 Chronic lower 122,009 5.1 1.4respiratory diseases

5 Accidents (unintentional 97,900 4.1 2.2injuries)

6 Diabetes mellitus 69,301 2.9 1.2

7 Influenza and pneumonia 65,313 2.7 1.3

8 Alzheimer’s disease 49,558 2.1 0.8

9 Nephritis, nephritic 37,251 1.5 1.4syndrome, nephrosis

10 Septicemia 31,224 1.3 1.2

11 Intentional harm (suicide) 29,350 1.2 4.5

12 Chronic liver disease and 26,552 1.1 2.2cirrhosis

13 Essential hypertension and 18,073 0.8 1.0hypertensive renal disease

14 Assault (homicide) 16,765 0.7 3.3

15 Pneumonitis due to solids 16,636 0.7 1.8and liquids

SOURCE: Adapted from National Center for Health Statistics, National Vital Statistics Report, 50(15), September 16, 2002,Table C.


increasingly taken up smoking and other riskbehaviors that elevated their rates of heartdisease and certain cancers. The historical vari-ations in gender differences in life expectancyin the United States, Canada, and other post-industrial nations suggest that both biologyand sociocultural processes shape men’s andwomen’s mortality. Waldron (1983) speculatedthat gender-related behaviors contribute morethan biogenic factors to the variations in mortal-ity between the sexes.

Although females generally outlive males,they report higher rates of acute illnesses suchas respiratory conditions, infective and parasiticconditions, and digestive system disorders thanmales do. In contrast, males report higher ratesof injuries than females, with injuries relatedto socialization and lifestyle differences, suchas working in manufacturing jobs, involvementwith contact sports, and risky occupations(Cypress, 1981; Dawson & Adams, 1987;Givens, 1979). Cockerham (1995) wondered ifwomen really do experience more sickness thanmen, or whether men are less likely than womento report symptoms and seek medical care. Hestated, “The best evidence indicates that theoverall differences in morbidity are real” and,further, that they are due to a mixture of biolog-ical, psychological, and social influences(p. 42).

Understanding the disparate morbidity andmortality rates between men and women isfurther complicated by the emphasis on genderdifferences, which, ironically, has been part oftraditional patriarchal beliefs and much SecondWave feminist thought. Whereas patriarchal cul-ture exaggerated differences between men andwomen, and masculinity and femininity, SecondWave feminists theorized a “presumed oppo-sitionality” between men and women, andmasculinity and femininity (Digby, 1998). Epi-demiologically, however, the emphasis on differ-ences can sometimes hide similarities. Forexample, MacIntyre, Hunt, and Sweeting (1996)questioned the conventional wisdom that inindustrialized countries men die earlier thanwomen, and that women get sick more oftenthan men. They studied health data sets fromboth Scotland and the United Kingdom andfound that, after controlling for age, statisticallysignificant differences between many of men’sand women’s self-reported psychological andphysical symptoms disappeared. They concluded

that both differences and similarities in men’sand women’s health exist and, furthermore, thatchanges in gender roles during recent decades“may produce changes in men’s and women’sexperiences of health and illness” (p. 623).

In summary, although some gender differ-ences in mortality and morbidity are associatedwith biological or genetic processes, or withreproductive biology (e.g., testicular or prostatecancer), it is increasingly evident that the largestvariations in men’s and women’s health arerelated to shifting social, economic, cultural, andbehavioral factors (Courtenay, McCreary, &Merighi, 2002; Kandrack, Grant, & Segall,1991). For this reason, Schofield et al. (2000) cri-tiqued the prevailing “men’s health discourse,”which too often equates “men’s health” to thedelivery of biomedical services to men, or to pri-vate sector marketing services or productsdesigned to enhance “men’s health.” They rejectlumping “all men” into statistical comparisonsbetween men’s and women’s health outcomesbecause, mainly, it is disadvantaged men (e.g.,poor men, men of color, uninsured men, gaymen) who disproportionately contribute to men’scollective higher mortality and morbidity rates incomparison to women. As Keeling (2000) writes,“So it is that there is no single, unitary men’shealth—instead, sexual orientation, race, socio-economic status, and culture all intervene toaffect the overall health status of each man and ofmen of various classes or groups” (p. 101).

CURRENT MEN’S HEALTH ISSUES

A variety of health issues have received particu-lar attention from researchers and men’s healthadvocates. Some issues that have received par-ticular attention in North America are discussedbelow.

Alcohol Use

Although social and medical problems stem-ming from alcohol abuse involve both sexes,males constitute the largest segment of alcoholabusers. Some researchers observe connectionsbetween the traditional male role and alcoholabuse. Isenhart and Silversmith (1994) showedhow, in a variety of occupational contexts,expectations surrounding masculinity encourageheavy drinking while working or socializing



during after-work or off-duty hours. Somepredominantly male occupational groups areknown to engage in high rates of alcohol con-sumption, such as longshoremen (Hitz, 1973),salesmen (Cosper, 1979), and military personnel(Pursch, 1976).

Findings from a Harvard School ofPublic Health (Wechler, Davenport, Dowdell,Moeykens, & Castillo, 1994) survey of 17,600students at 140 colleges found that 44% engagedin “binge drinking,” defined as drinking five drinksin rapid succession for males and 4 drinks forfemales. Males were more apt to report bingedrinking during the past 2 weeks than females—50% and 39%, respectively. Sixty percent of themales who binge-drank three or more times inthe past 2 weeks reported driving after drinking,compared with 49% of their female counterparts,thus increasing their risk for accident, injury,and death. Compared with non-binge drinkers,binge drinkers were seven times more likely toengage in unprotected sex, thus elevating therisk for unwanted pregnancy and sexually trans-mitted disease.

Binge drinking among all adults in theUnited States increased 17% between 1993 and2001, with a steeper 56% incline among 18- to20-year-olds. Whereas males averaged 12.5bingeing episodes in 2001, females averaged2.7 episodes (Centers for Disease Control andPrevention [CDC], 2002b). Alcohol use is aprimary factor in car crashes among males(Wilcox & Marks, 1994), which contributedto 78% of fatal injuries among younger malesin 1995 (Maternal and Child Health Bureau,1997). Worldwide, tens of thousands of peopledie and are seriously injured annually in high-way accidents (Roberts & Mohan, 2002). Breen(2002) indicated that road crashes are the lead-ing cause of death in persons under 45 years oldin the European Union. It may be that males aremore apt than females to equate risk taking withmanliness, to combine alcohol use with sensa-tion seeking, or simply to travel more often afterdrinking. For all U.S. males, the age-adjusteddeath rate from automobile accidents in 1998was 29.3/100,000 for African American malesand 26/100,000 for Caucasian males, comparedwith 9.4/100,000 for African American femalesand 10.7/100,000 for Caucasian females (U.S.Census Bureau, 2001).

The efforts of public health advocates topromote sobriety among male adolescents and

responsible drinking among adult males can becomplicated by cultural equations betweenmanhood and alcohol consumption. Massmedia often sensationalize and glorify linksbetween booze and male bravado. Postman,Nystrom, Strate, and Weingartner (1987) stud-ied the thematic content of 40 beer commer-cials and identified a variety of stereotypicalportrayals of the male role that were used topromote beer drinking, among them reward fora job well done; manly activities that featurestrength, risk, and daring; male friendship andesprit de vcorps; and romantic success withwomen. The researchers estimated that, betweenthe ages of 2 and 18, children view about100,000 beer commercials.

Anabolic Steroid Use

Some males use anabolic steroids to buildmuscle mass, to augment strength, to enhanceathletic performance, and/or to engage inextreme dietary practices. Users are at risk ofside effects that can include acne, liver disease,cardiovascular disease, atrophy of the testicles,depression, and increased aggression. About 5%to 10% of U.S. male adolescents (and about 2.5%of female adolescents) have indicated they useanabolic steroids (American Academy of Pedi-atrics, 1997). An estimated 375,000 males and175,000 females were using anabolic steroidsin 1995 (Yesalis, Barsukiewicz, Kopstein, &Bahrke, 1997). Although it is common to por-tray anabolic steroid use among adolescentsas mainly a problem for male athletes, about40% of steroid users do not play sports, andapproximately 29% are female (Miller, Barnes,Sabo, Melnick, & Farrell, 2002a). Whetherthey are athletes or not, male adolescents whouse anabolic steroids also have greater risks forother problem behaviors such as illicit druguse, alcohol use, aggression, suicidal ideation/behavior, and pathogenic weight-loss behavior(Miller, Barnes, Sabo, Melnick, & Farrell,2002b).

Klein (1993, 1995) studied the links betweenanabolic steroid use, overtraining, and muscu-larity in the bodybuilding subculture, wheremasculinity is equated to muscle and where thepsychosocial drive to be big and powerful isprominent. Bodybuilders often put their per-sonal health at risk in pursuit of ideal masculin-ity (Glassner, 1989; Messner & Sabo, 1994).



Erectile Disorders

Erectile Dysfunction Disorder (EDD), alsoknown as impotence, occurs when a man isunable to sustain an erection sufficiently firmenough for intercourse or through to orgasm. Inthe past, the issue of male impotence was eitherjoked about or cloaked by cultural silence. How-ever, the recent introduction of Viagra to themedical marketplace has spurred discussionabout erectile disorders, which, according tosome estimates, afflict between 10 and 30 millionU.S. men (Krane, Goldstein, & Saenz de Tejada,1989; National Institutes of Health, 1993). Onenationwide study of noninstitutionalized, healthyAmerican men between the ages of 40 and 70years found that 52% reported minimal, moder-ate, or complete impotence; the prevalenceof erectile disorders increased with age, and 9%of respondents reported complete impotence(Feldman, Goldstein, Hatzichristou, Krane, &McKinlay, 1994). Ayta, McKinlay, and Krane(1995) used data from the Massachusetts MaleAging Study and the United Nations to estimatethat 322 million men worldwide will suffer fromEDD in the year 2025.

Although erectile disorders may result frommasculine inadequacy or lack of psychologicalwell-being, the causes of impotence are nowbelieved to stem mainly from physiologicalrather than emotional factors (Zilbergeld, 1999).EDD is often tied to other physiological disor-ders such as hypertension, heart disease, dia-betes, and excessive alcohol use (Fedele et al.,2001). Today, diagnosis and treatment of erectiledisorders typically combines psychological andmedical assessment (Ackerman & Carey, 1995).

HIV/AIDS

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)infection became a leading cause of deathamong North American males in the 1980s. By1990, HIV infection was the second leading causeof death among men aged 25 to 44, comparedwith the sixth leading cause of death amongsame-age women (“Update: Mortality Attribut-able to HIV Infection/AIDS,” 1993). Amongreported cases of acquired immunodeficiencysyndrome (AIDS) for adolescent and adult menin 2000, more than half were men who had sexwith other men, 25% were intravenous drugusers, and about 14% were exposed through

heterosexual sexual contact. For cases of AIDSamong adolescent and adult women in 2000,33% were intravenous drug users and 64% wereinfected through heterosexual sexual contact(CDC, 2002a).

Perceptions of the AIDS epidemic in theUnited States and its victims have been tinc-tured by sexual attitudes, homophobia, and thestigma associated with illicit drug use. Thoughtsand feelings about men with AIDS are alsoinfluenced by attitudes toward race, ethnicity,and poverty. Just as men and women of color areoverrepresented in poverty, so also are theyoverrepresented with regard to HIV/AIDSprevalence. In the United States, HIV/AIDS ismost prevalent among poor persons, and the1995 incidence of AIDS was 6.5 times greaterfor African Americans and 4.0 times greater forHispanics than it was for whites (Garrett, 1994).(Also see Table 19.3 for comparisons.) HIV/AIDS has erroneously been dubbed a “minoritydisease,” yet it is not racial biology that confersrisk for HIV/AIDS, but rather behavioral adap-tations to cultural and economic circumstancesthat include community disintegration, unem-ployment, homelessness, eroding urban taxbases, mental illness, substance use, and crimi-nalization (R. Wallace, 1991; Zierler & Krieger,1997). For example, males (who composed themajority of homeless persons in New York Cityduring the 1980s) were prone to drug addiction,which in turn was linked to HIV infection(Ron & Rogers, 1989; Torres, Mani, Altholz, &Brickner, 1990).

Pain and Symptom Denial

Studies done in the United States revealeddifferences between the ways men and womenexperience and perceive pain. Generally, boysare taught not to express their pain, to be toughand deny pain, whereas girls are encouraged to bevulnerable to pain and to be openly emotional inthe midst of pain (Hoffmann & Tarzian, 2001).Adults often respond more to girls’ pain thanboys’ pain, and girls begin to have more painepisodes than boys at very young ages (Keefeet al., 2000). There is some evidence that menwith more masculine traits tend to have higherpain thresholds than those who are less mas-culine (M. Robinson, Riley, & Myers, 2000;Wise, Price, Myers, Heft, & Robinson, 2002).Whereas women’s coping strategies around pain



revolve more around emotions, men often denypain, suppress the emotional aspects of pain,and take an action-oriented approach to copingwith pain (Keough & Herdenfeldt, 2002).

Prostate Cancer

As men pass through middle age, they are aptto experience benign prostatic hyperplasia, anenlargement of the prostate gland that is asso-ciated with symptoms such as dribbling afterurination, frequent urination, or incontinence.Others may develop infections (prostatitis) ormalignant prostatic hyperplasia (prostate cancer).On average, one in three U.S. males will developprostate cancer in his lifetime, and it is the secondleading cause of cancer deaths in American men(Mayo Clinic, 2003). Prostate cancer is morecommon than lung cancer (Martin, 1990). Onein 10 men develop this cancer by age 85, withAfrican American males showing a higherprevalence rate than their Caucasian counter-parts (Greco & Blank, 1993). Lack of economicresources and reduced access to health care leadmany African American males to delay seekingtreatment for prostate symptoms, which in turnincreases their mortality rates compared withCaucasian males (Cooley & Jennings-Dozier,1998; Freedman, 1998).

Treatments for prostate problems depend onthe specific diagnosis and may range from med-ication to radiation and surgery. Some invasivesurgical treatments for prostate cancer can pro-duce incontinence and impotence. Researchers

have begun to explore men’s psychosocialreactions and adjustments to treatments for prostatecancer (Gray, Fitch, Phillips, Labrecque, &Fergus, 2000; Stanford et al., 2000). Supportgroups, established in many North Americancities, provide male survivors with information,camaraderie, and emotional connection (Gray,2003).

Suicide

It is estimated that 80% of suicide completersin the United States are male (Moscicki, 1994).Suicide is the third leading cause of death amongAmericans aged 15 to 24, with boys incurringhigher rates of completion than girls (Portner,2001; Stillion, 1995). One explanation for boys’higher rates of lethality from suicide attempts isthat males adopt more traditionally “masculine”methods (e.g., use of guns or knives) and psy-chological postures (e.g., aggression, goal direct-edness, passion to succeed, and denial of feelings)when attempting to kill themselves (Canetto,1995). Traditionally, males also have been moreattracted to guns than females. Indeed, Groholt,Ekeberg, Wichstrom, and Haldorsen (2000)suggested that gender differences in the suicidemethods used by Norwegian adolescents havebecome less marked in recent decades due to thegreater availability of firearms to both sexes. Onthis point, Johnson, Krug, and Potter’s (2000)cross-cultural study of 34 countries found a sig-nificant association between number of firearmsand firearm-related suicide rates. Finally, a study


Table 19.3 AIDS Cases Reported in 2000 and Estimated 2000 Population, by Race/Ethnicity, UnitedStates

Percentage of AIDS Percentage of the Race/Ethnicity Cases Reported U.S. Population

Asian/Pacific Islander 1 4

American Indian/Alaska Native 1 1

Black, not Hispanic 47 12

Hispanic 19 13

White, not Hispanic 32 71

Total AIDS cases N = 42,156Total population N = 285,863,000

SOURCE: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Retrieved June 4, 2002, fromhttp://www.cdc.gov/hiv/graphics/images/1178/1178-12.htm

NOTE: Includes 117 persons with unknown race/ethnicity.


of 10 European nations documented higher ratesof suicide for males than for females (Hearnet al., 2002a, 2002b).

The links between gender and suicide riskalso vary across racial and ethnic groups,subcultures, and age-groups. Among poor andmarginalized boys of color, self-destructivebehaviors such as intravenous drug use andweapons carrying may indirectly express suici-dal inclinations (Staples, 1995). Family break-down, poverty and despair, and illicit druguse contribute to suicide risk among NativeAmericans (L. J. Wallace, Calhoun, Powell,O’Neil, & James, 1996). Suicide among youngAfrican Americans increased 114% from 1980to 1995 (from 2.1 to 4.5 deaths per 100,000persons) (CDC, 1998). In contrast, adolescentmale athletes show lower risk for suicidalideation and attempts than their nonathleticcounterparts (Ferron, Narring, Cauderay, &Michaud, 1999; Sabo, Miller, Melnick, Farrell, &Barnes, 2002; Tomori & Zalar, 2000).

Elderly males in North America commitsuicide significantly more often than elderlyfemales. Whereas Caucasian women’s lethal sui-cide rate peaks at age 50, Caucasian men 60 andolder have the highest rate of lethal suicide, evensurpassing the rate for young males (Manton,Blazer, & Woodbury, 1987). Canetto (1992) sug-gested that elderly men’s higher suicide mortalityis chiefly owed to their limited coping skills andflexibility to meet changes that come with aging.

Finally, some data suggest that gay andbisexual males (especially among adolescents)are at greater risk for suicide than heterosexualmales. However, research in this area is sparseand fraught with methodological difficulties,among them lack of valid self-reports on sex-ual orientation, underreporting on medicalrecords, and confusion about sexual orientation(Garofalo & Katz, 2001). In one study of a pop-ulation-based sample of U.S. adolescents,Remafedi, French, Story, Resnick, and Blum(1998) found that among gay or bisexual males,28% reported a past suicide attempt, comparedwith 4% of the heterosexual males. Fergusson,Horwood, and Beautrais (1999) conducted a21-year longitudinal study of a birth cohort of1,007 New Zealand youth and found that, byages 18 to 21, gay and bisexual males (andfemales) had higher rates of psychiatric disor-ders and suicide attempts. Yet researchers alsocaution that sexual orientation alone does not

predict suicide risk as much as other mediatingfactors such as depression, hopelessness, sub-stance abuse, family dysfunction, social sup-port, interpersonal conflicts related to sexualorientation, and nondisclosure of sexual orienta-tion to others (D’Augelli, Hershberger, &Pilkington, 2001; Rutter & Soucar, 2002).

Testicular Cancer

Though relatively rare in the general U.S.population, testicular cancer is the fourth mostcommon cause of death among 15- to 34-year-oldmales (Devesa et al., 1999). It is the most commonform of cancer affecting 20- to 34-year-old whitemales. The incidence of testicular cancer hasbeen increasing since the 1950s in both theUnited States (Pharris-Ciurej, Cook, & Weiss,1999) and Canada (Ries et al., 1999). An estimated7,200 new U.S. diagnoses were made in 2001(American Cancer Society, 2001). If detectedearly, the survival rates are high, whereas delayeddiagnosis is life-threatening (Kinkade, 1999).Regular testicular self-examination (TSE), there-fore, is a potentially effective preventive meansfor ensuring early detection and successful treat-ment. Regretfully, however, few physicians teachTSE (Rudolf & Quinn, 1988), and most males donot practice TSE. One study of United Kingdomyoung men found that only 22% practiced TSE(R. A. Moore & Topping, 1999).

Denial may influence men’s perceptions oftesticular cancer and TSE (Blesch, 1986).Studies show that most males are not aware oftesticular cancer and, even among those who areaware, many are reluctant to examine their testi-cles as a preventive measure. Even when symp-toms are recognized, men sometimes postponeseeking treatment. Moreover, men who aretaught TSE are often initially receptive, but thepractice of TSE decreases over time. Men’sresistance to TSE has been linked to awkward-ness about touching themselves, associatingtouching genitals with homosexuality or mas-turbation, or the idea that TSE is not a manlybehavior. Finally, men’s individual reluctance todiscuss testicular cancer may derive in part fromthe widespread cultural silence that envelops it.The penis is a cultural symbol of male power,authority, and sexual domination. Its symbolicefficacy in traditional, male-dominated genderrelations, therefore, would be eroded or neutral-ized by the realities of testicular cancer.



Although testicular cancer rates areincreasing in many countries, mortality rateshave declined in the European Union, EasternEurope, Japan, the United States, and Canada(Levi, LaVecchia, Boyle, Lucchini, & Negri,2001). Declining mortality is likely owed toadvances in medical diagnosis and treatment,early detection, TSE, and greater educationalawareness among males. Finally, survivors oftesticular cancer generally go on to have physi-cally and emotionally healthy lives (Gordon,1995; Rudberg, Nilsson, & Wikblad, 2000).

VIOLENCE

Men’s violence is a major public health prob-lem. Hearn et al. (2002a, 2002b) analyzed publichealth data in 10 European nations and found that“men are strongly overrepresented among thosewho use violence, especially heavy violenceincluding homicide, sexual violence, racial vio-lence, robberies, grievous bodily harm, and drugoffences” (2002a, p. 23). They also documentedwidespread violence of men against women,which has been found in most other nations.

Cultural prescriptions for traditional mas-culinity can evoke aggression and toughnessin boys and men (Kuypers, 1992). Emergingresearch on children in elementary school showsthat aggressive boys are more popular amongtheir peers and that bullies use aggression tosecure resources from lesser-status children(Pellegrini & Long, 2002). Aggressive behavioris used by some males to separate themselvesfrom women and femininity, and to pursuestatus in male hierarchies. Male violence at anyage is both personal and institutional, moored inpersonality but channeled by group relationsand cultural practices (Connell, 2000). Malescan use the threat or application of violence toexert their personal will and to maintain politi-cal and economic advantage over women andlesser-status men. Kaufman (1998) has shownhow the “triad of men’s violence” (men’s vio-lence against other men, women, and them-selves) negatively affects public health.

Homicide is the second leading causeof death among 15- to 19-year-old males. Malesaged 15 to 34 years were almost half (49%,N = 13,122) of U.S. homicide victims in 1991. Inthe United States during 2001, men were 89% ofpersons arrested for murder and nonnegligent

manslaughter, 99% of those arrested for forciblerape, 90% of those arrested for robbery, and 80%of those arrested for aggravated assault (U.S.Department of Justice, 2001).

Women are often victimized by men’s angerand violence in the forms of rape, date rape, wifebeating, assault, sexual harassment on the job,and verbal harassment (Thorne-Finch, 1992).However, men’s violence also exacts a heavy tollon men themselves in the forms of fighting, gangclashes, hazing, gay bashing, injury, homicide,suicide, and organized warfare. In the UnitedStates, for example, men were 90% of all mur-derers in 2001, as well as 77% of murder victims(U.S. Department of Justice, 2001).

War and Guns

Paleontological evidence suggests that theinstitutions of war and patriarchy emergedduring the same phase of social evolution about12,000 to 14,000 years ago (Eisler, 1988). Warhas always been a predominantly male activity(Connell, 1989; Malszecki & Carver, 2001) that,historically, has exacted high rates of morbidityand mortality among the men who fight in bat-tles. Warriors were taught to conform to a type ofhegemonic masculinity that embodies violence-proneness, toughness, and obedience to maleauthority. The negative health consequences ofwar for both sexes are painfully evident. Manyboys and men, who are disproportionatelyenlisted to fight in wars, are killed or physicallyand psychologically maimed, whereas elite malegroups may profit or solidify political powerthrough warfare. Men’s violence on the patriar-chal battlefields also often spills over into civil-ian populations, where women and childrenare victimized (Brownmiller, 1975; Chang, 1997).As Sen (1997) observed, “Historically, warsbetween nations, classes, castes, races, have beenfought on the battlefield on the bodies of men,and off the battlefield on the bodies of women”(p. 12). Recent expressions of the militarizationof men’s violence, partly inspired and fueled byhegemonic masculinities, can be found in theTaliban of Afghanistan, Irish Republican Armyof Ireland (Bairner, 2000), terrorist movements,and the U.S./Iraqi war of 2003.

Guns and masculinity go hand in hand inmany cultures. Disarmament and peacemakingefforts in Afghanistan, for example, have beenpartially thwarted by the masculine symbolism



that males invest in owning and carrying guns.In the United States, hunting and marksman-ship have been mainly male cultural activities,with gun ownership being four times higheramong men than among women (Smith &Smith, 1994). Evidence indicates that gun own-ership elevates risk for morbidity and mortality.About 30,000 persons are killed with firearmseach year in the United States, almost as manydeaths as accrue from motor vehicle accidents(Siebel, 2000). Contrary to common beliefs,most gun-related deaths are the result of acci-dents and not criminal activity (Price & Oden,1999). Gun ownership is also linked to suiciderisk, and one cross-cultural study of 34 coun-tries found a significant association betweennumber of firearms and firearm-related suiciderates (Johnson et al., 2000).

Finally, although there may be some biologicalimpetus for men’s higher levels of aggressioncompared with women’s, we also know that maleaggression varies a great deal across cultures,individuals, and historical settings. To the extentthat masculinity is culturally defined and mal-leable, therefore, health promoters can encour-age the development of more cooperative andpeaceful forms of masculinity.

MALE GROUPS

WITH SPECIAL HEALTH NEEDS

There is no such thing as masculinity; there areonly masculinities (Sabo & Gordon, 1995), andthe view of “all men” as a single, large category inrelation to “all women” is misleading (Connell,1987). The fact is that men are not all alike, andvarious male groups face different conditions inthe gender order. At any given historical moment,there are competing masculinities—some domi-nant, some marginalized, and some stigmatized—each with their respective structural, psychosocial,and cultural moorings that, in turn, influence vari-ations in men’s health. Men’s health researchershave begun to study a wide range of male groups;some are discussed below.

Adolescent Males

Researchers and public health advocatesidentified adolescent health as a major priorityduring the 1990s (Schoen et al., 1997; Schoen,Davis, DesRoches, & Shehkdar, 1998). A

comparative analysis by the Centers for DiseaseControl and Prevention showed mixed trends inthe health risks of high school students between1991 and 1999 (CDC, 2000b). Fewer teenagersreported having sex, and rates of condom useand seatbelt use increased during the past decade.But cigarette smoking and use of marijuana andcocaine increased, as did the percentage of highschool students who attempted suicide (CDC,2000b).

Pleck, Sonenstein, and Ku (1992) researchedthe problem behaviors and health among anational sample of adolescent, never-marriedmales aged 15 to 19, surveying and interviewingtheir participants in 1980 and 1988. Hypothesistests were geared to assessing whether “mascu-line ideology” (which measured the presence oftraditional male role attitudes) put boys at risk foran array of problem behaviors. The researchersfound a significant, independent association with7 of 10 problem behaviors. Specifically, tradi-tionally masculine attitudes were associated withbeing suspended from school, drinking and useof street drugs, frequency of being picked up bythe police, being sexually active, the number ofheterosexual partners in the last year, and trickingor forcing someone to have sex. These kinds ofbehaviors, which are in part expressions of thepursuit of traditional masculinity, elevate boys’risk for sexually transmitted diseases, HIV trans-mission, and early death by accident or homicide.At the same time, however, these same behaviorscan also encourage victimization of womenthrough men’s violence, sexual assault, unwantedteenage pregnancy, and sexually transmitteddiseases.

Obesity in adolescence increases lifelong riskfor a variety of diseases such as coronary heartdisease, diabetes mellitus, joint disease, and cer-tain cancers. Obesity among both boys and girlshas been increasing; for example, the percentageof overweight children aged 12 to 19 moved from5% in 1970 to 14% in 1999 (National Health andNutrition Examination Survey [NHANES],2003). Between 1988 and 1994, about 11.3% ofall boys in this age-group were overweight com-pared with 9.7% of all girls. Adolescents fromracial/ethnic minorities were especially likely tobe overweight. Among non-Hispanic blacks,10.7% of boys and 16.3% of girls were over-weight, and among Mexican Americans, thecorresponding proportions were 14.1% for boysand 13.5% for girls (NHANES, 2003).



Males are also a majority of the estimated1.3 million teenagers who run away from homeeach year in the United States. For both boys andgirls, living on the streets raises the risks for poornutrition, homicide, alcoholism, drug abuse, andAIDS. Young adults in their 20s constitute about20% of new AIDS cases and, when the lengthylatency period is calculated, it is evident thatthey are being infected in their teenage years.Runaways are also more likely to be victims ofcrime and sexual exploitation (Hull, 1994).

Boys With ADHD

Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder(ADHD) has become a common chronic condi-tion among school-aged children. About 1.6million elementary school-aged children in theUnited States have been diagnosed with ADHD,with boys being three times as likely as girls tobe diagnosed (CDC, 2002b). The symptoms aremainly behavioral and include impulsivity,hyperactivity, poor impulse control, short atten-tion span, distractibility, irritability, and moodchanges. Many boys and parents have beencaught up in the ongoing debate about whetherADHD is a genuine medical problem thatshould be treated with medications and othertherapies, or instead is an example of the med-icalization of undesirable behaviors in children.

Gay and Bisexual Men

Lifestyle and sexual practices place gay andbisexual males at risk for diseases and behaviorstied to sexual behaviors. When HIV infectionbecame a leading cause of death among gay andbisexual men in North America during the1980s, health educators (both straight and gay)pushed for more health promotion and services.Workshops and educational materials were cre-ated that addressed mental and physical health,safe sex practices, and HIV prevention. Suchefforts to enhance the health of gay and bisexualmen were thwarted by homophobia, discrimina-tion, and governmental and public indifference.The links between masculinity and gay men’shealth risks, however, did not receive muchattention (Kimmel & Levine, 1989).

Although rates of sexually transmitteddisease declined in the 1980s among Americanmen who had sex with men (MSM), data gath-ered in some cities indicate a resurgent trend

toward increased prevalence rates since 1993(CDC,1999; Fox et al., 2001). These latter datamay mean that more MSM are engaging insexual behaviors that elevate risk for contagion,such as unprotected anal and oral sex. Otherresearchers suggest that some risky sexualbehaviors among MSM are related to polysub-stance abuse. An American Medical Associationcouncil report (1996) estimated the prevalence ofsubstance abuse among gay men and lesbians at28% to 35%, compared with a 10% to 21% ratefor heterosexuals. Some studies of gay commu-nities have found higher rates of substance use(e.g., heavy drinking, amphetamines, heroin,and Ecstasy) than among heterosexual males(Crosby, Stall, Paul, & Barrett, 1998; Klitzman,Pope, & Hudson, 2000; Stall & Wiley, 1998).

Sometimes gay and bisexual boys and menbecome targets for ridicule and gay bashing.Bias against sexual orientation was involvedwith 14.3% of the hate crimes perpetrated in theUnited States during 2000 (U.S. Department ofJustice, 2001).

Infertile Men

About 5.3 million American couples experi-ence difficulty conceiving a pregnancy (AmericanSociety for Reproductive Medicine, 1995).Although factors related to infertility can befound in both sexes, the bulk of extant researchfocuses on the psychosocial aspects of women’sexperiences with involuntary childlessness andin vitro fertilization (Daniluk, 1997; Nachtigall,Becker, & Wozny, 1992). In one of the few stud-ies of men’s experiences, Webb and Daniluk(1999) interviewed men who had never biologi-cally fathered a child and were the sole cause ofthe infertility in their marriages. They found thatmen experienced a “tremendous blow to theirmasculine identities” (p. 21), profound grief andloss, loss of control, personal inadequacy, isola-tion, a sense of foreboding, and desire to over-come and survive. They recommend that both“infertile men and women receive compassionatesupport when faced with negotiating this chal-lenging life transition” (p. 23).

Male Athletes

The linkages between athletic participationand health are complex and often paradoxical.On one hand, sports activities are associated with



building cardiovascular endurance, musculardevelopment, and emotional health. On the otherhand, certain sports elevate men’s risk for headinjury and neuropsychological deficit (boxing,soccer, and football), pathogenic weight lossbehavior (wrestling, horse racing), knee injuries(basketball, football), and erectile disorders(cycling).

Injuries are basically unavoidable in sportsbut, in traditional men’s sports, there has been atendency to glorify pain and injury, to inflictinjury on others, and to sacrifice one’s body inorder to “win at all costs.” The “no pain, nogain” philosophy, which is rooted in traditionalcultural equations between masculinity andsports, can jeopardize the health of athletes whoconform to its ethos (Sabo, 2003). Many maleathletes believe that the endurance of pain willhelp them achieve upward mobility, yet only ahandful ultimately make it to elite levels of suc-cessful competition (Sabo, 2003). Sometimesparents, especially fathers, push their sons into“physically abusive sports to harden them for acompetitive world and to eliminate any effemi-nate qualities” (p. 177).

The connections between sport, masculinity,and health are also evident in Klein’s (1993,1995) study of bodybuilders, who often use ana-bolic steroids, overtrain, and engage in extremedietary practices. In the bodybuilding subculture,masculinity is equated to maximum muscular-ity, and men’s striving for bigness and physicalstrength hides emotional insecurity and low self-esteem. The links between masculinity and mus-cle mass are currently embodied by the G. I. Joeaction figures that possess gigantic biceps andquadriceps, as well as by the overmuscled starsof the World Wrestling Federation. Klein laysbare a tragic irony in American culture; that is,that the powerful male athlete, a symbol ofstrength and health, has often sacrificed hishealth in pursuit of ideal masculinity (Messner &Sabo, 1994).

Some evidence suggests that the ill healthimpacts from youthful sports participation mayemerge later in life. The National Institute forOccupational Safety and Health, for example,conducted a retrospective study of formerNational Football League players who playedbetween 1959 and 1988. The data showed thatboth offensive and defensive linemen had a 52%greater risk for death from a heart attack thanthe general population. The physically largest

players were six times as likely as lesser-sizedplayers to develop heart disease (Freeman &Villarosa, 2002). Despite the prevalence andvisibility of sports injury, however, such longi-tudinal studies on the health impacts of partici-pation in predominantly male sports such asrugby, ice hockey, football, wrestling, and box-ing are rare. Researchers can only speculateabout how many athletes end up broken, bat-tered, drugged, and in varying states of chronicpain (Sabo, 2003). The parents of athletes,school officials, or public health planners havelittle evidence available to assess the long-rangehealth risks of athletes.

Male Caregivers

Life expectancy is increasing in postindus-trial societies and, as more elderly men andwomen develop chronic illnesses, they are aptto be cared for by family members in homesettings. Contrary to stereotypes that equatecaregiving to femininity, many males are care-givers for their loved ones. For example, an esti-mated 36% of the caregivers for persons withAlzheimer’s disease in the United States aremen (Kramer, 1997). A Commonwealth Fund(1992) survey found comparable numbers ofmen and women age 55 and over (28% and29%, respectively) were caring for a sick ordisabled friend, relative, parent, or spouse.

The research findings on male caregiversare mixed. Although they experience varyinglevels of stress, depression, and physical fatigue,they also derive emotional benefits (Kaye &Applegate, 1995). One study of men caring forpersons with Alzheimer’s disease showed thatalthough they rated their own health from “fair”to “excellent,” their symptoms of physical ill-ness increased by one third since taking onthe caregiver role (Shanks-McElroy & Strobino,2001). In summary, the experiences of malecaregivers are a key research area for men’shealth studies.

Male Victims of Sexual Assault

Sexual violence typically involves a male per-petrator and female victim. Whereas researchersand public health advocates began to recognizethe sexual victimization of women in Westerncountries during the late 1960s, it was not untilthe latter 1990s that the sexual abuse of males



began to receive systematic scrutiny from humanservice professionals and gender researchers(O’Leary, 2001). Recognition of the issue inCanada was spurred by media coverage of thesexual abuse of youth hockey players by theircoaches (L. Robinson, 1998). Prison reformershave recently decried man-on-man rape in NorthAmerican prisons (Sabo, Kupers, & London,2001). The alleged cover-ups by Catholic bishopsin the United States, in relation to some priests’pedophilic exploitation of boys, and the activismand litigation of victims have expanded publicawareness of the problem. Despite growingpublic recognition, research in this area is rare,and little is know about the prevalence of sexualabuse of boys and its psychosocial effects(Dhaliwal, Gauzas, Antonowicz, & Ross, 1996).Some studies show that males who suffer sexualvictimization as children experience lasting self-blame, feelings of powerlessness and stigmatiza-tion, suspicion of others, and confusion aboutsexual identity, and some eventually repeat thecycle by victimizing others as adolescents andadults (Mendel, 1995; Messerschmidt, 2000;O’Leary, 2001).

Men of Color

Variations in health and illness among men ofcolor in the United States are best understoodagainst the historical and social context of eco-nomic inequality. Generally, African Americans,Hispanics, and Native Americans are dispropor-tionately poor; they are more likely to work inlow-paying and dangerous occupations, live inpolluted environments, be exposed to toxicsubstances, experience the threat and reality ofcrime, and worry about meeting basic needs.Prejudice and cultural barriers can also compli-cate their access to available health care. Povertyis correlated with lower educational attainment,which in turn mitigates against adoption of pre-ventive health behaviors. Economic disadvan-tages, lower access to preventive care, racism,and underutilization of health care services putmany men of color at greater risk for illness anddeath. Data for both sexes show that, comparedwith whites, African Americans experience twiceas much infant mortality, are twice as likely to diefrom diabetes-related complications, have 80%more strokes, have 20% to 40% higher rates ofcancer, and have 5 to 7 years less life expectancy(Burrus, Liburd, & Burroughs, 1998; Chin,

Zhang, & Merrell, 1998; Straub, 1994; Wingoet al., 1996). Black women outlive black men byan average of 7 years (U.S. Department of Healthand Human Services [DHHS], 2000). The age-adjusted death rate is greater for men in allracial/ethnic groups: 1.7 times greater amongAfrican Americans, 1.8 times greater amongAsians, and 1.5 times greater among Latinos/Hispanics (Collins, Hall, & Neuhaus, 1999;Courtenay et al., 2002).

The neglect of public health in the UnitedStates is particularly pronounced in relation toAfrican Americans (Polych & Sabo, 1995, 2001).In Harlem of the early 1990s, for example,where 96% of the inhabitants were AfricanAmerican and 41% lived below the poverty line,the survival curve beyond the age of 40 formen was lower than that for men living inBangladesh (McCord & Freedman, 1990).Whereas accidents are the leading cause ofdeath among white males age 15 to 19, homi-cide is the leading cause among their same-ageAfrican American counterparts (National VitalStatistics, 2000, as cited by Franklin, 2002).Indeed, the number of young African Americanmale homicide victims in 1977 (N = 5,734) washigher than the number killed in the VietnamWar between 1963 and 1972 (N = 5,640)(Gibbs, 1988, p. 258).

African American men have higher ratesof alcoholism, infectious diseases, and drug-related conditions. In 1993, the AIDS rate forAfrican American males aged 13 and olderwas almost five times as high as the rate forCaucasian males (CDC, 1994). More than 36%of urban African American males are drug andalcohol abusers (Staples, 1995). Poor blackmales are less likely to receive health care, andwhen they do, they are more likely to receiveinferior care (Bullard, 1992; Gibbs, 1988;Staples, 1995). Recent data show black malesare falling behind black females in upwardsocial mobility, For example, black males areless likely than black females to hold profes-sional jobs, more likely to drop out of highschool (17% versus 13.5%), and less likely togo to college (25% versus 35%) (Close, 2003).For these reasons, young African Americanmales have been described as an “endangeredspecies” (Gibbs, 1988), while Boyd-Franklin andFranklin (2000) assert that the major priority ofAfrican American parents is to keep their sonsalive past the age of 25.



A similarly bleak health profile is foundwith Native Americans and Native Canadians.Alcohol is the number one killer of NativeAmericans between the ages of 14 and 44 (May,1986), with 42% of Native American male ado-lescents problem drinkers, compared with 34%of same-age Caucasian males (Lamarine, 1988).Native Americans (10–18 years of age) consti-tute 34% of in-patient admissions to adoles-cent detoxification programs (D. Moore, 1988).Compared with the “all race” population, NativeAmerican youth exhibit more serious problemsin the areas of depression, suicide, anxiety, sub-stance use, and general health status (Blum,Harman, Harris, Bergeissen, & Restrick, 1992).The rates of morbidity, mortality from injury,and AIDS are also higher (Metler, Conway, &Stehr-Green, 1991; Sugarman, Soderberg,Gordon, & Rivera, 1993). Similarly, Connell(2000) has observed an “exceptionally seriousrange of health problems” among Australianindigenous men when compared with the popu-lation as a whole (p. 182). These health problemsare correlates of poverty and social marginaliza-tion such as school dropout, hopelessness, theexperience of prejudice, poor nutrition, and lackof regular health care.

Prisoners

Rates of imprisonment vary around theworld. Nearly 1.6 million persons are impris-oned in the United States (600/100,000), com-pared with 1.2 million in China (103/100,000)and 1 million in Russia (690/100,000). Prisonpopulations tend to be disproportionately male,economically impoverished, and, in somenations, mainly racial and ethnic minorities. Inthe United States, the state and federal prisonpopulation expanded from 200,000 in 1970 to1,324,465 by the end of the year 2001, withabout 6.6 million Americans currently incarcer-ated or on parole or probation (SentencingProject, 2003). Blacks constituted 46% of themale prison population, and Hispanics another16% (Mauer, 1999). One in seven black males(13.4%) aged 25 to 29 is in prison, comparedwith 1 in 24 Hispanic men and 1 in 55 whitemen (Sentencing Project, 2003).

Prisons are also gendered institutions exhibit-ing earmarks of patriarchal institutions such assex segregation, hierarchical relationships, andsocial control through aggression and violence

(Sabo et al., 2001). The gendering of prison lifeis also evident in the constructions of masculin-ity among prisoners that revolve around a malecode for acting tough, being prepared to fight,avoiding intimacy, minding one’s own business,and avoiding feminine behaviors (Kupers, 1999;Newton, 1994). Traditional masculinity is alsoevoked by politicians who call for harsherpunishments of prisoners and less rehabilitativeapproaches (Levit, 2001).

Epidemiologically, the North Americancorrections system acts as a whirlpool of riskfor many men who, upon arrest, reside in struc-turally disadvantaged communities wherepoverty, unemployment, and racial oppressionalready yield higher morbidity and mortalityrates (e.g., tuberculosis, hepatitis, and AIDS)(Polych & Sabo, 2001). Because of unhealthyprison conditions, they are yet again exposed toheightened risk for illness (Bellin, Fletcher, &Safyer, 1993; Kupers, 1999; Toepell, 1992).For example, the incidence of active tuberculo-sis among New York State prisoners wentfrom 15/100,000 in the 1970s to 139/100,000in 1993, while 58% of new tuberculosis (TB)infections among medical personnel workingwith these inmates were attributed to occupa-tional exposure (Steenland, Levine, Sieber,Schulte, & Aziz, 1997). A study of New YorkCity jails, where the average inmate stay is 65days, found that 1 year of jail time doubled theprobability of contracting TB. The authorsexpressed concerns that, should a multidrug-resistant strain of TB enter the jail system, theresulting infection would be rapidly transmittedto the wider urban population as inmatesreturned to their homes (Bellin et al., 1993). Inaddition, despite the realities of man-on-mansexual relations (both consensual sex and rape)and intravenous drug use in prisons, inmates arerarely provided with condoms or clean needleworks, thus elevating risk for contagious disease(Expert Committee, 1994).

The failure of correctional institutions toprovide health education and effective treat-ment interventions is putting prisoners, as wellas the public at large, at greater risk for disease(Courtenay & Sabo, 2001; Polych & Sabo, 1995).Prisons are not sealed off from their surroundingcommunities, and men constantly move in andout of the corrections system, oftentimes carry-ing physical or mental illness with them. Theaverage prison sentence in the United States is



less than 5 years, and about 95% of all prisonersare eventually released, despite the trends towardlonger sentences (Kupers, 1999). Upon release,many infected male prisoners return to com-munities in which poor and racially oppressedpopulations of both males and females alreadyexhibit disproportionately higher rates of HIVinfection and AIDS (Zierler & Krieger, 1997).The cycles of risk and infection grind forward.

Despite the World Health Organization’scall for greater therapeutic and rehabilitativecorrections practices, prison policies in variousnations continue to emphasize punishment andendanger the public health. Two recent studiesexamine the interplay between masculinitiesand men’s health in Scotland (de Viggiani,2004) and Norway (Johnsen, 2001). Further-more, negative gendered health synergies areset into motion through which punitive, pre-dominantly male prison administrators maintainpolicies and conditions that jeopardize thehealth of male prisoners and corrections staff,and concomitantly, the women and children intheir lives.

GLOBALIZATION, GENDER, AND HEALTH

Globalization generally refers to the growinginterdependence among the world’s societies.The idea of interdependence does not neces-sarily connote international harmony or globalcommunity, but rather the recognition that whathappens in any single society is increasinglyinfluenced by its interactions with the manyother societies on the globe. For example, inter-national cooperation among health organiza-tions now makes early detection, control, andprevention of pandemics more effective; localdroughts or natural catastrophes are often metby worldwide relief campaigns. But globalinterdependence also reflects and reproducesexploitative relations between nations, fuelingeconomic and social inequalities that, in turn,can increase morbidity and mortality. Forexample, Farmer (1999) showed how the globaltourist industry influenced the historical devel-opment of HIV/AIDS in Haiti. Harsh livingconditions in Haiti’s marginalized economyhelped prostitution to take hold, and the influxof tourists in search of a tropical climate andcheap goods and services accelerated the spreadof HIV/AIDS among both Haitians and tourists.

Global economic inequalities profoundlyaffect men’s and women’s life chances in poorernations. Whereas mortality from infectious dis-ease is generally not a pressing health issue inFirst World nations, for example, diseases suchas acute respiratory infections, diarrheal dis-eases, tuberculosis, malaria, and meningitis aremajor killers in Third World countries (Platt,1996; Robbins, 2002). Geopolitical strugglescan also produce marked shifts in men’s andwomen’s health. The end of the Cold War andthe disintegration of the Soviet Union in theearly 1990s profoundly affected the publichealth. Whereas Russian boys born in 1972 hada life expectancy of 65 years, the figure plum-meted to 56 years for boys born in December of1998 (Garrett, 2000). A representative from theRussian Academy of Medical Sciences pre-dicted in the mid-1990s that, if the health crisiscontinued, “only 54 percent of the sixteen-year-olds (males) will live to pension age” (quoted inGarrett, 2000, p. 127). Alcoholism rates soared,with some estimates at 80% of all Russian men,and the alcohol poisoning rate approached 200times that of the rate of American males(Eberstadt, 1999). The hike in male alcoholismrates was accompanied by rising rates ofphysical abuse and rape of women and malesuicide (Garrett, 2000).

The Dawn of Global Awareness

In First World countries, most men’s healthscholars and advocates have not stretchedtheir analytic purview beyond local or nationalboundaries. Many are doing good work.Examples include those doing group work withprostate cancer patients in Toronto, Canada;coordinating a network of support groups formen recovering from heart disease in Rochester,New York; counseling poor, urban boys inCanberra, Australia, to reduce their risk forviolence; teaching San Francisco teenagersabout condom use and risk for HIV transmis-sion; conducting research on male caregivers inNorway; and giving a workshop to men in theU.S. armed services on men’s violence againstwomen. Despite the growth of men’s health stud-ies since its “birth” in the 1970s, however, globalawareness has been minimal.

Connell (1998) was the first to entreat thosestudying men and masculinities to think moreabout “men’s gender practices in terms of the



global structure and dynamics of gender” (p. 7).His concept of the “world gender order” ispainted against the historical backdrop of post-colonialism and neoliberalism. He argued thatnew forms of hegemonic masculinity are ascend-ing within the interdependent global matrices oftransnational corporations, world markets, andcapital and information flows. He created bridg-ing concepts to foster a global analysis. Theconcept of “transnational business masculinity”described a form of hegemonic masculinity com-mon among businessmen and political executiveswho dominate these emerging global institutions,a masculinity typified by “increasing egocen-trism, very conditional loyalties (even to thecorporation), and a declining sense of responsi-bility to others (except for purposes of imagemaking)” (p. 16). Furthermore, when a pattern ofmasculinity begins to become institutionalizedbeyond the confines of specific nations, itbecomes a “globalizing masculinity” competingfor hegemony within the world gender order(Connell, 1998, p. 12).

Connell’s vision has helped to steer the studyof men and masculinities toward a global analy-sis, and men’s health scholars have begun toheed the message. The International Journal ofMen’s Health was established in 2002, and itseditor, Will Courtenay, called for “comprehen-sive international and relational models ofmen’s health (that) would address micro andmacro health determinants at international,national, community, and individual levels”(Courtenay, 2002, p. 12). Two leading periodicalsthat focus on research on men and masculinities,the Journal of Men’s Studies and Men andMasculinities, have become more internationallyinclusive and more likely to publish health-relatedworks.

Probably the most ambitious research andpublic health policy initiative in men’s healthstudies to date is flowing from the EuropeanResearch Network on Men in Europe project(Hearn et al., 2002a, 2002b). An internationalnetwork of researchers has been gathering andanalyzing data from 10 European nations in fourkey areas, including health. The chief aim of theproject is “to develop empirical, theoretical, andpolicy outcomes on the gendering of men andmasculinities in Europe” (Hearn et al., 2002a,p. 6). Their comparative analysis of cross-national descriptive data is being developedwith a critical, relational, and global framework

that is intended to inform policy developmentthat will favorably affect the health of both menand women.

The Global Sex Industry: A Case Study

An analysis of the global sex industry canillustrate how the shifting patterns of genderrelations that are linked to globalization are pro-ducing negative impacts on men’s and women’shealth. Transnational business masculinity isalso earmarked by “increasingly libertarian sex-uality, with a growing tendency to commodifyrelations with women” (Connell, 1998, p. 16).Transnational business masculinity is becominga globalizing masculinity within the emergingglobal sex industry. Elements of this globalizingmasculinity are bound up with a variety ofemerging gendered health synergies within avariety of national settings.

Some of the institutional and cultural tenta-cles of the global sex industry should be outlinedbefore we point toward their gendered healthimpacts. Businessmen sometimes entertainthemselves or their associates in sex clubs ornude dancing establishments. Some arrange forprostitutes to “service” clients. In one case, min-ing industry executives drove a visiting NewYork City lawyer in a stretch limousine throughthe impoverished streets of a Peruvian city, enroute to a “girly club” in which women per-formed as totally nude table dancers. He wasshocked and dismayed by the total indifferenceof his male hosts to the suffering of the people onthe streets and the dehumanization of the womendancers, who also functioned as prostitutes (JohnLarkin, personal communication, October 19,1998).

Men’s sexual transactions within the globalsex industry can be direct or indirect. In Thailand,Brazil, or Haiti, foreign men with money maydirectly purchase sex from indigenous sex work-ers, or indirectly, these sex workers may be paidto pose naked or perform in pornographic videosthat are subsequently marketed and exportedto men in First World countries. For example,a hardcore porn video such as The Girls ofThailand may be sold by mail-order companies,shown by hotels that cater to businessmen, or pic-torially excerpted for “men’s magazines” that aresold openly in airports or drugstores. There isalso a growing market among Western males forpornography featuring “exotic” foreign females



(e.g., Asian, Latin American, or African women).The sexual “tastes” of many Western men arealso focusing on younger females, and the globalsex industry appears to be recruiting youngergirls into the ranks of its sex workers, models,and video performers.

Pornography is also rife in cyberspace, andthe Internet has become the major marketing anddistribution vehicle for the proliferating globalsex industry. For example, the combined entry ofthe search terms “teen,” “sex,” and “Asian” willyield hundreds of millions of Web sites. The fas-cination of many men for young girls, in partamplified and normalized by global pornographyflows, is related to reports of thousands of girlsand younger women being recruited, abducted,or sold into forced prostitution (Human RightsWatch, 1995, p. 196; Moreau, 1997).

The production and consumption of sexand pornography by Western men is also linkedto the operations of the global sex industry inSecond and Third World nations. The expandingdemand for sex and pornography among FirstWorld males provides economic incentives forthe sexual exploitation of sex workers in Secondand Third World economies. Local emissaries ofthe global sex industry are often linked to crimi-nal organizations within specific nations orurban centers. The controlling agents of local sexindustrial organizations (e.g., sex clubs, prostitu-tion rings, or porn video production companies),as well as their supportive criminal organizations,are likely to be men. Messerschmidt (1987) hasexamined how males use crime as a resource forconstructing masculinity and, consistent withWest and Zimmerman’s (1987) concept of“doing gender,” he argues that males actively usecrime in a variety of situations in order to makestatements about their status and identity as men.The social construction of hegemonic masculin-ity in various institutional sectors of the globalsex industry reflects, supports, and activelycultivates criminal forms of male behavior thatfoster the exploitation and health risks of manyfemales and males.

The growth and institutionalization of theglobal sex industry are linked both to economicinequalities across and within First, Second, andThird World nations and to gender inequalitieswithin respective gender orders. Sen (1997)argued that a “central feature of globalizationis the extent to which it draws upon anduses women’s labour flexibly” (p. 11). The

displacement of many women from more secureniches within local and global economies meansthat some will take jobs within the growing sexindustry. As Sen (1997) wrote,

Women across the world are under enormouspressure to earn incomes, just as social securitysystems are crumbling and public provisioning forhousehold work is becoming less and less secure.The failure to provide adequately for the resources,labour time, and emotional needs that bearing,raising, and caring for human beings require is oneof the major in-built flaws of capitalism. . . .(p.11)

And so Russian girls are taking to the streetsas prostitutes amid economic collapse, and EastAfrican women are emigrating to become sexworkers in the red light district of Amsterdam,catering to male tourists from around the world.Similarly, in the streets of New York City, SãoPaulo, or Bangkok, economically marginalizedboys and men are also being drawn into andexploited at lower ranks of the sex industry assex workers, actors, and petty drug pushers orusers. Sex work and life within the sexual under-ground bring with them elevated risk for disease,victimization by violence, and early mortality.

Finally, Sen (1997) observed that the “grow-ing hegemony of tastes, consumption patterns,and aspirations, as well as an objectification ofwomen’s bodies and female sexuality, have beenmade possible by globalization of media andnew communications technology” (p. 12). Herobservation is especially salient in relation to theglobal sex industry, where the emerging culturaltemplate for human relationships being gener-ated can be said to objectify men’s bodies andmale sexuality in ways that erode men’s capacityto empathize and care for women (or for malepartners). One result may be that men’s motiva-tions to enter into long-standing intimate rela-tionships, to form and maintain stable familyrelationships, are being stunted.

The resulting health impacts flowing fromthe growth of the global sex industry includeelevated risk for HIV infection, STDs, victim-ization from men’s violence, drug abuse, andcrime. There is clearly a risk for early mortalityfor both female and male workers within the sexindustry and, to a lesser extent, the predomi-nantly male consumers of sexual services andproducts. Finally, there is mounting risk for thewider population of citizens, especially women,



who may have little or no contact with theglobal sex industry but who nonetheless are atincreasing risk for contagion and crime thatare being generated by the global sex industry.Within the emerging world gender order, it is nolonger absurd to ponder the probability of afaithful wife and mother of three residing in theAmerican Midwest contracting the HIV virus ora drug-resistant form of hepatitis C from a busi-nessman husband who, in the pursuit of hege-monic masculinity, had unprotected sex with aprostitute in Santiago, Chile.

CONCLUSION: THEORY,GENDER HEALTH EQUITY, AND ADVOCACY

Garcia-Moreno (1998) argued that the purposeof gender analysis is to unravel the ways thatinequalities arise as a result of unequal powerrelations between the sexes and how one’s lifechances are influenced by being a member ofone sex or another. Consonant with this goal,advocates for gender health equity have gener-ally sought to improve the health of women, toensure that the sexes receive similar levels andquality of health care services, to foster researchon women’s health and program evaluation, andto secure comparable resource allocation to meetwomen’s health needs (Whitehead, 1992).Proponents of gender health equity call for more“gender aware” policies, but their messages arenot always heard by the males who predominatein the leadership and planning circles of nationaland international health governance organiza-tions (Pfannenschmidt & McKay, 1997).

In recent years, some men in internationalhealth organizations have pointed to women’sgreater longevity compared with men’s incountries such as Sri Lanka, Russia, and Pakistan(Evans, 1998). When viewed simply as an out-come measure, data showing greater longevityfor women seem to confound or underminewomen’s call for prioritizing women’s health ini-tiatives. The surface question becomes whetherthe appeals for increased resources for women’shealth should be heeded in light of men’s greatermortality. This type of thinking, however, canfoster a tendency to see issues of gender equityin categorical and binary terms, that is, as menversus women.

When concerns about men’s greater mortalityrates enter the dialogue around gender health

equity, women’s health advocates sometimesinfer that a focus on men’s health could under-mine the rationale for gender health equity; forexample, a heightened concern for men’s healthmight detract from women’s efforts to securegreater awareness and resource allocation forwomen’s health needs. Scientifically, the basicquestion is how the study of men’s health can beintegrated into a theory of women’s health orgender and health. Or, as Sabo and Gordon(1995) asked, “How can men’s health studiesposition itself in relation to women’s health stud-ies, women’s studies, gender studies, or the fem-inist paradigm?” (p. 16). Politically, the issuesgenerally revolve around finding a place for menwithin feminist theory and practice, and morespecifically, mapping out men’s roles in relationto women’s health movements.

More research on men’s health is issuingfrom around the globe, from the streets of NorthAmerican cities to Central African villages.Public health policymakers are beginning todraw on the emerging research and theory onmasculinities and health in their work, andprogress is being made on the theoretical front,most recently through the work of JonathanWatson (2000). He discusses several dominantperspectives that shape men’s health, includingthe biomedical paradigm, sociostructural theo-ries, epidemiology and risk discourse, feministperspectives, and critical studies of men andmasculinities. Without falling prey to reduction-ism, he shows how embodiment is the “personalground of culture” (p. 146), linking everydaybehaviors and lay knowledge to the wider worldsof marriage, family, work, and economic condi-tions. Watson’s critical analysis unearths the lim-itations of both neoliberal approaches to healthpromotion (i.e., it’s up to individuals to managerisk) and new public health agendas that pre-sume that mainly socioeconomic conditionsshape health outcomes.

The development of relational and globalmodels of gender and health promises to addressthe important issues of gender health equity.Some Latin American scholars, for example,have begun to question “the exclusive emphasison women in reproductive health research, seek-ing instead to examine men’s influence onwomen’s health and on reproductive decisions ingeneral” (Viveros Vigoya, 2001, p. 251). Whilethey critique and problematize men’s adoption ofdestructive forms of traditional masculinity, they



also reveal how men’s and women’s healthbehaviors and outcomes are interrelated when itcomes to negotiations around contraceptive use,decisions about abortion, and parenting (Tolbert,Morris, & Romero, 1994; Viveros & Gomez,1998), thus opening a conceptual and policydoor that has the potential to enhance both men’sand women’s health and make gender healthequity more of a reality in Latin America andelsewhere.

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20MASCULINITIES AND

INTERPERSONAL VIOLENCE

WALTER S. DEKESEREDY

MARTIN D. SCHWARTZ

Choose a form of violence and examine international statistics on the gender of itsperpetrators. You will always find a severely unbalanced sex ratio, generally with 90%to 100% of the violence being perpetrated by men and less than 10% being perpetratedby women. From time to time, a small number of violent acts committed by women gainnewspaper headlines and perhaps even a few scholarly articles on the rise in femalecrime. The reality behind this is that female violent crime rate is so rare that somestates and provinces have managed to survive for a century without any prison forwomen. The few female criminals who needed to be incarcerated were shipped off tolarger adjacent states and paid for via a per diem rate.

—Bowker (1998a, p. xiv)

353

THE GOOD AND BAD OF MEN

There are few fields in which men around theglobe are not making outstanding contributionsevery day: technology, medicine, education,science, entertainment, and sports are just a few.Among these areas of male accomplishment,profeminist men are playing a vital role in theongoing struggle to end violence against women,engaging in activities such as protesting por-nography, supporting and participating inwoman abuse awareness programs, and pro-testing against racist practices and discourses(DeKeseredy, Schwartz, & Alvi, 2000; Johnson,1997; Thorne-Finch, 1992). Despite all of thisgood, however, much of what is bad in the world,

from genocide to terrorism, and includinginterpersonal violence, is essentially the productof men and some of their masculinities. A largesocial science literature shows that men, espe-cially those who adhere to the ideology of famil-ial patriarchy,1 perpetrate the bulk of the violencein intimate heterosexual relationships through-out the world (DeKeseredy & MacLeod, 1997;Renzetti, Edleson, & Kennedy Bergen, 2001).

Similarly, men “have a virtual monopoly” onthe commission of crimes of the powerful, suchas price-fixing and the illegal dumping of toxicwaste (Messerschmidt, 1997). We would behard-pressed to find more than a handful ofwomen who are involved in acts of state terror-ism,2 such as the one below, described by a man


who resided in one of Argentina’s brutaldetention centers in the mid-1970s:

[T]hey would use the “submarino” (holding ourheads under water), hang us up by our feet, hit uson the sexual organs, beat us with chains, put salton our wounds and use any other method thatoccurred to them. They would also apply 220-voltdirect current to us, and we know that sometimes,as in the case of Irma Necich—they used whatthey called the “piripipi,” a type of noise torture.(Cited in Herman, 1982, p. 114)

How often do we hear about women partici-pating in mass killings like the one at ColumbineHigh School on April 20, 1999? How manywomen took part in the plot to fly planes into theWorld Trade Center and the Pentagon onSeptember 11, 2001? At the risk of belaboringthe issue, the most important point to consider isthat data sets generated by a variety of scientificmeans all show that men’s involvement in alltypes of violent crime greatly exceeds that ofwomen (Kimmel, 2000).

What accounts for this glaring difference?One argument is that most men are not violent,and thus those who beat, rob, kill, torture, rape,or behave in other injurious ways are deviantmembers of an otherwise harmonious society(Websdale & Chesney-Lind, 1998). There is akernel of truth to this statement. For example,serial killers like John Wayne Gacy are veryrare, committing less than 1% of all U.S. homi-cides (Fox & Levin, 1999; Jenkins, 1994).

Yet male violence itself is not particularlyrare. Just as one example of male violence, eachyear at least 11% of North American women inmarital/cohabiting relationships are physicallyabused by their male partners. Similar figureshave been reported in a variety of other English-speaking countries. Violence is endemic toour society (DeKeseredy & MacLeod, 1997;Gordon, 1988). In a Canadian national represen-tative sample survey of undergraduate students,about 28% of the females said that they had beensexually assaulted in some manner in the pastyear alone by a male boyfriend or dating partner,while 11% of the men admitted to such sexualviolence in the past year (DeKeseredy & Kelly,1993).3 This does not include physical, unadmit-ted, economic, or psychological violence.

Such data call into question popular notionsthat men who harm female intimates are “differ-ent,” “deviant,” or “sick.” Who are these violent

men? They are not generally men who sufferfrom mental illness. Of course, some abusivemen have clinical pathologies (Aldarondo &Mederos, 2002a), but generally no more than10% of all incidents of intimate violence can beblamed on mental disorders, which means thattheories stressing this causal factor cannotaccount for at least 90% of the events (Gelles &Straus, 1988; Pagelow, 1993). In fact, in anothersetting we suggested that woman abuse oncampus is so rampant that an argument might bemade that men who do not engage in womanabuse could be seen as the deviants (Godenzi,Schwartz, & DeKeseredy, 2001).

Mental illness is not the only possible expla-nation for the pervasiveness of male violence.Others include such biological arguments ashigh testosterone levels and evolutionary malecompetition for sexual access to women.4 Theseperspectives are, like some neoconservative the-ories of poverty (e.g., Herrnstein & Murray,1994),5 little more than ideologies “dressed upin . . . scientific regalia” (Devine & Wright,1993, p. 125). Men are not naturally aggressive.As Katz and Chambliss (1991) discoveredthrough an in-depth review of the research onthe relationship between biology and crime,

An individual learns to be aggressive in the samemanner that he or she learns to inhibit aggression.One is not a natural state, and the other culturallyimposed: both are within our biological potential.. . . Violence, sexism and racism are biologicalonly in the sense that they are within the range ofpossible human attitudes and behaviors. But non-violence, equality and justice are also biologicallypossible. (p. 270)

British psychotherapist Roger Hottocks(1994) made the bridging argument thatalthough the above is true, certain societies aremuch more likely to teach violence to men thanothers. “Therefore I insist: it is not men who areintrinsically violent, but certain societies whichare violent and warlike and genocidal” (p. 136).

There are other theories about male violence.Evolutionary theorists (e.g., Daly & Wilson,1988) claim that male violence is the result ofcompetition for sexual access to women. Yetmen kill not only men but also women. Whydo so many men beat, rape, or kill femaleintimates? As Kimmel (2000) reminds us, “Tomurder or assault the person you are trying toinseminate is a particularly unwise reproductive



strategy” (p. 244). Another challenge toevolutionary theory is that many societies havemuch lower rates of male violence than thoseof the United States. So if “boys will be boys,”they “will be so differently” (Kimmel, 2000),depending on where they live, their peer groups,social class position and race, and a host ofother factors (Messerschmidt, 1993).

Missing in the above brief review of theoriesand in most media accounts of the causes ofmale violence (e.g., drugs, video games) is anydiscussion of the role of masculinities in con-temporary society (Messerschmidt, 2000). Themain objective of this chapter is to review andcritique the extant sociological literature on therelationship between this important factor andvariations in interpersonal violence acrossdifferent social class and racial/ethnic back-grounds. Before doing so, however, it is firstnecessary to define interpersonal violence andexplain why masculinities studies provide a richsocial scientific understanding of this problem.

UNDERSTANDING

INTERPERSONAL VIOLENCE: THE

CONTRIBUTION OF MASCULINITIES STUDIES

Although the definition of interpersonal vio-lence has been much debated, here it means “thethreat, attempt, or use of physical force by oneor more persons that results in physical or non-physical harm to one or more persons” (Weiner,Zahn, & Sagi, 1990, p. xiii). More specifically,the behaviors examined in this chapter are non-lethal forms of male-to-female physical andsexual assaults (e.g., wife beating and rape),homicide, and youth gang violence, which wechose to examine because these harms have thusfar garnered the most empirical and theoreticalattention by social scientists interested in mas-culinities and crime. This is not to say, however,that we do not also view other highly injuriousbehaviors as interpersonal violence.

Part of the problem in defining interpersonalviolence is that there are many behaviors thatmay seem extremely violent but nevertheless arenot viewed that way by many or most people(Bessant & Cook, 2001). Certainly, killing theenemy in warfare is violent, but that is groundsfor being awarded a medal. Sports often provideour most ambiguous area, where exceptional

levels of very harmful behavior are often seen as“just part of the game.” It is relatively commonfor events to “occur in the name of sport, which,if they were perpetrated under any other bannershort of open warfare, would be roundly con-demned as crimes against humanity” (Atyeo,1979, p. 11). Here are two professional ice hockeyexamples:

• Boston’s “Terrible” Ted Green and WayneMaki of St. Louis engaged in a stick duel duringan exhibition game in Ottawa. Green was struckon the head by a full-swinging blow. His skullfractured, he almost died.

• Boston’s Dave Forbes and Minnesota’sHenry Boucha engaged in a minor altercation forwhich both were penalized. Forbes threatenedBoucha from the penalty box; then, leaving thebox at the expiration of the penalties, he lungedat Boucha from behind, striking him near theright eye with the butt end of his stick. Bouchafell to his knees, hands over face; Forbes jumpedon his back, punching until pulled off by anotherplayer. Boucha was taken to a hospital, where hereceived 25 stitches and the first of several eyeoperations (Smith, 1983, pp. 15-16).

Unfortunately, cases such as these are not iso-lated incidents. It is exacerbated because seriousviolence is widely regarded as a legitimate oracceptable part of many contact sports. Further,it is not difficult to identify many other injuriousbehaviors that sizable numbers of people do notregard as violent, and to find that the number ofpeople who regard them as violent differs radi-cally from society to society (Newman, 1976).For example, although a broad range of healthworkers and parents in North America regardsuch behavior as abusive and violent, and it hasbeen found to be unacceptable by the Committeeof Ministers of the Council of Europe,6 manyNorth Americans not only see nothing wrongwith slapping or spanking a child, but they alsomay regard such behavior as necessary, normal,and good (Straus, 1991).

Nevertheless, there is considerable agreementabout the seriousness of the violent behaviorsdiscussed in this chapter. In other words, they are“consensus crimes.” This means that most citi-zens share norms and values that legally prohibitthese forms of conduct, and impose penalties onthose who violate laws relating to them.

Masculinities and Interpersonal Violence • 355


Of course, it is also important to note thatalthough men commit most violent crimes andthat although such violence is widespread, thisstill does not mean that all men are violent(Connell, 2000). For example, homicide is aninfrequent violent crime, and thus “we are nottalking about a tendency that is either universalor inevitable” (Newburn & Stanko, 1994a, p. 4).Further, there is no simple standard of being aman that guides all male behavior, includingviolence (Messerschmidt, 1993; Polk, 2003). Infact, although society functions in many waysto promote male violence, there remain in anysituation other means of expressing one’smasculinity (Connell, 2000).

For example, we noted earlier that pro-fessional hockey players can be exceptionallyviolent. They live in an atmosphere heavilyinfluenced by hegemonic masculinity (Connell,1995), and they learn through pressure fromowners, sportswriters, coaches, teammates,fans, and parents to be aggressive, carry thecapacity for violence, strive for achievementand status, avoid all things feminine and partic-ularly emotions deemed feminine (e.g., crying),and actively engage in homophobia (Connell,1990; Levant, 1994). Official statistics are kepton penalty minutes, and executives and sportsmagazines talk approvingly about how teamsneed to hire “enforcers” who may have no talentfor ice skating or hockey but can intimidateothers through the use of violence. To pick oneisolated but not unusual example, one ofDetroit’s mainstream newspapers “ran a pictureof bleeding Colorado goalie Patrick Roy underthe huge headline, BLOODY GOOD” (Reilly,2003, p. 24). What this leads to is a sport wherefights are very common.

Yet, some hockey players will not engage infighting with an opponent because they can “domasculinity” in other ways. A prime example isWayne Gretzky, who recently ended his stellarcareer holding the record for most goals scoredin the National Hockey League (NHL). Gretzkyrarely fought. His amazing abilities to scoregoals and help his teams win games and cham-pionships were key resources at his disposal todemonstrate that he was “manly.” Those lackinghis skills, but under intense pressure fromemployers, teammates, and spectators to fightthose who challenge them, commonly feel thatthey would be derided as “of doubtful moralworth” and “relatively useless to the team”

(Smith, 1983, p. 42) if they walked away fromviolent “honor contests” (Polk, 2003).

Similarly, why are corporate executivesunlikely to participate in street fights? The issuecan be more complex for some AfricanAmerican athletes, rap artists, and entertainerswho attempt to derive their credibility (“cred”)among fans from their willingness to engage inviolence. Yet, although most skilled athletesof color are not likely to commit violent acts onthe street, such violence is a resource that canbe used by poor men of color who lack otherresources for “accomplishing masculinity”(Messerschmidt, 1993).

Obviously, more will be said about masculin-ities and violence in the rest of this chapter, but itmust be emphasized that masculinities studiesdemonstrate the fallacy of relying on essentialistexplanations such as those briefly reviewedearlier. Further, masculinities studies show thatalthough men are encouraged to live up to theideals of hegemonic masculinity and can be sanc-tioned for not doing so, violence is just one ofmany ways of “doing gender” in a culturally spe-cific way (Sinclair, 2002; West & Zimmerman,1987). Moreover, masculinities studies show usthat the decision to be violent is affected by classand race relations that structure the resourcesavailable to accomplish what men feel providestheir masculine identities (Messerschmidt, 1997;Schwartz & DeKeseredy, 1997).

Hegemonic masculine discourses and prac-tices, including violence, are learned throughpersonal and impersonal interactions withsignificant others such as teachers, journalists,parents, entertainers, and politicians (Connell,1995). However, the all-male patriarchal sub-culture is one of the most important agents ofsocialization (Bowker, 1983; DeKeseredy &Schwartz, 2002; Sinclair, 2002). As described inthe next section, membership in such a peergroup, regardless of its social class composition,promotes and legitimates the physical and sexualvictimization of female intimates.

VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN IN

INTIMATE HETEROSEXUAL RELATIONSHIPS

There is no question that many women arevictimized by men within intimate relationshipseach year, including the physical or sexual assaultof about 10% of those in marital/cohabiting



relationships (DeKeseredy & MacLeod, 1997)and the physical or sexual assault of womenwhen they try to leave or have left their spousesor live-in lovers.7 University/college datingrelationships are also marked by high numbersof physical and sexual assaults (DeKeseredy &Schwartz, 1998b; Koss, Gidycz, & Wisniewski,1987). Why do these assaults take place?Although there seem to be several key reasons,many quantitative and qualitative studies havefound that one of the most important is malepeer support, “the attachments to male peers andthe resources that these men provide which encour-age and legitimate woman abuse” (DeKeseredy,1990, p. 130).

The relationship between male peer supportand various forms of violence against womenvaries across different social classes and set-tings. For example, in universities and collegesacross North America, the identified sexualabusers typically are white middle-class men,especially if they belong to the “hypererotic”subcultures that exist on most campuses(Godenzi et al., 2001). As Kanin (1985) found,these all-male homosocial cohorts produce highor exaggerated levels of sexual aspiration, andmembers expect to engage in a very high levelof consensual sexual intercourse, or what is tothem sexual conquest. Of course, for most men,these goals are impossible to achieve. Whenthey fall short of what they see as their friends’high expectations, and perhaps short of whatthey believe their friends are actually achieving,some of these men experience relative depriva-tion. This sexual frustration caused by a “refer-ence-group-anchored sex drive” can result inpredatory sexual conduct (Kanin, 1967, p. 433).These men are highly frustrated not becausethey are deprived of sex in some objective sense,but because they feel inadequate in theirattempts to get what their peers have definedas the proper amount of sex to establish theirheterosexual masculinity. Hence, sexual assaultscommitted by socially and economically privi-leged white male undergraduates are largelyfunctions of a fear of appearing to be a “misfit”or of being “left out” (Messerschmidt, 2000).

Like the more affluent college students,impoverished men also form “specialized rela-tionships with one another” (Messerschmidt,1993, p. 110). Such close bonds, under certainconditions, also promote violence againstwomen as a means of meeting “masculinity

challenges,” although these challenges aredifferent from those encountered by members ofhypererotic subcultures (Messerschmidt, 2000).For example, men in public housing are signifi-cantly more likely to physically assault theirfemale partners than those who live in middle-and upper-class communities (DeKeseredy,Alvi, Schwartz, & Perry, 1999). To explain thisproblem, DeKeseredy and Schwartz (2002)offered an empirically informed EconomicExclusion/Male Peer Support Model, describedin Figure 20.1.8

Briefly, DeKeseredy and Schwartz (2002)contended that recent major economic transfor-mations (e.g., the shift from a manufacturing toa service-based economy) displace working-class men and women, who often end up inurban public housing or other “clusters ofpoverty” (Sernau, 2001).9 Unable to supporttheir families economically and live up to theculturally defined masculine role as breadwin-ner, socially and economically excluded menexperience high levels of life-events stressbecause their “normal paths for personal powerand prestige have been cut off” (Raphael,2001b, p. 703). For example, because they can-not afford to look after both their partners andtheir children, some women evict male inti-mates or “invert patriarchy” in other ways bymaking decisions for the household and havingthe lease and car in their names (Edin, 2000).Such actions often are perceived by patriarchalmen as “dramatic assaults” on their “sense ofmasculine dignity” (Bourgois, 1995, p. 215).

Some men deal with stress caused by theirpartners’ inversions of patriarchy by leavingthem, while others use violence as a means ofsabotaging women’s attempts to gain economicindependence (Bourgois, 1995; Raphael, 2001a).Other men, however, turn to their male peers foradvice and guidance on how to alleviate stresscaused by female challenges to patriarchalauthority. Large numbers of socially and eco-nomically excluded male peers in and aroundpublic housing view wife beating as a legitimatemeans of repairing “damaged patriarchal mas-culinity” (Messerschmidt, 1993; Raphael,2001b), and they often serve as role modelsbecause many of them beat their own intimatepartners (DeKeseredy, Alvi, Schwartz, &Tomaszewski, 2003).

In sum, male physical and sexual violenceagainst women is very much a function of men’s



deep-rooted concern with “presenting an imageof themselves as men within their social net-works” (Sinclair, 2002, p. 20), although patriar-chal peer groups’ definitions of what it meansto be a man vary across social class categories.Similarly, there are variations in motives fordifferent types of homicide, determined by thestructure and location of one’s peer group.

HOMICIDE

Stanko (1994) makes it clear that although menare violent to women, they are in fact muchmore violent to each other. Any discussion ofmale violence must include some understandingof how men experience violence, both as perpe-trators and as victims. Not only can’t we fullyexplore the nature of violence in men’s liveshere, but we can’t even describe all the variousscenarios of the form of violence we choose tocenter on here: homicide. Instead, we focus on afew subthemes of two common ones identified

by Polk (1994): (a) homicide in the context ofsexual intimacy and (b) confrontational homi-cide. Although Polk studied Australian men,many masculinities scholars argue that his find-ings are just as relevant to the discussion of menin other countries.

Male proprietariness is closely related tosexual intimacy homicide, especially during thestages of separation or divorce. M. Wilson andDaly (1992) define it as “the tendency [of men]to think of women as sexual and reproductive‘property’ they can own and exchange” (p. 85).More generally, proprietariness refers to “notjust the emotional force of [the male’s] ownfeelings of entitlement but to a more pervasiveattitude [of ownership and control] towardsocial relationships [with intimate femalepartners]” (M. Wilson & Daly, 1992, p. 85).Jealousy also plays a major role in a man’s deci-sion to kill a woman who threatens his powerand control by seeking to leave or actually leav-ing him. As Polk (2003, p. 134) pointed out,“[T]ime and time again the phrase ‘if I can’t


BroaderEconomicChange

Formal LaborMarket

Exclusion

Men’s Inability to FulfillBreadwinning Role

Social Isolation inPublic

Housing

Stress

Patriarchal MalePeer Support

Woman Abuse

Figure 20.1 Economic Exclusion/Male Peer Support Model


have you, no one will’ echoes through the data”on homicide in the context of sexual intimacy.

However, although intimate homicide is oneof the most common types of murder committedby men, it is a relatively rare crime. If we live ina patriarchal society that promotes male propri-etariness, why then do only some men kill theirestranged female partners? Certainly there arevariations in male proprietariness (DeKeseredy &Schwartz, 1998b; Smith, 1990), which meansthat female challenges through attempts or suc-cessful departures from a relationship, like allsingle factors, cannot account for estrangementhomicide (DeKeseredy, Rogness, & Schwartz,in press). This is why it is necessary to focussimultaneously on all-male subcultural dynam-ics when attempting to explain the linkagebetween masculinities and homicides. Forexample, as stated previously, many patriarchalmen have male friends with similar beliefs andvalues, and these peers reinforce the notion thatwomen’s exiting is a threat to a man’s mascul-inity (DeKeseredy & Schwartz, 2002). Again,patriarchal male peer support contributes tothe perception of damaged masculinity andmotivates possessive men to “lash out againstthe women . . . they can no longer control”(Bourgois, 1995, p. 214). Another point to con-sider is that if a patriarchal man’s peers see himas a failure with women because his partnerwants to leave or has left him, he is likely to beridiculed because he “can’t control his woman.”

Peers can also directly or indirectly influencePolk’s (1994) second type: male-to-male con-frontational homicides, which account for morethan 50% of all murders. Such killings are sim-ilar to “interpersonal disputes,” which, accord-ing to Wallace (1986):

formed the basis of the majority of killings outsidethe domestic sphere. A large number of thesequarrels were unpremeditated events that eruptedbetween strangers or acquaintances, usually whilesocializing in or around a club or hotel, or in thehome of either victim or offender. The content ofthe disputes in these circumstances may be lessimportant than the male context in which theyoccurred. (p. 155)

A common variant of confrontational homi-cide involves a “pub fight,” an event Polk (2003)referred to as an “honor contest.” Typicallycommitted by young working-class men whoare under the influence of alcohol and who have

histories of violence, such murders are triggeredby a perceived challenge to their masculinityor honor. This challenge may involve an insult,a “minor jostle,” a comment to a girlfriend orwife, or “challenging eye contact” (Polk, 2003,p. 135). Honor contest participants do not intendto kill each other. Rather, their main goal is tofight, and male peers often serve as bystandersin these tragic events. Consider the follow-ing scenario described by Polk (1994). Anthonyand his friends were returning from a localOctoberfest when they met up with anothergroup that included Don and Peter, who, it turnsout, were armed with broken pool cues andknives. A confrontation grew out of a youngwoman in Anthony’s group who wanted to ridea bike belonging to Peter. Insults and challengeswere traded back and forth. Polk (1994)describes what happened next:

The exchanges escalated into pushing and shov-ing. Anthony said: “If you want to have a go, I’llhave a go back.” Don then threw a punch atAnthony, and the fight was on. At first it was ageneral group scuffle, and at one point Anthonybroke a beer stein (obtained at Octoberfest) overthe head of a member of Don’s group.

The main group conflict began to simmerdown, but Anthony and Don sought each other outand continued their personal dispute. At first Donwas armed with the broken pool cue, but Anthonywas able to take it off him. Peter then handed Dona knife. Witnesses agree that at this point, Anthonykept repeating to Don: “I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you.”Don was able to come in close to Anthony, how-ever, and slashed out with his knife, stabbingAnthony in the left thigh, right hand, and finallythe left side of his chest. By now all eyes of thegroup were on the two. They say Anthony stag-gered, and he began to bleed profusely. The twogroups broke off the fight, each going their sepa-rate ways. . . . Don had no idea of the seriousnessof the injuries he had caused, and was said by hisfriends to be “shocked” when he was informed thenext day of Anthony’s death. (pp. 60-61)

Sometimes, male peers function in moreways than as a social audience. Above, Peterhanded Don a knife during an honor contest.Although other scenarios of homicide do notinvolve male peers, even when perpetrators actalone, peer influence should not be ruled out asa causal factor. Many men and male youthscommit violent crimes in anticipation of the



status they will gain (or lose) from friends, whomay not be present at the scene (Warr, 2002).

YOUTH GANG VIOLENCE

Before explaining how male adolescent involve-ment in gang violence is a means of accom-plishing masculinity, it is first necessary todefine the term “gang.” Many use this termloosely to refer to groups of young men who“hang around” street corners, malls, or otherpublic places (Schissel, 1997). However, don’tadults “hang out” in public places too? Whyaren’t they also defined as gang members?

Not surprisingly, many social scientists sharplyoppose popular stereotypes of male youth gangs,and they do not view all groups of unsupervisedyoung men interacting on the street as members ofdeviant or criminal cohorts (Short, 1997). Still,there is much debate among sociologists andcriminologists about what constitutes a gang.10

However, most researchers agree with Warr’s(2002) assertion that “gangs constitute only asmall fraction of delinquent groups, and that aganglike structure is not a prerequisite for delin-quent behavior” (p. 5). Thus, following Curryand Spergel (1988, p. 383), we define a violentyouth gang as “a group or collectivity of personsengaged in significant illegitimate or criminalactivities, mainly threatening and violent.” Ofcourse, as much as they engage in these activities,most violent gang members spend much of theirtime engaging in conformist activities such as lis-tening to music, playing video games, and watch-ing television (Jackson, 1989; Shakur, 1994).

Just because young men with similar socialbackgrounds associate with each other does notmean that they are gang members or that theyare violent. In fact, it is normal and healthy foryoung men to want to interact with their peers(Huff, 1993). Benefits derived from strong peerinteractions include the following:

• They help facilitate a successful transitionfrom childhood to adulthood.

• Peers are important sources of emotionalsupport during a time in young men’s lives inwhich many rapid changes are occurring (e.g.,puberty, physical maturation, and the transitionto higher levels of education).

• Interactions with peers help adolescents learnabout the norms of work, dating, sex, and lifein general (Warr, 2002, pp. 23-25).

Most serious crime by young men (e.g.,violence) is committed in groups (Bursik &Grasmick, 2001; Zimring, 1998), but the vastmajority of young men who “flock together” donot belong to violent gangs, are not perpetratorsof serious crimes, and do not see themselves aspart of a gang. Thus, many popular perceptionsof male youth street gangs are shaped by stereo-types (Shelden et al., 2001). These observationsare hardly trivial because they contribute to anongoing moral panic about “kids out of control,”and they target and scapegoat visible minorities(Schissel, 1997).

For example, newspapers often feature head-lines such as “Asian gang members responsiblefor violent attack.” Unfortunately, such racialreferences are common in the popular media.One is not likely to find headlines referring to“white youth offenders” or “European Americangangs” (Schissel, 1997). Racism is part and par-cel of much of the popular discourse on violentyouth gangs, and average white citizens responddifferently to three or four young men of colormingling together on the street than they do togroups of white youths doing so (Shelden et al.,2001).

To summarize all the rapidly growing litera-ture on how masculinities influence young men’sinvolvement in violent gang activities in a shortsection of a chapter is a daunting, if not impossi-ble, task.11 Instead, we address key themes thatemerge from this body of knowledge. The firstand perhaps most important one is status frustra-tion caused by economically and socially mar-ginalized young men’s inability to accomplishmasculinity at school through academic achieve-ment, participation in sports, and involve-ment in extracurricular activities (Cohen, 1955;Messerschmidt, 1993). This problem plaguesboth whites and minorities. As Cohen (1955)pointed out decades ago, some youths try to dealwith this problem by seeking extra help fromtheir teachers, while others quit school and comeinto contact with other “dropouts” who sharetheir frustration. A subculture soon emerges thatgrants members status based on accomplishinggender through violence and other illegitimatemeans. However, some dropouts avoid gang par-ticipation because they construct their masculin-ity through such behaviors as legitimate working.

Still, for many young men living in inner-cityor rural communities damaged by deindustrial-ization, the frustration spawned by the inability



to accomplish masculinity in the school setting isexacerbated by their failure to find a steady well-paying job, which is another important theme thatemerges from the extant literature on masculini-ties and gangs. These young men are hit with a“double whammy” that puts them at even greaterrisk of teaming up with others to create a sub-culture that promotes, expresses, and validatesmasculinity through violent means (Hagedorn,1988; Messerschmidt, 1993). In communitiesdamaged by deindustrialization, there is also “agreater proportion of peer groups that subscribeto violent macho ideals” (Schwendinger &Schwendinger, 1983, p. 205).

Then there are young men who are hit with a“triple whammy.” They are not only failures inschool and unable to find a job, but also peopleof color who face institutional racism on a dailybasis (Perkins, 1987; Shelden et al., 2001),especially if they live in public housing com-plexes. An example of how public housing con-tributes to social and economic isolation isprovided below by a Chicago-based employerinterviewed by W. J. Wilson (1996, p. 116). Hefelt that people who lived in public housingwould jeopardize his financial status:

I necessarily can’t tell from looking at an addresswhether someone’s from Cabrini Green or not, butif I could tell, I don’t think that I’d want to hirethem. Because it reflects on your credibility. Ifyou came here with this survey, and you werefrom one of those neighborhoods, I don’t know ifI’d want to answer your questions. I’d wonderabout your credibility.

In sum, then, many inner-city AfricanAmerican young men are denied masculinestatus in three ways: through the inability to suc-ceed in school, a lack of meaningful jobs, andthe racism and stereotypes of their neighbor-hoods. Many Hispanic and Asian young menexperience similar problems. Thus, it is not sur-prising that members of these socially marginal-ized ethnic groups compose most of the streetgangs in the United States (Klein, 2002).Nevertheless, it cannot be emphasized enoughthat social factors—not skin color or biologicalmakeup—contribute to a higher concentration ofthese people in violent youth gangs. These areyoung men who are most likely to go to schoolsthat lack adequate financial and humanresources, who live in neighborhoods plagued byconcentrated urban poverty, and who are unable

to find jobs in a society brutalized by majorstructural transformations, such as the shift froma manufacturing to a service-based economy(DeKeseredy, Alvi, Schwartz, & Tomaszewski,2003; Kazemipur & Halli, 2000; W. J. Wilson,1996; Zielenbach, 2000).

Unfortunately, for many of the young menfacing the problems described here, the only wayof gaining masculine status, a reputation, andself-respect is through youth gang violence(Shakur, 1994). Moreover, “the prospects for thefuture are not very good” (Shelden et al., 2001,p. 266). For example, at the time of writing thischapter, U.S. companies were in the process ofcutting many jobs. The sad reality is that as ofMay 2003, 7.45 million American adults wereofficially unemployed, not to mention those whoare not counted by government agencies becausethey had simply given up looking for work(Reich, 2003).12 Not only is work continuing todisappear, but schools also are facing massivecuts to their budgets, which precludes teachersfrom effectively reaching out to socially and eco-nomically marginalized young men who havespecial needs. Racial segregation in poor innercities also is a major problem (Massey &Denton, 1993; W. J. Wilson, 1996). For these andother reasons, we assert that there will be a majorincrease in the number of male youths lackinglegitimate or conventional resources to commu-nicate their masculinity to significant others andto society at large. Some support for our argu-ment is provided by data showing that LosAngeles gang wars culminated in 20 murdersduring a 1-week period near the end of 2002(KNBC.COM, 2002).

OTHER FORMS OF MALE VIOLENCE

In a short chapter, it has been possible to go intodepth in only three specific areas of men’s inter-personal violence. Needless to say, there aremany more arenas in which masculinities play arole in facilitating men’s violence. In fact, asAustralians Connell (1995) and Hatty (2000)have pointed out, there are various forms ofmasculinities, which helps to explain the widerange of responses to the contemporary crisesfacing men.

Among these other arenas is child discipline.We mentioned earlier in this context of disci-pline that many people see slapping or spanking



a child as violent behavior. An entire fieldof child abuse is devoted to the physical abuseof children outside the confines of mild disci-plinary actions. Similarly, although we discussyouth violence in the context of gang behavior,there is a great deal of interpersonal violence,especially in the United States, outside thecontext of youth gangs.

Barbara Perry (2003), following Connell(1987), has argued that a great deal of racist vio-lence and homophobic violence (“gay bashing”)can be traced to the desire of white men to asserttheir superiority and dominance as well as to thedesire to “prove the very essence of their mas-culinity: heterosexuality” (p. 158). She arguedthat many men do not view such violence asbreaking a cultural norm (on violence) as muchas affirming “a culturally approved hegemonicmasculinity: aggression, domination, and hetero-sexuality” (p. 158). Of course, men engage inmasculinist discourse to justify and allow theirown violence in many other areas.

POLICY AND PRACTICE

Thus far, there have not been many programsthat have been exceptionally successful inreducing men’s violence. In fact, as Hearn(1996) noted, although there was tremendousattention from a variety of sources to the devel-opment of a new field of men’s studies, suchstudies have “generally not explored the ques-tion of men’s violence to any large extent”(p. 22). However, a broad number of forces inmany countries are now working in many dif-ferent arenas to deal specifically with men’sinterpersonal violence in intimate relationships.As mentioned earlier, for example, profeministmen’s groups are engaging in a wide variety ofpractices to protest racism and sexism, and totry to promote men’s awareness (DeKeseredy,Schwartz, & Alvi, 2000). Unsurprisingly, atleast in North America the most active of theseare taking place on university campuses (e.g.,Moynihan, 2003). However, a wide variety ofgroups are dealing with a very different popula-tion, attempting to work with men who batterwomen. These programs had their beginningsin the United States, often at the instigation ofshelter houses and with the strong support oflower court judges who did not wish to allowbatterers to be released on probation without at

least sentencing them into “treatment.”Although widely called “treatment” programs,their efforts are most commonly short aware-ness programs that are more properly termedintervention programs (for extensive discus-sions, see Aldarondo & Mederos, 2002b). Suchprograms are now found in a variety of Europeancountries and Australia, although the theoreticalunderpinnings may be very different (Hearn,1998). Even though male peer support studieshave made it clear that men with social supportfor violence are more likely to be violent(DeKeseredy & Schwartz, 2002), the hope forsuch programs is that it is also possible that theright kind of male social support can help a manto stop being violent (Hearn, 1998).

CONCLUSIONS

There are many theories that attempt to lay outwhich offender characteristics best predict inter-personal violence, but the single best deter-minant of who commits beatings, homicide,rapes, and so on is whether the offender is male(Schwartz & Hatty, 2003). Why are most violentoffenders men? As stated before, it has little todo with their biological makeup or with factorsidentified by evolutionary psychologists. Thebest answer is provided by masculinities studiesand research on how masculinities conducive toviolence are shaped by male subcultural dynam-ics. Clearly, for many men, violence is, undercertain situations, the only perceived availabletechnique of expressing and validating mas-culinity, and male peer support strongly encour-ages and legitimates such aggression. Broaderpatriarchal forces alone do not motivate peopleto kill, rape, or rob others.

Still, the accounts of the three harms exam-ined here, like other explanations of the connec-tion between masculinities and violence, requiremore in-depth analyses of complex factorsrelated to race/ethnicity. For example, so far, tothe best of our knowledge, not one systematicstudy on how masculinities contribute to daterape among the African American communityhas been conducted.13 Similarly, Messerschmidt(1997, p. 117) appears to be the only researcherguided by the work of masculinities theoristswho has examined “the historical and/or con-temporary constructions of varieties of white-ness and their relation to crime.”14 Furthermore,



the contribution of technological developments,such as the Internet, require in-depth exami-nation (DeKeseredy & Schwartz, 1998a). Today,many males are developing friendships via elec-tronic mail, “chat rooms,” and other electronicmeans. It is necessary to determine whetherthese homosocial cohorts, referred to by Warr(2002) as “virtual peer groups,” present menwith new or reconstituted masculinity challengesthat spawn violence. Chances are that virtualpeer groups simply reinforce existing hegemonicmasculine discourses and practices, but onlyamong males who can afford or have accessto computers. However, as Warr (2002, p. 87)pointed out, there is no evidence that virtual peergroups, regardless of whether they promoteviolence, have “replaced or supplanted real ones.”

Additional new directions in empirical andtheoretical work could easily be suggested andwill be taken in the near future, because there isa growing interest in the relationship betweenmasculinities and crime, as demonstrated bya series of important books published sincethe early 1990s (Bowker, 1998b; Hatty, 2000;Messerschmidt, 1993, 1997; Newburn &Stanko, 1994b; Polk, 1994). Even so, as Connell(2000, p. 82) reminds us, “masculinities are notthe whole story about violence.” Obviously,there are many other sources of crimes coveredin this chapter and elsewhere. Nevertheless,violence and its reduction cannot be adequatelyunderstood without an in-depth understandingof masculinities.

NOTES

1. This is a subsystem of social patriarchy, andit refers to male control in domestic or intimate set-tings (Barrett, 1980; Ursel, 1986).

2. Barak (2003) defines state terrorism as “thetype of governmental abuse and terror perpetrated bytraditional dictatorships, from Europe to Central andSouth America” (p.129).

3. See DeKeseredy and Schwartz (1998b) formore information on the methods used in this studyand the data generated by it.

4. See Kimmel (2000) for a more in-depthreview of these perspectives.

5. Herrnstein and Murray (1994) contended thatbroader social forces, such as class, gender, and ethnicinequality, do not cause poverty. Rather, based on theiranalysis of highly questionable “scientific data” gen-erated by the Armed Forces Qualifications Test(AFQT), they argue that low intelligence or “cognitive

ability” is the main cause of poverty and other socialproblems such as crime.

6. See The Protection of Women AgainstViolence, Recommendation Rec(2002)5 of theCommittee of Ministers to member states on the pro-tection of women against violence adopted on April30, 2002, and Explanatory Memorandum, Council ofEurope, Strasbourg.

7. For example, Mahoney and Williams (1998)estimated that at least 1 in 10 married women experi-ence marital rape. Two thirds of the women inFinkelhor and Yllo’s (1985) interview sample(N = 50) were raped in the last days of a relationship,either after previous separations or when they weretrying to leave a relationship.

8. This model is a modified version of Sernau’s(2001, p. 24) Web of Exclusion Model and is heavilyinformed by sociological perspectives offered byhim, DeKeseredy and Schwartz (1993), W. J. Wilson(1996), and Young (1999).

9. A recent analysis of 2000 Census Bureaudata (see Jargowsky, 2003), however, shows that thepoor are becoming less concentrated in urban areasthan they were prior to the 1990s. Still, inWashington, D.C., Los Angeles, and San Diego, thepercentage of people in high-poverty areas increasedduring this time period.

10. See Shelden, Tracy, and Brown (2001) for anin-depth overview of conflicting social scientificdefinitions of gangs.

11. See Messerschmidt (1993) for an in-depthoverview of the literature on violent youth gang activ-ity and its relationship to masculinities.

12. In the United States, to be counted as unem-ployed, one has to be actively looking for paid work.

13. There is, however, a recent study of datingviolence, including sexual assault, among AfricanAmerican youth (West & Rose, 2000). Further, someresearchers (e.g., Bell & Mattis, 2000) have examinedthe linkage between African American manhood andviolence against women.

14. In Chapter 1 of his 1997 book, he argues that“during reconstruction and its immediate aftermath,lynching was a response to the perceived erosion ofwhite male dominance and was an attempt to recreatewhat white supremacist men imagined to be a loststatus of unchallenged white masculine supremacy”(p. 16).

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21MASCULINITY AND DEGREES

OF BODILY NORMATIVITY

IN WESTERN CULTURE

THOMAS J. GERSCHICK

367

What makes someone male or a man?Are people born with an unalterablesex, or can it be changed at will? If

one is assigned to the sex category “male,” musthe always remain there? If one thinks of oneselfas a man, is one? Must one have a penis in orderto be a man? To what degree are sex and genderphysical characteristics based in one’s geneticcode, the brain, and the body, and to what degreeare they psychological, cultural, or socialconstructions? Do the answers to the abovequestions differ as historical, cultural, and struc-tural contexts change? These questions concern-ing the relationship between the body, sex, andgender continue to be debated by scholars andactivists in law, medicine, social sciences,humanities, and natural sciences. None, how-ever, questions the central role of the body insocial life.

Over the past 30 years, scholarship about thebody spanning the natural sciences, humanities,and social sciences has exploded. Consequently,

the study of the body is highly interdisciplinary.The literature reflects many different academicinterest areas including cultural studies, healthand illness, disability, women’s/men’s/genderstudies, technology, sports, media studies, andmedical sociology. The literature also addressesa wide range of subjects, including the relation-ship between agency and constraint; identityand structure; power, privilege, and inequality;surveillance and self-regulation; and similaritiesand differences by race, class, and sexuality,ability, and disability (Dworkin, 2001).

Some of this scholarship is biographical orempirical; some is more interpretive or the-oretical. Much of the writing on the body hasfocused on females’ bodies, largely becausefeminist scholarship arose as a critique of theandrocentric nature of much of the previousscholarship. Because feminism focuses oninequality and emancipation, feminist scholar-ship detailed the various arenas in which womenhave historically been oppressed, including

Author’s note: I would like to thank Bob Broad for his insights and many suggestions as he read multiple copies of this chapter.Additionally, I would like to thank the book editors and the copy editor for their patience, support, and advice, without whichthis chapter would not have been completed.


through their bodies. Examples of such topics ofinquiry include body image (Bordo, 1995),eating disorders (B. W. Thompson, 1992), illness(Lorber, 1997), disability (Fine & Asch, 1988),cosmetic surgery (Davis, 1995), physical andsexual violence (Bart & Moran, 1993), self-defense (McCaughey, 1997), reproductive rights(Roberts, 1998), and sexuality (Collins, 2000).

There is increasing recognition that the diver-sity of human bodies does not fit neatly intoWestern culture’s two sex/body categories. As aconsequence, there is a burgeoning literature inwhat loosely might be called transgender/queerstudies (Stryker, 1998).1 Examples of the topicsexplored in this literature include intersexuality(Kessler, 1998), transsexuality and transgression(Bornstein, 1995), cross-dressing (Garber, 1993),gender blurring (Devor, 1989), and multigen-dered societies (W. L. Williams, 1986).

The development of the Disability RightsMovement in the late 1960s led to an upsurge ofinterest in disability studies among people withdisabilities, academics, and researchers through-out the world (Barnes, Barton, & Oliver, 2002).This has generated an increasingly expansivemultidisciplinary literature spanning culturalstudies, the humanities, and social sciences(Barnes et al., 2002). Comprising a combinationof personal accounts and scholarly works, thisliterature has shifted researchers’ thinking aboutdisability away from medical conditions requir-ing pity and intervention to an understanding ofthe social conditions that create and reinforcedisability (Monaghan, 1998). Hence, the empha-sis is on the cultural, attitudinal, and structuralbarriers that people with disabilities face ratherthan on their physical limitations. This move-ment has increasingly become institutional-ized. In the United States, for instance, TempleUniversity’s Institute on Disabilities recentlycelebrated its 30th anniversary. The Society forDisability Studies was founded in 1982 andshortly thereafter began publishing the DisabilityStudies Quarterly, and the University of Illinoisat Chicago created the first PhD program indisability studies in the United States in 1998.

Building on a literature dating to the 1970sthat focused on men’s health issues, masculinityand sports, and men’s sexuality and violence,there has been a steady growth of interest in malebodies and their relation to social life (Bordo,2000; Connell, 1983, 1995; Goldstein, 1995;Kimmel, 1994). Increasing attention has been

paid to the male body in sports (Dworkin &Messner, 1999; Messner, 1992) and disability(Gerschick, 2000; Gerschick & Miller, 1995;Shakespeare, Gillespie-Sells, & Davies, 1996),health and illness (Sabo & Gordon, 1995), glob-alization (Connell, 1998), and sexuality (Connell,1990). Race and ethnicity, class, and the malebody are relatively unexplored topics. (Somenotable exceptions include Almaguer, 1991, andStodder, 1979.)

This chapter discusses a range of biographi-cal, empirical, and theoretical literature on mas-culinities and the body, with particular attentionto men with less-normative bodies, especiallymen with disabilities.2 It summarizes and ana-lyzes key questions, themes, and debates in thisliterature and concludes with suggestions forfuture research. The lives of men with less-normative bodies, such as those with disabilities,provide an instructive arena in which to study theintersection of bodies and masculinity.

Depending on the degree of their deviation,men with less-normative bodies contravenemany of the beliefs associated with being a man.Yet little has been written about the intersectionof less-normative bodies and masculinity.Studying their circumstances provides valuableinsight into the struggles that all men experiencein this realm. Men with less-normative bodiesalso occupy unique subject positions in whatPatricia Hill Collins (2000) calls the matrix ofdomination and privilege. These men havegender privilege by virtue of being men, yetthis privilege is eroded to differing degrees bytheir less-normative bodies, which leaves themsubject to a range of possible sanctions. Theirpositions in the gender stratification hierarchyprovide insight that is obscured from those withmore conventional bodies (Janeway, 1980).

APPROACHES TO THE BODY

To what degree are bodies shaped by natural andsocial/cultural influences? Are the differencesamong and between female and male bodieslargely due to biology, therefore legitimizingsex and gender stratification? Or are they largelysocially constructed to benefit some men atother men’s and women’s expense? To whatdegree are our thoughts, behaviors, emotions,and physical bodies shaped by the genes weinherit versus our life experiences? At the heart



of these questions are assumptions, theories,and debates over the definition of the body andwhat shapes it.

Bodies mean different things to differenttheorists depending on the questions they ask,the assumptions they make, and the methodsthey utilize. When one synthesizes the variousapproaches to studying the body and the result-ing conclusions, the accumulated knowledgedemonstrates that “the body is simultaneouslya physical, biological entity and a symboliccultural artifact” (Johnston, 2001, p. xv). Thatadherents of these different views of the bodytend to ignore other perspectives and therebytalk past one another makes it more difficult toimprove the existing theories about the body. Itis probably most appropriate, then, to think ofthe literature on the body as multifaceted, withlittle overlap or integration.

Bodies are simultaneously created, main-tained, and changed through a constant andenduring interplay of biological and socialforces. Bodies are both internal subjective envi-ronments and objects for others to observe, eval-uate, and project upon (Johnston, 2001). Bodiesand the resulting bodily practices are at onceindividual and collective entities. Humansactively engage the physical and social worldsthrough the medium of their bodies (Toombs,2001). Bodies and bodily expectations varywidely across time and space. They are shapedby social factors including race, class, gender,and disability. People are self-reflexive andagentic as they negotiate their way throughcultural values, rules, and regulations of sociallife. Bodies thus incorporate and live cultural tensions and paradoxes. This brief synthesis isnot a claim of consensus; multiple perspectivesexist regarding what constitutes bodies.

Biologically Based Explanations

The recent, contentious debate betweensociologist J. R. Udry (2000, 2001) and his crit-ics (Kennelly, Merz, & Lorber, 2001; Miller &Costello, 2001; Risman, 2001) published in theflagship journal of the American SociologicalAssociation demonstrates that the debate overbiological causes of gender behavior continuesto rage. Although the biological perspectivehas some high-profile adherents such as E. O.Wilson, accounts of how popular it is and amongwhom vary. Some commentators (Kimmel,

2000) maintain it is pervasive among biologists,whereas others (O’Brien, 1999, p. 37) maintainthat most natural and social scientists agree thathuman behavior, including gendered behavior, isa complex combination of genetic tendenciesand environmental influences.

Defining the biological perspective is difficultfor a number of reasons. First, it shares at leastthree names—biological essentialism, socio-biology, and evolutionary psychology—therebycausing undue confusion. Second, a range ofviewpoints occurs along a continuum within thisperspective; the viewpoints depend on theemphasis that adherents place on biological fac-tors and the degree to which they acknowledgesocial influences on human bodies, behavior, andpsychologies, if at all. Third, it is clouded by pol-itics because of the implications of the theory.Critics of sociobiology maintain that it unjustlyrationalizes sexual and gender inequality.

Representing one end of the continuum, bio-logical essentialism, at its core, is a belief in theprimacy of genes. That is, genes determine andcontrol the human body and brain, and conse-quently behavior and psychology. The 23 pairsof human chromosomes are thought to carrybetween 80,000 and 100,000 genes that regulatethe expression of all physical, psychological, andbehavioral characteristics and traits. At variouspoints in a human’s life, these genes instructwhen and in what amounts “male” or “masculin-izing” hormones such as androgen and testos-terone or “female” or “feminizing” hormonessuch as progesterone and estrogen are released.

The differences in hormones are then pre-sumed to be responsible for seemingly naturaland pervasive bodily, psychological, and behav-ioral differences between women and men.Specifically, hormonal processes are thoughtto be responsible for bodily differences suchas brain structure and the use of the brain,verbal abilities, and math and science abilities.Hormones also are thought to be responsible fordifferences in interests, occupational prefer-ences and achievement, sexuality, and parentingstyles. Although adherents to this perspectiverecognize that some overlap exists between thesexes, they think of them as largely dichoto-mous, as demonstrated by the bodily, psycho-logical, and behavioral differences that arethought to complement one another. This is cod-ified in the English language through suchphrases as “the opposite sex.”

Degrees of Bodily Normativity in Western Culture • 369


These differences are thought to be the resultof evolutionary adaptation to natural environ-ments that became embedded in humans’ geneticstructures over long periods of time. “Survival ofthe fittest” selects for success: Beings with traitsthat promote survival or reproduction pass ontheir genes, and others die out. Examples includeexplanations for males’ typically higher scores inmath and science, females’ sexual selectiveness,and males’ promiscuity, and rape. For instance,biologist Randy Thornhill and anthropologistCraig T. Palmer (2000) suggested that rape couldbe an alternative reproduction strategy resultingfrom natural selection. Evolutionarily, rape mayhave increased men’s chances of successfullytransmitting their genes. Genetics, then, arethought to determine human bodies and the psy-chologies, abilities, and behaviors that emanatefrom them. The focus in the biological perspec-tive consequently is much more on differencesbetween the sexes and genders and the similari-ties within them. Because they are both rooted inbiology, sex and gender are thought to be essen-tially the same thing, and the terms are generallyused interchangeably.

According to this perspective, then, the bodyplays two key roles. First, it houses hormones andgenes. Second, it represents the behavioral, psy-chological, and physical expression of thosegenes. Consequently, bodies are simultaneouslyperceived to be both the source of sex differencesand the physiological, psychological, and behav-ioral evidence of them. Because these differencesare presumed to be rooted in nature and largelystatic and immutable, attempts to change themwill lead to serious social problems (Udry, 2001).

More recently, some researchers have exhib-ited a greater appreciation of and interest ininteractions between biology and social andenvironmental forces, along with the effects ofthese interactions on the body and behavior.Although it may be impossible to unravel com-pletely the connections among these, increas-ingly the consensus is that biology provideshuman potential that in turn is nurtured and/orconstrained by culture. Researchers pursuingthis line of thought seek to end what NatalieAngier (2003) characterized as a “false yet obdu-rate” dichotomy between nature and nurture.

For instance, psychologist David Reiss andhis colleagues studied 720 pairs of adolescentswith different degrees of genetic relatedness,from identical twins to step siblings. Their

research (Reiss, Plomin, Neiderhiser, &Hetherington, 2003) suggests that genetic ten-dencies are encouraged or stifled by specificparental responses. “To have any effect, genesmust be activated. Whether, and how strongly,genes that underlie complex behaviors areturned on, or ‘expressed,’” noted Reiss, “dependson the interactions and relationships a child haswith the important people in his or her life”(quoted in Begley, 2000, p. 64). Thus, geneticfactors influence development, but socialprocesses are critical for shaping those influ-ences (Begley, 2000). How this interactive effectworks remains a subject of much speculationand research.

This new wave of research demonstrates thatbiological and social explanations for anatomi-cal, behavioral, and psychological differencesamong humans are not necessarily incompati-ble, although they are frequently pitted againstone another (O’Brien, 1999). Unfortunately,integrative thinking is in its infancy and is onlybeginning to extend to the relationship betweenthe body and gender (Fausto-Sterling, 2000).

Social Constructionist Perspectives3

The realness of social forces, whether one acceptsthem uncritically or wrestles them continually,can be seen written across the body. (O’Brien,1999, p. 64)

Counter to biological theorists, social con-structionists stress bodily sex similarities whilefocusing on the social processes through whichgender differences are created, maintained, andchanged. Social constructionists acknowledgethat males and females have highly differentiatedreproductive systems, but they maintain that thereare only minor physical differences between thesexes and great overlaps in physique and capac-ity between them (Connell, 1999, p. 450). Theseminor differences are socially nurtured through-out the life course to the point that very differentsexual beings are created. Consequently, socialconstructionists attend to the social, cultural, andpsychological processes involved in the creationof gendered bodies, behaviors, and practices.

One of the most profound decisions that isever made for a human being occurs at birth, orin some cases in utero via a sonogram. That deci-sion is the assignment to a dichotomous sexcategory via a cursory look at the genitals. This



assignment sets in motion a powerful set of socialpractices that strongly shape, but do not deter-mine, the trajectory of an individual’s life. Oncean infant is bodily assigned to a sex category, sheor he is then assigned to the associated gendercategory: feminine or masculine. On the basis ofthis, human beings then expect different thingsfrom these “different” infants. These expectationsvary according to the historical, cultural, struc-tural, and global contexts.

Yet, as a brief look around the United Nationsor the Olympics reveals, bodies vary tremen-dously; they do not fit neatly into dichotomouscategories. Biology partially accounts for this.Basic genetic variation accounts for some. Inother cases, missing, fragmented, or extra sexchromosomes and exposure to toxins contributeto this variation, as reflected in hermaphroditesand pseudo-hermaphrodites. Yet, social con-structionists maintain that social processes arethe primary factor in bodily and gender differen-tiation. Thus, for social constructionists, bodiesphysically exist along a continuum rather than asa dichotomy.

The social differentiation and disciplining ofbodies assigned to the sex categories of femaleand male is reinforced throughout one’s lifetimevia social institutions such as school, families,medicine, and the law. For instance, from birth,girls and boys are taught to use their bodies verydifferently. Karin Martin’s (1998) research onthe hidden curriculum of preschools demon-strates how boys are encouraged to be expan-sive in the use of their bodies whereas girls aretaught to be reserved. These differential bodilypractices, taught covertly, reinforce the beliefthat boys and girls are “naturally” different. Itis through this training and reinforcement thatmasculinity becomes internalized in boys’bodies. Practices become habits. As thesebecome more deeply internalized, males becomeincreasingly self-monitoring (S. J. Williams &Bendelow, 1998). Social constructionists, then,are interested in how meanings, practices, andidentities consolidate consciously and uncon-sciously in the body and the ramifications of thisfor men and women. Thus, they are interested inthe interplay between agency and structure.

Definitions of masculinity and masculinebodies vary within different historical, structural,and cultural contexts: There are likely few, ifany, transhistorical or cross-cultural ideals; whatis considered normative varies across time and

space (Burton, 2001; Kimmel, 2000). Kimmel(1994), for instance, tracked the arc of masculin-ities and their relation to bodies in the UnitedStates between 1832 and 1920. As work increas-ingly became bureaucratized, men turned to thegym, athletics, and the outdoors as the foundationof their masculinity. They read self-improvementbooks and quaffed elixirs and tonics. They grewbeards and moustaches and developed theirmuscles, all as ways of distinguishing themselvesfrom the feminine. Manly countenances andphysiques demonstrated masculinity. “The bodydid not contain the man,” Kimmel (1994, p. 26)concluded; “it was the man.”

Similarly representing the centrality of thebody to masculinity, but utilizing very differentstandards, the Wodabe men of the Sahara utilizephysical beauty as the foundation of their mas-culinity. “To be ugly,” a Wodabe proverb goes, “isto be unforgiven” (Knickmeyer, 2003, p. A10).One of the first items entrusted to a boy is amirror. Lifelong attention to appearance culmi-nates in a series of beauty pageants in whichadult males compete to win prestigious brides.Competitors and their families go to great lengthsto prepare for these pageants. Families mayspend up to a year fashioning the young men’scostumes, bedecking them with embroidery,dangling earrings, and a profusion of necklaces.A young man will travel for days to find the rightingredients to make his face paint (Knickmeyer,2003). Accounts like these are rare; there is muchwe do not know about cross-cultural and trans-historical bodily standards. Our task is becomingmore complex as conceptions of masculinity andmasculine bodies increasingly become moreglobal, and this occurs as the media and multina-tional corporations penetrate the remotest regionsof the planet (Connell, 1998). Consequently, thisis a key area for future research.

Because of the large amount of human varia-tion across time and space and the array ofexpectations and contexts, it makes sense whendiscussing the body to discuss degrees ofnormativeness—from more normative to less.There are many ways in which a body can beless normative. Characteristics such as race, eth-nicity, class, age, physique, weight, height, abil-ity, disability, appearance, and skin colorpredominate. People can be less normative bybeing too light, too dark, too fat or too skinny,too poor, too young or too old, too tall, tooshort, too awkward, or too uncoordinated. The



degree to which one is bodily normative mattersconsiderably because it helps place one in thestratification order (Connell, 1983; Shakespeareet al., 1996). The treatment one experiences,then, depends on the degree of normativeness,one’s resources, and the particular historical,cultural, and structural contexts. People areprivileged by the degree to which they approxi-mate cultural ideals (Gerschick, 1998).

The degree to which bodily and gender varia-tion has been accepted has varied across timeand culture. Although the number of sex andgender categories has varied historically andculturally, in the West and increasingly acrossthe globe, societies are committed to two, andonly two, sex and gender categories. Forinstance, in the contemporary West, when thereis both sexual ambiguity (resulting from chro-mosomal problems, for instance) and access totechnology, surgeons seek to create bodies thatmore neatly fit into cultural categories. In otherplaces and times, especially where surgical tech-nology does not exist, there has been greateracceptance of sexual and gender diversity,although individuals outside the norms have beenassigned to special categories. AnthropologistWalter Williams (1986), for example, has docu-mented a range of genders occupied by NativeAmerican men called berdache and the resultingsocial relations that occurred prior to Europeancolonization. Unfortunately, colonization largelyended these practices among indigenous peoplein the Americas, demonstrating the early powerof globalization.

Bodies are symbolic. One’s body serves as atype of social currency that signifies one’s worth.Consequently, people with less-normative bod-ies are vulnerable to being denied social recog-nition and validation.4 People respond to oneanother’s bodies, which initiates social processessuch as validation and the assignment of status(Goffman, 1963). Thus, to have a less-normativebody is not only a physical condition; it is alsoa social and stigmatized one (Goffman, 1963;Zola, 1982).

This stigma is embodied in the popularstereotypes of people whose bodies are less nor-mative. People with disabilities, for instance, areperceived to be weak, passive, and dependent(Shapiro, 1993). Our language exemplifies thisstigmatization; people with disabilities arede-formed, dis-eased, dis-abled, dis-ordered,ab-normal, and in-valid (Zola, 1982, p. 206).

Asian men in the West are perceived either to beshrewd and cunning or effeminate, neutered, andweak; either martial arts masters and evil sadis-tic soldiers or houseboys, laundrymen, computernerds, and faceless salarymen (Espiritu, 1997;Iwata, 1991).

This stigma is embedded in daily interactionsamong people. People are evaluated in terms ofnormative expectations and are, because of theirbodies, frequently found wanting. As demon-strated by the social responses to people withdisabilities, people with less-normative bodiesare avoided, ignored, and marginalized (Fine &Asch, 1988; Shapiro, 1993). They experience arange of reactions from subtle indignities andslights to overt hostility and outright cruelty.This treatment creates subtle but formidablephysical, economic, psychological, architectural,and social obstacles to their participation in allaspects of social life. For example, writing aboutAsian American men in the United States, AsianAmerican journalist Edward Iwata (1991, p. 52)observed the following (note how central thebody is to his description of these dynamics):

by others and by ourselves, we’re rendered impo-tent. I wasn’t a limp lover. But outside my homeor bedroom, I felt powerless—desexed like a babychick. It was as if I didn’t exist. Employers didn’tacknowledge my work. Professors in collegerebuffed my remarks in the classroom. Maitre d’signored my presence in restaurants. I felt voice-less, faceless. (1991, p. 129)

Having a less-normative body can also becomea primary identity that overshadows almost allother aspects of one’s identity.

The type of less-normative body—its visibil-ity, the severity of it, whether it is physical ormental in origin, and the contexts—mediate thedegree to which a person with a less-normativebody is socially compromised (Gerschick, 2000).For instance, a severe case of the Epstein-Barrvirus can disable someone, thereby creating aless-normative body; however, typically thecondition is not readily apparent and as a conse-quence does not automatically trigger stigmati-zation and devaluation. Conversely, havingquadriplegia and utilizing a wheelchair formobility is highly visual, is perceived to besevere, and frequently elicits invalidation.One of the challenges facing researchers is todevelop a systematic theory to address the degreesof non-normativity and the circumstances that



lead to different levels of stigmatization andmarginalization and how these differ for womenand for men.

The degree to which one’s body is devaluedis also affected by other social characteristicsincluding social class, sexual orientation, age,and race and ethnicity. For instance, Hearn(1995) notes that although a paradoxical and fre-quently contradictory range of images of oldermen exists in the West, those images are domi-nated by marginalization, redundancy, and obso-lescence. Older men are not depicted or treatedas hegemonic men in the United States, butrather as diminished (E. H. Thompson, 1994).Like age, race also factors into the valuationof bodies. For the 40 years between 1932 and1972, the United States Public Health Serviceconducted a study of the effects of late-stageuntreated syphilis on 399 poor black men inAlabama (Jones, 1993, p. 1). According to thepress, at least 28 and perhaps as many as 100men died as the direct result of complicationscaused by the treatable syphilis. Others devel-oped other serious conditions that may have con-tributed to their deaths (Jones, 1993, p. 2). Thestudy was roundly criticized for callously nottreating the men, actively preventing them fromgetting treatment, and keeping knowledge of thedisease from them in order to indulge scientists’curiosity (Jones, 1993). This follows a longhistory in the United States and globally of abus-ing black males’ bodies with impunity. Thus, ahierarchy of bodies exists in any particular his-torical, cultural, structural, and global context.

People with less-normative bodies areengaged in an asymmetrical power relationshipwith their more-normative-bodied counterparts,who have the power to validate their bodies andtheir gender. In order to accomplish gender,each person in a social situation needs to be rec-ognized by others as appropriately masculine orfeminine. Those with whom we interact contin-uously assess our gender performance anddecide whether we are “doing gender” appropri-ately in that situation. Our “audience” or inter-action partners then hold us accountable andsanction us in a variety of ways in order toencourage compliance (West & Zimmerman,1987). Our need for social approval and valida-tion as gendered beings further encourages con-formity. Much is at stake in this process becauseone’s sense of self rests precariously upon theaudience’s decision to validate or reject one’s

gender performance. Successful enactmentbestows status and acceptance; failure invitesembarrassment and humiliation (West &Zimmerman, 1987).

Consequently, bodies are central to achievingsocial recognition as appropriately genderedbeings. In the contemporary West, men’s genderperformance tends to be judged using thestandard of hegemonic masculinity, which rep-resents the optimal attributes, activities, behav-iors, and values expected of men in a culture(Connell, 1983, 1990). Social scientists haveidentified career orientation, activeness, athleti-cism, sexual desirability and virility, indepen-dence, and self-reliance as exalted masculineattributes in Western culture/society (Connell,1983, 1995; Ervø & Johansson, 2003; Gerschick &Miller, 1995; Kimmel, 1994). In the developingworld, anthropological accounts suggest thattoughness, the ability to endure pain and drinkto excess, willingness to take risks, and sexualperformance are all central to achieving mas-culinity (Gilmore, 1990). Thus, men whosebodies allow them to evidence the identifiedcharacteristics are differentially rewarded overthose who cannot. Despite the fact that attainingthese attributes is often unrealistic and morebased in fantasy than in reality, men continue tointernalize them as ideals and strive to demon-strate them as well as judge themselves andother men using them. Women also tend tojudge men using these standards. Successfullycreating and maintaining self-satisfactorymasculine gender identities under these circum-stances is an almost Sisyphean task. Con-sequently, masculinity is threatened whencorporeal appearance and performance are dis-cordant with hegemonic expectations, such as inthe case of having a having a less-normativebody (Connell, 1983, 1995; Ervø & Johansson,2003; Gerschick & Miller, 1995).

Because of the tremendous pressures to con-form and the perceived rewards associated withdoing so, people will go to great lengths to maketheir bodies appear more normatively masculine.How and what they do is influenced by genderexpectations and financial, technological, andcultural resources available to them. A range ofpossible bodily modification practices exists,from relatively low-tech procedures such asexercise/body building, tattoos, dieting, pierc-ings, and cutting/scarring to more technologi-cally sophisticated forms of cosmetic surgery



such as hair transplants and rhinoplasty. Klein(1993), for instance, introduced readers to theimportance of musculature in establishing andmaintaining masculinity in the United States.Among the Karo of Ethiopia, where technologyis relatively undeveloped, men use elaborate hairdesigns, body painting, and piercings as trade-marks of their masculinity. Scarification of thechest and wearing of gray or ochre-colored hairbuns are reserved for men who have proven theirmasculinity by killing an enemy or a dangerousanimal (Burton, 2001, p. 60d). In the developedworld, using surgical techniques is more com-mon. For instance, Iwata (1991, p. 52) underwentcosmetic surgery to replace his Asian facialfeatures with Caucasian:

It is a taboo subject, but true. Many people ofcolor have, at some point in their youths, imaginedthemselves as Caucasian, the Nordic or WesternEuropean ideal. Hop Sing meets Rock Hudson.Michael Jackson magically transformed intoRobert Redford. For myself, an eye and nosejob—or blepharoplasty and rhinoplasty in sur-geons’ tongue—would bring me the gift of accep-tance. The flick of a scalpel would buy merespect. . . . I felt compelled to measure up to acultural ideal in a culture that had never asked mewhat my ideal was.

Bodies, then, largely are not fixed biologi-cally but rather are significantly malleable,fluid, and plastic and are greatly influenced bycontext-specific gender expectations. Physicalconstruction of bodies, then, is intimately linkedto social construction.

In addition to disciplining their own bodies,people will go to great lengths to disciplineothers’ to ensure that they are more normativetoo. A premier example is the treatment ofintersexed bodies in the United States. ABCNews’ Primetime Live (1997) aired a segment onchildren with ambiguous or damaged genitals. Inone of the two cases highlighted, a geneticallymale child was born without any genitals. In theother case, a boy’s penis was destroyed in a cir-cumcision accident. Following medical profes-sionals’ advice that the boys could never havenormally functioning penises, in both cases theparents authorized sex reassignment surgery toraise the children as girls. Without a functioningpenis, the doctors maintained that they could notbe either male or a man. In one case, the doctorswere quoted as saying that without the surgery,

“He will have to recognize that he is incomplete,physically defective, and that he must live apart”(Colapinto, 2000, p. 16).

As the above examples indicate, penises areparticularly tangible symbols of masculinity.Circumcision, for instance, is a popular mascu-line rite of passage in many cultures. Among theXhosa and Basotho in Africa, male circumcisioninitiates one into manhood (Cauvin, 2001).Historically, the ritual was performed as boyswere preparing to search for paid work, typi-cally in their early twenties. However, economicchanges, urbanization, industrialization, andpeer pressure have led to a decrease in ages,typically closer to 18 and increasingly youngerthan that. In cities and universities, uncircum-cised teens are increasingly shunned or derided.As a result, boys pursue circumcision andmanhood at an increasing risk. In 2001, at least35 boys died from infections caused by botchedprocedures, and hundreds more were mutilated(Cauvin, 2001). This demonstrates just one ofthe ways that masculinity can be injurious toone’s health. Anticircumcision activists in theUnited States maintain that circumcision is amasculine form of genital mutilation. Some “cutmen,” as they refer to themselves, resort toweights or tape to stretch their penile skin backover the glans; others undergo surgery torestore the foreskin/prepuce (Newman, 1991;Whipple, 1987).

Like penis shape, penis size has long been apreoccupation of men in the West in regard totheir masculinity. Perry (1992), describing him-self as “hung like a hamster,” details his con-stant vigilance regarding his “manhood.” Hefaked taking showers after gym class by usingtoilet water to slick his hair, quit the swim teamin high school because the suits were too reveal-ing, and pledged a particular fraternity solelybecause it had individual toilets and showerstalls. He explicated years of feeling inadequate,impotent, cheated, and humiliated because ofhis small size.

In some cultures, relief from such predica-ments is available. In the United States, thereare doctors who specialize in penile enlarge-ment. Whether or not penis size can be dramat-ically improved remains a topic of debate, but itis known that there are limitations to technolog-ical intervention. Presently, surgical techniquesare not advanced enough to create a functionalor normative appearing penis. Consequently,



many female-to-male transsexuals elect not tohave the “surgery down there” and leave theirvaginas intact. Although they typically haveradical mastectomies to reduce their breasts andadopt a public persona of being male and mas-culine, their bodies are not completely in con-cert with their new identity. Whether or not andunder what conditions the “partial operative”transsexuals might represent challenges to thegender order is a matter of debate (Cram &Schermerhorn, 1997).

It is not just how bodies look that secures thelabel of masculine, but also how they move andwhat they do. Bodies operate kinesthetically asa key mechanism through which men performand achieve gender. Kimmel (1994, pp. 37-38)observed that males’ bodies are “the ultimatetesting ground for identity in a world in whichcollective solutions to the problem of identityseem all but discredited.” For instance, on TrukIsland, a tiny atoll in the Pacific, men histori-cally have associated masculinity with daringand risk. They chanced their health and theirlives by undertaking long fishing expeditions inshark-infested waters with little thought tosafety. Drinking to excess, fighting, and seekingsexual conquest were all elements of their questto be recognized as males (Marshall, 1979, citedin Gilmore, 1990). Among the rural cultivatingAmhara tribe of Ethiopia, manliness was demon-strated via participation in bloody whippingmatches in which faces frequently were lacer-ated. Any sign of pain or weakness resulted inmockery and taunts of being effeminate. Boysalso would burn their arms with hot embers todemonstrate their masculinity (Reminick, 1982,cited in Gilmore, 1990).

In a far different context, Stodder (1979)detailed the abuse he took as a roughneck (oil rigworker) as men continually tested each other’smasculinity by challenging their bodies. Thisinvolved subjecting each other to very dangerouspranks, such as dropping men suspended by atether 100 feet as if the safety device failed, onlyto stop them short of crashing onto the oil rigfloor. Threats of anal rape were frequent andsometimes involved going so far as tying andstripping the potential victim and threateninghim with a tarred implement. Despite the con-stant challenges to his masculinity and sexuality,Stodder also described the sense of accomplish-ment he experienced from earning his placein this particular men’s club. By working at

breakneck and dangerous speeds and survivingthe constant challenges to his masculinity, heproved himself a man while simultaneouslyenriching his employer. In this latter way, hisbody and the bodies of men like him can beunderstood as instrumental commodities to besacrificed to capitalism.

In addition to what they represent, what theylook like, and what they physically do, bodiesalso contain minds—the locus of cognitionwhere people create meaning about gender.Historically, some philosophers conceived ofthe mind as masculine and distinct from thebody. Men’s minds represented rationality andlogic. Conversely, women were thought to rep-resent and be governed by the body. They wereearthly, irrational, and wanton (S. J. Williams &Bendelow, 1998). Despite many attempts, therelationship of the body to the brain and to themind has yet to be satisfactorily theorized. PoetKenny Fries (1997, p. 220), who was born witha disability affecting his legs, asked, forinstance, “Can anyone comprehend how themind reacts to what the body remembers?”People experience their worlds through theirbodies; that experience is simultaneouslyphysical and cognitive, but the relationship ofthese components is not yet understood. Conse-quently, this represents another promisingavenue of research. As the following exampledemonstrates, we have much to think about.

For some men in some cultures, the founda-tion of their masculinity is not in their physicalbodies but rather in their minds. For instance,the traditional emphasis on literacy and love oflearning in Jewish culture confers dignity andmasculinity. In the United States, however,intellectualism is a cultural liability (Kimmel,1988). Because of this, Jewish men in manyareas of the Diaspora are often consideredeffeminate and unathletic, that is, as less thanmen. “The historical consequences of centuriesof laws against Jews, of anti-Semitic oppres-sion,” Kimmel (1988, p. 154) argues, “are a cul-tural identity and even a self-perception of being‘less than men,’ who are too weak, too fragile,too frightened to care for our own.”

NOTES

1. Stryker (1998) described in detail howscholars wrangle over terms and definitions. No



universal language exists to reflect the diversity ofless-normative bodies, sexes, and genders.

2. Wherever possible, I draw on examples fromdifferent time periods and across the globe. However,most of the extant literature focuses on men in theWest (Ervø & Johannson, 2003), and consequentlythis is reflected in the examples that I utilize through-out this chapter. Within this literature, the UnitedStates is grossly overrepresented; this chapter reflectsthat overrepresentation. Addressing this limitation isa fruitful area for future research.

3. Although the focus of this chapter is mas-culinity and the body, the social and bodily dynamicsarticulated below generally hold for both men andwomen. Consequently, they are presented as such.Given the allotted space, it is beyond the scope of thischapter to explore the ways in which these dynamicsvary for women and men.

4. The next several pages draw on and extend myprevious research. Insights in this section are drawnfrom an in-depth interview study of 10 men in south-east Michigan, United States (Gerschick, 1998;Gerschick & Miller, 1995) and synthesis of a diversebody of literature focusing on the intersection ofgender and disability (Gerschick, 2000).

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22TRANSGENDERING,MEN, AND MASCULINITIES

RICHARD EKINS

DAVE KING

In 1961 Lou Sullivan was a 10-year-old girl living in the suburbs of Milwaukee, Wisconsin;in 1991 he was a gay man dying of AIDS in San Francisco.

—Stryker (1999, p. 62)

As I grew older my conflict became more explicit to me, and I began to feel that I wasliving a falsehood. I was in masquerade, my female reality, which I had no words todefine, clothed in a male pretence.

—Morris (1974, p. 16)

“For every woman who burned her bra, there is a man ready to wear one,” saysVeronica Vera, who founded Miss Vera’s Finishing School for Boys Who Want to BeGirls in 1992 as a resource for the estimated three to five percent of the adult male pop-ulation that feels the need, at least occasionally, to dress in women’s clothing.

—Miss Vera’s Finishing School for Boys Who Want to Be Girls (n.d., 2)

“Have you ever wanted to dress as a man, try on a male guise and enter the maledomain?” asks Torr in the ads for her “Drag King For A Day” workshops. A streamof housewives, artists, straight, lesbian, young and old, sign up for Torr’s classes. Thefirst thing Torr tells them, is to “stop apologising,” then over one afternoon they learnhow to construct a penis, bind their breasts, sit with their legs open and “take upspace.” They then have to go to a bar to put it all into practice.

—Cooper (1998)

379

These fragments, chosen fairly randomly,illustrate a little (but only a very little) ofthe complex and diverse nature of the

human experiences that today are consideredtogether under the heading of “transgender.”Although this term has been used in other ways

(Ekins & King, 1999, p. 581), transgender ismost commonly used today in the extensivesense of Thom and More (1998): to encompass“the community of all self identified crossgender people whether intersex, transsexualmen and women, cross dressers, drag kings


and drag queens, transgenderists, androgynous,bi-gendered, third gendered or as yet unnamedgender gifted people” (p. 3). Until recently, asharp distinction was made between trans-vestites, transsexuals, and others whose bodiesappeared to be consonant with their assignedsex, and those people who were born with inter-sexed bodies. Now people with intersexedbodies, as in the encompassing definition ofThom and More (1998), are often included—and sometimes include themselves—under theumbrella term of transgender, especially wherethe term “transgender” has a transgressiveconnotation.

In addition to emphasizing diversity, theconcept of “transgender,” emerging out of thetransgender community itself, has avoidedassumptions of pathology inherent in the dis-course of transvestism, transsexualism, genderidentity disorder, and gender dysphoria generatedby the medical profession. It also allows consid-eration of a range of transgender phenomena thathave not been subjected to the medical gaze.

We prefer the gerund “transgendering”because of its focus not on types of people buton social process. Transgendering refers to theidea of moving across (transferring) from onepreexisting gender category to the other (eithertemporarily or permanently), to the idea of liv-ing in between genders, and to the idea of tran-scending or living “beyond gender” altogether(Ekins & King, 1999, 2001b). In the context ofthis book, it is most usefully viewed as a socialprocess in which males renounce or suspendthe masculinity that is expected of them andfemales (unexpectedly) embrace it.

In the mid-1970s, when we began to researchthis area, the literature was comparatively smalland we could be reasonably confident that wewere at least aware of it all. The relevant sectionsin Bullough, Dorr Legg, Elcano, and Kepner’sbibliography (1976) contain about 450 refer-ences. More recent bibliographies demonstratethe growth in the literature since that time.Demeyere’s (1992) bibliography, particularlystrong on anthropological material, and Denny’s(1994) bibliography, particularly strong onmedical and psychological literature, each includemore than 5,000 entries. The growth in theliterature since 1994 has been rapid.

Not only has the literature increased in size,but it also now ranges across a large number ofdisciplines and fields of study. In the mid-1970s,

the bulk of the literature came from medicineand psychology. Now, although these disciplinesare still dominant, much can also be found com-ing from sociology (Devor, 1997; Ekins, 1997;King, 1993), social anthropology (Ramet, 1996),social history (Meyerowitz, 2002), law (Sharpe,2002), lesbian and gay studies (Prosser, 1997),women’s studies (Maitland, 1986), and (espe-cially in recent years) cultural studies (Garber,1992). In addition, transgender topics appearregularly in the popular media, on television, inthe cinema, in the press, and, of course, on theInternet. There are transgender plays and novels,there is transgender photography, and there istransgender art and transgender pornography.Trans people themselves have written theirautobiographies, formed organizations, and pro-duced magazines, bulletins, and guides to andcelebrations of the topic. During the 1990s, inparticular, a number of openly trans people madesignificant contributions to the academic litera-ture (e.g., More & Whittle, 1999).

In all this material, concepts of masculinityand femininity and what it means to be a man orwoman are omnipresent but usually taken forgranted. Often, the transgender literature makessense only against an implicit backdrop com-posed of prevailing stereotypes of masculinityand femininity and related conceptions of whatit means to be a man or woman. Only sometimesis the searchlight turned onto this backdrop.Similarly, although there are occasional refer-ences to transgender in the masculinity literature(Connell, 1995; Petersen, 1998), this latter liter-ature has largely ignored the area of transgender.

It is not possible in a single chapter to coverall aspects of transgendering, and here our focusis on transgenderism in contemporary Westernsocieties, which has been the focus of the bulk ofthe academic literature. It is within this literaturethat the conceptual apparatus of transvestite,transsexual, and transgender has originated. Asmall but growing literature does, however, existon “transgender”-related phenomena in non-Western cultures. Most of this has focused onNorth American indigenous cultures (see Fulton &Anderson, 1992; Jacobs, Thomas, & Lang, 1997;Whitehead, 1981), although there is work onother cultures (Nanda, 1988; Ramet, 1996;Totman, 2003; Wikan, 1977; Young, 2000).Recently, there has been a surge of anthropo-logical interest in transgender, principally inSoutheast Asia (Jackson & Sullivan, 1999;



Johnson, 1997) and in South America (Kulick,1998a, 1998b). Western medicine assumes that,in its conceptualizations of gender disorders, it isdiscovering the “truth” of such phenomena, andit has tended to use the anthropological literatureto illustrate the universality of the “conditions”(e.g., Steiner, 1985). Recent transgender theo-rists (e.g., Cromwell, 1999; Feinberg, 1996)have used the same literature to emphasize thediversity and cultural specificity of gender cate-gories, an approach that is more in keepingwith the anthropological literature itself, whichhas often focused on the idea of an institutional-ized “third” gender or liminal gender space,anticipating in many ways some of the conceptscommon in contemporary transgender theory.Nevertheless, it is also evident that Westerndiscourses of transgenderism have been exportedto many parts of the world and are usurping orare heavily influencing more traditional notionsof gender and “transgender” phenomena (Teh,2001; Winter, 2002; Winter & Udomsak, 2002).

In this chapter, we have chosen to take a his-torical and chronological approach and focus onfour very influential perspectives on the topic anddiscuss their conceptions of and implications formasculinity (and usually of and for femininity,too). The first of these perspectives to emerge, andthe one that in many ways is still dominant, isthat of medicine, although it is not articulated onlyby those who are medically qualified. The secondperspective was first articulated by self-identified“transvestites” as they sought to provide their ownvoice for their own experiences and began to formtheir own subcultural groupings. The thirdperspective, articulated by a number of feministgender theorists, consisted of major critiques ofboth the medicalization of gender roles and whatthey saw as the male-to-female transsexuals’ andtransvestites’ “masculinist” appropriation of“femaleness” and “femininity.” Finally, we look atthe emergence, at the end of the 20th century,of a late modern/postmodern approach withinwhich emphasis is placed on transgender diver-sity, fluidity, and moving beyond the rigiditiesof the binary gender divide, to celebrate newcombinations of masculinity and femininity.Here, the predominant voice is that of activistswho identify as transgendered.

The theme of the relationship of masculinityand femininity to male and female runs through-out the history of these four perspectives.All forms of transgendering potentially raise

questions about the fundamental culturalassumptions (a) that “normal” men do (andshould) have male bodies, and do (and should)display an appropriate amount of masculinity;and (b) that “normal” women do (and should)have female bodies, and do (and should) displayan appropriate amount of femininity. Mas-culinity or femininity without the appropriate“accompaniments” is then often depicted as “notreal.” Another theme is that of identity. Through-out the history of the phenomenon of trans-gender, the paramount concern has been “Whatam I?” or “What is he/she?” in gender terms. Inour review of the four major approaches, we willhighlight these themes.

MEDICAL DISCOURSE, PATHOLOGY,AND “RENOUNCING” MASCULINITY

The original emphasis within this approach is onmale-to-female, as opposed to female-to-male,transgender. This has remained so until recently.The dominant voice within this perspective cameto be on males who wish to “renounce” theirmasculinity and “embrace” femininity perma-nently. In the period prior to technologies thatenabled “sex change” reassignment, the focuswas on a medical discourse that considered the“reality” of men’s appropriation of femininity.Could a “real” man embrace the “feminine”?From the 1950s onward, when “sex change”surgery became a practical possibility, the focusshifted to enabling—in selected cases—therenouncing of male bodies, along with suchmanliness and masculinity that “transsexuals”may have acquired. The “real reality” of whatnow came to be conceptualized as psychologicalsex—“gender identity”—was privileged over the“apparent reality” of the body—morphologicalsex. The modern “transsexual” was “invented.”

Although it is possible to cite examples ofthe phenomenon of transgender throughouthuman history, the roots of our modern concep-tion of transgenderism are to be found in thelatter half of the 19th century. This period sawthe beginning of what Foucault terms the “medi-calisation of the sexually peculiar” (Foucault,1979, p. 44). It was during this period that psy-chiatrists and other medical practitioners beganto puzzle over the nature of people who reportedthat they felt like/dressed as/behaved like aperson of the “opposite sex.”

Transgendering, Men, and Masculinities • 381


Early manifestations of what later cameto be seen as transgenderism were first seen asvariations of homosexuality. “Real” men weremasculine and heterosexual. Men who werehomosexual were not “real men” and oftenwere conceptualized as feminine souls in malebodies. Men who enjoyed behaving and dressingas women or, indeed, wished to be women,simply took the whole business much further! Itwas Hirschfeld (1910/1991) who coined the term“transvestite” for this latter group. In doing so,he argued that the transvestites’ love of the femi-nine did not make them women. Rather, theywere men who enjoyed expressing femininity.Hirschfeld redefined the link between being aman and masculinity. He argued that men (andwomen) are variously masculine and feminine:

There are men with the gentle emotions of a MarieBaskiertschew, with feminine loyalty and mod-esty, with predominant reproductive gifts, with analmost unconquerable tendency to feminine pre-occupations such as cleaning and cooking, alsosuch ones who leave women behind in vanity,coquetry, love of gossip, and cowardice, and thereare women who greatly outweigh the average manin energy and generosity, such as Christine ofSweden, in being abstract and having depth, suchas Sonja Kowalewska, as many modern women inthe women’s movement in activity and ambition,who prefer men’s games, such as gymnastics andhunting, and surpass the average man in tough-ness, crudeness, and rashness. There are womenwho are more suited to a public life; men more toa domestic life. There is not one specific charac-teristic of a woman that you would not also occa-sionally find in a man, no manly characteristicnot also in a woman. (Hirschfeld, 1910/1991,pp. 222-223)

By implication, male “transvestites” are noless “men.” In a similar way, Hirschfeld arguedthat renouncing masculinity did not necessarilyinvolve homosexuality: “one has to extend thesentence ‘not all homosexuals are effeminate’ toinclude ‘and not all effeminate men are homo-sexual’” (1910/1991, p.148). Later, he wrote that“today we are in a position to say that trans-vestism is a condition that occurs independentlyand must be considered separately fromany other sexual anomaly” (Hirschfeld, 1938,pp. 188-189). Havelock Ellis also saw what hepreferred to call eonism (Ellis, 1928) as separatefrom homosexuality, although he had a more

conventional belief than Hirschfeld in thebiologically given and fundamentally different(but complementary) natures of men andwomen (Ellis, 1914).

Both Hirschfeld and Ellis were broadly sup-portive of those who would later be distin-guished as transvestites and transsexuals (theydid not employ the then fashionable language ofdegeneracy or perversion), but they neverthelessviewed such people as anomalies to be explainedwithin a medical framework. Not surprisingly,given the then “expected” congruity betweensex, gender, and heterosexuality, both surmisedthat the explanation could only be biological.

Ellis’s and Hirschfeld’s views were not with-out their critics. Onetime psychoanalyst Stekel(1934), for example, disagreed with the separa-tion from homosexuality and also argued for apsychological explanation.

The implications of these contrasting viewsbecame more apparent when, around the middleof the 20th century, a number of technologicaldevelopments came together that made it possi-ble, by altering the body in more or less limitedways, to grant the wishes of some people to“change sex.” The term “transsexual” began tomake its appearance in medical and popularvocabularies, and the question of whether (andif so, on what grounds) men should be allowedto renounce and be assisted in renouncing theirmale bodies (and, to a lesser extent, womentheir female bodies) came to the fore.

In brief, the arguments have revolved aroundthe perceived “authenticity” or otherwise of thetranssexual’s masculinity or femininity. On theassumption that authentic masculinity and fem-ininity are rooted in the body, claims of biolog-ical origins have been and are used to prove thetranssexual’s entitlement to renounce his or herassigned sex. Claims of psychopathology havebeen used to deny any such entitlement.

During the 1950s, a new conception began todevelop that provided a somewhat differentargument in favor of bodily intervention. Thiswas the separation of sex from gender. Stoller(1968) put it in this way:

Gender is a term that has psychological or culturalrather than biological connotations. If the properterms for sex are “male” and “female,” the corre-sponding terms for gender are “masculine” and“feminine”; these latter may be quite independentof (biological) sex. (p. 9)



In addition to stressing the independence ofsex and gender, the writings of Money (1973),Stoller, and others also stressed the immutabil-ity of the latter when conceptualized as “genderidentity.” What became referred to as “coregender identity” (Stoller, 1977) was regarded asunalterable after the age of 2 or 3, thus attaininga degree of “reality” comparable to that of thebody. On this conception, therefore, it becamepossible to be both a male and a man in termsof the body and a female and a woman in termsof the psyche or, indeed, vice versa. Thus,Benjamin gave his male-to-female transsexualpatients a certificate that contained the follow-ing sentences: “Their anatomical sex, that is tosay, the body, is male. Their psychological sex,that is to say, the mind, is female” (Benjamin,1966, p. 66). Despite the separation, there wasstill an assumption that, as Stoller put it, “mas-culinity fits well with maleness and femininitygoes with femaleness” (1977, p. 173) so that if a“fully differentiated gender identity” is immu-table, it makes sense to achieve harmony byaltering the body to the extent that technologicaldevelopments allow. Money and Tucker write ofthe transsexual as

a person whose sex organs differentiated as maleand whose gender identity differentiated asfemale. Medical science has found ways to reducethe incompatibility by modifying anatomy to helpthat person achieve unity as a member of a sex . . .but medical science has not yet found a way tomodify a fully differentiated gender identity.(Money & Tucker, 1977, pp. 69-70)

Although not entirely without controversy, thehormonal and surgical renunciation of malenessand masculinity and femaleness and femininityhas become accepted in many Western countries,and elsewhere it no longer seems to require con-tinual justification. Although gender identity hascontinued to take priority over morphologicalsex, the search is still on for what is assumedwill be a biological determinant of the sexedbrain. A document titled Transsexualism: TheCurrent Medical Viewpoint, written for the mainUnited Kingdom campaigning organization by agroup of medical specialists, claims that

the weight of current scientific evidence suggestsa biologically-based, multifactoral aetiology fortranssexualism. Most recently, for example, astudy identified a region in the hypothalamus of

the brain which is markedly smaller in womenthan in men. The brains of transsexual womenexamined in this study show a similar brain devel-opment to that of other women. (Press for Change,1996, “Aetiology”)

Opponents of bodily modification have tendedto argue that the transsexual does not have an“opposite gender identity” but instead is sufferingfrom some form of psychic disturbance. Thisargument is orthodox among those many psy-choanalysts, for instance, who consider that“healthy” development leads toward “mature”heterosexual relationships that presuppose twomembers of the “opposite” sex who each manifest“healthy” degrees of “masculinity” and “feminin-ity,” respectively. Socarides, for instance, is avociferous exponent of this view:

The fact that the transsexual cannot accept hissex as anatomically outlined . . . is a sign of theintense emotional and mental disturbance whichexists within him. It is the emotional disturbancewhich must be attacked through suitable means bypsychotherapy which provides alleviation of anx-iety and psychological retraining rather thanamputation or surgery. (Socarides, 1969, p. 1424)

According to this view, the gender identity androle that is seen to be at variance with biologicalsex must be a sham, an imitation of the “realthing.” Socarides (1975), for example, wrote of“behaviour imitative of that of the opposite sex”(p. 131) and a “caricature of femininity” (p. 134).Like the supporters of surgery, its opponents tendto employ traditional stereotypes of gender iden-tity and roles. Ostow argued that in the casedescribed by Hamburger, Stürup, and Dahl-Iversen (1953), there was “no desire for sexualrelations with men” and “no evidence of anymaternal interest” (Ostow, 1953, p. 1553). Meyerand Hoopes (1974) have similarly argued that

a true feminine identification, for instance, wouldresult in warm and continued relationships withmen, a sense of maternity, interest in caring forchildren, and the capacity to work productivelyand continuously in female occupations. . . . Theadult “transsexual” reaches accommodation witha simulated femininity or masculinity at a sacri-fice in total personality. (p. 447)

The medical approach has facilitated somedegree of migration (Ekins & King, 1999) fromone sex (body) to the other, but it retains a view



of sex, sexuality, and gender as binary and has, onthe whole, accepted existing stereotypes of whatconstitutes masculinity and femininity and theirlinkages to male and female bodies. Thus, inthe absence of a “test” that will unequivocallydemonstrate that a person is a transsexual, suit-ability for hormone and (especially) surgical “sexchange” is determined by the extent to which thecandidate “passes” or demonstrates sufficientmasculinity or femininity, as the case may be.Some critics (and some of the candidates them-selves) have complained that the conceptions ofmasculinity and femininity that the medical pro-fession has employed in this respect have becomeoutmoded and are out of step with notions ofmasculinity and femininity in “the real world.”

The second approach that we consider in thefollowing section also makes use of traditionalstereotypes, but it loosens the linkage betweensex and gender to a greater extent than the med-ical approach. As with the bulk of the medicalliterature on transsexuality, there tends to be adownplaying of the details of transgender sexu-ality (eroticism) and the relations between“masculine” and “feminine” sexuality, as opposedto the details of sex (the body) and gender (bothas identity and as the social and cultural accom-paniments of sex).

THE TRANSGENDER COMMUNITY,VIRGINIA PRINCE, “FULL

PERSONALITY EXPRESSION,”AND “SUSPENDING” MASCULINITY

From the early 1960s onward, the voicesof transgendered people, themselves, began tobe heard outside the medical case histories.The dominant voice within this, our secondapproach, was of those who sought to avoidmedicalization and develop a view of theiridentities and behaviors in terms of their “sus-pending” aspects of masculinity for variousperiods of time, while not renouncing it entirely.Although self-identified transsexual “renounc-ers” tended to articulate themselves within thedeveloping medical discourse, the “suspenders”sought to develop their own perspective andaccompanying concepts of what it meant tobe male/masculine and female/feminine. Here,the work of Virginia Prince was particularlyinfluential, and her view that men should

express “the girl within” gained a following in“transvestite” groups throughout the world. ForPrince, being a male with a fully developed per-sonality expression entailed embracing “femi-ninity” in various modes, for varying periods oftime, and in various spaces and places. Princewas, it may be said, man enough to be a woman.Although Prince, herself, eventually came tolive full-time as what she termed a “transgen-derist” (a male woman without sex reassign-ment surgery), her main influence has been inarticulating a “transvestite” lifestyle in whichmales “oscillate” (Ekins & King, 1999, 2001b)between the expression of masculinity and offemininity in the service of “full personalityexpression.”

Although Hirschfeld coined the term “trans-sexualism” in 1923 (Hirschfeld, 1923; Ekins &King, 2001a), it was not widely used until the1950s and, at least in the English-speakingworld, the term “transvestism” (which he hadcoined earlier, in 1910) was employed in a verybroad sense to denote a diverse range of trans-gender practices, from what he termed “nametransvestism” (the adoption of an opposite-sexname) to full “sex changes.” With massive mediaattention focused on cases of the latter in theearly 1950s, medical attention focused on trans-sexualism, which, as we have seen, achieved adegree of respectability in some quarters.

There was much less interest in the other maintransgender practice (transvestism) to come tothe notice of the medical profession. This wasthat of (mainly) men who did not wish torenounce their masculinity permanently but whowould sometimes suspend it by cross-dressingand behaving “in a feminine fashion,” usually inprivate but sometimes in public. This compulsion(as it was often experienced) was sometimestroubling enough for some men to seek a “cure.”The term “transvestism” came to refer princi-pally to compulsive and sexually arousing cross-dressing, usually by biological males. Because no“cure” was available (despite a brief flurry ofinterest in the use of aversion therapy in the1960s), and because (despite the anguish of sometransvestites and sometimes their partners) cross-dressing was seen as a relatively harmless “per-version,” transvestism was of little interest tomost of the medical profession.

So it was left to transvestites themselvesto fashion an identity and a script that wasmore tenable than that on offer by the medical



profession. Central to this was Virginia Prince,who, after struggling to find a cure for her cross-dressing, was encouraged by a psychiatrist to“stop fighting it.” Prince went on to fashion anew identity depicting a certain type of cross-dressing supported by an explanatory and justi-ficatory philosophy with which she sought toeducate the medical profession and transvestitesthemselves. In doing so, she provided the basisfor the beginnings of what we now call thetransgender community.

Prince (1957, p. 82) distinguished betweenthree types of males who may share “the desireto wear feminine attire.” These were the homo-sexual, the transvestite, and the transsexual.Prince then distinguished the homosexual andthe transsexual from what she called the “truetransvestite” (Prince, 1957, p. 84). The truetransvestites are “exclusively heterosexual . . .frequently married and often fathers” (Prince,1957, p. 84). “They value their male organs andenjoy using them and do not wish them to beremoved” (p. 84).

In 1960, Prince published a magazine calledTransvestia that was sold by subscription andthrough adult bookshops. The message on theinside cover read: “Transvestia is dedicated tothe needs of those heterosexual persons whohave become aware of their ‘other side’ and seekto express it.” Gradually, Prince developed anorganization called the Foundation for FullPersonality Expression (FPE or Phi Pi Epsilon)that was clearly aimed at those cross-dresserswho, like Prince (at that time), were heterosex-ual and married—homosexuals and transsexualswere not admitted. This organization wasimmensely successful and spread to many partsof the world.

By 1967, Prince (writing under the pseu-donym “Bruce,” 1967) was evidently familiarwith the gender terminology and concepts thatare taken for granted today. Sex, she points out,is anatomical and physiological; gender is psy-chosocial. Transvestism, for Prince, is very firmlyabout gender. She argues that sex, the divisioninto male and female, is something we sharewith other animals. Gender, the division of mas-culine and feminine, is, on the other hand, “ahuman invention” and “not the inevitable resultof biological necessity” (Bruce, 1967, p. 129).But in their socialization, children are pushed inone or the other gender direction and, conse-quently, anything associated with the other

gender has to be suppressed, particularly in thecase of males. Transvestism is the expression ofthis suppressed femininity.

Prince’s views on the nature of masculinityand femininity are particularly apparent in herpublications aimed at instructing transvestitesthemselves on how to dress and behave in orderto express the woman within. How to Be aWoman Though Male (Prince, 1971) is a practi-cal guide for males who wish to be women, andthis involves Prince in presenting what lookslike a very dated, traditional view of women andmen, even for its time. To be masculine is tobe active, competitive, strong, logical, and soon; to be feminine is to be the opposite—passive, cooperative, weak, and emotional (Prince,1971, pp. 115-116). However, she is aware thatshe is presenting a stereotype of womanhoodand writes that she agrees with the feminist crit-icism of some aspects of it, but she argues thatthis is how things are, not as they should be, andthis is what it takes to be a woman in our culture(Prince, 1971, p. 116).

It is also, we should note, a very middle-classstereotype of femininity: Prince tells her read-ers, “if you are going to appear in society as awoman, don’t just be a woman, be a lady”(Prince, 1971, p. 135); and

it is the best in womanhood that the [transvestite]seeks to emulate, not the common. Be the LADYin the crowd if you are going to be a woman at all,not the scrubwoman or a clerk. It is the beauty,delicacy, grace, loveliness, charm and freedom ofexpression of the feminine world that you areseeking to experience and enjoy, so “live it up”—be as pretty, charming and graceful as you can . . .(Prince, 1971, p. 136)

Prince’s views are important in this contextfor her insistence on breaking the link betweenfemininity and femaleness, and (implicitly, forshe has little to say about this) between mas-culinity and maleness. The conception of thewoman within the man (and presumably theman within the woman) gave a more seriousedge to the emerging identity of the transvestite,and the notion of whole persons, both masculineand feminine, does strike a chord with some ofthe visions of the past 30 or so years.

However, Prince’s apparent recognition ofthe cultural relativity of masculinity and femi-ninity seems at odds with the notion of thememerging “from within” and, ultimately, Prince



herself seems to have found it hard to retain theseparation of sex and gender. She wrote in 1979that “I have had my beard removed by electrol-ysis and . . . as a result of a course of hormonetherapy I now possess a nice pair of 38Bbreasts” (Prince, 1979, p. 172).

FEMINISM, THE “TRANSSEXUAL

EMPIRE,” AND “REJECTING” MASCULINITY

From the late 1960s, with the emergence ofthe gay and women’s movements, there arose aninterest in the political significance of transgen-dering and its relationship to forms of sexualand gender oppression. From one point of view,“transvestites” and “transsexuals” (the terms inuse at the time) were seen as politically conser-vative, reinforcing gender stereotypes by per-forming hyperfemininity, for instance. From analternative standpoint, however, insofar as theybroke the congruity between sex and gender, theywere seen by some to be radical (e.g., Brake,1976). However, by far the most influential singlepolitical critique of what she termed “the trans-sexual empire” was that put forward by JaniceRaymond. Raymond (1980) argued that the cre-ation by the male medical profession of trans-sexualism and its “treatment” by means of sexchange surgery obscures the political and socialsources of the “transsexual’s” suffering. This,then, was the period of influence of feministtransgender theory disposed to “rejecting” menand masculinity. The male-to-female transsex-ual’s claim to womanhood and femininity wasrejected, as well as that medical discourse andpractice which sought to aid the transsexual’s“renouncing” of his masculinity. Raymond sawfemale-to-male transsexuals as merely “tokens”who had no significance for her argument. In thissense, too, females who wished to “embrace” themasculinity attendant on their sex reassignmentsurgery were rejected from her considerations.

As we have seen, some medical approacheshave accepted the authenticity of a masculineor feminine identity at variance with the bodyand have given priority to the identity over thebody. Prince and the organizations influencedby her philosophy have also recognized anauthentic femininity within a male body andpresumably would allow an authentic mascu-linity within a female body. Other approachesfrom within the medical profession have seen

transvestism and transsexualism unequivocallyas psychopathologies and have denied thereality of a gender identity at variance with theevidence of the body.

Although some of these approaches havenoted the culturally contingent nature of mas-culinity and femininity, they have not ques-tioned the content of these categories and haveshown little awareness of gender inequality. Yet,in the late 1960s, when sex change surgery hadgained a degree of legitimacy as the treatment ofchoice for those who claimed a gender identityother than that suggested by their bodies andwho displayed the appropriate masculinity orfemininity, the emerging women’s movementwas beginning to question just what was appro-priate about these categories. The problem thattranssexuals posed for the women’s movementwas this: Who qualifies as a woman?

As the transgender activist Wilchins (1997)was to put it later,

Feminist politics begins with the rather commonsense notion that there exists a group of peopleunderstood as women whose needs can be politi-cally represented and whose objectives soughtthrough unified action. A movement for women—what could be simpler? But implicit in this is thebasic idea that we know who comprises this groupsince it is their political goals we will articulate.What if this ostensibly simple assumption isn’ttrue? (p. 81)

Although it is not the only feminist positionon transsexualism, that of Janice Raymond(1980) is probably the best known. Although ithas been subjected to considerable criticism(e.g., Califia, 1997; Riddell, 1996; Wilchins,1997), its influence can still be found in thework of some writers, such as Jeffreys (1996,2003). At the heart of Raymond’s position is thedenial of the legitimacy of the transsexual’s“chosen” gender. What she calls “male-to-constructed-females” can never be womenbecause of their lack of both female biology andfemale life experiences. Raymond asserts:

it is biologically impossible to change chromo-somal sex. If chromosomal sex is taken to be thefundamental basis for maleness and femaleness,the male who undergoes sex conversion surgery isnot female . . . Transsexuals are not women. Theyare deviant males. (1980, pp.10, 183)



Raymond argued that transsexualism is notan individual condition, a personal problem forwhich changing sex is merely a neutral, techni-cal method of treatment, but instead is a socialand political phenomenon. According to her,“transsexuals” are among the victims of patriar-chal society and its definitions of masculinityand femininity. By creating transsexualism andtreating it by means of sex change, the politicaland social sources of the “transsexuals”’ suffer-ing are obscured. Instead, it is conceptualized asan individual problem for which an individualsolution is devised.

Raymond argues that by means of thisillegitimate medicalization, the “real” problemremains unaddressed. Medicalization alsoserves to defuse the revolutionary potential oftranssexuals, who are “deprived of an alternativeframework in which to view the problem”(1980, p. 124).

She argues that not only does transsexualismreflect the nature of patriarchal society, but it isalso ultimately caused by it:

The First Cause, that which sets other causesof transsexualism in motion . . . is a patriarchalsociety, which generates norms of masculinity andfemininity. Uniquely restricted by patriarchy’sdefinitions of masculinity and femininity, thetranssexual becomes body-bound by them andmerely rejects one and gravitates toward the other.(Raymond, 1980, p. 70)

Thus, we have a circular process by whichpatriarchy creates, via the family and otherstructures, problems for individuals that are thendealt with as transsexualism, thus reinforcingthe conditions out of which the problems arose.

However, this is primarily a one-way move-ment, for Raymond sees transsexualism asprimarily a male movement. Female-to-maletranssexuals are mere tokens created to maintainthe illusion that it is a “condition” that affectsboth sexes. The reason why it is primarily amale problem, says Raymond (1980), is becausemen are seeking to possess

the power that women have by virtue of femalebiology. This power, which is evident in givingbirth, cannot be reduced to procreation. Ratherbirthing is only representative of the many levelsof creativity that women have exercised in thehistory of civilization. Transsexualism may beone way by which men attempt to possess female

creative energies, by possessing artifactual femaleorgans. (p. xvi)

In addition, Raymond (1980) sees the cre-ation of transsexualism and sex change surgeryas an attempt to replace biological women(p. 140) and argues that “gender identity clinics”where transsexuals are “treated” are proto-typical “sex-role control centers” (p. 136). Thus,transsexualism is not merely another exampleof the pervasive effects of patriarchal attitudes;it actually constitutes an attack on women.“Transsexualism constitutes a sociopoliticalprogram that is undercutting the movement toeradicate sex role stereotyping and oppressionin this culture” (p. 5).

Apart from measures directed at the “firstcause” itself (patriarchy), Raymond advocatesrestrictions on “sex change” surgery; the pre-sentation of other, less favorable, views of itsconsequences in the media; and nonsexist coun-seling and consciousness-raising groups fortranssexuals themselves to enable them to real-ize their radical potential (1980, appendix).

How much acceptance Raymond’s thesishas had is difficult to tell, but it clearly has beenwidely read and discussed. Stone (1991) writesof Raymond’s book that “here in 1991, on thetwelfth anniversary of its publication, it is stillthe definitive statement on transsexualism by agenetic female academic” (p. 281). The positionof Raymond and other feminist academics wasnot merely “academic.” In the middle and late1970s, as Carol Riddell explains (personal com-munication, 1994),

a small but very active section of the feministmovement, the “Revolutionary Feminists,” weretaking over some positions in the radical subcul-tures of extreme feminism. They owed a littleintellectually to Mary Daly and her ex-studentJanice Raymond, from whose doctoral thesis TheTranssexual Empire was written. There werereports of threats to transsexuals in London, and Imyself was threatened with violence when Iattended a Bi-sexuality conference there.

The position was much the same two decadeslater, when members of the New York Citychapter of the activist Transexual Menace con-fronted Janice Raymond at the launch of her1994 edition of The Transsexual Empire.Wilchins (1997) has written eloquently of thestruggles for male-to-female transsexuals to



gain admittance to “womyn-born womyn only”spaces and the harassment they have suffered atevents that ban “nongenetic women” (Wilchins,1997, p. 110).

POSTMODERNITY, “TRANSCENDING,”AND BREAKING THE LINK BETWEEN

MALES AND MASCULINITY

Finally, we look at the emergence, at the endof the 20th century, of a postmodern approach:the coming of age of transgenderism. Now theemphasis is on transgender diversity, fluidity, andmoving beyond the rigidities of the binary genderdivide. New combinations of masculinity andfemininity are celebrated. Particularly significant,from the standpoint of masculinity, is the conceptof female masculinity put forward by Judith“Jack” Halberstam (1998). Whereas the vastmajority of the men and masculinities literatureconcerns itself with variants of masculinity con-sidered in relation to males, Halberstam breaksthat link. Furthermore, in a postmodern age,medical technology becomes something to callupon for the purposes of “optional” body modifi-cation, as opposed to “diagnosis,” treatment, ormanagement of pathology or disorder.

Virginia Prince notwithstanding, the voices oftransgendered people themselves were largelymissing from the earlier approaches that we havelooked at; they appeared largely as cases inthe medical literature or as dupes of the medicalprofession in the dominant feminist discourses.This was to change radically in the 1990s as anew discourse emerged, constituting a majorparadigm shift. A key work in this new approachwas Sandy Stone’s “The Empire Strikes Back”(1991), in which she argued that “the people whohave no voice in this theorizing are the transsex-uals themselves. As with males theorizing aboutwomen from the beginning of time, theorists ofgender have seen transsexuals as possessingsomething less than agency” (1991, p. 294).

Stone also pointed out that transsexuals hadfailed to develop a counterdiscourse. It is easy tosee why, because the main “traditional” transgen-der identities have “worked” only to the extentthat they have been covert and temporary. Themale transvestite who suspends his masculinityfor varying amounts of time most usually doesnot want to be “read” as such. Except within asmall subcultural setting, he wishes to be seen as

a “normal” man or (to the extent that he is able tosuspend his masculinity in public) as a “normal”woman. Similarly, the male transsexual who isrenouncing his masculinity permanently, likethe female transsexual who is seeking to embraceit, are also seeking to be read as a woman and aman, respectively. Both identities are also tempo-rary ones; the transvestite oscillates (Ekins &King, 1999, 2001b) between masculinity andfemininity; the transsexual passes through a transphase on the way to a permanent masculine orfeminine identity.

Where these identities have become openand/or permanent, they have been seen as patho-logical and/or problematic. In other words, nopermanent “in-between” identity was allowedfor. To the extent that the transvestite or trans-sexual passes as a person of the other gender,and to the extent that the transgendering remainshidden, the “fact” of two invariant gendersremains unquestioned. As Stone (1991) put it,“authentic experience is replaced by a particularkind of story, one that supports the old con-structed positions” (p. 295). In consequence,Stone argued that transsexuals can develop theirown discourse only by recognizing their uniquegender position:

For a transsexual, as a transsexual, to generate atrue, effective and representational counterdis-course is to speak from outside the boundariesof gender, beyond the constructed oppositionalnodes which have been predefined as the onlypositions from which discourse is possible. (1991,p. 295)

Stone contended that the dominant binarymodel of gender and its employment in the cate-gory of transsexuality has obscured the diversityof the transsexual experience. It “foreclosed thepossibility of analyzing desire and motiva-tional complexity in a manner which adequatelydescribes the multiple contradictions of individ-ual lived experience” (1991, p. 297). What beganto happen, in fact, during the 1990s was therecognition of the vast diversity of transgenderexperiences. Some people did begin questioning“the necessity of passing for typically genderedpeople” and began to develop new gender iden-tities. For some people, “the experience ofcrossed or transposed gender is a strong part oftheir gender identity; being out of the closet ispart of that expression” (Nataf, 1996, p. 16).



The following quotation from Denny (1995)underscores the point of diversity:

With the new way of looking at things, suddenlyall sorts of options have opened up for transgen-dered people: living full-time without genitalsurgery, recreating in one gender role while work-ing in another, identifying as neither gender, orboth, blending . . . characteristics of differentgenders in new and creative ways, identifying asgenders and sexes heretofore undreamed of—evendesigner genitals do not seem beyond reason. (p. 1)

The 1995 International Bill of Gender Rights(reprinted in Feinberg, 1996, pp. 171-175)claims that “all human beings have the rightto define their own gender identity” . . . “to freeexpression of their self-defined gender identity,”and to change “their bodies cosmetically, chem-ically, or surgically, so as to express a self-defined gender identity” (pp. 172-173). Califia(1997), too, writes of the “individual’s rightto own his or her own body, and [to] make what-ever temporary or permanent changes to thatbody the individual pleases. . . . A new sort oftransgendered person has emerged, one whoapproaches sex reassignment with the samemindset that they would obtaining a piercing ora tattoo” (p. 224).

However, at the same time as there is anacknowledgment of diversity, there has alsodeveloped a greater sense of unity. Writers nowcomment on the “transgender community,” andthis is sometimes seen to extend into the gaycommunity (Mackenzie, 1994; Whittle, 1996).Parts of this community have been workingmore vociferously and more effectively thanever before to end discrimination toward, andclaim what are described as the rights of, trans-gendered people. The emphasis has shifted tothe rights of transgendered people as transgen-dered, and not as members of their “new” gen-der. A particular focus of this activism has beenthe advocacy of the right of “gender expression”subversive of masculine/feminine dichotomiesas linked to “male” and “female” bodies.

Stone’s (1991) chapter can also be seen to pro-vide the starting point for the emergence of trans-gender theory, which is now seen by some to beat the very cutting edge of debates about sex, sex-uality, and gender and has achieved a position ofprominence in a number of recent contributionsto cultural studies and “queer theory.” Stone’simage of transsexuals as “outside the boundaries

of gender” chimed in well with many of thethemes in cultural studies and queer theory andprovided a motif that has been much developedsince.

This idea points to the position of transpeople as located somewhere outside the spacescustomarily offered to men and women, aspeople who are beyond the laws of gender. Sothe assumption that there are only two (oppo-site) genders, with their corresponding “mas-culinities” and “femininities,” is opened up toscrutiny. Instead, it is suggested that there is thepossibility of a “third” space outside the genderdichotomy. This idea refers not simply to theaddition of another category; it is conceived as“a space for society to articulate and make senseof all its various gendered identities” (Nataf,1996, p. 57), or, as Herdt (1994) put it, “the thirdis emblematic of other possible combinationsthat transcend dimorphism” (p. 20).

Within this approach, the idea of permanentcore identities and the idea of gender itself dis-appear. The emphasis is on transience, fluidity,and performance. Kate Bornstein, for instance,talks about “the ability to freely and knowinglybecome one or many of a limitless number ofgenders for any length of time, at any rate ofchange” (Bornstein, 1994, p. 52). In that genderfluidity recognizes no borders or “laws” ofgender, the claim is to live “outside of gender”(Whittle, 1996) as “gender outlaws” (Bornstein,1994).

Writing at the beginning of the 1990s, Rubinpointed out that “transsexual demographics arechanging. FTMs [female-to-males] still comprisea fraction of the transsexual population, but theirnumbers are growing and awareness of their pres-ence is increasing” (1992, p. 475). Convenientlywritten off as “tokens” by Raymond, female-to-male transsexuals or, more accurately, female-bodied trans persons, indeed had become a morevisible feature of the transgender community bythe end of the 20th century and leading into the21st century. In fact, they have come to play keyroles within that community and within transgen-der politics, and they have been prominent inthe emergence of transgender theory (e.g.,Cromwell, 1999; Prosser, 1998; Whittle, 1996).More specifically, it is trans men who have ledthe way in linking transgender to revolutionarysocialism (Feinberg, 1996), to radical lesbianism(Nataf, 1996), to radical body configurationsand pansexualism (Volcano, 2000), and to the



beginnings of a hitherto neglected transgenderapproach to class, race, and masculinity (Volcano& Halberstam, 1999). In the main, followers ofRaymond such as Jeffreys (1996) have continuedto turn a blind eye to the significance of FTMswithin the transgender community.

Notably, it is Judith “Jack” Halberstam whohas turned the spotlight onto “female masculin-ity” or “masculinity” without men (Halberstam,1998), thus avoiding the limitations of seeingmasculinity as “a synonym for men and male-ness” (Halberstam, 1998, p. 13). Halberstam’smain aims are to demonstrate that women his-torically have contributed to the constructionof contemporary masculinity and to underlinethe diversity of female masculinity, which hasbeen obscured because it challenges “main-stream definitions of male masculinity as non-performative” (Halberstam, 1998, p. 234).

CONCLUDING COMMENTS

The “lessons” of transgender for masculinity(and femininity) are complex and often contra-dictory. They revolve around the nature of andthe relationships between sex, gender, and sexu-ality. The neat binary divisions in each of theseareas has given way to diversity, and the simplelinkages between them have given way to com-plexity. Not surprisingly, much academic andpopular discussion has been focused on themost dramatic aspect of transgender, that oftranssexualism. Against a backdrop of theassumed correlation of sex, gender, and hetero-sexuality, radical refashioning of the body hasbeen conventionally sanctioned by the medicalprofession after the demonstration by the“applicant” that the applicant’s body is “out ofsync” with the applicant’s gender and sexuality,thereby restoring harmony. Recent thinking hasupset that harmony.

The early attempts by Hirschfeld and Ellis todistinguish transvestism or eonism from homo-sexuality and Prince’s insistence on the genderednature of transvestism led to an underplaying ofthe significance of transgendered sexuality. Thediversity of transgender sexual experiences evi-dent in the early medical literature was graduallyreplaced by a “heteronormative” perspective inwhich those transsexuals who took steps tochange their bodies to match their perceivedidentity on the “opposite” side of the binary

divide, and who took up a heterosexual positionfrom the vantage point of this “opposite” side,were privileged over transgendered people whoevidenced other forms of transgender experi-ence. This heteronormative position that privi-leges heterosexuality, as set within a binary maleand female gender divide, over other forms ofsexual and gender expression, may be illustratedby Benjamin’s (1968) statement:

Transsexuals are attracted only to members of theirown anatomical sex; however, they cannot becalled homosexual because they feel they belongto the sex opposite to that of the chosen partner.The transsexual man loves another man as awoman does, in spite of his phenotype and in spiteof his genital apparatus which he feels he mustchange. The transsexual woman woos anotherwoman as a man would, feeling herself to be a manregardless of her anatomical structure. (p. 429)

It was not until 1984 that Dorothy Clarecoined the term “transhomosexuality” (Clare,1984) in recognition of the fact that the “trans-sexual’s” renouncing masculinity did not necessar-ily mean renouncing sexual attraction to womenand that embracing masculinity did not necessar-ily entail embracing women as sexual partners(see also Feinbloom, Fleming, Kijewski, &Schulter, 1976). More recently, through thepopularization of the writings of Ray Blanchard(e.g., 1989) by Anne Lawrence (1999) andMichael Bailey (2003) (see Ekins & King,2001c), the recognition of a sexual motivation forsex reassignment has occurred. This literaturehighlights the complex interrelations between“masculine” and “feminine” transgendered sexu-ality insofar as many self-identified male-to-female transsexuals are committed to renouncingmany elements of their masculinity, but paradox-ically this desire for permanent renunciationderives from a sexuality that is in importantrespects stereotypically masculine. Significantly,Lawrence (1999) refers to such male-to-femaletranssexuals as “Men Trapped in Men’s Bodies.”The key concept here is “autogynephilia” (loveof oneself as a woman). As Lawrence puts it(personal communication, 2001), “I renounced amasculine sexed body and for the most partrenounced masculine gender behavior, in anattempt to both express and control my (mascu-line) autogynephilic sexuality. Paradoxically, thecontrol aspect also involved a renunciation ofmasculine sexuality, at least in part.”



Similarly, the straightforward dichotomyof male and female bodies is also breachedby recent developments. Transvestites alteredtheir bodies only in temporary or reversibleways; transsexuals were either pre- or post-op,and post-op meant that the body had been recon-figured to resemble as closely as possible the“normal” body that “fitted” the gender identity.The only limits were those imposed by cost ortechnical limitations. Now some people are notgoing “all the way” and are choosing to recon-figure their bodies in ways that are not “stan-dard” male or female. Virginia Prince, radical insome ways and clearly ahead of her time, mightnot be happy with the sexual implications in thefollowing quotation, but she would otherwise,we feel, approve:

If a man says he loves me, he’d better love all ofme. Ain’t no part of me that ain’t me. Ain’t no partof me that’s bad. I am an African Americanheterosexual woman who is transgendered with apenis. . . . A man either love all of me or none ofme. And I mean ALL of me. (quoted in Griggs,1998, p. 93)

Another example of body diversity is that ofthose people born with intersexed bodies whohave been (and often still are) surgically andhormonally fitted into one or the other categoryas early in their lives as possible. Now, increas-ingly, people with intersexed bodies who wereneither aware of nor able to control such surgi-cal and hormonal intervention are questioningthose practices and demanding the right todetermine whether, when, and how their bodiesshould be altered (Chase, 1998; Kessler, 1998).

As we explained earlier, it was the primacygiven to gender and specifically gender identitythat gave legitimacy to the efforts of the medicalprofession to change the sex of those seeking tochange. By and large, only two gender identitieswere “allowed”: masculine and feminine. Againthe dichotomy is being questioned, as there isemerging a diversity of identities “in between”or even “outside” the conventional parameters.

Members of the medical profession—healthprofessionals and therapists, too—have begunto look at their patients or clients in less dichoto-mous ways. Bockting and Coleman, forexample, wrote that their clients “often have amore ambiguous gender identity and are moreambivalent about a gender role transitionthan they initially admit” (1992, p. 143). Their

treatment program allows their clients, they say,to “discover and express their unique identity”(1992, p. 143) and “allows for individuals toidentify as neither man nor woman, but as some-one whose identity transcends the culturallysanctioned dichotomy” (1992, p. 144).

We leave the penultimate word to JasonCromwell, who expresses the idea clearly whenhe says that “there is more to gender diversitythan being transvestite or transsexual . . . thereare more than two sexes or genders” (Cromwell,1999, p. 6). By the same token, there is more toMen and Masculinities Studies than men andmasculinities. Therein lies the particular contri-bution of transgendering to the field.

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PART V

POLITICS



23NATION

JOANE NAGEL

397

“I t is no secret,” James Messerschmidtargues in Masculinities and Crime, “whocommits the vast majority of crime.

Arrest, self-report, and victimization data allreflect that men and boys both perpetrate moreconventional crimes and the more serious ofthose crimes than do women and girls” (1993,p. 1; see also Messerschmidt, 2000). Likewise,it is also no secret who commits the vast major-ity of war crimes, or who sits at the helms ofnational governments and movements aroundthe world, or who articulates the ideologiesand dominates the ruling structures of nationsand states. Men organize, run, and “man” themachinery of government; they set policy, andthey make war; men occupy the vast majority ofpositions of power and influence in nations inthe global system.

This is not to say that women do not haveroles to play in the making and unmaking ofstates and nations: as citizens, as members ofthe nation, as activists, as leaders. It is to saythat the scripts in which these roles are embed-ded are written primarily by men, for men, andabout men, and that women are, by design,supporting actors. If nations and states are gen-dered institutions, as much recent scholarshipasserts (Brown, 1988, 1992; Davis, Leijenaar, &Oldersma, 1991; Eisenstein, 1985; Enloe, 1990,1993; Hooper, 2001; MacKinnon, 1989; Walby,1989), then to limit the examination of gender in

politics to an investigation of women only, asmuch contemporary research has tended to do, isto miss a major, perhaps the major, way in whichgender shapes politics—through men and theirinterests, their notions of manliness, and thearticulation of masculine micro (everyday) andmacro (political) cultures. For instance, in herstudy of gender, race, and sexuality in colonial-ism, Imperial Leather, McClintock (1995,pp. 356-357) notes the “gendered discourse” ofnationalism, commenting that “if male theoristsare typically indifferent to the gendering ofnations, feminist analyses of nationalism havebeen lamentably few and far between. Whitefeminists, in particular, have been slow to recog-nize nationalism as a feminist issue.” The inti-mate historical and modern connection betweenmanhood and nationhood is forged through theconstruction of patriotic manhood and exaltedmotherhood as icons of nationalist ideology—in which the nation is a family with men as itsdefenders and women as the defended embodi-ment of home and hearth; through the designa-tion of gendered “places” for men and women inthe nation and national politics—where men areseen as rightly concerned with such manlyactivities as all things military and international,and where women are seen as properly concernedwith such womanly things as family and domes-tic issues; through the institutionalization ofmasculine interests and ideology in nationalist


movements—by which the convergence ofmasculinism and nationalism operates to keepmen in charge and women in their place; throughthe tight fit between masculine microculturesand nationalist ideology—by which the congru-ence of masculinism and nationalism is reflectedin the embeddedness in nationalist ideology ofsuch masculine preoccupations as honor, cow-ardice, strength, face-saving, and manliness onplaygrounds and battlefields, as well as in sportsarenas and international affairs; through themilitarization of [hetero]sexuality in nationalistconflicts—by which heterosexuality is enlisted inthe service of defending the nation, and “enemy”men and women are sexually constructed assimultaneously oversexed and undersexed Othermen and promiscuous Other women; and throughthe mobilized, sometimes frantic defense of mas-culine, racial, and heterosexual privilege in male-dominated national and nationalistic arenas—inwhich the “purity” of traditions and institutionsof hegemonic masculinity, such as militaryschools, armed forces, and combat theatres, issanctified and segregated. The following incidentfrom 19th-century U.S. history illustrates thepowerful brotherhood of masculinities even incases where competing manhoods and nation-hoods confront one another in battle.

A CLASH OF MANHOODS

In 1931, Hunkpapa Lakota, Moving RobeWoman, recounted a battle that took placeon June 24, 1876, at Peji Sla Wakapa (GreasyGrass), an event remembered by most Americanstoday as the “Battle of Little Bighorn”:

I was born seventy-seven winters ago, near GrandRiver, South Dakota. . . . I belonged to SittingBull’s band. They were great fighters. . . . I amgoing to tell you of the greatest battle. This was afight against Pehin Hanska (General Custer). . . .Several of us Indian girls were digging wildturnips . . . [and we] looked toward camp and sawa warrior ride swiftly, shouting that the soldierswere only a few miles away. . . . I heard HawkMan shout: “Hoka He! Hoka He!” (Charge!Charge!). . . . Someone said that another body ofsoldiers was attacking the lower end of the village.I heard afterwards that these soldiers were underthe command of Long Hair (Custer). With myfather and other youthful warriors I rode in thatdirection. . . . The valley was dense with powder

smoke. I never heard such whooping and shouting.“There is never a better time to die!” shouted RedHorse. Long Hair’s troopers were trapped in anenclosure. There were Indians everywhere. . . . Itwas not a massacre, but a hotly contested battlebetween two armed forces. (Hardorff, 1997,pp. 91-95)

The battle at Peji Sla Wakapa was betweentroops of the U.S. Seventh Cavalry led byGeneral George Armstrong Custer and warriorsfrom the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, andArapaho nations led by Sitting Bull, CrazyHorse, and Two Moons, among others.1 Custer’sforces were caught between groups of nativewarriors and were killed in the cross fire.Historians identify a number of events leadingup to the Indian victory at Little Bighorn thatconstitute a familiar 19th-century scenario(Gray, 1976, 1991; Hedren, 1991; Leckie, 1993,p. 201; Michno, 1997; Utley, 1984b; Viola,1999), but to this day Custer’s defeat remains asource of immense controversy among scholarsand intense interest among hobbyists. Custerand Little Bighorn remain stuck in the collectiveAmerican craw. The attention given to—somemight argue, obsession with—Custer’s defeatgenerated several official and military inquiries,hundreds of scholarly monographs and articles,numerous popular books and films, dozens ofnewsletters and enactment groups, countlessInternet Web sites and links, and even LittleBighorn trading cards.2

Moving Robe Woman’s words quoted aboveprovide considerable insight into the enduringpreoccupation with Custer and the Battle of LittleBighorn in the American scholarly and popularimagination: “It was . . . a hotly contested battle.”What was contested in the Battle of LittleBighorn was not simply the land and who wouldcontrol it, though that political economic contestwas and remains central to understanding thehistory of indigenous-settler relations in Americaand around the world. The “hotly contested battlebetween two armed forces” was a gendered con-flict, a confrontation of masculinities that playeditself out on the U.S. northern plains in 1876and in the years to follow. It was a battle not onlyover land and resources; it was a struggle over thedefinition and boundaries of manhood andnationhood, a contest to determine the shape andcontent of American national identity and—I willargue in this chapter, its constant companion—American masculine identity.

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The commentary of Wooden Leg, a Cheyennefighter in the battle, articulates the genderedcharacter of this battle for native men as well:

Our war cries and war songs were mingled withmany jeering calls, such as: “You are only boys.You ought not to be fighting. We whipped you onthe Rosebud. You should have brought moreCrows or Shoshones with you to do your fight-ing.” Little Bird and I were after one certain sol-dier. Little Bird was wearing a trailing warbonnet.He was at the right and I was at the left of the flee-ing man. We were lashing him and his horse withour pony whips. It seemed not brave to shoot him.Besides, I did not want to waste my bullets.(Nabokov, 1979, pp. 136-137)

Wooden Leg’s contempt for Custer and his“boys” is one articulation of a much larger dis-course of masculinities sizing up one another,sometimes conflicting and sometimes collabo-rating in the construction of nations and nation-alities. The interplay between indigenous andsettler manhoods throughout history is complexand contradictory. U.S. Indian-white relationswere and are enacted as part of a gendereddrama in which white men “play Indian” by

dressing in feathers and beating on drums toconsume fetishized native manly arts and power(Deloria, 1998; Huhndorf, 1997; Nelson, 1998;Schwalbe, 1995), and in which Indian men par-ticipate in the spectacle of American manhoodby serving in the U.S. military and in honoringveterans for their service to recuperate van-quished manhoods and nationhoods (Fowler,1987; Whitehorse, 1988).

This gendered reading of Custer’s last standand the continuing anxieties associated withits place in the American nationalist imaginaryserve as my first illustration of the link betweenmanhood and nationhood (see also Clark &Nagel, 2001). The remainder of this chapterexplicates and explores further the intimate rela-tionship between men and nations in a variety ofnational settings during the past century.

CONSTRUCTING MEN AND NATIONS

In her evocative book Bananas, Beaches, andBases, Cynthia Enloe (1990, p. 45) observesthat “nationalism has typically sprung from mas-culinized memory, masculinized humiliation and

Nation • 399

Figure 23.1 Custer’s Last Dodge

SOURCE: From www.savedge.com/pinhole/images/civilwar/custer.jpg. Reprinted with permission of Billie Anne Wright.


masculinized hope.” She argues that womenare relegated to minor, often symbolic, rolesin nationalist movements and conflicts, eitheras icons of nationhood, to be elevated anddefended, or as the booty or spoils of war, to bedenigrated and disgraced. In either case, the realactors are men who are defending their freedom,their honor, their homeland, and their women.Enloe’s insight about the connection betweenmanhood and nationhood raises definitionalquestions about each: What do we mean by“masculinity,” and what do we mean by “nation-alism”? Because much of this volume is dedi-cated to a discussion of masculinity in theoryand practice, I will limit my discussion of thatconcept to two observations.

First, historical studies of masculinity in theUnited States and Europe argue that contempo-rary patterns of U.S. middle-class masculinityarose out of a crisis and renaissance of manlinessin the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Carnes,1989; Leverenz, 1989; Trachtenberg, 1982).Scholars document a resurgent preoccupationwith masculine ideals of physique and behavioraround the turn of the century that becameinstitutionalized into such organizations andinstitutions as the modern Olympic movement,which began in 1896 (MacAloon, 1981, 1984);Theodore Roosevelt’s “Rough Riders” unit,which fought in the Spanish American War in1898 (Morris, 1979; Rotundo, 1993); a variety ofboys’ and men’s lodges and fraternal organiza-tions, such as the Knights of Columbus and theImproved Order of Red Men, which were estab-lished or expanded in the late 19th century(Kauffman, 1982; Orr, 1994; Preuss, 1924); andthe Boy Scouts of America, which were foundedin 1910, 2 years after the publication of R.S.S.Baden-Powell’s influential Scouting for Boys(MacKenzie, 1987; Warren, 1986, 1987). Theseorganizations embodied U.S. and Europeanmale codes of honor (Nye, 1993), which stresseda number of “manly virtues” described by Mosse(1996) as “normative masculinity”; these includedwillpower, honor, courage, discipline, competi-tiveness, quiet strength, stoicism, sangfroid, per-sistence, adventurousness, independence, sexualvirility tempered with restraint, and dignity, andthey reflected masculine ideals such as liberty,equality, and fraternity.

Second, despite debates about the racial, class,sexual, historical, or comparative limits of vari-ous definitions and depictions of masculinity,

or about the extent to which U.S. or WesternEuropean cultures of masculinity typify man-hoods around the world, most scholars arguethat at any time, in any place, there is an identifi-able “normative” or “hegemonic” masculinitythat sets the standards for male demeanor, think-ing, and action (Connell, 2000; Gilmore, 1990).Hegemonic masculinity is more than an “ideal”;it is assumptive, it is widely held, and it has thequality of appearing to be “natural” (Donaldson,1993; Morgan, 1992). Whether current U.S.hegemonic masculinity is derived from a 19th-century renaissance of manliness or is rootedin earlier historical cultural conceptions of man-hood, it is certainly identifiable as the dominantform among several racial, sexual, and class-based masculinities in contemporary U.S. society(see Kimmel, 1996; Kimmel & Messner, 1995;Pfeil, 1995). The same can be said for other coun-tries as well—in Europe, Latin America, Africa,Asia, or the Middle East. For instance, whetherthe manly attitudes and rules for behavior forArab men described by T. E. Lawrence in SevenPillars of Wisdom (1926) set the current stan-dards of manliness for men in the modern Arabworld is not so much the question, as whethersome current set of masculine standards existsand can be identified as hegemonic. The answerto that question is, most certainly, yes (seeKandiyoti, 1991; Massad, 1995; Mehdid, 1996).

NATIONALISM

Max Weber defines a nation as a community ofsentiment that would adequately manifest itselfin a state and that holds notions of commondescent, though not necessarily common blood(Gerth & Mills, 1948, pp. 172-179). Layoun(1991, pp. 410-411) concurs: Nationalism “con-structs and proffers a narrative of the ‘nation’and of its relation to an already existing orpotential state.” By these definitions, national-ism is both a goal (to achieve statehood) anda belief (in collective commonality). Nation-alists seek to accomplish both statehood andnationhood. The goal of sovereign statehood—“state-building”—often takes the form ofrevolutionary or anticolonial warfare. The mainte-nance and exercise of statehood vis-à-vis othernation-states often takes the form of armedconflict. As a result, nationalism and militarismseem to go hand in hand.

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The goal of nationhood—“nation-building”—often involves “imagining” a national past andpresent (Anderson, 1991), inventing traditions(Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1983), and symbolicallyconstructing community (Cohen, 1985). AsGellner (1983) argues, “it is nationalism thatengenders nations, and not the other wayaround” (p. 49). The tasks of defining commu-nity, of setting boundaries, and of articulatingnational character, history, and a vision for thefuture tend to emphasize both unity and “other-ness.” The project of establishing national iden-tity and cultural boundaries tends to fosternationalist ethnocentrism. As a result, national-ism and chauvinism seem to go hand in hand.Chauvinistic nationalism is often confined tothe ideational realm in the form of attitudes andbeliefs about national superiority. During peri-ods of nationalist conflict or expansion, however,such ethnocentrism becomes animated. Theresult in modern world history has been fornationalism to display an intolerant, sometimesmurderous face. Nairn (1977) refers to the nationas “the modern Janus” to contrast nationalism’stwo sides: a regressive, jingoistic, militaristic“warfare state” visage versus a progressive, com-munity-building “welfare state” countenance—guns versus butter (see Hernes, 1987).

The distinction between ideology and actioncharacterizes most discussions of the definitionand operation of nationalism. Nationalist ideol-ogy (i.e., beliefs about the nation—who we are,what we represent) becomes the basis and justi-fication for national actions (i.e., activities ofstate- and nation-building—the fight for inde-pendence, the creation of a political and legalorder, the exclusion or inclusion of variouscategories of members, the relations with othernations). Whether nationalism is manifested inaction or ideology, most scholars identify the19th century as the origin of nationalism as away of understanding and organizing localand global politics. Nairn (1977) argued that“nationalism in its most general sense is deter-mined by certain features of the world politicaleconomy in the era between the French andIndustrial Revolutions and the present day”(p. 333). These features include a “new andheightened significance accorded to factors ofnationality, ethnic inheritance, customs, andspeech” and “the creation of a national marketeconomy and a viable national bourgeois class”(p. 333). Similarly, Seton-Watson identifies the

late 1700s as the dividing line between “old”and “new” nations in Europe, where the oldnations, such as the English, Scots, Danes,French, and Swedes, enjoyed relative autonomy,and the new nations, basically the rest of theworld, mobilized in the form of national move-ments to achieve independence, either frommonarchies or from colonialism, articulating aform of nationalism designed to “implant in[their constituents] a national consciousness anda desire for political action” (Seton-Watson,1977, p. 9).

MEN’S AND WOMEN’S

PLACES IN THE NATION

By definition, nationalism is political and closelylinked to the state and its institutions. Like themilitary, most state institutions have been histor-ically and remain dominated by men. It is there-fore no surprise that the culture and ideology ofhegemonic masculinity go hand in hand with theculture and ideology of hegemonic nationalism.Masculinity and nationalism articulate well withone another, and the modern form of Westernmasculinity emerged at about the same time andplace as modern nationalism. Mosse (1996, p. 7)notes that nationalism “was a movement whichbegan and evolved parallel to modern mascul-inity” in the West about a century ago. Hedescribes modern masculinity as a centerpiece ofall varieties of nationalist movements:

The masculine stereotype was not bound to anyone of the powerful political ideologies of theprevious century. It supported not only conserva-tive movements . . . but the workers’ movement aswell; even Bolshevik man was said to be “firm asan oak.” Modern masculinity from the very firstwas co-opted by the new nationalist movements ofthe nineteenth century. (Mosse, 1996, p. 7)

Other political ideologies of that time, inparticular colonialism and imperialism, alsoresonated with contemporary standards ofmasculinity (see Bologh, 1990; Walvin, 1987).Many scholars link the renaissance in manlinessin Europe to the institutions and ideology ofempire (Hobsbawm, 1990; Koven, 1991; Sinha,1995). Springhall (1987, p. 52) describes themiddle-class English ideal of Christian manli-ness, “muscular Christianity,” with its emphasison sport—the “cult of games” in the public

Nation • 401


schools. He outlines how, through organizationssuch as the “Boys’ Brigades,” these middle-classvalues were communicated to “less privileged,board school–educated, working-class boys inthe nation’s large urban centres.” Boys fromboth classes served throughout the Empire inBritish imperial armies.

Contemporary nationalist politics remainsa major venue for “accomplishing” masculinity(Connell, 1987) for several reasons. First, asnoted above, the national state is essentially amasculine institution. Feminist scholars pointout its hierarchical authority structure, the maledomination of decision-making positions, themale superordinate/female subordinate internaldivision of labor, and the male legal regulationof female rights, labor, and sexuality (Connell,1995; Franzway, Court, & Connell, 1989;Grant & Tancred, 1992).

Second, the culture of nationalism isconstructed to emphasize and resonate withmasculine cultural themes. Terms such as honor,patriotism, cowardice, bravery, and duty arehard to distinguish as either nationalistic ormasculine because they seem so thoroughly tiedboth to the nation and to manhood. My pointhere is that the “microculture” of masculinity ineveryday life articulates very well with thedemands of nationalism, particularly its mili-taristic side. When, over the years, I have askedmy undergraduate students to write down ona piece of paper their answer to the question“What is the worst name you can be called?,”the gender difference in their responses has beenstriking. The vast majority of women haveresponded “slut” (or its equivalent), with “bitch”a rather distant second; a vaster majority of menhave responded “wimp” or “coward” or “pussy.”Only cowards shirk the call to duty; real men arenot cowards.

Patriotism is a siren call few men can resist,particularly in the midst of a political “crisis”; ifthey do, they risk the disdain or worse of theircommunities and families, sometimes includingtheir mothers. Counter to the common stereotypeof mothers attempting to hold back their sonsas they march off to war, Boulding (1977, p. 167)reports that many mothers of conscientiousobjectors during World War II opposed theirsons’ pacifism, and she argues that women play aclear role in preparing “children and men for life-long combat, whether in the occupation sphere,the civic arena, or the military battlefield” (see

also Vickers, 1993, pp. 43-45; Adams, 1990,pp. 131-132). The disdain of men for pacifists isconsiderably greater, as Karlen (1971) recountsin Sexuality and Homosexuality:

In 1968 pacifists set up coffee houses to spreadtheir word near military bases. A Special ForceNCO said to a Newsweek reporter, “We aren’tfighting and dying so these goddam pansies cansit around drinking coffee. (p. 508)

Fear of accusations of cowardice is not theonly magnet that pulls men toward patriotism,nationalism, or militarism. There is also themasculine allure of adventure. Men’s account-ings of their enlistment in wars often describetheir anticipation and excitement, their senseof embarking on a great adventure, their desirenot to be “left behind” or “left out” of the grandquest that the war represents.

I felt the thrill of it—even I, a hard-boiled soldierof fortune—a man who was not supposed to havethe slightest trace of nerves. I felt my throattighten and several time the scene of marchingcolumns swam in oddly elliptical circles. By God,I was shedding tears. (Adams, 1990, p. vii; see alsoGreen, 1993)

Finally, women are the foils against whichmen are defined and made. Women occupy adistinct, symbolic role in nationalist culture, dis-course, and collective action. The restriction ofwomen to a more “private” sphere of action innationalist arenas reflects a gender division ofnationalism that parallels the gender division oflabor in the larger society. Anthias and Yuval-Davis have identified five ways in which womenhave tended to participate in ethnic, national, andstate processes and practices:

(a) as biological producers of members of ethniccollectivities;

(b) as reproducers of the (normative) boundariesof ethnic/national groups (by enacting properfeminine behavior);

(c) as participating centrally in the ideologicalreproduction of the collectivity and as trans-mitters of its culture;

(d) as signifiers of ethnic/national differences; and

(e) as participants in national, economic, politi-cal, and military struggles (Yuval-Davis &Anthias, 1989, pp. 7-8)

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Although some of these roles involveaction—women participating in nationaliststruggles—Anthias and Yuval-Davis (1992),Walby (1989), Tohidi (1991), and Jayawardena(1986), among others, note the pressure felt bywomen nationalists to remain in supportive,symbolic, and traditional roles. Thus, women’splace as national symbols tends to limit theirinterest in or ability to assume active, publicroles. There are, of course, exceptions to this(i.e., women leaders of nationalist movements,resistance movements, and states), but the listis short, and the same names are heard againand again. As Horrocks (1994) notes, whendiscussing male dominance in public life, “Theexception—Margaret Thatcher—proves therule” (p. 25).

Some scholars argue that “woman national-ist” is an oxymoron reflecting the historiccontradiction between the goals and needs ofwomen and those of nationalists (see Enloe,1990, 2000; McClintock, 1995). Feminists oftenfind themselves attempting to negotiate thedifficult—some would say impossible—terrainthat lies between the interests of women and theinterests of nationalists. Discussing Hindu andMuslim nationalism in Indian politics, Hasan(1994) notes the tension between feminist prin-ciples and communal solidarity: “Forging com-munity identities does not imply or guaranteethat women will always identify themselveswith or adhere to prevailing religious doctrineswhich legitimise their subordination” (p. xv).The goals of feminists and nationalists, particu-larly “retraditionalizing” (Nagel, 1996, p. 193)nationalists (which many are), are often at odds.This is because men in many national commu-nities have an interest in regulating the activitiesand appearance of women as the bearers of thenation’s culture, honor, and future.

Sometimes women attempt to enact national-ism through traditional roles assigned to themby nationalists—by supporting their husbands,raising their (the nation’s) children, and servingas symbols of national honor. In these cases,women can exploit patriarchal views of women’sroles in order to participate in nationalist strug-gles. For instance, in situations of military occu-pation, male nationalists seen on the street aloneor in groups can be targets of arrest or detention.Women are less likely to be seen as dangerousor “up to something,” and so can serve as escortsfor men or messengers for men who are

sequestered inside houses. Similarly, women areoften more successful at recruiting support fornationalist efforts because they are seen as lessthreatening and militant (Mukarker, 1993;Sayigh & Peteet, 1987). Edgerton (1987)describes Northern Irish Catholic women’s useof traditional female housekeeping roles as awarning system against British army raids; thepractice was called “bin [trash can] lid bashing”:

When troops entered an area, local women wouldbegin banging their bin lids on the pavement; thenoise would carry throughout the area and alertothers to follow suit. . . . At the sound of the binlids, scores of women would emerge armed withdusters and mops for a hasty spring clean.(Edgerton, 1987, p. 65)

In addition to brandishing these “weaponsof the weak” (Hart, 1991; Scott, 1985), womenalso have participated more directly in variousnationalist movements and conflicts. Sometimes,women’s participation has been in support ofmale nationalist efforts, and at other times,women have been involved themselves in cadresand military units (Helie-Lucas, 1988; Nategh,1987; Sayigh & Peteet, 1987; Urdang, 1989).Despite their bravery, sometimes marked by tak-ing on traditional male military roles, and despitethe centrality of their contribution to manynationalist struggles, it is often the case that fem-inist nationalists find themselves once againunder the thumb of institutionalized patriarchyonce national independence is won. A nationalistmovement that encourages women’s participa-tion in the name of national liberation often balksat feminist demands for gender equality witharguments that national needs must come first.

Enloe (1990) argues that waiting is a danger-ous strategy for feminists because “every timewomen succumb to the pressures to hold theirtongues about problems they are having withmen in nationalist organizations, nationalismbecomes that much more masculinized” (p. 60).Women who press their case face challenges totheir loyalty, their sexuality, or their ethnic ornational authenticity: They are either “carryingwater” for colonial oppressors, or they are les-bians, or they are unduly influenced by Westernfeminism. Third World feminists are quite awareof these charges and share some concerns aboutthe need for an indigenous feminist analysis andagenda. As Delia Aguilar, a Filipino nationalistfeminist, comments:

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when feminist solidarity networks are todayproposed and extended globally, without a firmsense of identity—national, racial and class—weare likely to yield to feminist models designed byand for white, middle-class women in the indus-trial West and uncritically adopt these as our own.(in Enloe, 1990, p. 64)

Despite efforts to build an indigenous femi-nism into nationalist movements, many womenin these movements and states fail to achievegender equality. Indeed, patriarchal, masculinistnotions of men’s and women’s roles oftenbecome more entrenched during nationalistmobilizations and after independence. There aresome exceptions to this. For instance, in themany socialist revolutions in the Second andThird Worlds, women were granted constitu-tionally equal rights, though in practice thiscomplete de jure gender equality generally fellshort of the mark. Nonetheless, the legal chal-lenges to patriarchal customary and official lawbrought about by socialist gender policies oftenrepresented quite a radical break with tradition,though this radicalism was sometimes short-lived. For instance, Shen (2003) reports thatwomen’s legal and social gains in mainlandChina have begun to erode as the country shiftsfrom a centrally planned to a market economy.

In Afghanistan, nationalist struggles duringthe past two decades often have involved controlnot only over geographical territory, but alsoover the gendered terrain of women’s and men’sbodies. In the 1980s, competing Afghani nation-alisms pitted relatively egalitarian socialismagainst patriarchal traditionalism. In that decade,international superpower competition led toU.S. support of Afghan rural, traditionalist, clan-based and Mujahideen rebels who opposedthe Soviet-backed Kabul regime’s policies of“expanding economic and educational opportu-nities for Afghanistan’s women” (Enloe, 1990,p. 57). Although at the time, the United Statescriticized the neighboring Islamic regime inIran’s repression of women, the U.S. policy ofsupporting Pashtu traditionalists in Afghanistancontinued despite a resulting “militarized pur-dah” in clan-controlled regions where womenwere kept in tight seclusion and where, forinstance, girls’ enrollments in U.N. schools num-bered 7,800 compared with 104,600 for boys in1988 (Enloe, 1990; see also Moghadam, 1991).In 1996, U.S.- and Pakistani-backed politicizedMuslim conservatism took over the capital city,

Kabul, when the Taliban movement ascended topower, prohibited the education of girls and theemployment of women outside the home, andstrictly enforced complete Islamic dress and arigid code of conduct for women. The conse-quences of this sequence of events is, as theysay, history. The Taliban’s Afghanistan became atraining ground and refuge for international mil-itant Islam, and it allegedly was the financial,ideological, and strategic base from which theSeptember 11, 2001, attacks on the World TradeCenter in New York City and the Pentagon inWashington, D.C., were launched (Goodwin &Neuwirth, 2001; Rashid, 2000).

It is important to note that the relationshipbetween masculinity and nationalism is an orga-nizing and hegemonic one not only for Islamicsocieties, but for most others as well. Religiousnationalism—indeed, all nationalism—tends tobe conservative, and “conservative” often means“patriarchal” (Lievesley, 1996; Manning, 1999;Waylen, 1996). This is partly due to the ten-dency of nationalists to embrace tradition asa legitimating basis for nation-building andcultural renewal. These traditions—real orinvented—are often patriarchal. The “feminismlost” or losing ground in nationalist move-ments in many states—whether in Afghanistanor Algeria or Russia or India or Hungary orTanzania or any number of modern states—points out the entrenched nature of masculineprivilege and the intimate link between mas-culinity and nationalism (see Lutz, Phoenix, &Yuval-Davis, 1995; Mayer, 2000; Steinfels,1995; Twine & Blee, 2001; Williams, 1996).The quickness with which nationalists putwomen in their traditional places not onlyreveals the relatively greater power of men butalso suggests that very powerful hegemonicforces are at work in nationalism. Masculinity isone such hegemonic force.

FEMININE SHAME AND MASCULINE

HONOR IN THE NATIONAL FAMILY

Many theorists of nationalism have noted thetendency of nationalists to liken the nation to afamily (McClintock, 1991; Skurski, 1994; vanden Berghe, 1978); it is a male-headed householdin which both men and women have “natural”roles to play. Although women may be subordi-nated politically in nationalist movements and

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politics, as we have seen asserted above, theyoccupy an important symbolic place as themothers of the nation. As exalted “mothers in thefatherland” (Koonz, 1987), their purity must beimpeccable, so nationalists often have a specialinterest in the sexuality and sexual behavior oftheir women. Although traditionalist men may bedefenders of the family and the nation, womenare thought by traditionalists to embody familyand national honor; women’s shame is the family’sshame, the nation’s shame, the man’s shame(see Thomas, 1992).

In his analysis of ethnicity and caste inEthiopia, Quirin (1992) notes the rigid seclusionand sexual restrictions placed on “Falasha” or“Beta Israel” (Jewish) women. She concludesthat “gender may often be used as a marker ofethnic differentiation . . . [since] the Beta Israelconsidered their more rigid treatment of womenas an indication of a higher level of moral puritythan existed in Abyssinian society” (p. 209).Sapiro (1993) comments on the general ten-dency for nationalists to be preoccupied withwomen’s appearance and behavior:

Perhaps one of the most obvious illustrations of amerging of the significance of gender and culturalor national membership is the history of politicalcontrol over women’s dress and demeanor. . . .[That] ethnic or religious communities often identifythemselves with physical markers—sometimes inclothing, sometimes hair styles, and sometimes inbodily alteration—is clear, but . . . in the politics ofdress and demeanor women and men are rarelytreated similarly. Despite the support of Westerni-zation of male dress in Korea in the 1890s, womenwho adopted Western hairstyles and dress wereattacked. (Sapiro, 1993, pp. 44-45)

The politicization of women’s bodies andthe politics of the veil in Islamic societies is yetanother often-cited example of male nationalistsasserting both manhood and nationhood throughthe control of women’s bodies (see Augustin,1993; Berberi, 1993; Shirazi, 2001; Tohidi,1991).

Women’s sexuality often turns out to be amatter of prime national interest for at least tworeasons. First, women as mothers are exaltedicons of nationalism. In their discussion ofAfrikaner nationalism in South Africa, Gaitskelland Unterhalter (1989) argue that Afrikanerwomen appear regularly in the rhetoric andimagery of the Afrikaner “volk” (people) and

that “they have figured overwhelmingly asmothers” (p. 60). As Theweleit (1987, p. 294)summarizes, “woman is an infinite untroddenterritory of desire which at every stage ofhistorical deterritorialization, men in search ofmaterial for utopias have inundated with theirdesires.” Second, women’s sexuality is of con-cern to nationalists because women as wivesand daughters are bearers of masculine honor.For instance, ethnographers report that AfghaniMuslim nationalists’ conception of resourcecontrol—particularly of labor, land, andwomen—is defined as a matter of honor; “pur-dah is a key element in the protection of thefamily’s pride and honor” (Moghadam, 1991,p. 433). El-Solh and Mabro (1994, p. 8) furtherrefine the connection between men’s and familyhonor and women’s sexual respectability as asituation in which honor is men’s to gain andwomen’s to lose: “honour is seen more as men’sresponsibility and shame as women’s . . . hon-our is seen as actively achieved while shame isseen as passively defended.”

It is not only Third World men whose honoris tied to their women’s sexuality, respectability,and shame. Whereas female fecundity is valuedin the mothers of the nation, unruly female sex-uality threatens to discredit the nation. Mosse(1985) describes this duality in depiction ofwomen in European nationalist history: On onehand, “female embodiments of the nation stoodfor eternal forces . . . [and] suggested innocenceand chastity” (p. 98) and most of all respectabil-ity, but on the other hand, the right womenneeded to be sexually available to the right men:“the maiden with the shield, the spirit thatawaits a masculine leader” (p. 101) to facilitate“the enjoyment of peace achieved by malewarriors” (p. 98). These images of acceptablefemale sexuality stood in contrast to female“decadents” (prostitutes or lesbians) who wereseen as “unpatriotic, weakening the nation”(Mosse, 1985, p. 109) and dishonoring thenation’s men. Both willing and unwilling sexualencounters between national women and “alien”men can create a crisis of honor and can precip-itate vengeful violence. Saunders (1995)describes the outrage of Australian men (whiteand aborigine) about voluntary sexual liaisonsbetween African American servicemen andAustralian women during World War II, whichescalated to such a high level of “racial and sex-ual hysteria” that six black GIs were executed

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for allegedly raping two white nurses in NewGuinea (see also Luszki, 1991; Nagel, 2003).

MILITARIZED HETEROSEXUALITY

Concerns about the sexual purity and activitiesof women are not the only way that sexualityarises as an issue in masculinity and national-ism. Enloe (1990, p. 56) argues that “when anationalist movement becomes militarized . . .male privilege in the community usuallybecomes more entrenched.” She is referring tothe highly masculine nature of things military.The military, it turns out, is also highly sexual.I am referring here to several (masculinehetero)sexualized aspects of military institu-tions and activities.

First is the sexualized nature of warfare.Hartsock (1983, 1984) argues that all forms ofpolitical power, including military power, havean erotic component. She points particularly toa masculine eroticism embedded in notionsof military strength and valor. Classical historyis replete with references linking strength andvalor on the battlefield with masculine sexualvirility, hence Julius Caesar’s (1951) admonitionto men to avoid sexual intercourse before a bat-tle (or, in more modern times, before that socialequivalent of war, sport) so as not to sap theirstrength. Mosse (1985, p. 34) discusses debatesin Germany about masturbation and homosexu-ality as sexual practices that endangered nationalmilitary strength, and describes war as an “invi-tation to manliness,” exemplified in the follow-ing poem used to introduce a nationalistic playabout a military battle (at Langemarck):

A naked sword grows out of my hand,The earnestness of the hour flowsthrough me hard as steel.Here I stand alone, proud and tall,Intoxicated that I have now become aman. (Mosse, 1990, p.166)

A second way that military institutions andactions are sexualized centers on the depictionof the “enemy” in conflicts. Accounts of manywars and nationalist conflicts include portrayalsof enemy men either as sexual demons, bent onraping nationalist women, or as sexual eunuchs,incapable of manly virility. Bederman’s (1995)analysis of Theodore Roosevelt’s nationalistdiscourse provides examples of both. In African

Game Trails, Roosevelt adopts a colonialist’ssuperior, indulgent attitude toward “childlike”African men, whom he describes as “strong,patient, good-humored . . . with somethingchildlike about them that makes one really fondof them. . . . Of course, like all savages and mostchildren, they have their limits” (quoted inBederman, 1995, p. 210). Roosevelt’s assess-ment of Native Americans was less patroniz-ingly benevolent, because Indians represented amilitary threat to the white man who was

not taking part in a war against a civilized foe; hewas fighting in a contest where women andchildren suffered the fate of the strong men. . . .His sweetheart or wife had been carried off, rav-ished, and was at the moment the slave and con-cubine of some dirty and brutal Indian warrior.(Bederman, 1995, p. 181)

Mosse (1985, p. 127) describes portrayalsof women on the battlefield as victims of sexualaggression or exploitation along the linesdepicted above. He notes, however, that“women haunted soldiers’ dreams and fan-tasies” in other roles as well, either as “objectsof sexual desire or as pure, self-sacrificingMadonnas, in other words, the field prostituteor the battlefield nurse” (p. 128). Enemy womenare more uniformly characterized as sexuallypromiscuous and available: sluts, whores, orlegitimate targets of rape. The accounts of virtu-ally all wars are replete with references to anddiscussions of the rape, sexual enslavement, orsexual exploitation of women not only by indi-viduals or small groups of men, but also byarmy high commands and as part of state-runnational policies (see Brownmiller, 1975;Sturdevant & Stoltzfus, 1992).

A third sexualized aspect of militarizedconflict is the use of the masculine imagery ofrape, penetration, and sexual conquest to depictmilitary weaponry and offensives. A commonlyreported phrase alleged to have been written onU.S. missiles targeted on Iraq during the 1990Gulf War was “Bend over, Saddam” (Cohn,1993, p. 236). There is a tendency in nationaldefense discourse to personify and sexuallycharacterize the actions of states and armies.Cohn reports that one “well-known academicsecurity advisor was quoted as saying that‘under Jimmy Carter the United States isspreading its legs for the Soviet Union’” (Cohn,1993, p. 236). She reports similar sexualized

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depictions by a U.S. defense analyst of formerWest German politicians who were concernedabout popular opposition to the deploymentof nuclear Euromissiles in the 1980s: “ThoseKrauts are a bunch of limp-dicked wimps”(p. 236). Such sexualized military discourse isvery much from a heterosexual standpoint, as isclear when we consider the imagery of rapeduring the 1990 Gulf War: Attacks that neededto be defended or retaliated against were castas heterosexual rapes of women (“the rape ofKuwait”); attacks that were offensive against theIraqi enemy were phrased as homosexual rapesof men (“bend over, Saddam”) (see also Cohn,1987, 1990).

CONCLUSION

What does this exploration of masculinity andnationalism tell us? For one thing, understandingthe extensive nature of the links between nation-alism, patriotism, militarism, imperialism, andmasculinity helps to make sense of some puz-zling items in the news. It has always seemeda mystery to me why the men in the military andparamilitary institutions—men concerned withmanly demeanor and strength of character—seemed to get so agitated by, seemed to be soafraid of the entry of, first blacks, then (still)women, and now homosexuals into militaryinstitutions and organizations. This unseemly,sometimes hysterical resistance to a diversitythat clearly exists outside military boundariesmakes more sense when it is understood thatthese men are not only defending tradition butalso defending a particular racial, gendered, andsexual conception of self—a white, male, hetero-sexual notion of masculine identity loaded withall the burdens and privileges that go along withhegemonic masculinity. Understanding that theirreactions reflect not only a defense of maleprivilege but also a defense of male culture andidentity makes it clearer that there are very fun-damental issues at stake here for men who arecommitted to these masculinist and nationalistinstitutions and lifeways.

Another puzzling issue that this study ofmasculinity and nationalism has illuminatedfor me is the question of why men are so muchmore likely to advocate war and go to war thanare women. This not to say that all men or allwomen respond in the same way to “a call to

arms.” Many women are patriotic, concernedabout honor, and mobilizable; many men arecritical of hegemonic masculinity and national-ism, and are not mobilizable. And there are his-torical moments when hegemony wavers—thewidespread resistance to the U.S. war in Vietnamin the 1970s was one such moment. Further,masculinist and nationalist ideology can affectwomen as well as men. Take the epithet “wimp.”I argued above that this is among men’s mostdreaded insults but that for women it or an equiv-alent is either not on their list or is nowhere nearthe top of the list. Carol Cohn (1993) was calleda wimp while participating in a RAND Cor-poration war simulation. She reported being“stung” by the name-calling despite the fact thatshe was “a woman and a feminist, not only con-temptuous of the mentality that measures humanbeings by their degree of so-called wimpishness,but also someone for whom the term wimp doesnot have a deeply resonant personal meaning”(p. 237). Cohn’s explanation for her reactioncenters on the power of group membership andreality-defining social context. While she was aparticipant in the simulation, she became “a par-ticipant in a discourse, a shared set of words,concepts, symbols that constituted not only thelinguistic possibilities available to us but alsoconstituted me in that situation” (pp. 237-238). Inother words, Cohn became “masculinized.”

But why don’t women who participate inmasculine organizations or situations “femi-nize” those institutions and settings, rather thanbecoming, however momentarily, masculinizedthemselves? Do women who join the militarybecome “men”? Or if enough women join themilitary, will they “feminize” it? Is there a criti-cal mass—a point at which women cease tobecome masculinized in masculine institutionsand begin to transform the institutions accordingto the feminine interests and culture they bringwith them to that setting? I wonder, is the gen-der makeup of governments why nationalism ismore associated with preparing for and wagingwar than with building schools, museums, hos-pitals and health care systems, social securitysystems, public transportation, arts and enter-tainment complexes, and nature preserves?While states concern themselves with thesethings, they never seem to become the “moralequivalent of war.”

The answer to this question of womenbecoming masculinized or masculine institutions

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becoming feminized is an important one formaking sense of national and internationalpolitics. As women enter the political realm ingreater numbers around the world, will we see ashifting of state agendas and a decoupling ofnationalism from masculinity? Enloe (1990,p. 64) is skeptical. She notes the limited changethat has resulted from the many nationalist inde-pendence movements around the world, and sheobserves that in many post–World War II states itis “business as usual” with indigenous masculin-ity replacing colonialist masculinity at the helmsof states.

There is one final puzzle that this explorationof masculinity and nationalism has begun tosolve for me—that is, the different way that I, asa woman, may be experiencing my citizenshipcompared with the citizenship experience ofmen. According to a Southern African Tswanaproverb, “a woman has no tribe” (Young, 1993,p. 26). I wonder whether it might not also be truethat a woman has no nation, or that for manywomen, the nation does not “feel” the same asit does to many men. We are not expected todefend our country, run our country, or representour country. Of course, many women do thesethings, but our presence in the masculine institu-tions of state—the government and the military—seems unwelcome unless we occupy the familiarsupporting roles—secretary, lover, wife. We aremore adrift from the nation, less likely to becalled to “important” and recognized public duty,and our contributions are more likely to be seenas “private,” as linked only to “women’s issues,”and as such, less valued and acknowledged.Given this difference in men’s and women’s con-nection to and conception of the nation and thestate, it is not surprising that there is a “gendergap” dividing men and women on so manypolitical issues.

The terrorist attacks on the U.S. in September2001 narrowed somewhat the U.S. gendergap. When asking about public support forthe U.S. war in Afghanistan following theattacks, opinion pollsters found a much smallerthan usual discrepancy between men’s andwomen’s support for the war. In November2001, U.S. pollsters asked American women andmen where they stood on the war in Afghanistan.They reported that 79% of men and 72% ofwomen responded “Support Strongly.”3 This nar-rowing of the U.S. gender gap over issues ofmilitary action had begun to widen again in polls

taken 2 months after the 2003 U.S. invasion ofIraq, when 52% of women and 62% of menreported supporting the war (Raasch, 2003). Therelatively closer agreement between men andwomen on these two conflicts can be under-stood, in part, from the way the attacks wereperceived and defined by the public, politicians,and the media. That collective definition wasreflected in the title of the new cabinet-level postcreated immediately following the attacks:Secretary of Homeland Security. The joining ofthese two differently gendered domains, “home-land” and “security,” reflects a wedding of thetraditional interests of women and of men intoone U.S. agency, and it suggests that there arehistorical moments when cultures of masculinityand femininity can combine into national genderalliances.

NOTES

1. This narrative of the Little Bighorn battle isdrawn from several historical sources: Hardorff(1997, 1998, 1999), Utley (1973/1984a, 1984b,1988), Gray (1976, 1991), and Viola (1999). There issome controversy regarding the actual number ofnative warriors whom Custer and his approximately500 men faced that June morning in 1876. Estimatesrange from a few hundred to several thousand; seeUtley (1984a), Michno (1997), Eastman (1900), andMeans (1995).

2. The most famous court of inquiry was the1879 Reno Court of Inquiry that exonerated MajorReno (see Graham, 1954); see also Dippie (1994), theWeb site of the Little Big Horn Associates (www.lbha.org/newsletter/), and the Old West Legacy site,which sells Little Big Horn Trading Cards (www.helenamontana.com/LBH/).

3. A Washington Post/ABC News poll conductedby telephone on November 5-6, 2001, among anational sample of 756 randomly selected adults; seewww.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/polls/vault/stories/data112801.htm.

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414

24GLOBALIZATION AND

ITS MAL(E)CONTENTS

The Gendered Moraland Political Economy of Terrorism

MICHAEL S. KIMMEL

The chief social basis of radicalism has been the peasants and the smaller artisans inthe towns. From these facts one may conclude that the wellsprings of human freedom lienot where Marx saw them, in the aspirations of classes about to take power, but perhapseven more in the dying wail of a class over whom the wave of progress is about to roll.

—Barrington Moore (1966, p. 505)

Globalization changes masculinities,reshaping the arena in which nationaland local masculinities are articulated,

and transforming the shape of men’s lives.Globalization disrupts and reconfigures tradi-tional, neocolonial, or other national, regional, orlocal economic, political, and cultural arrange-ments. In so doing, globalization transformslocal articulations of both domestic and publicpatriarchy (see Connell, 1998). Globalizationincludes the gradual proletarianization of localpeasantries, as market criteria replace subsis-tence and survival. Local small craft producers,small farmers, and independent peasants tradi-tionally stake their definitions of masculinity inownership of land and economic autonomy intheir work; these are increasingly transferred

upward in the class hierarchy and outward totransnational corporations. Proletarianizationalso leads to massive labor migrations—typically migrations of male workers—wholeave their homes and populate migrant enclaves,squatter camps, and labor camps.

Globalization thus presents another level atwhich hegemonic and local masculinities areconstructed. Globalization was always a gen-dered process. As Andre Gunder Frank pointedout several decades ago in his studies of eco-nomic development, development and under-development were not simply stages throughwhich all countries pass, and there was no sin-gle continuum along which individual nationsmight be positioned. Rather, he argued, therewas a relationship between development and

Author’s note: The author has made every effort to obtain written permission for use of the cartoons appearing in this chapter.


underdevelopment, that, in fact, the developmentof some countries implied the specific and delib-erate underdevelopment of others. The creation ofthe metropole was simultaneous and coordinatedwith the creation of the periphery.

As with economic development, so too withgender—the historical constructions of the mean-ings of masculinity. As the hegemonic ideal wasbeing created, it was created against a screen of“others” whose masculinity was thus problem-atized and devalued. Hegemonic and subalternemerged in mutual but unequal interaction ina gendered social and economic order. Colonialadministrations often problematized the mas-culinity of the colonized. For example, in BritishIndia, Bengali men were perceived as weak andeffeminate, though Pathans and Sikhs were per-ceived as hypermasculine—violent and uncon-trolled (see Sinha, 1995). Similar distinctionswere made in South Africa between Hottentotsand Zulus, and in North America betweenNavaho or Algonquin on one hand, and Sioux,Apache, and Cheyenne on the other (see Connell,1998, p. 14). In many colonial situations, the col-onized men were called “boys” by the colonizers.

Today, although they appear to be gender-neutral, the institutional arrangements of globalsociety are equally gendered. The marketplace,multinational corporations, and transnationalgeopolitical institutions (World Court, UnitedNations, European Union) and their attendantideological principles (economic rationality, lib-eral individualism) express a gendered logic.The “increasingly unregulated power of transna-tional corporations places strategic power in thehands of particular groups of men,” while thelanguage of globalization remains gender neu-tral so that “the ‘individual’ of neoliberal theoryhas in general the attributes and interests of amale entrepreneur” (Connell, 1998, p. 15).

As a result, the impact of global economicand political restructuring is greater on women.At the national and global levels, the world gen-der order privileges men in a variety of ways,such as unequal wages, unequal labor force par-ticipation, unequal structures of ownership andcontrol of property, unequal control over one’sbody, and cultural and sexual privileges. What’smore, in the economic South, for example, aidprograms disproportionately target women (as inpopulation planning programs that involve onlywomen), while in the metropole, attacks on thewelfare state generally weaken the position of

women, domestically and publicly. These effects,however, are less the result of bad policies oreven less the results of bad—inept or evil—policymakers, and more the results of the gen-dered logic of these institutions and processesthemselves (Connell, 1998; Enloe, 1990).

HEGEMONIC MASCULINITY

AND ITS DISCONTENTS

In addition, the patterns of masculinity embed-ded within these gendered institutions also arerapidly becoming the dominant global hege-monic model of masculinity, against which alllocal, regional, and national masculinities areplayed out and to which they increasingly refer.The emergent global hegemonic version of mas-culinity is readily identifiable: You can see himsitting in first-class waiting rooms in airports, orin elegant business hotels the world over, wear-ing a designer business suit, speaking English,eating “continental” cuisine, talking on his cellphone, his laptop computer plugged into anyelectrical outlet, while he watches CNN Inter-national on television. Temperamentally, he isincreasingly cosmopolitan, with liberal tastes inconsumption (and sexuality) and conservativepolitical ideas of limited government control ofthe economy. This has the additional effect ofincreasing the power of the hegemonic countrieswithin the global political and economic arenabecause everyone, no matter where they arefrom, talks and acts as he does.

The processes of globalization and the emer-gence of a global hegemonic masculinity havethe ironic effect of increasingly “gendering”local, regional, and national resistance to incor-poration into the global arena as subordinatedentities. Scholars have pointed out the ways inwhich religious fundamentalism and ethnicnationalism use local cultural symbols to expressregional resistance to incorporation (see espe-cially Barber, 1995, and Juergensmeyer, 1995,2000). However, these religious and ethnicexpressions are often manifest as gender revolts,and they often include a virulent resurgence ofdomestic patriarchy (as in the militant misogynyof Iran or Afghanistan), the problematization ofglobal masculinities or neighboring masculini-ties (as in the former Yugoslavia), and the overtsymbolic efforts to claim a distinct “manhood”along religious or ethnic lines to which others do

Globalization and Its Mal(e)contents • 415


not have access and which will restore manhoodto the formerly privileged (white militias in theUnited States and skinhead racists in Europe).

Thus, gender becomes one of the chief orga-nizing principles of local, regional, and nationalresistance to globalization, whether expressed inreligious or secular, ethnic or national terms.These processes involve flattening or eliminatinglocal or regional distinctions, along with culturalhomogenization as citizens and social heteroge-nization as new ethnic groups move to new coun-tries in labor migration efforts. Movements thustap racialist and nativist sentiments at the sametime as they can tap local and regional protec-tionism and isolationism. They become genderedas oppositional movements also tap into a vaguemasculine resentment of the economic displace-ment, loss of autonomy, and collapse of domesticpatriarchy that accompany further integrationinto the global economy. Efforts to reclaim eco-nomic autonomy, to reassert political control, andto revive traditional domestic dominance thustake on the veneer of restoring manhood.

To illustrate these themes, one could considerseveral political movements of men, in NorthAmerica or elsewhere. Indeed, Promise Keepers,men’s rights, and fathers’ rights groups allrespond to the perceived erosion of public patri-archy with an attempted restoration of someversion of domestic patriarchy. The mythopoeticmen’s movement responds instead to a perceivederosion of domestic patriarchy with assertionsof separate mythic or natural space for men toexperience their power—because they can nolonger experience it in either the public or pri-vate spheres. (For more on these men’s move-ments in the United States, see Kimmel, 1996a,1996b, and Messner, 1998.)

In this chapter, I will examine the ways inwhich masculinities and globalization areembedded in the emergence of extremist groupson the far right in Europe and the United States,with a final discussion of the Islamic world.Specifically, I will discuss the ways in whichglobalization reconfigures certain political ten-dencies among different class fractions. In theeconomic North, the members of the far rightwhite supremacists in the United States andScandinavia tend to be from a declining lowermiddle class—traditionally the class basis oftotalitarian political solutions like socialism orfascism. They are movements of the far right.It is the lower middle class—those strata of

independent farmers, small shopkeepers, craftand highly skilled workers, and small-scaleentrepreneurs—who have been hit hardest bythe processes of globalization. “Western indus-try has displaced traditional crafts—female aswell as male—and large-scale multinational-controlled agriculture has downgraded the inde-pendent farmer to the status of hired hand”(Ehrenreich, 2001). This has resulted in massiveand uneven male displacement—migration,downward mobility. It has been felt the most notby the adult men who were the tradesmen, shop-keepers, and skilled workers, but by their sons,by the young men whose inheritance has beenseemingly stolen from them. They feel entitledand deprived—and furious.

In the economic South, however, the sons ofthe rising middle classes, whose upward mobil-ity is thwarted by globalization, join the down-wardly mobile sons of the lower middle classes.The terrorists of Al Qaeda, or other Middle Eastterrorist organizations like Hezbollah, tend to behighly educated young men, trained for profes-sional jobs that have been choked off by globaleconomic shifts. Historically, this rising middleclass, as Barrington Moore noted, were thebackbone of the bourgeois revolutions; today,the rising middle class is no longer rising, andin its descent, the young men who trained forupward mobility seek enemies upon whom toheap their rage, as well as alternate strategies ofmobility (see, for example, Barro, 2002; Kristof,2002a, 2002b). These are movements of theultra-left. Both of these groups of angry youngmen are the foot soldiers of the armies of resent-ment that have sprung up around the world. Theyare joined in the new ways in which masculineentitlement has become gendered rage.

In this essay, I will discuss white supremacistyouth in both the United States and Scandinaviaas my two primary case studies, and I concludewith a brief comparative discussion of the ter-rorists of Al Qaeda who were responsible forthe heinous acts of September 11, 2001.1 All usea variety of ideological and political resourcesto reestablish and reassert domestic and publicpatriarchies. All deploy “masculinity” as a sym-bolic capital (a) as an ideological resource tounderstand and explicate their plight, (b) as arhetorical device to problematize the identitiesof those against whom they believe themselvesfighting, and (c) as a recruitment device toentice other, similarly situated young men to

416 • POLITICS


join them. These movements look backward,nostalgically, to a time when they—native-bornwhite men, Muslim men in a pre-global era—were able to assume the places in society towhich they believe themselves entitled. Theyseek to restore that unquestioned entitlement,both in the domestic sphere and in the publicsphere. They are movements not of revolution,but of restoration.

Types of Patriarchies

In this chapter, I describe the transformationof two forms of patriarchy. It is important to notethat patriarchy is both a system of domination bywhich men dominate women and a system bywhich some men (older men; fathers, in the clas-sic definition of the term) dominate other men.

Public patriarchy refers to the institutionalarrangements of a society, the predominance ofmales in all power positions within the economyand polity, both locally and nationally, as well asthe “gendering” of those institutions themselves(by which the criteria for promotion, for example,appear to be gender-neutral but actually reproducethe gender order).

Domestic patriarchy refers to the emotionaland familial arrangements in a society, the waysin which men’s power in the public arena isreproduced at the level of private life. Thisincludes male-female relationships as well asfamily life, child socialization, and the like.

Both public patriarchy and domestic patri-archy are held together by the threat, implicit orexplicit, of violence. Public patriarchy, ofcourse, includes the military and police appara-tus of society, which are also explicitly gen-dered institutions (revealed in their increasedopposition to women’s entry). In the aggregate,rape and domestic violence help sustain domes-tic patriarchy (see Hearn, 1992, 1998).

These two expressions of men’s power overwomen and other men are neither uniform normonolithic; they vary enormously and are con-stantly in flux. Equally, they are not coincident,so that increases or decreases in one invariablyproduce increases or decreases in the other. Norare they so directly linked that a decrease in oneautomatically produces an increase in the other,although there will be pressures in that direc-tion. Thus, women’s entry into the workforce orincreased representation in legislatures under-mines public patriarchy and will likely produce

both backlash efforts to reinforce domesticpatriarchy (covenant marriage, tighteningdivorce laws to restrain women’s exit from thehome, increased domestic assault) or even a vir-ulent resurgence of domestic patriarchy (theTaliban). At the same time, women’s increasedpublic presence will also undermine domesticpatriarchy, by pressing men into domestic dutiesthey had previously avoided (such as houseworkand parenting).

All these movements exhibit what Connell(1995, pp. 109-112) calls “protest masculinity”—a combination of stereotypical male norms withoften unconventional attitudes about women.Exaggerated claims of potency are accompaniedby violent resistance to authority, school, andwork, accompanied by engagement with crimeand heavy drinking. In such a model, the “grow-ing boy puts together a tense, freaky façade,making a claim to power where there are no realresources for power,” Connell writes (1995,p. 109). “There is a lot of concern with face, alot of work keeping up a front.” However, thosegroups in the economic North claim to supportwomen’s equality (in varying degrees), whereasthose in the Islamic world have made women’scomplete resubordination a central pillar of theedifice of their rule.

By examining extreme right white suprema-cists in the United States and their counterparts inScandinavia, we can see the ways in which mas-culinity politics may be mobilized among somegroups of men in the economic North; while look-ing at the social origins of the Al Qaeda terrorists,we might merely sketch how they might work outin Islamic countries. Although such a comparisonin no way effaces the many differences that existamong these movements, especially between themovements in the economic South and North,a comparison of their similarities enables us toexplore the political mobilization of masculinitiesand to map the ways in which masculinities arelikely to be put into political play in the comingdecades.

RIGHT-WING MILITIAS: RACISM,SEXISM, AND ANTI-SEMITISM

AS MASCULINE REASSERTION2

In an illustration in W.A.R., the magazine of theWhite Aryan Resistance, for 1987, a working-class white man, in hard hat and flak jacket,



stands proudly before a suspension bridge whilea jet plane soars overhead. “White Men BuiltThis nation!!” reads the text. “White Men AreThis nation!!!”

Most observers immediately see its racistintent, but rarely do we see the deeply genderedmeaning of the statement. Here is a moment offusion of racial and gendered discourses, whenboth race and gender are made visible. “Thisnation,” we now understand, “is” neither whitewomen nor nonwhite.

The White Aryan Resistance that produced thisillustration is situated on a continuum of the farright that runs from older organizations such asthe John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan, and theAmerican Nazi Party, to Holocaust deniers, neo-Nazi or racist skinheads, White Power groups likePosse Comitatus and White Aryan Resistance,and radical militias like the Wisconsin Militia orthe Militia of Montana. The Southern PovertyLaw Center cites 676 active hate groups in theUnited States, including 109 Klan centers 209neo-Nazi groups, 43 racist skinheads groups,and 124 neo-Confederate groups, and morethan 400 U.S.-based Web sites (“Maps of WhiteSupremacist Organizations,” 2002).

These fringe groups of the far right arecomposed of young white men, the sons ofindependent farmers and small shopkeepers.Estimates of their numbers range from an“improbably modest” 10,000 to an “improbablycautionary” 100,000 (Kramer, 2002, p. 24),while the number of far-right extremists andPatriots of any sort is estimated to run to betweenthree and four million who “believe themselvesvictims, real or intended, of an international plotto destroy their freedom and their faith and pol-lute their blood” (Kramer, 2002, p. 30; see alsoJipson & Becker, 2000). Buffeted by the globalpolitical and economic forces that have producedglobal hegemonic masculinities, they haveresponded to the erosion of public patriarchy(displacement in the political arena) and ofdomestic patriarchy (their wives now work awayfrom the farm) with a renewal of their sense ofmasculine entitlement to restore patriarchy inboth arenas. Ideologically, what characterizesthese scions of small-town rural America—boththe fathers and the sons—is (a) their ideologicalvision of producerism, threatened by economictransformation; (b) their sense of small-towndemocratic community, an inclusive communitythat was based on the exclusion of broad seg-ments of the population; and (c) a sense of enti-tlement to economic, social, and political andeven military power.

(It is, of course, true that women play animportant role in many of these groups, rangingfrom a Ladies’Auxiliary to active participants asviolent skinheads [see Blee, 2002, and Kimmel,2002]. Yet although their activities may rangefrom holding a Klan bake sale, using Aryancookbooks, and helping their children with theirracist coloring books to active physical violenceand participation in hate crimes against immi-grants, blacks, Jews, and gays, their genderideology remains firmly planted in notions ofunchallenged domestic patriarchy.)

To cast the middle class straight white mansimply as the hegemonic holder of power in theUnited States would be to fully miss the dailyexperience of these straight white men. Theybelieve themselves to be entitled to power—bya combination of historical legacy, religious fiat,biological destiny, and moral legitimacy—butthey believe they do not have power. That powerhas been both surrendered by white men (theirfathers) and stolen from them by a federal gov-ernment controlled and staffed by legions of the

Illustration 24.1 W.A.R. Cartoon

SOURCE: Copyright © 2000 White Aryan Resistance. Usedby permission of Tom Metzger.

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newly enfranchised minorities, women, andimmigrants, all in service to the omnipotentJews who control international economic andpolitical life. “Heaven help the God-fearing,law-abiding Caucasian middle class,” explainedCharlton Heston to a recent Christian Coalitionconvention, especially

Protestant or even worse evangelical Christian,Midwest or Southern or even worse rural, appar-ently straight or even worse admittedly [hetero-sexual], gun-owning or even worse NRAcard-carrying average working stiff, or even worstof all, male working stiff. Because not only don’tyou count, you’re a downright obstacle to socialprogress. (quoted in Citizens Project, p. 3)

Downwardly mobile rural white men—thosewho lost the family farms and those whoexpected to take them over—are squeezedbetween the omnivorous jaws of capital concen-tration and a federal bureaucracy that is at bestindifferent to their plight and at worst facilitatestheir further demise. What they want, says one,is to “take back what is rightfully ours” (inDobratz & Shanks-Meile, 2001, p. 10).

In many respects, the militias’ ideologyreflects the ideologies of other fringe groupson the far right from whose ranks they typicallyrecruit, especially racism, homophobia, nativ-ism, sexism, and anti-Semitism. These dis-courses of hate provide an explanation for thefeelings of entitlement thwarted, fixing theblame squarely on “others” whom the state mustnow serve at the expense of white men. The uni-fying theme of these discourses, which tradi-tionally have formed the rhetorical packageRichard Hofstadter labeled “paranoid politics,”is gender. Specifically, it is by framing statepolicies as emasculating and problematizing themasculinity of these various “others” that ruralwhite militia members seek to restore their ownmasculinity.

Contemporary American white supremaciststap into a general malaise among Americanmen who seek some explanations for the con-temporary “crisis” of masculinity. Like the Sonsof Liberty who threw off the British yoke oftyranny in 1776, these contemporary Sons ofLiberty see “R-2,” the Second AmericanRevolution, as restorative—a means of retriev-ing and refounding traditional masculinity bythe exclusion of others. The entire rhetoricalapparatus that serves this purpose is saturated

with gendered readings—of the problematizedmasculinity of the “others,” of the emasculatingpolicies of the state, and of the rightful mascu-line entitlement of white men. As sociologistLillian Rubin puts it:

It’s this confluence of forces—the racial and cul-tural diversity of our new immigrant population;the claims on the resources of the nation nowbeing made by those minorities who, for genera-tions, have called America their home; the failureof some of our basic institutions to serve the needsof our people; the contracting economy, whichthreatens the mobility aspirations of working classfamilies—all these have come together to leavewhite workers feeling as if everyone else is gettinga piece of the action while they get nothing.(Rubin, 1994, p. 186)

One issue of The Truth at Last put it this way:

Immigrants are flooding into our nation willing towork for the minimum wage (or less). Super-richcorporate executives are flying all over the worldin search of cheaper and cheaper labor so that theycan “lay off” their American employees. . . . Manyyoung White families have no future! They are notgoing to receive any appreciable wage increasesdue to job competition from immigrants . . . (citedin Dobratz & Shanks-Meile, 2001, p. 115)

White supremacists see themselves assqueezed between global capital and an emascu-lated state that supports voracious global profi-teering. In a song, “No Crime Being White,”Day of the Sword, a popular racist skinheadband, confronts the greedy class:

The birthplace is the death of our race.Our brothers being laid off is a truthwe have to face.Take my job, it’s equal opportunityThe least I can do, you were sooppressed by meI’ve only put in twenty years now.Suddenly my country favors gooks andspicks and queers.Fuck you, then, boy I hope you’rehappy when your new employees arethe reason why your business ends.(cited in Dobratz & Shanks-Meile,2001, p. 271)

The North American Free Trade Agreement(NAFTA) took away American jobs; the erodingjob base in urban centers also led many African



Americans to move to formerly all-white suburbsto find work. As a result, what youngsters nowsee as the “Burger King” economy leaves noroom at the top so many “see themselves as beingforced to compete with nonwhites for the avail-able minimum wage, service economy jobs thathave replaced their parents’ unionized industryopportunities” (Coplon, 1989, p. 84).

That such ardent patriots as militia membersare so passionately antigovernment might strikethe observer as contradictory. After all, are thesenot the same men who served their country inVietnam or in the Gulf War? Are these not thesame men who believe so passionately in theAmerican dream? Are they not the backbone ofthe Reagan Revolution? Indeed they are. Militiamembers face the difficult theoretical task ofmaintaining their faith in America and in capi-talism, and simultaneously providing an analy-sis of an indifferent state, at best, or an activelyinterventionist one, at worst, coupled with acontemporary articulation of corporate capitalistlogic that leaves them, often literally, out in thecold—homeless, jobless, hopeless.

It is through a decidedly gendered and sexu-alized rhetoric of masculinity that this contra-diction between loving the nation and hatingits government, loving capitalism and hatingits corporate iterations, is resolved. First, likeothers on the far right, militia members believethat the state has been captured by evil, evenSatanic forces; the original virtue of theAmerican political regime deeply and irretriev-ably corrupted. “The enemy is the system—thesystem of international world dominance,”according to the Florida Interklan Report (inDobratz & Shanks-Meile, 2001, p. 160). Envi-ronmental regulations, state policies dictatedby urban and northern interests, the InternalRevenue Service—all are the outcomes of astate now utterly controlled by feminists, envi-ronmentalists, blacks, and Jews.

In their foreboding futuristic vision, commu-nalism, feminism, multiculturalism, homosexu-ality, and Christian-bashing are all tied together,part and parcel of the New World Order. Multi-cultural textbooks, women in government, andlegalized abortion can individually be taken assigns of the impending New World Order.Increased opportunities for women can only leadto the oppression of men. Tex Marrs proclaims,“In the New Order, woman is finally on top. Sheis not a mere equal. She is Goddess” (Marrs,

1993, p. 28). In fact, she has ceased to be a“real” woman—the feminist now represents theconfusion of gender boundaries and the demas-culinization of men, symbolizing a future wheremen are not allowed to be real men.

The “Nanny State” no longer acts in theinterests of “true” American men but is, instead,an engine of gender inversion, feminizing men,while feminism masculinizes women. Whitemen not involved in the movement are oftenreferred to as “sheeple,” while feminist women,it turns out, are more masculine than men are.Not only does this call the masculinity of whitemen into question, but it also uses gender as therhetorical vehicle for criticizing “other” men.Typically, problematizing the masculinity ofthese others takes two forms simultaneously:Other men are both “too masculine” and “notmasculine enough,” both hypermasculine—vio-lent rapacious beasts incapable of self-control—and hypomasculine—weak, helpless, effete,incapable of supporting a family.

Thus, in the logic of militias and otherwhite supremacist organizations, gay men areboth promiscuously carnal and sexually vora-cious and effete fops who do to men what menshould only have done to them by women.Black men are seen both as violent hypersexualbeasts, possessed of an “irresponsible sexual-ity,” seeking white women to rape (W.A.R., 8(2),1989, p. 11; cited in Ferber, 1998, p. 81) andless than fully manly, “weak, stupid, lazy” (NSMobilizer, cited in Ferber, 1998, p. 81). In TheTurner Diaries, the apocalyptic novel thatserved as the blueprint for the Oklahoma Citybombing and is widely read and peddled bymilitias, author William Pierce depicts a night-marish world where white women and girls areconstantly threatened and raped by “gangs ofBlack thugs” (Pierce, 1978, p. 58). Blacks areprimal nature—untamed, cannibalistic, uncon-trolled, but also stupid and lazy—and whites arethe driving force of civilization. “America andall civilized society are the exclusive products ofWhite man’s mind and muscle” is how TheThunderbolt put it (cited in Ferber, 1998,p. 76). “[T]he White race is the Master race ofthe earth . . . the Master Builders, the MasterMinds, and the Master warriors of civilization.”What can a black man do but “clumsily shuffleoff, scratching his wooley head, to search forshoebrush and mop” (in New Order, cited inFerber, 1998, p. 91).

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Most interesting is the portrait of the Jew.On one hand, the Jew is a greedy, cunning, con-niving, omnivorous predator; on the other, theJew is small, beady-eyed, and incapable ofmasculine virtue. By asserting the hypermascu-line power of the Jew, the far right can supportcapitalism as a system while decrying the actionsof capitalists and their corporations. Accordingto militia logic, it’s not the capitalist corpora-tions that have turned the government againstthem, but the international cartel of Jewishbankers and financiers, media moguls, andintellectuals who have already taken over theU.S. state and turned it into ZOG (ZionistOccupied Government). The United States iscalled the “Jewnited States,” and Jews areblamed for orchestrating the demise of theonce-proud Aryan man.3

In white supremacist ideology, the Jew isthe archetypal villain, both hypermasculine—greedy, omnivorous, sexually predatory, capableof the destruction of the Aryan way of life—andhypomasculine, small, effete, homosexual,pernicious, weasely. A cartoon in Racial Loyaltyfrom 1991 illustrates this simultaneous position.

In the militia cosmology, Jews are bothhypermasculine and effeminate. Hypermasculinityis expressed in the Jewish domination of the

world’s media and financial institutions, andespecially Hollywood. They’re sexually omniv-orous, but calling them “rabid, sex-perverted”is not a compliment. The Thunderbolt (#301,p. 6; cited in Ferber, 1998, p. 140) claims that90% of pornographers are Jewish. At the sametime, Jewish men are seen as wimpish, small,nerdy, and utterly unmasculine—likely, in fact,to be homosexual. It’s Jewish women who areseen as “real men”—strong, large, and hairy.

In lieu of their brawn power, Jewish menhave harnessed their brainpower in their questfor world domination. Jews are seen as the mas-terminds behind the other social groups whoare seen as dispossessing rural American menof their birthright. Toward that end, they haveco-opted blacks, women, gays, and brain-washed and cowardly white men to do theirbidding. In a remarkable passage from The NewOrder, white supremacists cast the economicplight of white workers as being squeezedbetween nonwhite workers and Jewish owners:

It is our RACE we must preserve, not just oneclass . . . White Power means a permanent end tounemployment because with the non-Whites gone,the labor market will no longer be over-crowdedwith unproductive niggers, spics and other raciallow-life. It means an end to inflation eating up aman’s paycheck faster than he can raise it becauseOUR economy will not be run by a criminal packof international Jewish bankers, bent on using theWhite worker’s tax money in selfish and evendestructive schemes. (The New Order, March1979, p. 8; cited in Ferber, 1998, p. 140)

Because Jews are incapable of acting likereal men—strong, hardy, virtuous manual work-ers and farmers—a central axiom of the interna-tional Jewish conspiracy for world dominationis their plan to “feminize White men and tomasculinize White women” (Racial Loyalty, 72,1991, p. 3; cited in Ferber, 1998, p. 141). TheTurner Diaries describes the “Jewish-liberal-democratic-equalitarian” perspective as “anessentially feminine, submissive worldview”(Pierce, 1978, p. 42). W.A.R. echoes this theme:“One of the characteristics of nations which arecontrolled by the Jews is the gradual eradicationof masculine influence and power and the trans-fer of influence into feminine forms” (cited inFerber, 1998, pp. 125-126).

Embedded in this anti-Semitic slander is acritique of white American manhood as soft,


Illustration 24.2 Racial Loyalty Cartoon

SOURCE: Racial Loyalty, 71 (June 1991). Copyright ©1991 by Racial Loyalty.


feminized, weakened—indeed, emasculated.Article after article decries “the whimperingcollapse of the blond male,” as if white menhave surrendered to the plot (in Ferber, 1998,p. 127). According to The Turner Diaries,American men have lost the right to be free;slavery “is the just and proper state for a peoplewho have gown soft” (Pierce, 1978, p. 33). Themilitias simultaneously offer white men ananalysis of their present situation and a politicalstrategy for retrieving their manhood. AsNational Vanguard puts it,

As Northern males have continued to becomemore wimpish, the result of the media-createdimage of the “new male”—more pacifist, lessauthoritarian, more “sensitive,” less competitive,more androgynous, less possessive—the con-trolled media, the homosexual lobby and the fem-inist movement have cheered . . . the number ofeffeminate males has increased greatly . . . legionsof sissies and weaklings, of flabby, limp-wristed,non-aggressive, non-physical, indecisive, slack-jawed, fearful males who, while still heterosexualin theory and practice, have not even a vestige ofthe old macho spirit, so deprecated today, left inthem. (cited in Ferber, 1998, p. 136)

It is through participation in these move-ments that American manhood can be restoredand revived—a manhood in which individualwhite men control the fruits of their own labor andare not subject to the emasculation of Jewish-owned finance capital or a black- and feminist-controlled welfare state. It is a fantasy of “theViking warrior who comes to rescue his peoplefrom the ‘evil Jews and subhuman mongrels,’” amilitarized manhood of the heroic John Rambo—a manhood that celebrates their God-sanctionedright to band together in armed militias if any-one—or any governmental agency—tries to takeit away from them (see Blazak, 2001, p. 991). Ifthe state and capital emasculate them, and if themasculinity of the “others” is problematic, thenonly real white men can rescue this AmericanEden from a feminized, multicultural androgy-nous melting pot. “The world is in trouble nowonly because the White man is divided, con-fused, and misled,” we read in The New Order.“Once he is united, inspired by a great ideal andled by real men, his world will again become liv-able, safe, and happy” (in Ferber, 1998, p. 139).The movements of the far right seek to reclaimtheir manhood gloriously, violently.

Perhaps this is best illustrated with anothercartoon from W.A.R., the magazine of the WhiteAryan Resistance. In this deliberate parody ofcountless Charles Atlas advertisements, thetimid white 97-pound weakling finds his power,his strength as a man, through racial hatred. Inthe ideology of the white supremacist move-ment and its organized militia allies, it is racismthat will again enable white men to reclaim theirmanhood. The amorphous groups of whitesupremacists, skinheads, and neo-Nazis may bethe symbolic shock troops of this movement, butthe rural militias are its well-organized andhighly regimented infantry.

White Supremacists in Scandinavia

While significantly fewer in number than theirAmerican counterparts, white supremacists in theNordic countries have also made a significantimpact on those normally tolerant social democ-racies. Norwegian groups such as Bootboys,NUNS 88, the Norsk Arisk Ungdomsfron(NAUF), Varg, and the Vikings; the Green JacketMovement (Gronjakkerne) in Denmark; and theVitt Ariskt Motstand (VAM, or White AryanResistance), Kreatrivistens Kyrka (Church of theCreator, COTC), and Riksfronten (NationalFront) in Sweden have exerted an impact beyondtheir modest numbers. Norwegian groupsnumber a few hundred, and Swedish groupsmay barely top 1,000 adherents, with perhapsdouble that number as supporters and generalsympathizers.

Their opposition seems to come preciselyfrom the relative prosperity of their homelands,a prosperity that has made the Nordic countriesattractive to ethnic immigrants from the eco-nomic South. Most come from lower-middle-class families; their fathers are painters,carpenters, tillers, bricklayers, and road mainte-nance workers. Some come from small familyfarms. Several fathers own one-man businessesand are small capitalists or self-employedtradesmen (Fangen, 1999, p. 360). In her life-history analysis of four young Norwegian par-ticipants, Katherine Fangen (1999, pp. 359-363)found that only one claimed a working-classidentity, and his father owned his own business;another’s father owned a small printingcompany, another was a carpenter, and thefourth came from a family of independentfishermen.

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All the sons are downwardly mobile; theywork sporadically, they have little or no controlover their own labor or workplace, and noneowns his own business. Almost all members arebetween 16 and 20 years of age (Fangen, 1999,p. 360). Youth unemployment has spiked,especially in Sweden, just as the numbers ofasylum seekers has spiked, and with them

attacks on centers for asylum seekers. Theystruggle, Fangen notes, to recover a class identity“that no longer has a material basis” (2003, p. 2).Danish Aryans have few assets and “few prospectsfor a better future” (Bjorgo, 1997, p. 104; seealso Bjorgo, 1998).

This downward mobility marks these racistskinheads from their British counterparts, who


Illustration 24.3 W.A.R. Cartoon

SOURCE: Copyright © 2000 White Aryan Resistance. Used by permission of Tom Metzger.


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have been embedded within working class cul-ture. These young Nordic lower-middle-classboys do not participate in a violent, racistcounterculture as preparation for their workinglives on the shop floor (see, for example, Willis,1981). Rather, like their American counterparts,they see no future in the labor market. They donot yearn nostalgically for the collective soli-darity of the shop floor; for them, that life wasalready gone.

Like the American white supremacists,Scandinavian Aryans understand their plight interms of masculine entitlement, which is erodedby state immigration policies, internationalZionist power, and globalization. All desire areturn to a racially and ethnically homogeneoussociety, seeing themselves, as one put it, as a“front against alienation, and the mixing ofcultures” (Fangen, 1998, p. 214).

Antigay sentiments also unite these whitesupremacists. “Words are no use; only actionwill help in the fight against homosexuals,” saysa Swedish magazine, Siege. “With violence andterror as our weapons we must beat back thewave of homosexual terror and stinking perver-sion whose stench is washing over our country”(cited in Bjorgo, 1997, p. 127). Almost all haveembraced anti-Semitism, casting the Jews asthe culprits for immigration and homosexuality.According to a Swedish group, Vitt ArisktMotstand, the Jew represents a corrupt societythat “poisons the white race through the immi-gration of racially inferior elements, homo-sexuality, and moral disorder” (in Loow, 1998a,p. 86). As Storm, the magazine of the SwedishWhite Aryan Resistance, put it,

In our resistance struggle for . . . the survival ofthe white race . . . we must wield the battle axeagainst our common enemy—the ZionistOccupation Government (ZOG) and the liberalrace traitors, the keen servants of the hook noseswho are demolishing our country piece by piece.(cited in Bjorgo, 1997, p. 219)4

Anti-Semitism, however, also has inhibitedalliances across the various national groups inScandinavia. Danish and Norwegian Aryansrecall the resistance against the Nazis, andthey often cast themselves as heirs to the resis-tance struggle against foreign invasion. SomeSwedish groups, on the other hand, openlyembrace Nazism and Nazi symbols. To maintain

harmony among these different national factionsof the Nordic Aryan movement, the Danishgroups have begun to use Confederate flags andother symbols of the racist U.S. South, whichall sides can agree signifies the Ku Klux Klanand the “struggle against Negroes, communists,homosexuals and Jews” (in Bjorgo, 1997,p. 99).

Another unifying set of symbols includesconstant references to the Vikings. Vikings areadmired because they lived in a closed commu-nity, were fierce warriors, and were feared andhated by those they conquered (Fangen, 2003,p. 36). Vikings also represent an untrammeledmasculinity, an “armed brotherhood” of heroesand martyrs (Bjorgo, 1997, p. 136).

Masculinity figures heavily in whitesupremacist rhetoric and recruitment. Youngrecruits are routinely savagely beaten in a “bap-tism of fire.” Among Danes, status is achieved“by daring to do something others don’t. You area hell of a guy if you go to ‘work’ at night andcome home the next day with 85,000 crowns[about US$10,000]” (cited in Bjorgo, 1997,p. 104). One Norwegian racist recounted in courthow his friends had dared him to blow up a storeowned by a Pakistani in Brumunddal. He said hefelt a lot of pressure, that they were making funof him, and he wanted to prove to them that hewas a man after all. After he blew up the shop,he said, the others slapped his back and cheeredhim. Finally, he felt accepted (Fangen, 1999,p. 371). A former Swedish skinhead recountedhis experience of masculine transformation ashe joined up:

When I was 14, I had been bullied a lot by class-mates and others. By coincidence, I got to know anolder guy who was a skinhead. He was really cool,so I decided to become a skinhead myself, cuttingoff my hair, and donning a black Bomber jacket andDoc Martens boots. The next morning, I turned upat school in my new outfit. In the gate, I met one ofmy worst tormentors. When he saw me, he wasstunned, pressing his back against the wall, withfear shining out of his eyes. I was stunned as well—by the powerful effect my new image had on himand others. Being that intimidating—boy, that wasa great feeling! (cited in Bjorgo, 1997, p. 234)

Like their American counterparts,Scandinavian white supremacists also exhibitthe other side of what Connell calls “protest


masculinity”—a combination of stereotypicalmale norms with often rather untraditionalattitudes that include respecting women. Allthese Nordic groups experience significantsupport from young women because the malescampaign on issues that are of significance tothem; that is, they campaign against prostitu-tion, abortion, and pornography because theseare seen as degrading to women (see Durham,1997). On the other hand, many of thesesame women soon become disaffected whenthey feel mistreated by their brethren,“unjustly subordinated” by them, or just seen

as “mattresses” (in Fangen, 1999, p. 365; see alsoDurham, 1997).

In another illustration, the hypocrisy of theNorwegian state and culture is ridiculed. Oneman confronts another who is shouting in favorof censorship. “Are you against freedom ofspeech?” he asks. Then he gets angry andaccuses the first man of being anti-democratic.“You should be ashamed of your undemocraticbehavior!” he says. However, when the first maninforms him that he’s protesting the Nazis, thesecond man abandons his principles and joinsright in.


Illustration 24.4 Vigrid Cartoon


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Illustration 24.5 Vigrid Cartoon

Often, sexualized images of women are used torecruit men. In one comic strip for Vigrid’s news-paper, a topless woman with exaggerated breastsis hawking the newspaper on the streets. “Norway

for Norwegians!” she shouts. She’s arrested bythe police for “selling material based on racediscrimination”; meanwhile, caricatures of blacksand Pakistanis burn the city and loot a liquor store.



One significant difference between theAmerican and the Scandinavian Aryan move-ments concerns their view of the environment.Whereas American Aryans support right-wingand conservative Republican efforts to discardenvironmental protection in the name of jobcreation in extractive industries, and are morethan likely meat-eating survivalists, Nordicwhite supremacists are strong supporters of asort of nostalgic and conservative environmen-talism. Many are vegetarians, some vegan. Eachgroup might maintain that its policies flowdirectly from its political stance. The Nordicgroups claims that the modern state is “impure,”“perverted,” and full of “decay and decadence”and that their environmentalism is a means tocleanse it. As Matti Sundquist, singer in theSwedish skinhead group Svastika, puts it (inLoow, 1998b, p. 134),

Well, it’s the most important thing, almost,because we must have a functioning environmentin order to have a functioning world . . . and it’salmost too late to save the earth, there just be someradical changes if we are to stand a chance.5

THE RESTORATION OF ISLAMIC

MASCULINITY AMONG AL QAEDA

Although too little is yet known to develop asfull a portrait of the terrorists of Al Qaeda, cer-tain common features warrant brief comment.For one thing, the class origins of the Al Qaedaterrorists appear to be similar to those of theseother groups. Virtually all the young men whoparticipated in the hijackings on 9/11 wereunder 25 and well educated. Some were lowermiddle class, downwardly mobile; others weresons of middle-class fathers whose upwardmobility was blocked.

Other terrorist groups in the Middle Eastappear to have appealed to similar young men,although they were also organized by theologyprofessors—whose professions also were threat-ened by continued secularization and westerniza-tion. For example, Jamiat-I-Islami, formed in1972, was begun by Burhannudin Rabbani, a lec-turer in theology at Kabul University. (Anotherleader, Ahmed Shah Masoud, was an engineeringstudent at Kabul University.) Hisb-e-Islami,which split off in 1979 from Jamiat, wasorganized by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, also an

engineering student at Kabul University. Thisgroup appealed particularly to relatively well-educated radical students, most of whom werestudying engineering. Ittihad-I-Islami wasformed by Abdul Rasoul Sayyaf, former theologylecturer at Kabul University (see Marsden, 2002,pp. 29-31; see also Waldman, 2002). One studyof 129 Lebanese members of Hezbollah foundthem to be better educated and far less impover-ished than the Lebanese population of compara-ble age (see Barro, 2002). Another study of 149suicide bombers offers a fascinating portrait.More than two thirds (67.1%) were between 17and 23 years of age; almost all the rest werebetween 24 and 30. More than one third (37.6%)had a high school education, and another 35.6%had at least some college. Nearly nine of ten weresingle (“Who They Are,” 2002, p. 25).

Of course, it is well-known that several of theleaders of Al Qaeda are quite wealthy. Aymanal-Zawahiri, the 50-year-old doctor who wasthe closest adviser to Osama bin Laden in 2001,was from a fashionable suburb of Cairo; hisfather was dean of the pharmacy school atthe university there. Osama bin Laden himselfwas a multimillionaire. By contrast, many ofthe September 11 hijackers were engineeringstudents, for whom job opportunities had beendwindling dramatically. (From the minimalinformation I have found, about one fourth ofthe hijackers had studied engineering.) KamelDaoudi studied computer science at a universityin Paris, and Zacarias Moussaoui, the first manto be formally charged with a crime in theUnited States for the events of September 11,took a degree at London’s South Bank Univer-sity. Marwan al-Shehhi, a chubby, bespectacled23-year-old from the United Arab Emirates,was an engineering student, and Ziad Jarrah, a26-year-old Lebanese, had studied aircraftdesign.

The politics of many of these Islamic radicalorganizations appear to be similar. All opposeglobalization and the spread of Western values;all oppose what they perceive as corrupt regimesin several Arab states (notably Saudi Arabiaand Egypt), which they see as merely puppetsof U.S. domination. Central to their politicalideology is the recovery of manhood from thedevastatingly emasculating politics of globaliza-tion. Over and over, Nasra Hassan writes, sheheard the refrain “The Israelis humiliate us.They occupy our land, and deny our history”


(2001, p. 38). The Taliban saw the Sovietinvasion and Westernization as humiliations.Osama bin Laden’s October 7, 2001, videotape(shown on CNN News on October 8, 2001, andelsewhere) describes the “humiliation and dis-grace” that Islam has suffered for “more thaneighty years.” Even more telling is his commentto the Arab television network Al Jazeera inDecember 1998, in which the masculinity of theAmerican is set against that of the Muslim:

Our brothers who fought in Somalia saw wondersabout the weakness, feebleness and cowardlinessof the U.S. soldier. We believe that we are men,Muslim men who must have the honor of defend-ing [Mecca]—We do not want American womensoldiers defending [it]. The rulers in that regionhave been deprived of their manhood and theythink that the people are women. By God, Muslimwomen refuse to be defended by these Americanand Jewish prostitutes. (cited in Judt, 2001)

This fusion of antiglobalization politics,convoluted Islamic theology, and virulent misog-yny has been the subject of much speculation.Viewing these through a gender lens, though,enables us to understand the connections better.The collapse of certain public patriarchal enti-tlements led to a virulent and violent effort toreplace them with others, for example in thereassertion of domestic patriarchal power. “Thisis the class that is most hostile to women,” saidthe scholar Fouad Ajami (Crossette, 2001, p. 1).But why? Journalist Barbara Ehrenreich explainsthat whereas “males have lost their traditionalstatus as farmers and breadwinners, womenhave been entering the market economy andgaining the marginal independence conferredeven by a paltry wage.” As a result, “the manwho can no longer make a living, who has todepend on his wife’s earnings, can watchHollywood sexpots on pirated videos and beginto think the world has been turned upside down”(Ehrenreich, 2001, p. 37).

When these groups have gained some politi-cal power, as has the Taliban, they have movedquickly to enact deliberately gendered policies,designed both to remasculinize men and torefeminize women. “The rigidity of the Talibangender policies could be seen as a desperateattempt to keep out that other world, and to pro-tect Afghan women from influences that couldweaken the society from within” (Marsden,2002, p. 99). Thus, not only were policies of the

Afghani republic that made female educationcompulsory immediately abandoned, butwomen also were prohibited from appearing inpublic unescorted by men, from revealing anypart of their body, or from going to school orholding a job. Men were required to grow theirbeards, in accordance with religious images ofMohammed—but also because wearing beardshas always been associated with men’s responseto women’s increased equality in the publicsphere. Beards especially symbolically reaffirmbiological natural differences between womenand men, even as they are collapsing in thepublic sphere. Such policies removed women ascompetitors and also shored up masculinitybecause they enabled men to triumph over thehumiliations of globalization, as well as to tri-umph over their own savage, predatory, and vio-lently sexual urges that would be unleashed inthe presence of uncovered women.

Perhaps this can be best seen paradigmati-cally in the story of Mohammed Atta, appar-ently the mastermind of the entire September 11operation and the pilot of the first plane to crashinto the World Trade Center tower. Theyoungest child of an ambitious lawyer fatherand pampering mother, Atta grew up a shy andpolite boy. “He was so gentle,” his father said.“I used to tell him ‘Toughen up, boy!’” (inNew York Times Magazine, October 7). Attaspent his youth in a relatively shoddy Caironeighborhood. Both his sisters are profession-als—one is a professor, the other a doctor.

Atta decided to become an engineer, but his“degree meant little in a country where thou-sands of college graduates were unable to findgood jobs.”6 His father had told him he “neededto hear the word ‘doctor’ in front of his name.We told him your sisters are doctors and theirhusbands are doctors and you are the man of thefamily.” After he failed to find employment inEgypt, he went to Hamburg, Germany, to studyto become an architect. He was “meticulous,disciplined and highly intelligent,” yet an “ordi-nary student, a quiet friendly guy who wastotally focused on his studies,” according toanother student in Hamburg.

But his ambitions were constantly thwarted.His only hope for a good job in Egypt was to behired by an international firm. He applied andwas constantly rejected. He found work as adraftsman—highly humiliating for someonewith engineering and architectural credentials

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and an imperious and demanding father—for aGerman firm involved with razing lower-incomeCairo neighborhoods to provide more scenicvistas for luxury tourist hotels.

Defeated, humiliated, emasculated, a disap-pointment to his father and a failed rival to hissisters, Atta drifted into an increasingly militantIslamic theology. By the time he assumed con-trol of American Airlines Flight 11, he evinceda gendered hysteria about women. In the mes-sage he left in his abandoned rental car, he madeclear what really mattered to him in the end. “Idon’t want pregnant women or a person who isnot clean to come and say good-bye to me,” hewrote. “I don’t want women to go to my funeralor later to my grave” (CNN, October 2, 2001).

Masculine Entitlementand the Future of Terrorism

Of course, such fantasies are the feveredimagination of hysteria; Atta’s body was with-out doubt instantly incinerated, and no funeralwould be likely. But the terrors of emasculationexperienced by the lower middle classes all overthe world will no doubt continue to resound forthese young men whose world seems to havebeen turned upside down, their entitlementssnatched from them, their rightful position intheir world suddenly up for grabs. And they maycontinue to articulate with a seething resent-ment against women, “outsiders,” or any other“others” perceived as stealing their rightfulplace at the table.

The common origins and common com-plaints of the terrorists of 9/11 and theirAmerican “comrades” were not lost on Americanwhite supremacists. In their response to theevents of 9/11, American Aryans said theyadmired the terrorists’ courage, and they tookthe opportunity to chastise their own compatri-ots. Bill Roper of the National Alliance publiclywished his members had as much “testicularfortitude” (“Reaping the Whirlwind,” 2001).“It’s a disgrace that in a population of at least150 million White/Aryan Americans, we pro-vide so few that are willing to do the same,”bemoaned Rocky Suhayda, Nazi Party chair-man from Eastpointe, Michigan. “A bunch oftowel head/sand niggers put our great WhiteMovement to shame” (in Ridgeway, 2001,p. 14). It is from that gendered shame that massmurderers are made.

NOTES

1. Let me make clear that I explore here only theterrorism of social movements, such as Al Qaeda, andnot the systematic terrorism of states, where terror isa matter of political strategy or military opportunity.My analysis, however, may well apply to socialmovements in the former Yugoslavia, as well as toother cases. An earlier version of this chapter was pub-lished in International Sociology, 18(3), September2003. It is part of a larger research project on “angrywhite men.” I have benefited from comments frommy coeditors as well as many colleagues and friends,notably Amy Aronson, Abby Ferber, MichaelKaufman, and Lillian Rubin.

2. This section is based on collaborative work withAbby Ferber and appears in Kimmel and Ferber (2000).I recognize that the illustrations may be offensive tosome. I offer them as emblematic of the ways in whichdiscourses of masculinity offen saturate political hatespeech.

3. Of course, there is a well-developed literatureon the “gendered” elements of Nazism that underliesmy work here. See especially Theweleit (1987-1989).

4. Interestingly, Loow (1994, p. 21) found thatthe localities with the highest numbers of attacks onasylum seekers in the early 1990s had the highestconcentrations of national socialist or racist organiza-tions in the 1920s through the 1940s.

5. In that sense, these groups are similar toBritish groups such as Blood and Soil, and thePatriotic Vegetarian and Vegan Society.

6. All unattributed quotations come from a fasci-nating portrait of Atta (Yardley, 2001).

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432

25WAR, MILITARISM,AND MASCULINITIES

PAUL HIGATE

JOHN HOPTON

The nexus linking war, militarism, andmasculinities has remained an enduringand consistent feature of societies and their

cultures across time. Despite these close linkages,it is surprising that scholars have tended to over-look the masculinist dimensions of the military; inso doing, they have unwittingly preserved the nat-uralized dimension of military masculinity. Thischapter’s focus on the British military, an institu-tion characterized by its unique role in the acqui-sition and maintenance of a global empire, aims toexplore the connections between the armed forcesand their masculinist culture.

According to one source, British defensespending is currently in the region of £36.9 bil-lion ($60 billion), with a further £3 billion beingset aside for the 2003 war in Iraq (£50 per headfor U.K. citizens) and an extra £330 millionbeing spent on domestic counterterrorism mea-sures. This would mean that military spendingcurrently accounts for 6% of the total U.K. budget(White & Norton-Taylor, 2002). An alternativesource suggests that “British defense spending

has declined more than 30 percent to a currentlevel of 2.7 percent of Gross Domestic Product”(National Center for Policy Analysis, 2002).Worldwide,

military expenditure, which has been increasingsince 1998, accelerated sharply in 2002, by 6% inreal terms to $794 billion in current prices. Itaccounted for 2.5% of world GDP. . . . The cur-rent level of world military expenditure is 14%higher in real terms than it was at the post-coldwar low of 1998, but is still 16% below its 1988level, when world military expenditure was closeto its cold war peak.

The increase in 2002 is dominated by a 10%real terms increase by the USA, accounting foralmost three-quarters of the global increase, inresponse to the events of 11 September 2001. . . .The USA now accounts for 43% of world militaryexpenditure, when currencies are converted at mar-ket exchange rates, as is the SIPRI practice in thisYearbook. The top five spenders—the USA, Japan,the UK, France and China—account for 62% oftotal world military expenditure. (StockholmInternational Peace Research Institute, n.d.)

Author’s note: This chapter is a synthesis of two previously published chapters (Higate, 2003a; Hopton, 2003) from MilitaryMasculinities: Identity and the State (Higate, 2003b). We are grateful to Praeger for allowing to reproduce these texts in this form.


These figures give some sense of thecentrality of the armed forces to governmentspending priorities and provide a context for thesubsequent discussion.

The British military’s development might beconsidered somewhat unique: nevertheless, theexamples drawn on throughout the chapter havea strong resonance with the universal feature ofarmed forces more widely. The chapter beginswith a historical overview of the structural andideological links between masculine and mili-tary cultures. This is followed by discussion sug-gesting that the 1990s represented a change inthe relationship between women and the mili-tary, in terms of both the military role in the post-modern world and the role of the women withinthe military. Finally, we attempt to evaluate howdeep this apparent “feminization” of the militaryruns in reality and to speculate how the militarymay change again in the coming decades.

Throughout history, there are examples ofwomen assuming male military dress to joinarmed forces or to fight in specific battles orcampaigns. For example, there is the historicalexample of the Ancient Briton Boudicca/Boadicea fighting the Romans, and there aremany stories of women dressing as men inthe 18th and 19th centuries in order to enlist onfighting ships or in armies (Wheelwright, 1989),as well as examples of women taking up arms invarious locations in the Americas and Africabetween the 16th and 19th centuries and evenduring World War II. Similarly, in the late 20thcentury, women sometimes played key roleswithin “liberation”/terrorist movements, andsome countries at various times attempted inte-gration of women into their armed services,including the assumption of some combat roles(Klein, 2003; Kovitz, 2003; R. Morgan, 1989).

Nevertheless, throughout modernity, one ofthe enduring characteristics of military organi-zation has been a gendered division of labor(Connell, 2000; Enloe, 2000; Kovitz, 2003).Although there have been some indications inrecent years that this division of labor is becom-ing more fluid, barriers remain in place thatexclude women from certain forms of militaryservice. For example, in Britain women are stillexcluded from service on submarines and inelite airborne and commando units. Thus, at thetime of writing, it is still possible to see explicitlinks between militarism and ideologies of mas-culinity, although the effects of the opening up

of more opportunities to women in the militaryrequire further consideration.

MILITARISM AND THE

INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF MASCULINITY

Writers who have developed critiques ofmasculinity (e.g., Connell, 1987; Harris, 1995;Hearn, 1996; MacInnes, 1998; Miedzian, 1992)suggest that there is a form of masculine iden-tity (hegemonic masculinity) to which boys andmen are generally encouraged to aspire. Thisform of masculinity is characterized by theinterrelationship of stoicism, phallocentricity,and the domination of weaker individuals(Brittan, 1989; Rogers, 1988; Stanley & Wise,1987; Stoltenberg, 1990), competitiveness, andheroic achievement (Brittan, 1989; Harris,1995; Miedzian, 1992). Thus, men who exem-plify this model of masculinity tend to beaccorded a higher social status than those whodo not (Connell, 1987). By publicly demonstrat-ing that he has at least the potential to conformto this model of masculinity, a boy or man mayhave his masculinity affirmed. Military organi-zations, military successes, military pageantry,and rituals such as the “passing out” parades forsuccessful recruits to the armed forces representthe public endorsement of such values and theirinstitutionalization in national culture (Dawson,1994). Certainly, there are other manifestationsof this process of celebrating masculinity, butuniquely the exploits of the military are alwaysopenly and aggressively celebrated in the pub-lic sphere (Hockey, 2003; McGregor, 2003).Indeed, there are echoes of militarism in every-day language. For example, in the UnitedKingdom the term “Dunkirk spirit” (a referenceto Britain fighting on after the humiliatingdefeat at Dunkirk early in World War II) is usedas a shorthand for expressing admiration forsomeone’s unwillingness to accept defeat; andsomeone who is finally defeated after a lengthystruggle may still be said to have “met theirWaterloo” (a reference to Wellington’s finaldefeat of Napoleon Bonaparte nearly 200 yearsago). Furthermore, boys encounter many mili-tarist influences during their childhood andadolescence (Dawson, 1994).

Although there are exceptions to the rule(such as the Woodcraft folk, an explicitlypacifist British organization that has always

War, Militarism, and Masculinities • 433


accepted both boys and girls), uniformed youthorganizations that were originally only forboys tend to explicitly reflect military culture.For example, the organization, uniforms, andculture of the Boy Scout movement reflect themilitary background of its founder, RobertBaden-Powell. Similarly, from its very begin-ning, military-style drilling was a core activityof the Boys’ Brigade to the extent that itsfounder, William Smith, originally introducedwooden dummy rifles into these activities.Although the use of wooden rifles was aban-doned relatively early on in the Boys’ Brigade’shistory, drilling remained a core activity, anda military structure of brigade, battalions, andcompanies together with a quasi-military hierar-chy of officers and noncommissioned officershas been retained to this day (McFarlan, 1983).More explicitly, the various army, air, and seacadet forces in Britain (which were originallyboys-only organizations), which offer youngpeople opportunities to participate in manyadventure activities and sports at low cost, havebeen supported by the Ministry of Defence(MoD). These and other similar organizationshave played a key role in “exporting” a cultureequating masculinity and militarism from theelite British privately funded schools such asEton and Harrow to boys from the middle andworking classes (Brod, 1987; Weeks, 1981).Although not all boys and men will ever haveany connection with uniformed youth organi-zations such as the Boy Scouts or the Boys’Brigade, most adult males are aware of thecultural values promoted by such organizationsand will have been exposed to such influencesvia their peers. Thus, a shared understanding ofmasculinity will be influenced by the valuespromoted by such organizations.

This valorization of military values isreflected in other ways as well. One of the mostcommonly cited examples is the kinds of toysthat boys traditionally have been encouraged toplay with by their peers and/or their parents.Typically, these may include toy tanks, toy guns,toy warplanes, and toy soldiers (Dawson, 1994).Indeed, even many of the fantasy figure–typetoys that have become popular over the last20 years are armed with what clearly are meantto be lethal weapons (Goldstein, 2001, p. 238).Links between militarism and masculinity alsoare evident in printed matter and other mediaaimed at the youth market (Gibson, 1994,p. 111). For example, during the 1960s, British

boys’ comics such as The Valiant and The Victor,whose very titles reflected military culture, cele-brated the heroic exploits of both fictional andnonfictional soldiers. In the 1980s, televisionseries such as The A-Team, Airwolf, andMagnum, PI (some of which were aimed atadults as much as children) attributed the astute-ness, strength, self-reliance, and sexual attrac-tiveness of the central male characters to theirmilitary backgrounds, while during the 1990smany video and computer games featuredviolence or had explicitly militarist themes(Goldstein, 2001, pp. 294-296). Such culturalinfluences are a powerful influence on howchildren and young people interpret the worldaround them and their place within it, and theseinfluences may lead to them equating manlinesswith military ideals.

THE RECIPROCAL RELATIONSHIP

BETWEEN MILITARISM AND MASCULINITY

Historically, there has been a reciprocal rela-tionship between militarism and masculinity.On one hand, politicians have utilized ideolo-gies of idealized masculinity that valorize thenotion of strong active males collectively risk-ing their personal safety for the greater good ofthe wider community (see Barnett, 1982; Platt,1992; Segal, 1990) to gain support for the useof violence by the state (such as wars in theinternational arena and aggressive policing inthe domestic situation). On the other hand, mil-itarism feeds into ideologies of masculinitythrough the eroticization of stoicism, risk-taking, and even lethal violence (Goldstein,2001). This can be detected in populist fictionaland nonfictional books about war and weaponsas well as in newspaper coverage of militaryactions (Newsinger, 1997; Shepherd, 1989).

The reciprocal relationship between mili-tarism and masculinity can be illustrated usingWorld War I as an example. In the earlier partof the 1914-1918 war, recruitment of volunteersoldiers owed much to Victorian ideologiesthat defined masculinity in terms of strength,courage, determination, and patriotism. In turn,this image of masculinity was reinforced bywartime propaganda that glamorized militaryculture and military success and that tacitlyencouraged brutality toward war resistersand those males (such as Jewish refugeesfrom Eastern Europe) who were ineligible for

434 • POLITICS


military service (Showalter, 1987; Taylor &Young, 1987).

In the British context, a more recent exampleof this process is the media obsession withthe Special Air Service (SAS), an obsessionthat began with the Iranian Embassy Siege of1980 (e.g., Geraghty, 1980; Warner, 1983,pp. 271-273). Geraghty, himself a journalist,neatly encapsulated the media image of the SAStrooper as the epitome of socially constructedmasculinity.

The deployment of the SAS in situations thatmight (arguably) have been more appropriatelyhandled by the civil police, and the subsequentmedia coverage of such events, is particularlyinteresting in the context of the relationshipbetween masculinity and militarism. Whetherthe victims of such intervention are Iranianor Irish “terrorists” or protesting prisoners(J. Jenkins, 1989; Scraton, Sim, & Skidmore,1991; Warner, 1983, pp. 271-273), the messageis the same: Although the dissidents are dis-playing the masculinist virtues of aggression,domination, and endurance, glory and respect(see Bibbings, 2003, and Stanko, 1990) canbelong only to the fighting men whose aggres-sion is controlled and regulated by the State andused to uphold the authority of the State. Segalhas shown how, in addition to celebrating“heroic” exploits of aggression and competitive-ness, the ideology that links maleness withrugged individualism may also play a role inpromoting intensely conservative politics andvalues (Segal, 1990, p. 20).

However, the link between militarism andmasculinity reaches beyond the eroticizationof masculinism through the glamorization ofmilitary culture and military actions; it can bedetected in the law-and-order policies of Britishgovernments during the 1980s and 1990s. Themost obvious manifestation of this is the increasein the use of paramilitary tactics by the police(see Jefferson, 1990), and it also can be seen inpenal policy. The use of police cavalry chargesand similar paramilitary approaches to “riotcontrol” throughout the 1980s and 1990s (e.g.,Coulter, Miller, & Walker, 1984; Hillyard &Percy-Smith, 1988; “Tony,” 1990) have beenextensively documented. Taken in isolation, suchpolicies do not seem to have a direct bearing onthe politics of sexuality. However, if the mainpurpose of such actions is taken to be the sup-pression of dissent (Hillyard & Percy-Smith,1988), they may be interpreted as being a public

spectacle wherein the forces of law and orderappropriate the symbols and ritualized behaviorof eroticized masculinity (military language, hel-mets, combat dress, special weapons and tactics)(see Stoltenberg, 1990, pp. 117 and following,and Macnair, 1989) to enforce the authority of agovernment that systematically reinforced ide-ologies of the patriarchal family (Lister, 1990;Millar & Glendinning, 1989) and attacked alter-native sexualities (Shepherd & Wallis, 1989).The sexual-political undertones here are thatthese masculinist symbols and ritualized behav-iors are associated in “commonsense” assump-tions with the exercising of legitimate power andauthority.

Within the penal system, militarism fromtime to time has been reflected in ideas aboutthe rehabilitation of young offenders. Forexample, young offenders’ institutions haveadopted regimes based on military drill andarmy-style physical training in the belief thatthis will prepare young male offenders for law-abiding manhood (Muncie, 1990). Here, themotive seems to be to deny the possibility thatyoung men’s “crimes” may represent politicalprotest or reaction to social disadvantage, andinstead to view their “antisocial” behavior asarising from destructive biological urges (e.g.,Brittan, 1989, pp. 78-82) that military-stylediscipline will enable them to control. Suchpolicies seem to be rooted in an ideology thatregards militarism as the ultimate form of disci-plined masculinity (Brittan, 1989, pp. 74-75)and ignores the contradiction that militarism isin fact a celebration of the most extreme formsof violence (Harrison, 2003).

If the reciprocal relationship between mas-culinity and militarism is being in some senseweakened, so too is the power of the state tomanipulate public support for its right to useviolence to pursue its policies at home andabroad, and to encourage young men to join thearmed forces. Thus, the state has a vested inter-est in maintaining strong ideological linksbetween militarism and masculinity.

1991: A TURNING POINT

The 1991 Gulf War seems to represent a turningpoint in the relationship between militarism andmasculinity. On one hand, the traditional rela-tionship between masculinity and militarismwas clearly evident in the political rhetoric that



was used to justify the war. On the other hand, aweakening of the link between the traditionalpreoccupations of hegemonic masculinityand militarism also is evident in the buildup tothe war, the defeat of Iraq, and the aftermath ofthe war. First, notwithstanding the contradictoryattitudes sometimes shown toward such women,female armed services personnel involved in thewar were given a high profile. Second, as thewar reached its conclusion, notions of a “newworld order” and new forms of military inter-vention began to emerge, although these alsowere contradictory.

It has been argued that the 1991 war againstIraq was an avoidable event that was delib-erately created by Western governments—principally those of the United States and theUnited Kingdom—that previously had ignoredIraq’s poor record on human rights (Cale,1991; Cockburn & Cohen, 1991; Farry, 1991;Melichar, 1991). In this context, the rhetoric ofthe “new world order” that accompanied thepromotion of the war may be interpreted as anattempt by (mostly male) politicians in the Westto capitalize on the political changes in EasternEurope (and the resultant demise of the WarsawPact military alliance, which might otherwisehave kept their ambitions in check) to justify thefurther pursuit of militaristic policies and to actout the masculinist fantasy of becoming “heroes-hunters-competitors-conquerors” (Brittan, 1989)on a global scale.

Nevertheless, the presence of 40,000 femalepersonnel among the American military force inSaudi Arabia during the war (Douglas, 1991)appeared to represent a change in the relationshipbetween women and the military. Historically,the militarization of women’s lives has tended toinvolve the regulation and control of women serv-ing the needs of male military personnel. This hasbeen manifested in the roles traditionally ascribedto women in patriarchal societies: wives, cooks,laundresses, prostitutes, secretaries, and so on(Enloe, 1988). During the 1991 Gulf War, though,women were serving as soldiers, marines, airforce personnel, and sailors in support units closeto and within combat zones (Ellicott, 1991).Although, on a superficial level, this seems to sig-nal a radical change in the relationship betweenmilitarism and social constructions of femininity,this new relationship was contradictory.

Press coverage of the Gulf War referring tofemale personnel tended to highlight those

female soldiers who were also mothers ofyoung children (e.g., Ellicott, 1991; this storywas accompanied by a picture of Captain Jo AnnConley in full combat dress with a photograph ofher 2-year-old daughter fixed to her helmet).Such imagery implicitly challenges the viewthat the violence of war is inextricably linked tomen’s violence against women. However, whena female soldier was captured by the Iraqis, fearswere expressed openly that she might be rapedby her captors, or that female soldiers who weremothers might be killed, and that this mightadversely affect the morale of male troops (Muir,1991). Thus, although a clear message was giventhat war and other military interventions were nolonger to be strictly gendered activities, therewas also tacit recognition that the casual misog-yny that pervades military culture may leadto male sexual violence against women becom-ing an integral part of war (see Enloe, 1988;McGowan & Hands, 1983; Mladjenovic, 1993;Smith, 1989; Theweleit, 1987).

Nevertheless, during the period between the1991 Gulf War and the events of September 11,2001, the pace of change to women’s service inthe British armed forces increased. For example,between 1992 and 1994, the (British) Women’sRoyal Army Corps, Women’s Royal NavalService, and Women’s Royal Air Force becamefully integrated with, respectively, the BritishArmy, the Royal Navy, and the Royal Air Force;in 1995, the first woman qualified as an RAFcombat-ready Tornado bomber pilot (Cooke,1995). Although these developments appear tosignal a material change in the nexus linkingwomen with military service, questions remainover the extent to which the increasing presenceof women in the armed forces will affect thenature of its masculinist culture.

THE CONTEMPORARY

MILITARIZATION OF WOMEN

To summarize, militarism is the major meansby which the values and beliefs associated withideologies of hegemonic masculinity are eroti-cized and institutionalized. Although there arealternative contexts in which traditional mascu-line virtues are valorized and eroticized, theylack the potential to link masculinity with thepolitical concerns of the state. This is not to saythat women are innately pacifist. Indeed, both

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male and female pacifists have been known torenounce pacifism when faced with brutal polit-ical regimes or genocidal armies (Kuzmanicet al., 1994; Oldfield, 1989). Furthermore,throughout history, women have participatedactively in military life in a variety of roles(Wheelwright, 1989).

The willingness of some women to join thearmed forces and even assume combat rolesmay be used to refute an essentialist position inrelation to feminist pacifism (see Segal, 1990).Nevertheless, militarism has tended to workagainst the interests of women, often in waysthat directly benefit men. For example, bothWheelwright (1989) and Rogers (1988) haveshown how military organizations that openlyincorporate women have sometimes contrived toprevent them from enjoying equal benefits, priv-ileges, and advantages with the men in thoseorganizations. Furthermore, Brittain (1953) andEnloe (1988) have documented the role of themilitary throughout modern history with regardto the regulation and control of the sexuality,social roles, and labor of women in the interestsof patriarchal states.

Since the early 1990s, there has beenincreased emphasis on developing policies thatgive female armed forces personnel equal rightswith their male counterparts; for example,allowing women to take maternity leave(whereas previously mothers would not beallowed to continue their careers) and resurrect-ing debates about their potential to be fully com-batant. Although this might simply reflectgrowing concern to genuinely promote equalopportunities and diversity and/or change theculture within the armed forces, there may bealternative explanations. For example, the emer-gence of a view of masculinity that refuses toequate militarism with manliness (Stoltenberg,1990) has presented the masculinist-militaristpower elites with a potential labor shortage thatcould be offset in part by allowing an expansionof the role of women in the armed forces(Dandeker, 2000).

Overall, however, women remain a thornyissue in debates about gender integration inthe armed forces, with (military) men tending toremain invisible and unchallenged in their privi-leged positions. In relation to a review of theliterature examining the Canadian military inrespect to gender integration, for example, DonnaWinslow and Justin Dunn highlight the domain

of combat. Although women have been allowedto enter the combat arms since 1989, they stillface many barriers that are rooted in the negativeattitudes of their male peers who believe thatcombat should remain a male bastion (Winslow& Dunn, 2001, p. 50). Canada might be consid-ered to have one of the more enlightened armedforces with regard to equal opportunities anddiversity initiatives, and although recent integra-tion trials have not gone as far as some wouldprefer, nevertheless it has been argued that a basehas been established for further progress.Whatever the rationale behind these develop-ments, though, the relationship between mili-tarism and masculinity appears to be shifting.The question is whether the essence of militarismhas been transformed by the sexual politics of thelast 30 years, or whether an increased presence ofwomen in the armed services has just modified itssuperficial appearance.

CHANGING THE GENDERED CULTURE?

Will the presence of more women, particularlyat the heart of the male bastion of face-to-facecombat, affect the nature of the combat mas-culine warrior ethic? Assumptions of this sortmay rely on naturalist discourses of sex andgender, and they implicitly view femininity in ahomogeneous way, a point that ignores theextent of self-selection. Said one female WestPoint graduate:

Women who are in military training to be an offi-cer are not the girl next door or your mother . . .they were among the top athletes in college.Military women are just like men who becomeairborne—he is not your average guy—he’s in thetop five percent. (Skaine, 1999, p. 202)

The influence of increased proportions ofwomen in the military is yet to be assessed con-clusively, though some have suggested thatit may shape the behavior of male colleaguesin positive ways suggested by experiences inthe British police force (Martin, 1996, p. 523).Similar “civilizing” effects also have been docu-mented within the context of particular missions,including Peace Support Operations (PSO)(see Olsson, Ukabiala, Blondle, Kampungu, &Wallensteen, 1999, pp. 1-24). In addition,accessibility to local civilian communities thathave suffered at the hands of militarized men



might be improved by the greater inclusion ofcivilian and military women. Here, masculin-ized gender ideologies can be challenged andless aggressive responses to volatile situationsimplemented.

However, there are numerous parallelsbetween the pace of change effected by diversityand equal opportunity strategies in professionsdominated by men, on one hand, and the extentof transformation of gendered culture in themilitary, on the other. Countless uniformed mas-culinist organizations, including the fire service,for example, have been slow to develop (Baigent,2001). A further masculinist sphere of employ-ment that has received rather less scholarly atten-tion is that of the British construction industry.This gendered sphere is similarly masculinist,traditional, hierarchical, and resistant to change.In using this example, it is possible to highlightthe more universal aspects of gendered culturethat serve to maintain the status quo with respectto cultural shift around the acceptance of womenat both the formal and informal levels. ClaraGreed’s work on the British construction industryhas considerable generalizability and has particu-lar resonance with the military. She states that

[C]ritical mass . . . is one of the most frequentlyused terms in the [construction] industry whendiscussing equal opportunities . . . [it] is highlyoptimistic and over-simplistic if used as a predic-tive social concept without acknowledging theimmense cultural and structural obstacles present.(Greed, 2000, p. 183, emphasis added)

The approach currently taken by the BritishMoD is to stress the opening up of posts.Women may well be “accepted”—but will theybe accepted as equal? How would we know ifthe negative aspects of military masculineculture—in particular, those that serve to mar-ginalize women—had been neutralized? Whatdoes an organization of equal opportunities anddiversity look like? As Pringle (1989) asks,might not the influx of women into certain mil-itary jobs result in the feminization and declinein status of particular specialties where womencome to be concentrated? The fuller integrationof women into the armed forces necessarily hasto take place within a framework of formalizedand wide-ranging equal opportunities. Issues thatmust be addressed if the military is to more fullyintegrate women could concern the following:

Questions concerning the granting of maternityleave and career progress,

Dual service marriages,

The availability of child care and single-parenthouseholds,

The posting of women away from families, and

Overall family support policies in times ofincreasing pressure on resources. (Winslow &Dunn, 2001, p. 50)

Although it is possible to point to degreesof incremental structural change with respectto women in the armed forces, cultural andstructural obstacles to their integration remain.However, might this institutional resistancebecome diluted in the face of the alleged emer-gence of masculinities that have appropriatedmore feminized ways of being? Commentaryconcerning the ascendancy of the so-called“New Man” could be of significance here, asthe associated ways of “doing masculinity” areargued to be gaining both legitimacy and popu-larity, and they may, over time, shape the moretraditional masculinist culture of the military viathe importation of recruit values. However, theterm “New Man” is often taken for granted. Oneway in which to make sense of the phrase is sug-gested by Hondagneu-Sotelo and Messner(1994), who state:

[W]hen analysed within a structure of power, thegender displays of the New Man might best be seenas strategies to reconstruct hegemonic masculinityby projecting aggression, domination and mis-ogyny onto subordinate groups of men. (p. 215)

In any case, debates about New Men may beless than relevant to the divergence of militaryfrom civilian culture, particularly when theextent of self-selection among young maleenlistees is taken into account. A number ofthese individuals may import hypermasculinevalues, perhaps linked to their earlier experi-ences of growing up in deprived areas wherefrequent exposure to and the use of physicalaggression could represent part-component ofthe motivation to enlist (Higate, 2002). Thedegree to which recruits “self-select” is unlikelyto change as long as these masculine subcul-tures persist and the combat masculine warriorethic is linked to the armed forces in the mindsof the wider public and potential recruits.

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The Future Military: Two Scenarios

Given recent and current trends, what mightwe expect gendered military culture to look likein 2020? A hypothetical all-volunteer Britisharmed forces of the year 2020 could take theform of a culturally homogeneous single serviceorganization. In theory at least, it could differfrom today’s armed forces by virtue of repre-sentative levels of gender, sexual orientation,and ethnic minority integration across all mili-tary occupations (however, see Mason andDandeker, 2001, for discussion of the MoD’sinconsistent thinking on women and ethnicminorities). Service people in this future organi-zation may be held in high public esteem andenhance, rather than degrade, certain elementsof the local civilian communities in which theywork and live. To these ends, there would be nosign of “camp following” sex workers sustainedby servicemen (Enloe, 2000; Moon, 1997) andno evidence of violence in drinking establish-ments within garrison towns—circumstancesthat may arise from a “spilling over” of the com-bat masculine warrior ethic. Indeed, futureservice personnel would be perceived as well-remunerated professional “technocratic war-riors” carrying out risky and challenging workon behalf of the state.

In the second scenario, we note little differ-ence to the British armed forces seen today. Thethree services would retain their discrete identi-ties, together with the continued underrepre-sentation of women, gay personnel, and ethnicminorities. Although public opinion wouldremain high in terms of perceptions of thearmed forces generally (Dandeker, 2000), ser-vice personnel would continue to be involved inoccasional high-profile violent incidents in andaround garrison towns, and they would be impli-cated in disproportionate incidences of domesticviolence in military communities and sexualharassment in the military workplace; theambivalent label of “squaddie” would remain.

Both of these hypothetical organizationswould be smaller in size when compared withtoday’s tri-service armed forces, and theywould be configured to respond rapidly toglobal “hot spots,” Peace Support Operations,and assisting the civil powers in antiterrorism,drug enforcement, and illegal immigration(Dandeker, 1999). One possibility might bethat missions would come to be mainly

“euro-national” in composition within thecontext of growing debates about the futurerole of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization(NATO). Considerable advances in technologymight come to supplant individual troop differ-ences in terms of physical and mental capa-bility, and there would be a greater reliance onquickly mobilized reserve forces.

LOCATING THE CONTEMPORARY MILITARY

It has been argued that the military is a micro-cosm of society (Chamallas, 1998, p. 307).Framing the military in this way provides the keypoint of departure when thinking through howthe organization might transform, as we cannotignore future economic, political, and socialchange across the host society and beyond, intothe global context. If the armed forces truly havebecome “postmodern,” as some have suggested(Moskos, Williams, & Segal, 2000), then wemight expect to see the celebration of diversity,as it is asserted to represent a key dimension ofthe postmodern condition. It has been suggested,however, that a “postmodern” military mightmean no military at all, as uniformity remainsthe key philosophy on which military cultureturns (Booth, Kestnbaum, & Segal, 2001).

Current and future political climates atthe national level are likely to have significantimpacts on the gendered characteristics of mili-tary cultures, with a continuum ranging from“traditional” (conservative) through to “detradi-tional” (liberal) signposting the extent to whichdiversity initiatives are prioritized (Dandeker,1999, p. 64). The armed forces are likely to bebuttressed by an increasing number of reservistsand civilians, many of whom we might imaginewould be more tolerant of homosexuals andwomen in the workplace, a situation that hasevolved more fully in civilian life (Dandeker,1999, p. 31). A further trend suggesting conver-gence between civilian and military cultures issignaled by the development of an occupationalor “civilianized” attitude to working life in thearmed forces. The apparent decline in institu-tional attitude, traditionally informed by astrong public service ethos to military service,has received considerable attention over theyears (Moskos, 1988). Might there be a correla-tion between occupational/civilian attitudes tomilitary service and positive perceptions of



the drive to increase diversity in the militaryorganization as institutional/military affiliationsare noted to weaken? Other developments in themilitary include the decreasing tolerance ofphysical brutality directed toward militaryrecruits by their training instructors. If physicalbrutality were to be considered an accepted andpreviously unquestioned component of (mili-tary) masculine ideology, then changes to basicarmy training through which recruits are more“empowered” (rendering them less open tophysical and mental assault from instructors)represents a further important development(Dandeker, 1999, p. 36; Skaine, 1999, p. 138).Career structures in the armed forces also havechanged dramatically over the last 20 years,with shorter engagements becoming the norm(Dandeker, 1999, p. 40). It seems likely that thistrend will continue and that more “flexible”working conditions will further align the organi-zation with developments in civilian labor mar-kets and in so doing have the potential to giverelatively greater opportunities to women whowish to take career breaks to raise families. Anintensifying trend in contemporary militaries,frequently discussed within the context of theexecution of “clinical” wars, is the appropriationof and fascination with technological develop-ments. To what extent does this increasingreliance on technology serve to weaken thearguments of those who highlight the relativephysical shortcomings of women?

TECHNOLOGY AND GENDER

Morris Janowitz suggested that changes in tech-nology influence both organizational behaviorand the characteristics of combat within themilitary (Winslow & Dunn, 2001). Given thatoverall, technological developments havetended to erode the significance of physicalstrength and aggression, we might expectwomen to be more accepted in the role of “clos-ing with the enemy.” However, it is the embod-ied elements of their combat effectiveness thatconstantly have been questioned, frequentlywithin an ideological context (Cohn, 2000). It isclaimed that the “blurring” of the “cyborg” sol-dier’s gender (Hables-Gray, 1997, p. 247) islikely to intensify as technology develops. AsHables-Gray states (1997), “It seems the femalesoldier’s identity is beginning to collapse into

the archetype soldier persona creating abasically male vaguely female mechanicalimage” (p. 175), though we would argue thatthis view exaggerates developments thus far. Avision of the future in these somewhat idealized“postmodern” terms could take technologicaltransformations to their end point, where com-batant women would come to be considered aswholly interchangeable with male soldiers.More significantly, technological developmentsthemselves are likely to continue to be mas-culinized, and women’s role within them consid-ered somewhat peripheral. Computer systemsare one important example of vital future (andcurrent) military technology:

They are “masculine,” in the full ideological senseof that word which includes, integrally, soldiering,and violence. There is nothing far-fetched in thesuggestion that much AI [artificial intelligence]research reflects a social relationship: “intelligent”behavior means the instrumental power Western“man” has developed to an unprecedented extentunder capitalism and which he has always wieldedover woman. (Hables-Gray, 1997, p. 246)

The gendering of science and war as mascu-line looks unlikely to change in the near or distantfuture. Indeed, could an example of the allegedpinnacle of technological advance, the “missiledefense system” proposed by George W. Bush,ever have been called the “daughter of StarWars”? Here, we are dealing with discourses thattend to close off the technological arena fromwomen, both structurally and culturally.

SEXUAL ORIENTATION AND

MILITARY MASCULINE CULTURE—CURRENT AND FUTURE TRENDS

Mark Simpson and Steven Zeeland ironicallyilluminate the homoerotic and homosexual ratherthan the straightforwardly heterosexual elementsof life in the armed forces in the case of both theBritish and United States’ militaries (Simpson &Zeeland, 2001). Further, anecdotal evidence sug-gests that a “significant proportion” of the moresenior of the female officers in the British armymay be homosexual, although this label tellsus little of their explicit views of and attitudestoward the organization and how they mightevolve with respect to its gendered culture. David

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Morgan’s autobiographical writing about theBritish National Service includes reflection onan effeminate colleague who was presumed bysome to be homosexual. He was described as apopular man whose camp and comical perfor-mances were celebrated rather than condemned(D. Morgan, 1987). The notion that there exists auniform culture of (hetero)sexuality in the Britishmilitary and those of other countries remains anarea of some contestation. However, the inscrip-tion of heterosexuality into all aspects of cultureranging from language through to leisure activi-ties remains deeply bound up with the combatmasculine warrior ethic, ensuring that homosex-uality is seen as deviant and likely to threaten unitcohesion.

Yet, what of the future scenario outlinedabove in which sexuality, like gender, is nolonger an issue within the military environment?Might not the already present “inconsistencies”flagged above give way to greater toleration inthe future as civilian society becomes more dis-posed to subvert the binaries of homo- and het-erosexuality that frame the public face of themilitary? The MoD’s statement on diversity rep-resents the formal face of the organization andexplicitly links “sexual orientation” with “toler-ance.” Although future catalysts for change maybe rooted in both formal policy and humanrights legislation, it is difficult to envisage theways in which advances toward equality at thelevel of culture can be satisfactorily achieved.Given the oppressive and sometimes brutalapproach taken toward the identification andremoval of homosexuals from the armed forcesin the very recent past, future enlightened devel-opments will be slow in coming (Hall, 1995;Tatchell, 1995).

NATIONALITY AND

MILITARY MASCULINE CULTURE

Military masculinities are embedded into dis-courses of nationalism (Bickford, 2003; Caplan,2003; Dawson, 1994; Shaw, 1991). Construc-tions of “Englishness” or “Britishness,” invok-ing past victories, and resonating with theimperial and colonial trajectories of the UnitedKingdom have remained tenacious for both themilitary and its host society. “Our boys” belongto us and not “the (foreign) other,” and service-person identity is constructed around this

sharp dichotomy. The experience of beingdeployed overseas frequently amplifies thisdistinction, and expressions of nationality arerefracted through military masculinity. In addi-tion, we might note the ways in which socialclass structures these performances, with themore junior ranks embarking on high-profile“drinking binges” (Hockey, 2003) as a way inwhich to celebrate their nationality rowdily andmark themselves out from the local “foreign-ers.” The reputation for “squaddies” to celebratethe masculinized ritual of high alcohol con-sumption is unlikely to disappear within thecontext of either a home posting or furtherafield, as particular elements of civilian societycontinue to reinforce “lad culture.”

It has been argued that a future militarylocated within rapidly changing situations,tasked with multirole missions, and able to copewith the scrutiny of the media will need to relyincreasingly on the role of the soldier-scholarand the soldier-statesman to augment thoseinvolved with fighting wars (Dandeker, 1999,p. 36). These two roles are strongly gendered,and it is not clear how women might be easilyassimilated into them. In terms of the first, thesoldier-scholar, it is expected that technologicaland political conditions represent the centralissues with which personnel would have to deal.Once again, these realms continue to be domi-nated by men (and, no doubt, these genderedprocesses are intensified within the context ofthe armed forces), and there would need to beconsiderable thought given to the ways in whichthey can be opened up to women, not just at thelevel of accessibility, but also in a cultural sense.In terms of the second, the soldier-statesman,there may be more acceptance of female servicepersonnel from the perspective of commanderson account of their handling of “delicate mis-sions” requiring diplomacy and sensitivity.

THE TENACITY OF

MILITARY-MASCULINE CULTURE

In the years following the conclusion of the1991 Gulf War, there were some significantchanges in the politics of war, the role of thearmed forces of the major world powers, and,in the case of some nation-states, the role ofwomen within the armed forces. However, theobservation by some commentators that the new



world order that was emerging in the wake ofthe Gulf War heralded the retreat of militarismhas proved to have been mistaken (Shaw, 1991).Nevertheless, between the end of the 1991 GulfWar and the events of September 11, 2001, therewere changes in the politics of war, the nature ofmilitarism, and the sexual politics of militarism.The most obvious change in the politics of warbetween the 1991 Gulf War and the destructionof the World Trade Center on September 11,2001, was the tendency of Western governmentsto claim humanitarian motives for any mili-tary intervention beyond their own borders.Although similar arguments may be advanced tojustify Britain’s declaration of war against NaziGermany in 1939, Western military interven-tions during the 1990s were inconsistent andambiguous. For example, there was large-scaleUnited Nations and NATO intervention in theBalkans, Somalia, and Iraq, but little attemptto intervene militarily in similar situations inRwanda and other “Third World” countries(Friends Committee on National Legislation,1993; Gittings, 1995; Richards, 1993). Notwith-standing such inconsistency, though, there was asteep increase in United Nations peacekeepingactivities after 1991 “which in 1993 cost about$3bn. In 1994 almost 80,000 ‘Blue Helmets’were deployed around the world, most based in‘South’ countries and without the consent of oneor other of the parties in the conflicts” (Assie,1995, p. 8). By the late 1990s, though, politi-cians were using the same logic they had usedto justify the deployment of ground troops toprotect humanitarian aid convoys or act aspeacekeepers to justify aerial bombing raids onIraq and Serbia (Chomsky, 1999; S. Jenkins,1998; Swain, Campbell, Rhodes, et al., 1998;Wintour, 1999). Significantly, the politicianswho sanctioned these bombing raids justifiedtheir action with a rhetoric of “determination,”“courage,” and euphemistic references to“diminishing and degrading” Saddam Hussein’snuclear and chemical weapon stocks or “attack-ing the heart of Slobodan Milosevic’s securitystructure.” Although it is clear that both Husseinand Milosevic were leaders whose regimescommitted crimes against humanity, suchrhetoric is reminiscent of traditional masculine-militaristic political posturing. Indeed, GeorgeW. Bush’s declaration of a worldwide waragainst terrorism in the wake of the events ofSeptember 11, 2001, and subsequent wars in

Afghanistan and Iraq rather underline the pointthat traditional masculinist/militarist preoccu-pations have yet to disappear. Furthermore, thehigh profile given to press reports of an appar-ently risky operation to rescue the injuredfemale American soldier Private Jessica Lynchfrom her Iraqi captors during the 2003 waragainst Iraq could be interpreted as a sign thatfemale soldiers are valued differently from theirmale comrades (Hamilton & Charter, 2003).Leaving aside speculation that this operationmay not have been as risky or as necessary asoriginally suggested, male soldiers were rescuedalongside Private Lynch, and it is possible thatthe intelligence that led to the rescue missionpresented the American forces with a uniqueopportunity. The facts remain, though, that thisparticular rescue mission was given moreprominence in the news media than any othersimilar operations that might have taken place,and that the gender of Private Lynch was verymuch stressed in much of the media coverage.

A British Army recruiting advertisement inthe late 1990s emphasized the integration ofwomen in the Armed Forces and, significantly,linked this to the growth in the army’s peace-keeping role. The film shows a woman coweringin the corner of a building as the commentaryintones, “She’s just been raped by soldiers. Thesame soldiers murdered her husband. The lastthing she wants to see is another soldier—unlessthat soldier is woman.” Then, as the advertise-ment concludes, an armed female soldier in fullbattledress enters the room. Thus, notwithstand-ing the persistence of militaristic posturing onthe part of certain politicians, there are signsthat the relationship between militarism andmasculinity have begun to change (de Groot,1999). If it is the case that “pure fighting func-tions will become of secondary importance” andthat the tasks for the military after 2000 areto “protect, help and save” (Dandeker, 1999,p. 60), these changing doctrines seem to sug-gest that while a need for combat will remain,its significance and centrality may decline.Given that the combat masculine warrior ethic isderived from the military’s unique purpose ofconducting face-to-face violence, interestingquestions might be raised about future militarymasculine cultures. Will any potential decline inthe significance of combat result in a similardiminution in the “spillover” features of thecombat masculine warrior ethic? Will violence

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in military and civilian communities, in militaryhomes, and in the military workplace becomeincreasingly rare as the culture evolves?

PEACE SUPPORT OPERATIONS—AMODEL FOR THE FUTURE?

Given that Peace Support Operations functionin postconflict environments in which womenand girls have borne the brunt of war, we mightexpect the activities of the Blue Helmets towardthis particularly vulnerable element of the pop-ulation to be beyond question. We might evenconsider that Peace Support Operations couldcome to represent models of good practicewithin the context of gendered relationsbecause their activities are informed by interna-tional agreements such as UN Resolution 1325protecting the rights of women and children.Thus, it is difficult to escape from a sense ofpessimism when considering the future ofmilitary-dominated institutions, their internalgendered culture, and their impact on widergendered relations when seen against the back-drop of recent scandals involving male peace-keepers. A number of these military personnelhave been implicated in trafficking in womenfor the purpose of sexual slavery (Rees, 2002)and the routine use of prostitutes in peacekeep-ing missions (Higate, in press; Rehn & Sirleaf,2002). Although the “good news” stories abouttheir positive impact on gendered relations isgiven considerably less attention by both themedia and scholars working in the field, never-theless, military masculinist culture has provedresistant to change, and a number of powerfuland privileged male peacekeepers are routinelyabusing women and girls in the postconflictsetting. Finally, PSO have signally failed tomainstream gender successfully, with only atiny percentage of their numbers being made upof female peacekeeping personnel (LessonsLearned Unit, 2000).

CONCLUSIONS

Traditionally, the casual sexism, competitive-ness, and celebration of aggression and thedomination of others that are characteristic ofhegemonic masculinity have been explicitly andunambiguously reflected in military culture

(e.g., Hicklin, 1995; Jennings & Weale, 1996).Similarly, militarism (i.e., the celebration ofmilitary culture in national politics and popularculture) has represented an affirmation of thelegitimacy of hegemonic masculinity. Con-versely, men who reject militarism have oftenbeen portrayed as effeminate, naive, untrust-worthy, or even politically dangerous (Taylor &Young, 1987). Thus, there are clear linksbetween militaristic attitudes, male self-esteem,and sexual charisma (Bristow, 1989; Hicklin,1995; Warner, 1982).

Although this established relationship wasevident in the events leading up to, during, andimmediately following the 1991 Gulf War, thatwar and its aftermath also appeared to repre-sent a turning point in the relationship betweenmilitarism and masculinity. First, there was anexpansion of the role of the women in the Britisharmed services and full integration of separatewomen’s services into the army, navy, and airforce. Second, there was a shift in the politicaldiscourses concerning military intervention,away from traditional masculine preoccupationswith power, dominance, and territoriality andtoward issues of human rights and peacekeeping.On the other hand, some (male) politicians con-tinued to behave in stereotypically masculinist-militarist fashion, pursuing overtly militaristicforeign policy and justifying their actions in lan-guage that reflected both traditional masculinist-militaristic concerns and a newer rhetoric ofpromoting human rights and political stability.Since the destruction of the World Trade Centeron September 11, 2001, politicians have contin-ued to imply that being prepared to sanction mil-itary intervention is a sign of moral courage,strong government, and commitment to estab-lishing global security.

The armed forces continue to representthe exemplar masculinist institution in termsof their dominant values and gendered divisionof labor. These models of masculinity extendbeyond the military and tend to shape hege-monic ideologies of what it is to be a manthroughout many aspects of life. From the linksbetween privately funded elite British schools,through children’s toys to video games andother aspects of popular culture, military mas-culine culture continues to be valorized. Thereciprocal relationship between militarism andmasculinity functions at the level of identity aswell as the state (Higate, 2003b). For example,



aspects of the British criminal justice systemare influenced by paramilitary symbols andpractice as a way in which to legitimate partic-ular forms of violence such as those used by thepolice force.

In light of the recent military action by theUnited States and allies against Iraq, there hasbeen a regression to traditional gender roles,with men cast as the protectors and women asthe protected. In looking to the future of thegendered culture of the British armed forces,we have made a number of speculative com-ments about potential areas of development. Aswider social change intensifies, we mightexpect that the military would reflect theseinfluences, given that it has been argued tobe a microcosm of its host society. Yet, notonly does military culture change slowly(Goldstein, 2001), but in addition, it has beenargued that there exists a growing gulf betweenthe military and civilian spheres, particularlypoliticians, few of whom have direct experi-ence of military service (Dandeker, 2000). Inthis understanding, the military is argued to beunique and to have a “need to be different”(Dandeker, 2000); it should not, therefore, betreated as a social laboratory by “uninformedcivilians.”

We also commented on potential points ofconvergence and divergence concerning thepermeable civilian-military interface. Here, thesomewhat mythical New Man was invokedand disregarded in the face of the extent to whicha number of young enlistees—particularly thosedrawn to the combat arms—may be disposedto activities deemed hypermasculine. Otherdevelopments, concerning the links betweentechnology, nationality, sexuality, the so-calledsoldier-scholar, and the soldier statesman, werespeculatively discussed. Throughout, we feltunable to identify areas that might ultimatelyserve to dilute either the spillover effects ofmilitary masculinist ideologies, beliefs, andpractices, or those that offered unarguable andsustainable progress for military women.

Finally, within the context of Peace SupportOperations, it was suggested that the recentsexual exploitation and abuse of local womenin peacekeeping missions offers little hope forfuture developments, perhaps pointing to theuniversality of wider masculine culture. Thelinks between hegemonic forms of masculinityand the military are surprisingly tenacious, and

in tracing many practices to the level of the stateand more globally, it is clear that militarist val-ues continue to have disproportionate influenceon the ways in which hegemonic masculinity isboth created and reproduced.

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448

26ISLAMIST MASCULINITY

AND MUSLIM MASCULINITIES

SHAHIN GERAMI

The terrible conflicts that herd people under falsely unifying rubrics like “America,”“The West” or “Islam” and invent collective identities for large numbers of individu-als who are actually quite diverse, cannot remain as potent as they are, and must beopposed. We still have at our disposal the rational interpretive skills that are the legacyof humanistic education, not as a sentimental piety enjoining us to return to traditionalvalues or the classics but as the active practice of worldly secular rational discourse.

—Edward Said (2003, p. 23)

INTRODUCTION

It has become a common mantra to acknowledgethe incredible diversity of Islamic cultures, identi-ties, and interpretations. Having said that, we thenproceed to identify and analyze commonalitiesand even offer generalizations. Following EdwardSaid and borrowing from Bayat, I will distinguishbetween Islamist identity as an abstract constructapplied by others, on one hand, and Muslim iden-tities as “concrete, contested, and differentiated”identities created through individual or groupagency, on the other. Bayat reminds us that“‘Islamic society’ becomes a totalizing notion”that is undifferentiated, while “‘Muslim societies’

are never monolithic as such, never religious bydefinition, nor are their cultures simply reducibleto mere religion” (2003, p. 5).

Accepting this dynamic and self-consciousprocess of cultural construction within Muslimsocieties, it is then more plausible to conceive ofgender identities not merely reducible to Islamicfemininity or Islamic feminist; nor are mas-culinities reducible to one dimension of Islamicmasculinity. In this chapter, I will explore theprototype of Islamist masculinity and Muslimmasculinities. The former is more of a categoryrecognized by others; the latter is more repre-sentative of construction of masculinities withinMuslim countries.

Author’s note: I would like to thank Doris Ewing and Michael Kimmel for their insightful comments and suggestions. I amindebted to Sondra Cogswell for her untiring assistance in preparing various versions of this chapter.


Gender discourses in Muslim cultures have adouble life. Similar to other gender dichotomies,gender identities have indigenous faces andexternal stereotypes. The indigenous women’sidentities are multifaceted and are becomingmore visible and diverse. The men’s discourseis visible as a standard and the norm. It is theWestern cultural references of these roles that arevery visible and stereotypical.

Exploring Muslim masculinity has foundits cultural context not in the Islamic societiesbut in the post–September 11 context of Westerncultures. The Western popular cultures haveseen their demons, and they are Muslim men(Ratnesar & Zabriskis, 2004). Their universallyrecognized prototypes are bearded, gun-toting,bandanna-wearing men, in long robes or mili-tary fatigues of some Islamist (read terrorist)organization or country.

Analysis of masculinities is another newWestern discourse that may eventually spread toother cultures. Kimmel and Messner (2001)maintain that masculinity studies in the UnitedStates are influenced by feminist studies, raceand class studies, queer theory, and poststruc-turalisms. Because masculinity studies—liketheir predecessor, women’s studies—come fromthe West, they are constructed within Westerngender dichotomies. The major premises of thesestudies indicate that (a) gender is socially con-structed, and thus, gender identities are acquired;(b) power differential is societal and not natural;(c) the intersection of race, class, gender, andother social distinctions makes some categoriesof women privileged as compared with others;(d) gender privileges of masculinities must bemade visible and thus challenged; (e) humanbiology is defined by the linguistic tools of a cul-ture, and thus, biological hierarchies of race andgender are open to interpretations; and finally,(f) heterosexuality is a given culturally privilegedsexuality. Masculinities studies have borrowedfrom all of the above, proposing plural construc-tion of masculinities (Duroche, 1990; Edwards,1990; Kegan Gardiner, 2000; Pleck & Sawyer,1974). Of the above premises, the first three havebeen accepted in the academic and intellectualgender discourses in many Muslim countries;the others, especially sexuality as sociallyconstructed, has a long way to go.

There is a nascent literature in the Northanalyzing lived experiences of Muslim men,focusing on the Middle Eastern/North African

countries (MENA). Among them, some articlesin Sinclair-Webb’s (2000) volume exploreindividual agency and group construction ofmasculinities in this region. Articles in a specialissue of the journal Men and Masculinities(2003) deliver additional perspectives on mas-culinity discourse in this region. Nevertheless,the emphasis has remained on Arab cultures andMiddle Eastern and North African societies.Because the Western notions of Muslim men aredriven from the stereotypes of Middle Easterncultures, I will focus on Muslim Middle Easternand North African societies as well. The vastdiversities of Central and South Asian countriesand Muslim cultures of European and NorthAmerican societies will not be covered. Thiswill be a historical extraction of masculinemodalities in this region since the colonialdomination.

In the remainder of this chapter, I will explorethe role of global hegemonic masculinity andthe emergence of national masculinity figuresout of the independence movements and nation-building process in MENA societies. Later, I willexamine the postindependence and Cold Warperiod when we witness varied representationsof Muslim masculinities on the national scene inthe region. In the last three decades, we have wit-nessed the arrival of Islamist masculinity fromIslamic and fundamentalist movements. Finally,I will attempt to make plural Muslim masculini-ties visible.

GLOBAL HEGEMONIC MASCULINITY

Is there a hegemonic masculinity universallyrecognized? Inevitably, one leads to the media-projected images of Western masculinitybroadcast around the globe. This hegemonicmasculinity is invariably white, Christian,heterosexual, and dominant. Its virtual presenta-tions are on movie screens and Internet sites. Itsreal-life representatives are Western politicaland military leaders peering from front pages ofnewspapers and TV screens. In the era of CNN,even in small villages there are a few satellitedishes that project these images.

The appearance of global hegemonic mas-culinity dates back to colonial expansion.Previous invasions of the motherland or its rapeand pillage were more regional and by groupsthat were culturally and physically somewhat

Islamist Masculinity and Muslim Masculinities • 449


similar to the victims. None had the magnitudeof colonial domination by a different race andculture. This invasion also intensified the lan-guage of rape of motherland by a penetratingforeign force (Ahmed, 1992). In Muslim soci-eties, as in many other colonized cultures, thecolonial domination raised serious challenges tothe local masculinities across the region. Men’shonor was threatened, and they were calledupon to protect it. This catapulted women’s veilto the national and political scene as the symbolof men’s honor. No longer was women’s honorparticular to a clan, a tribe, or a man; it becamesymbolic of the national honor. Female sym-bolisms figure strongly in independence move-ments from Egypt to the Indian subcontinent(Abdel Kader, 1987; Gerami, 1996).

What hampers the recognition of masculinitystudies in the South is the marginal attentiongiven to the colonized masculinities as opposedto the Western hegemonic masculinity. Feministstudies have overcome this by both acknowl-edgment of Western feminist scholars and therich literature appearing both from and by thefeminists of the South. In contrast, when colo-nized masculinities are considered, they arehyphenated ethnic masculinities of Westernsocieties. This is less a failure of Western genderstudies than a result of the cultural contextof gender debate in the South. The Islamicsocieties are grappling with crosscurrents ofglobalization, cultural liberalization, Islamicfundamentalism, and democracy, to name a few.In this context, the gender discourse for theforeseeable future will revolve around women’srights and roles.

Whereas women’s studies are emerging andeven thriving in many parts of the South, mas-culinity issues remain un-organic. Needless tosay, the privileged position of gender discoursein the West calls for consideration of colonizedmasculinities, in the hope that when the timecomes, organic studies of masculinities willemerge from within gender studies of the South.

NATIONAL

CONSTRUCTION OF MASCULINITY

The pervasiveness of hegemonic masculinityovershadows the national and cultural masculin-ities in most Muslim societies. Needless to say,national masculinity figures are present and

visible; and in some cases they are omnipresent,as in Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan, and Iran, amongother countries (Saghieh, 2000). Although anational masculinity dominates the social scene,it remains secondary to global masculinity.

During the nation-building period, strongnational leaders emerged and overshadowedtribal or ethnic ideals of masculinities. Heroicmodels like Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in Turkey,Jamaal Abdul Nasser in Egypt, Iran’s RezaShah, and Pakistan’s Jinnah became the coun-terparts to the Western hegemonic masculinity.With the ideal of nationhood and a centralizedstate came the ideal of one national leadersubsuming regional or ethnic masculinities. Asthese leaders each forcefully forged a nation-state, he also forged a national masculinity bysubduing other contending masculine figures.For example, Reza Shah in Iran, following theexample of Ataturk in Turkey, not only bannedwomen’s veil but also barred men from wearingethnic, religious, or tribal clothing. Men’s publicappearance was made to comply in both coun-tries with Western codes of suit and tie.

Cold War Masculinities

The postwar, postindependence situation ofthe Muslim countries was dominated by the ColdWar of the two superpowers; therefore, eachnational leader was subservient to another hege-monic male figure. For example, EgyptianNasser was under the protection of the Soviets’Nikita Khrushchev, just as the Iranian Shah andPakistani Butu were under the patronage ofvarious American presidents from DwightD. Eisenhower to Richard Nixon. The closer acountry was to a dominant core, the more presentand dominating the hegemonic masculinity wasin the peripheral country. While Eisenhower waspresent in the subtext of Iranian politics, he wasless visible and perhaps less influential inTurkish national discourse, as Turkey was less ofa client state of the United States than was Iran.

The postcolonial period offered a hierarchyof nation-states accompanied by a hierarchy ofmasculine modalities. A global hegemonicmasculinity was followed by national mascu-linity figures born with their nation-states. Thenational masculinity of the independence move-ments became more diffused and more pene-trating. The Cold War and the détente periodoffered a respite allowing diffusion of cultural

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discourses, among them gender narrativesspreading to the mainstream of Western cul-tures. From this appeared varied representationsof plural masculinities in the core and peripheralcountries.

Cultural Masculinities

As variations of Western masculinities, par-ticularly in terms of ethnicity and racial diversity,became visible, so did Muslim masculinities wit-ness some diversions. Postindependence Muslimmen in the MENA region experienced somefreedom of expression that was allowedthe hegemonic man of the Western cultures.Masculinities in Muslim societies came full cir-cle by starting from the diffused ethnic, tribal,rural, and urban masculinities of precolonialismto a national masculinity of independence move-ments, and then to diverse masculinities of post-independence and the Cold War era.

The dominant prototype remained the strongnationalistic—as opposed to ethnic—Muslimleader; however, mass media provided for alter-native masculinities. These were never too farfrom the prototype, but less austere and morerepresentative of the class and ethnic diversityof a society. Weak men or funny figures wereallowed and made fun of to teach a lesson inproper masculinity. The national media, espe-cially the visual media, experimented with vari-ations in terms of ethnic, working class, peasant,and even criminal masculinities.

The national cinema in countries such asEgypt, Iran, and Turkey had typecasts represent-ing these masculinities. They were virile men,physically and morally strong. They could besimple or rural, as opposed to the cunning urbanmen. They defended the good woman’s honorand sometimes saved a woman from turning invile and corrupt ways (Armbrust, 2000; Leaman,2001).

These prototypes, whether a strong leader,working class hero, or historical figure, usuallywere secular but committed to Islamic moralities.The religious subtext informed all moral dimen-sions of personalities and identities, female ormale. The wrongdoers and evil masculinitesdeparted from the right path of Islamic moralcodes, and heroes adhering to them saved the day.

In addition to the indigenous portrait ofIslamic masculinities, Western examples ofmasculinity resembling John Wayne and

company provided potent models. I rememberthat many of the prime-time characters ofAmerican television, such as Dr. Kildare,Western cowboys, and even Perry Mason wereduplicated and imitated in Iranian TV produc-tions or in radio shows. The same happened inthe Egyptian or Turkish genre of TV production.

The Iranian Contributionsof the Warrier and the Shahid

Being Shiite, the Iranian heroes had themasculine attributes of Ali and Hussein; theprophet’s son-in-law and grandson. Shiitesbelieve that before his death, the Prophet haddesignated his son-in law, Ali, and his descen-dants to be his true successors. But after theProphet’s death, the community elders electedhis father-in-law, Abu Baker, as the first caliph.Ali eventually became the fourth caliph andruled for 5 years that ended with his assassina-tion by a militant group. In 680 C.E., his secondson, Hussein, tried to regain the power fromcaliph Yazid to restore the true Islamic society.In the Battle of Karbala, he was defeated, and heand many members of his small entourage werekilled.

These two ideals of righteousness have col-ored the notion of justice and morality as well asgender ideals of masculinity in Shiite communi-ties. Ali and Hussein reflect different types ofmasculinities in the Shiite construction-of-masculinity package. Ali’s manly persona of“the Warrier” has been replicated in Shiite cul-tures from Pakistan to Lebanon, from poetry tocinema. Hussein represents another type ofmasculinity, that of “the shahid,” a martyr.Hussein’s model became the essence of injus-tice and denied rights in the Iranian conscious-ness (Hegland, 1995). He is praised andmourned every year in Shiite communities ofthe region in street plays (tazieh). Whereas theIranian cinema seized on Ali’s myth to presentnew folk heroes, Hussein’s persona as a shahidbecame the essence of the street play and laterwas integrated into the construction of Islamistmasculinity.

ISLAMIST MASCULINITY

Here I distinguish between Islamist masculinityand plural Muslim masculinities. The former is a



product of fundamentalist resistance movementsand Western media. The latter are the genderidentities of real men formed across boundariesof nationality, ethnicity, and class.

During the 1970s, Middle Eastern experimen-tations with Western models of development suchas capitalism, socialism, or even a mixed econ-omy were showing signs of fissure. The IslamicRevolution in Iran marked the first reaction to thefailure of the experiments and, in hindsight, thefuture of the Cold War policies. The Iranian revo-lution marks the beginning of Islamic fundamen-talism as a solution to the problems of Muslimnations and as a political base for the state. In thelate 20th century, fundamentalist movementsspread across the region and contributed to theprominence of one particular image of masculin-ity. It became a response to the hegemonic globalmasculinity and its various national duplicates.Fundamentalist movements in many Muslimsocieties share elements of a retroactive ideologyto reinstate the earlier “pure” Islamic society.Therefore, their gender ideologies dictate reli-giously ordained places for each sex. There is arich literature documenting Islamic fundamen-talisms’ doctrinal mandates and policies forwomen (Afshar, 1998; Gerami & Safiri, in press;Mir-Hosseini, 1999; Shehadeh, 2003). Men’sideals within these ideologies are receiving someattention (Gerami, 2003a). Kurzman (2002) pro-vides a concise summary of characteristics ofIslamic fundamentalism and the socioeconomicbackground of some famous Islamist men. Peteet(2000) contributes to our understanding ofthe construction of Islamist masculinity in theoccupied territories. Indirectly, the growing bodyof work on Islamic precepts, jihad, and thehermeneutics of Quran further the discourse onMuslim identity and Muslim men (Esposito,2003; Lawrence, 1998; Soroush, 2000).

The Islamist masculinity is the product ofthis era. Two major narratives inform the proto-type of Islamist masculinity discourse acrossthe world: jihad and shahadat. The majority ofMuslims, regardless of their orientation, distin-guish between “the greater jihad, the personal,spiritual struggle, and the lesser, warfare form ofjihad” (Esposito, 2003, p. 38). It is the warfarejihad that is known by non-Muslims and formsthe narrative of this Islamist masculinity.

Equally, the shahadat (martyrdom) narrativealso occupies a personal and a public level ofengagement (Gerami, 2003b, p. 266). When

Muslims take witness that “there is no God butAllah and Mohammad is the Prophet of Allah,”they take witness to strive against desires offlesh, polytheism, and concerns for worldly pos-sessions. The public aspect of shahadat is theact of sacrificing one’s life in a jihad to protectIslam or an Islamic nation. Needless to say,these personal levels have been subsumed underthe public aspects of the narratives to deliver theIslamist masculinity of today.

The invasion of Iran by Iraqi forces in 1980created the perfect context for the comingtogether of the above narratives. The Islamicideology of the revolution and charismatic forceof the Ayatollah Khomeini had already created afertile ground to move beyond the personalaspects of jihad and shahadat to the publicarena of a social movement. These narrativesfurther evolved in the context of the Iraqi inva-sion and the ensuing 8-year war. Thus the mod-ern myth of the shahid was born. Although theideal of shahadat was used by the Afghanimujahideens against the Soviet Union, or thePalestinian resistance against the occupation,none had the force and prominence of theIran/Iraq war.

The Iranian resistance institutionalized andinternationalized shahadat and its masculinityprototypes. Shahids are poster men (boys) ofIslamist masculinity. They are young men, pureand innocent (virgin), who battle the forces ofthe infidel while taking witness to their faith.

There are cultural variations to this masculin-ity script but no major deviation from its essenceof maleness, purity, and faith. The real-lifeexamples of Islamist masculinity may have noneof the above, but they claim admission to the rankof shohada (plural of shahid) by virtue of theirsacrifice. In the Iran/Iraq war, this hero worshipprompted many boys to join the ranks of bosiji(volunteers). To the outside world, they werechild soldiers or human cannonballs. To theIslamist discourse, they were martyrs. This idealof martyrdom later engulfed the region. In Egypt,various uprisings were attributed to the MuslimBrotherhood (Al-ikvans al-muslimun). Amongtheir heroes is President Anwar Sadat’s murderer.All the hijackers of September 11, 2001, have thecharacteristics of this prototype, and for many inthe region they fit the shahid persona.

Warrior rites in the past and soldiering ritualsof modern armies mark the transition of thechild into manhood. In cultures with a siege

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component, military aspects of masculinitysignal the arrival and inclusion of the “man” asvenerated citizen (Arkin & Dobrofsky, 1978;Sinclair-Webb, 2000). Kaplan (2000) and Peteet(2000) illustrate how masculinities are forgedthrough daily violent confrontations betweenIsraeli soldiers and stone-throwing Palestinianyouth. Soldiers and the youth obtain their ven-erated manhood through acts of sacrifice in thename of faith, land, and honor.

Kaplan maintains that military service inIsrael confers “recognized and legitimate themesidentified with hegemonic masculinity” (2000,p. 136) within the Zionist enterprise. This mas-culinity is then poised and ready to battle theenemy’s masculinity. Therefore, as the ritual-ized battles confer hegemonic masculinity to theyoung Israeli men, the beatings by these soldiersand imprisonment confer militant manhood uponthe Palestinian boys (Peteet, 2000). According toSahmmas (quoted by Peteet, 2000, p. 106), theIsraeli military does not use the Hebrew word for“children” when referring to Palestinian boys;rather, it will report that a young man of 10 wasshot dead by soldiers. The military initiation thatturns the Israeli youth into hegemonic men, bybeating, turns Palestinian youth into freedomfighters, and maybe martyrs. The Palestinianyouth then has deference and respect bestowedupon him by his community, upon release fromprison. These daily examples of violence inflictedupon boys are used to confer status and markrecognition to manhood.

Islamist masculinity is one player in thisglobal guerrilla warfare of hegemonic masculini-ties. Shahid as a category is abstract and failsto encompass the diversity of the participants,including women (“Hamas Woman Bomber KillsIsraelis,” 2004). Kimmel points out that gender,“their masculinity, their sense of masculineentitlement, and their thwarted ambitions” (2004,p. 82), is the commonality that bonds TimothyMcVeigh, Adolf Hitler, and Atta together. He andothers have also pointed to the shared middle-and lower-middle-class background of the partic-ipants in this brand of masculinity (Gerami,2003b; Wickham, 2002; Wiktorowicz, 2001).

MUSLIM MASCULINITIES

Young urban men are the majority of men inthe MENA countries. They are under the age of

30 years, born to middle- or lower-class urbanparents. The majority of this population has ahigh school education, with some having a fewyears of postsecondary schooling. Regardless,they are poorly trained for limited, desirablejobs in technology. Their families’ expectationsdeem manual jobs undesirable, leaving themwith limited prospects of employment. Thislarge group is in the center of two major coun-tercurrents: Islamic fundamentalism andcultural liberalization. The ideal of a prosper-ous nuclear family is out of reach for mostmembers of this group. Islamic fundamentalismprovides the answer for some segment of thispopulation; however, its strict mandates of aus-tere lifestyle do not have wide appeal, contraryto the media views in the West.

The older generations of urban middle-classmen have their own unyielding problems totame. These groups, who have moved to citiesor were born there, have some secondary educa-tion. Most are small merchants or civil serviceemployees. With families to support, they facethe exorbitant cost of housing and the demandsof supporting large families, usually of morethan four. Inflation, unresponsive governments,corruption, and obligations of extended familycreate counterpressures (Salehi Esfahani &Taheripour, 2002). This group may welcomeIslamic fundamentalisms’ restrictions onwomen, as they allows them to better controltheir women in the cities. They then pay for thestay-at-home wife and daughters who cannotcontribute to the family income. Additionally,they have to deal with their adolescent children’sdemands for new consumer goods.

The lower-income urban and rural men arefurther frustrated by the above-mentioned pres-sures. Disappointed with the poor employmentprospects of rural areas and small towns, theyare the first to migrate to larger cities of theregion. There, they swell the ranks of the under-and unemployed and contribute to increasedcrime. The demand for manual labor in cities islimited to construction and some service work.These jobs, when available, offer little savingsto be sent to the family left behind or for wed-ding expenses. Islamist organizations offersome of these young men an answer but cannotoffer employment or pay for the expenses oflarge masses of recruits.

The professional upper-middle-class menhave the advantages of a life of consumerism



and meaningful work. They are more securefinancially and can support their children’sdreams. Despite their contribution to the system,they remain the technocrats in most govern-ments and face blocked avenues of political par-ticipation. They have the continuous anxiety oftheir children’s future. Most universities cannotmeet the demands of a large pool of youngapplicants, leaving men of this class and theirfamilies searching for a better future for theirchildren. For many, this better future lies in thelong lines of visa applicants at Western con-sulates (Gerami, 2003a).

Interestingly, as in the United States, highereducation in many Muslim countries recordsmore female than male students. Countries suchas Egypt, Iran, and Turkey report more femalethan male students passing the Herculeanentrance exams and entering universities (Sachs,2000; UNESCO, 2000-2001). Several factorshave contributed to this gender reversal, amongthem the increase in urban mothers who have ahigh school education and approve higher edu-cation for their daughters. It is more acceptablefor young men to travel abroad for educationthan for single women, and thus more scholar-ships are guaranteed to men for study abroad.Indeed, some countries, such as Saudi Arabia,require that an adult supervise a young women’stravel abroad. The high cost of living has led topostponement of marriage for both sexes, andthe young families need the woman’s income tomaintain their middle-class standard or even toachieve it.

For men, higher education as a means towardthe “global good life” has failed to deliver.Women with more education are making somemen feel insecure and are challenging their senseof male entitlement. In addition, the responsibilityof being the male provider may have contributedto young men’s disdain of a higher educationthat does not guarantee return. Thus, some youngmen look for innovative approaches (Merton,1968) to obtain the good life for themselves andtheir families.

Muslim masculinities are produced withinthese structural and cultural currents (Lubeck,2000). Islamic fundamentalisms, with theirassociated vigilance against Western hegemony;relaxation of traditional gender roles; and astrong desire for cultural authenticity, demand aconservative approach. Economic globalizationhas reduced micro agricultural production and

the demand for farm labor while failing toproduce living-wage manufacturing jobs incities (Coes, 1995; Onis & Webb, 1994). Unre-sponsive governments that are run by a singlefamily or stratum lack flexibility to respond tothese forces. Additionally, for the majority ofMuslims, the Palestinians’ suffering has turnedinto a chronic feeling of guilt and shame,regardless of ethnic identity (Kurd, Arab, orIranian) or religious orientation (Armenians,Druz, etc.). The Middle Eastern/Islamic psycheaches with the pain and humiliation of thePalestinians, sometimes leading to desperatemeasures.

There are other currents worthy of note, suchas the influx of information through the Internet,international migration and heightened aware-ness of the promised land of the West, andwomen’s movements of various strength. Addi-tionally, the Muslim population worldwide isvery young, with the median age in the MENAregion about 21 years old (United NationsPopulation Division, 2002). The demographicsalone promises reconstruction of gender roles forthe next millennium. More than ever, this largepopulation will form their masculine identityinfluenced by economic and cultural forces of ahegemonic global system. Their responses varyby their socioeconomic background and theirperception of available opportunities.

For example, in the Cape Town ghettos inSouth Africa, urban youth combine machismoand vigilantism to fight drug dealers and takeback their neighborhood in the name of Islam(Bangstad, 2002, p. 10). In France, second-generation “reconvert” youth walk the citiesinside or outside the country to spread Islam.“They are between 18 and 36 years of age andlive essentially in the French suburbs, where thecumulated difficulties of unemployment, exclu-sion and racism are predominant” (Khedimellah,2002, p. 20).

Liberal Masculinities

Muslim masculinities are also responding tothe positive aspects of globalization, namelycultural tolerance and political liberalization. AsI am finishing this chapter the Iranian experi-ment of adjusting democracy to Islam is strug-gling with liberalization. The Iranian electoratesare gearing for the Majles (parliamentary) elec-tion in February of 2004. The Guardian Council,

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a constitutional body of mostly conservativeclerics, is responsible for checking every bill andevery law to guarantee compatibility with theIslamic mandates. The Council is also responsi-ble for vetting candidates for the parliament orpresidency by reviewing their credentials fortheir Islamic worthiness. For the currentelections, the Council has rejected about 3,000candidates, among them most of the currentrepresentatives.

The Islamic Republic is an experimentalmodel of negotiating between Islam andmodernity. Individual civil liberties, secularism,organizational separation of faith and state appa-ratus, universal definition of citizenship free fromgender, and ethnicity or religious restrictions allare being debated.

Children of the revolution, born at the end ofthe war, call themselves “generation 3” and are atthe forefront of this debate. Their middle-classurban parents believed in small families andlavished on their offspring what they had desiredfor themselves, especially on education. Nowthis generation has arrived, and they are impa-tient, young, technology-savvy children of globalexpectations. They face another group of childrenof the revolution from their own generation,mostly from the lower strata of urban areas; theyare more inclined toward Islamic organizationsand are loyal to the regime and the revolution.

Families are siding with their children too.Families of the shahids or those of the veterans ofthe war are vigilant to keep the spirit of the revo-lution and Islam alive and present. These familieshave a lot to lose, both psychologically and finan-cially. The pain of giving a son for a cause whenthe memories are cherished is more bearable thanwhen the son is forgotten or his memories arediminished. These families receive tangible ben-efits from the giant Shahid Foundation in termsof pension, material goods, and favorable quotasin employment and university admission.

The university students are the countertrendsto the shahids. These young, clean-shaven, urbanyouth are for liberalized education, free accessto civil liberties, and privatization of religiousinstitutions and practices. They want to mix andsocialize with the opposite sex freely, and theyfind mandatory dress and behavior codes humil-iating and oppressive. They often organize instudent protests, sit-ins, and media events toexpress their opinions on issues. Unlike theIslamists, who blame mostly the outsiders,

imperialists, or globalization, this group puts theblame at the door of the national leaders.

The Iranian liberal masculinities are inaccordance with a nascent youth movement inMuslim societies. This is an anti-Islamist move-ment and anti-shahid. It is a product of, and con-tributes to, a new discourse on modernity thathas gone beyond the old dichotomy of “the Westand the Rest.” It is an attempt not to modernizeIslam, but rather to design an Islamized mod-ernism compatible with pluralism, reformation(ijtihad), and dismantling of religious jurispru-dence. The liberal Muslim men pioneering thisnarrative are writers such as Soroush, Mujtahid-Shabastari, Kadviar, or the Algerian oppositionleader, Abbasi Madani. This new brand and theirideological leaders are against “ideologizationof religion, which means turning it into aninstrument of fanaticism and hatred” (Soroush,2000, p. 21). The second-generation Western-born youth or Muslim converts in Europe(Allievi, 2002) echo the same sentiments.Progressive Muslim men of this brand are bor-rowing from the environmental and women’smovements to reinterpret the Quran, and theyespouse new constructions of Muslim identity(Esack, 2003). They are against exclusionaryideologies of fundamentalism and Wahabismand strive toward a discourse of tolerance andgender redefinition. This is a fine line, espe-cially for Muslim men in the West. While theyare striving for acceptance, they are being sin-gled out by the public and profiled by theauthorities. To the conservative Muslims, theylack ethnic authenticity and have sold out theirtrue faith for the price of admission to the West.To the dominant group of their Western homes,they are suspects deserving to be watched.

POSTSCRIPT

My personal experiences have suggested thatmen’s class position creates more commonali-ties than do their combined ethnic and religiousbackground. During my first 2 years of college,I rented an apartment from an Armenianwoman in a lower-middle-class neighborhoodof old Tehran. My landlady, a businesswoman,covered her hair like her Muslim neighbors,though slightly differently. The majority of theshops and businesses belonged to ethnicIranians. The prominent distinguishing feature



of the community was not its religious plurality,but rather its rich language diversity. The menlooked, acted, and treated their businesses andtheir families very similarly. The only way youknew their religious background was throughtheir language. With each other, they spoke inFarsi; with their ethnic members, they brokeinto Armani, Turkish, and Kurdish, with a fewsprinkles of Assyrian. As expected, they knewtheir customers’ backgrounds and spoke appro-priate languages. The class distinction boundmen of my neighborhood from the lower mid-dle class of the old city, to the middle class ofsuburbia, and later to the yuppie condos. Theirdiverse ideologies of Sunni and Shiia Islam,Christian Armenian, Kalimi Jewry, and laterMarxism-Leninism, were secondary.

Men’s social class and its associated lifechances are the primary factors in their iden-tity construction. Their ethnicity, rural or urbanbackground, and religious orientations con-tribute to their agency in constructing mascu-linity out of opposing trends and pressures.Feminist men oppose the spread of Shari’at, forit can restrict women’s civil rights. Contrary toexpectations that Islamic states will increasemen’s advantages, in countries that have imple-mented Shari’at law, men are not faring better interms of economic gains or life chances ofhealth, education, or improved standards ofliving. If fundamentalist governments were toimprove men’s opportunities, Afghani menshould have been at the forefront of Muslimmasculinities.

Schacht and Ewing (1998) remind us of afeminist agenda of “creating nonoppressiverealities” by challenging “the invisible wayspatriarchal and corresponding gender assump-tions have dominated our thinking” (p. 14). Thecurrent demonization of brown men in theWestern media, particularly American, is harm-ful to all of us. The pervasiveness and the pene-trating power of American media beckon us tochallenge its continuous vilification of Muslimand Middle Eastern men. A study of Muslimmasculinities is necessary, for it will aid womenand gender studies in the Muslim societies, itwill help Muslim men to understand and negoti-ate rapid social changes, and it will aid Westernmasculinity studies in going beyond self-absorption with sexuality and in further incor-porating the discourse of imperialism into themainstream of gender discourse and perhaps the

popular culture. Finally, it will help to make realMuslim masculinities visible.

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458

27MEN’S COLLECTIVE

STRUGGLES FOR GENDER JUSTICE

The Case of Antiviolence Activism

MICHAEL FLOOD

Men’s collective struggles for genderjustice are an important aspect of con-temporary contestations of gender.

Groups and networks of men across the globe,often in collaboration with women, are engagedin public efforts in support of gender equality.Men’s antiviolence activism is the most visibleand well-developed aspect of such efforts.Among the range of groups and campaignsenacted by men in the name of progressive gen-der agendas over the last three decades, antivio-lence work has been the most persistent focus,has attracted the largest involvements, and hasachieved the greatest international participation.Men’s antiviolence activism therefore is animportant case study of male involvement instruggles for gender justice. What does thisactivism involve, why do men participate, andhow do patriarchal inequalities shape bothmen’s efforts and their reception?

Antisexist men’s networks and campaignsare an instance of “masculinity politics”—“thosemobilisations and struggles where the meaningof masculine gender is at issue, and, with it,men’s position in gender relations” (Connell,

1995, p. 205). Four other forms of masculinitypolitics currently visible among men include gaymen’s movements, men’s groups and networksfocused on “men’s liberation” or “masculinitytherapy,” mythopoetic men’s groups, and men’srights and fathers’ rights groups engaged in adefense of patriarchal masculinity. These diverseforms of gendered activity are both symptoms ofand contributors to a wider problematization ofmen and men’s practices (Hearn, 2001, p. 85). Arange of terms has been used to describe malepolitical and intellectual endeavors sympatheticto feminism, from antisexist and antipatriarchalto profeminist.

Men’s collective and profeminist mobiliza-tions on gender issues are a delicate form of polit-ical activity, as they involve the mobilization ofmembers of a privileged group in order to under-mine that same privilege. Most if not all contem-porary societies are characterized by men’sinstitutional privilege (Messner, 1997, p. 5), suchthat men in general receive a “patriarchal divi-dend” from gendered structures of inequality(Connell, 1995, pp. 79-82). The danger, there-fore, is that by mobilizing men collectively as


men and thus drawing on their shared interests,activists inadvertently will entrench gender privi-lege (Connell, 1995, pp. 234-238). This potentialhas been realized among men’s rights andfathers’ rights groups, which are energeticallyengaged in an antiwomen and antifeminist back-lash (Flood, 1997, 1998).

However, men can be and are motivated byinterests other than those associated with genderprivilege. There are important resources inmen’s lives for the construction of nonviolentmasculinities and forms of selfhood, such asmen’s concerns for children, intimacies withwomen, and ethical and political commitments.Furthermore, given the intersection of genderwith other social divisions of race, class, sexual-ity, nation, and so on, men share very unequallyin the fruits of gender privilege (Messner, 1997,p. 7), and men’s material interests are multipleand complex. The argument that men havecontradictory experiences of power, pioneeredby Kaufman (1993), is influential in interna-tional discourses of male involvement in move-ments toward nonviolence and gender equality.Kaufman (2003, p. 14) argues that efforts toinvolve men in building gender equality mustsimultaneously challenge men’s power andspeak to men’s pain.

The tension here between men’s sharedpatriarchal interests and their interests in under-mining patriarchy is one with which any men’sactivism for gender justice must reckon. Thissame tension is evident in the answers offered tothe question “Why should men change?” Thereare two broad responses: Men ought to change,and it is in men’s interests to change. First,given the fact of men’s unjust privilege, thereis an ethical obligation for men to act in supportof the elimination of that privilege (Pease, 2002,pp. 167-168). The basis of profeminist men’spolitics is the moral imperative that men give uptheir unjust share of power (Brod, 1998, p. 199).Second, men themselves will benefit from sup-porting feminism and advancing toward genderequality. Although men’s position brings powerand status, it also involves burdens, such thatmen’s self-interest can be served by supportingfeminism (Kaufman, 2003, p. 13; Kilmartin,2001, pp. 29-30; Pease, 2002, pp. 166-167).

This second reason is more contentious, asthere are dangers of men asserting their interestsat women’s expense, denying male privilege andseeing themselves as victims. Yet to sustain their

involvement, it is important for men to see theirstake in feminist futures. As Brod (1998, p. 199)argues, “self-sacrificing altruism is insufficientas the basis for a political movement” and thereis “a moral imperative to go beyond mere moralimperatives.” It is therefore vital that antisexistmen invite men to see beyond prevailing patri-archal constructions of men’s interests and artic-ulate nonpatriarchal notions of what Pease(2002, p. 173) calls men’s “emancipatory inter-ests” and Brod (1998, p. 199) calls men’s “long-term enlightened self-interest.”

ANTIVIOLENCE ACTIVISM

Men’s violence against women has been a keyfocus of antisexist men’s groups since they firstemerged in the early 1970s in response to the sec-ond wave of feminism. Violence against womenis widely identified as a central element in genderinjustice, as both an expression of men’s powerover women and a way to maintain that power.Men’s antiviolence activism therefore addresses aparadigmatic expression of patriarchal power.This activism has intensified and spread since theearly 1990s. In many countries, both developingand developed, groups of men have emergedwhose agenda is to end men’s violence againstwomen and children. They share the fundamentalpremise that men must take responsibility forstopping men’s violence. Taking responsibilitybegins with individual men taking personalsteps to minimize their use of violence (Funk,1993, pp. 95-111; Kimmel, 1993; Madhubuti,1993; Warshaw, 1988, pp. 161-167; Weinberg &Biernbaum, 1993). But it goes beyond this, topublic and collective action. Antiviolence men’sgroups engage in community education; holdrallies and marches; work with violent men; facil-itate workshops in schools, prisons, and work-places; and act in alliance with women’s groupsand organizations. There are at least two otherways in which men have been involved in antivi-olence efforts: as the participants in programs forperpetrators of violence and as the targets ofpublic education campaigns that aim to increasemen’s understanding of and opposition to vio-lence against women. The discussion in thischapter focuses largely on efforts by men that arecommunity based and often voluntary.

The best known example of men’s antivio-lence activism is the White Ribbon Campaign, a

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grassroots education campaign that spans atleast four continents and 35 countries. The WhiteRibbon Campaign is the largest collective effortin the world among men working to end men’sviolence against women. It began in 1991 on thesecond anniversary of one man’s massacre of 14women in Montreal, Canada, and it has spread tothe United States, Europe, Africa, Latin America,Asia, and Australia. During White Ribbon Week,in November each year, men are encouraged toshow their opposition to men’s violence againstwomen by purchasing and wearing a whiteribbon. In pinning on the ribbon, men pledgethemselves never to commit, condone, or remainsilent about violence against women. The WhiteRibbon Campaign also involves year-round edu-cational strategies, including advertising cam-paigns, concerts, fathers’ walks, and fund-raisingfor women’s organizations. Monies raised by thecampaign go to services for the victims and sur-vivors of violence and to women’s advocacy pro-grams. In Canada, close to 180,000 ribbons weredistributed in 2002 and 250,000 in 2001.

Alongside this international campaign, thereare men’s groups in at least a dozen countriesthat share the goal of ending men’s violenceagainst women. In Mumbai, India, the MenAgainst Abuse and Violence is a volunteer orga-nization focused on ending domestic violence(Greig, Kimmel, & Lang, 2000, p. 12). A sub-stantial educational campaign in CentralAmerica aimed at men and tackling domesticviolence began in 1999. In Nicaragua, Puntos deEncuentro (Meeting Points) and the Asociaciónde Hombres Contra la Violencia (Men AgainstViolence) ran a large-scale campaign encour-aging men to respect their partners, resolveconflicts peacefully, and seek help to avoid domes-tic violence (Solórzano & Montoya, 2001). InNamibia, a National Conference on Men AgainstViolence Against Women was held in February2000 (Odendaal, 2001, pp. 90-91), and men areinvolved in networks against gender-basedviolence in Malawi, Kenya, South Africa, andZimbabwe (Wainana, 2002). In Australia, MenAgainst Sexual Assault (MASA) began in 1989,a national network of MASA groups was estab-lished over the period from 1989 to 1992, and atMASA’s height, marches of 300 to 500 menwere held in many capital cities (Fuller &Fisher, 1998, p. 3).

Men’s antiviolence groups appear to be mostwell established in North America. There are

more than 100 such groups in the United States,including Men Overcoming Violence (MOVE)in San Francisco, the Atlanta-based MenStopping Violence, and the Men’s ResourceCentre in Massachusetts. Men Can Stop Rape inWashington, D.C., mobilizes young men acrossthe United States to behave as allies to womenin preventing rape and other forms of men’s vio-lence. Such groups share the belief that menmust act to stop men’s violence. As a full-pagenewspaper advertisement taken out by theMen’s Resource Centre in November 1999proclaimed, “We call on all men to reject themasculine culture of violence and to work withus to create a culture of connection, of coopera-tion and of safety for women, for men and forchildren” (Daily Hampshire Gazette, November11, 1999, p. B7).

There is a growing international dialogueon men’s involvement in stopping violenceagainst women. From June to October 2002,560 people from 46 countries participated in aVirtual Seminar Series on Men’s Roles andResponsibilities in Ending Gender-Based Vio-lence, hosted by the United Nations Interna-tional Research and Training Institute for theAdvancement of Women (INSTRAW). FromMay to July 2003, a similar online discussionseries on “Building Partnerships to End Men’sViolence” was sponsored by the United States–based Family Violence Prevention Fund.

Men’s antiviolence groups and organizationshave adopted strategies of both violence pre-vention and violence intervention. Preventionaims to lessen the likelihood of men using vio-lence in the first place by undermining thebeliefs, values, and discourses that supportviolence, challenging the patriarchal powerrelations that promote and are maintained byviolence, and promoting alternative construc-tions of masculinity, gender, and selfhood thatfoster nonviolence and gender justice. A recentexample is Men Can Stop Rape’s campaigncalled “My strength is not for hurting.” TheStrength Campaign includes presentations tohigh schools, posters for schools and buses, ahandbook for teachers and school staff, and ayouth magazine. All address men’s role aswomen’s allies in ending violence in datingrelationships by encouraging men to practiceconsent and respect in their sexual relations.

Violence intervention refers to strategiesfocused on those people who have committed

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acts of violence and those people who have beensubject to violence. Some men’s antiviolencegroups work with male perpetrators of violence,including men who have volunteered to partici-pate in counseling programs and men in court-mandated groups within the criminal justicesystem. Men’s antiviolence activists share acommitment to the provision of appropriateresources and services for the victims andsurvivors of men’s violence.

An important way in which antiviolence edu-cation has been conducted is to find examples ofboys’ and men’s resistance to hegemonic andviolent masculinities and evidence of their gender-equitable practice, then to foster communities ofsupport with which to sustain and spread these.Among boys, an educator may identify alreadyexisting interests in and commitments to nonvio-lent relations with girls and women, find excep-tions to dominant practices and narratives ofmasculinity, affirm and build on such histories,and identify significant others who can supportthem (Denborough, 1996). For example, in anaction-research project in low-income settings inRio de Janeiro, Brazil, young men who ques-tioned prevailing violence-supportive viewswere trained as peer educators to foster gender-equitable relations in their communities (Barker,2001).

Men’s antiviolence work has involved a widerange of creative strategies, including the use offilm in India to encourage men to reflect on theirrelations with women (Roy, 2001), “guerrillatheater” in South African bars to spark discus-sion, the distribution of pamphlets to men incommunity markets in Cambodia (Kaufman,2003, p. 36), and a “Walk Across America” toraise community awareness about violenceagainst women. Although men’s antiviolenceefforts often aim to shift men’s attitudes in orderto shift their behavior, some also work in thereverse direction. By inviting men to publiclycommit to a course of action, such as by wear-ing a white ribbon or participating in an antiraperally, some strategies aim to increase men’s pri-vate acceptance of the attitudes that support thatbehavior (Kilmartin, 2001, p. 70). Other strate-gies empower men to resist conformity to sexistpeer norms. Men typically overestimate eachother’s comfort with coercive and derogatorycomments about and behavior toward women,so that publicizing survey results documentingmen’s discomfort with other men’s sexism can

undermine male approval of sexist behavior(Kilmartin, 2001, pp. 63-66).

Antirape education efforts directed at menhave an increasing presence on university cam-puses, particularly in North America. Campusrape-prevention programs typically are con-ducted by male peer educators, among all-malegroups, and address men’s acceptance of vio-lence-supportive myths and lack of empathy forvictims of rape. Such efforts generally result inpositive changes in men’s attitudes and theirintentions to commit rape and sexually coercivebehavior (Earle, 1996; Foubert, 2000; Foubert &Marriott, 1997; Foubert & McEwen, 1998;Parrot, Cummings, & Marchell, 1994; Schewe &O’Donohue, 1993, 1996; Smith & Welchans,2000).

Boys and young men in schools are a particu-larly important target group for antiviolenceefforts. Many males come to university, paidwork, and other adult settings with proabuse atti-tudes already firmly in place, having grown up inhome, school, and peer contexts that foster toler-ance for violence against women (DeKeseredy,Schwartz, & Alvi, 2000, pp. 925-926). In antivio-lence education, “starting young” is vital, becauseadolescence is a crucial period in terms ofwomen’s and men’s formation of healthy, nonvio-lent relationships later in life (National CampaignAgainst Violence and Crime, 1998, p. 23). Recog-nizing that the formal and informal processes ofschools have a critical role in either discouragingor encouraging violence, both men’s groupsand government agencies have developed pro-grams for boys and young men in school settings(Cameron, 2000; Gilbert & Gilbert, 1998,pp. 222-251; Kaufman, 2003, pp. 27-28).

What motivates the men who are active instruggles against men’s violence againstwomen? What inspires men to question sexistcultural values and patriarchal power relations?John Stoltenberg (1990) offers an account ofhow men come to join the struggle for women’sequality, and its themes are pertinent ones forthese questions. Some men come to antisexistinvolvements because their loyalty and close-ness to a particular woman in their lives—amother, a partner, a friend, a sister—has forgedan intimate understanding of the injusticessuffered by women and the need for men to takeaction. Some men’s advocacy is grounded inother forms of principled political activism,such as pacifism, economic justice, green



issues, or gay liberation. They have beenexposed to feminist and related ideals throughtheir political involvements, their workplaces, ortheir higher education. Others become involvedthrough dealing with their own experience ofsexual violence or sexual abuse from other menand sometimes women, perhaps as children orteenagers (Stoltenberg, 1990, pp. 11-12). Men’scommitments to the movement against violenceagainst women have blossomed in the same soilof deeply felt personal experiences; particularrelationships, intimacies, and loyalties; andethical and political involvements.

FOR GENDER JUSTICE

Men’s antiviolence activism is significant in atleast two ways. First, this activity symbolizesthe growing recognition that violence againstwomen will cease only when men join withwomen to put an end to it. Men are the over-whelming majority of the perpetrators of vio-lence against women, a substantial minority ofmales accept violence-supportive attitudes andbeliefs, and cultural constructions of mascu-linity inform men’s use of physical and sexualviolence against women. Profound changes inmen’s lives, gendered power relations, and thesocial construction of masculinity are necessaryif violence against women is to be eliminated.

More widely, in working to transform thesocial structures, relationships, and ideologieson which gender inequality is based, it is vitalto engage with men and boys (Kaufman, 2003,p. 1). Many men participate in sexist practicesand the maintenance of unjust gender relations,men often play a crucial role as “gatekeepers” ofthe current gender order and as decision makersand community leaders, and men’s own healthand well-being are limited by contemporaryconstructions of manhood. Involving men inefforts toward achieving gender equality runsthe risk of reinforcing men’s existing power andjeopardizing resources and funding directed atwomen, so the goal of promoting gender justicemust be central. Male participation is not a goalin itself, but a means to an end: healthy and non-violent relations for all.

The notion that it is desirable to involvemen in the movements to stop violence againstwomen and girls is rapidly becoming institu-tionalized in the philosophies and programs of

international organizations. The Beijing Platformfor Action in 1995 recognized that “men’sgroups mobilising against gender violence arenecessary allies for change,” and this was reaf-firmed and extended in the follow-up meeting in2000 (Hayward, 2001, p. 49). In 1997, at theregional meeting titled “Ending ViolenceAgainst Women and Girls in South Asia,” spon-sored by the United Nations InternationalChildren’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), theUnited Nations Development Fund for Women(UNIFEM), and the United Nations Develop-ment Programme (UNDP), the 100 or so menpresent added the following statement to theKatmandu Commitment, issued at the meeting:“We men, realizing that no sustainable changecan take place unless we give up the entrenchedideas of male superiority, commit ourselvesto devising new role models of masculinity”(UNICEF, 1998; cited in Hayward, 1999, p. 9).Also in 1997, the United Nations Educational,Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)held an Expert Group Meeting in Oslo on “MaleRoles and Masculinities in the Perspective of aCulture of Peace.” Participants emphasized thatthe transformation from a culture of violence to aculture of peace depends on the development ofmore egalitarian and partnership-oriented formsof masculinity, as opposed to traditional formspremised on dominance, authority, control, andforce (AVSC International and InternationalPlanned Parenthood Federation/Western Hemi-sphere Region, 1998, pp. 66-67).

Second, the existence of men’s antiviolenceactivism demonstrates that men can take collec-tive public action to oppose men’s violence. Thegroups and campaigns I have described representsuccessful attempts to create among men, albeitsometimes small numbers of men, a publicresponse to men’s violence. More broadly, mencan and do organize and agitate in support ofgender justice. There are historical precedents inmen’s organized support for women’s suffrageand equality in the 18th and 19th centuries (John& Eustance, 1997; Kimmel & Mosmiller, 1992;Strauss, 1982). In addition, contemporary men’santiviolence groups are one expression of awider network of profeminist men’s activism,represented for example by the National Organi-zation of Men Against Sexism (NOMAS) in theUnited States, the European Profeminist Men’sNetwork, the Men for Change Network in theUnited Kingdom, and emergent progressive

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men’s networks in Africa and elsewhere. Thus,“it is not a question of whether men can takeaction but how” (Pease, 1997, p. 76).

PARTNERSHIPS ACROSS GENDER

Partnerships with women are central to men’santiviolence efforts. Most of the men’s groupsand organizations I have described conduct theirefforts in alliance with women and women’sgroups involved in antiviolence campaigns or inservices for the victims of violence. More radi-cally, many profeminist men’s groups positionthemselves as accountable to feminist con-stituencies: They consult with women’s groupsbefore initiating their campaigns, do not com-pete with women’s groups for funding or otherresources, and build strong lines of communica-tion and trust (Funk, 1993, pp. 125-126, 132-134).There are debates over the processes throughwhich accountability is established (Hall, 1994)and over which feminism one is accountable to,and given the diversity of feminisms, this is anongoing issue.

Men’s partnerships with antiviolencewomen’s groups are critical. They enable mento learn from existing efforts and scholarshiprather than “reinventing the wheel.” They lessenthe risk that men will collude in or comply withdominant and oppressive forms of masculinity.They are a powerful and practical demonstrationof men’s and women’s shared interest in stop-ping violence. Men’s partnerships with womenare an inspiring example of cross-gender collab-oration, a form of activism that reaches acrossand transforms gender inequalities.

Should men’s efforts to end men’s violencebe linked to wider struggles for gender equality,social justice, and human rights? MichaelKaufman writes pragmatically that in order forlarge numbers of men to unite to end violence,they should put aside their differences overother issues of gender and justice such as abor-tion (Kaufman, 2000). Keith Pringle, on theother hand, firmly locates men’s work againstviolence within a broader antioppressive prac-tice. Men challenging violent masculinitiesmust also address other dimensions of oppres-sion that intersect with gendered domination(Pringle, 1995, p. 150). Support for Pringle’sposition comes from the scholarship on cross-cultural predictors of violence against women.

Levels of violence against women are higher insocieties showing male economic and decision-making dominance in the family, and wife abuseis more likely in couples with a dominanthusband and an economically dependent wife(Heise, 1998, pp. 270-271). Given that men’sviolence is fueled by and itself perpetuatesgender inequalities (and other forms of injus-tice), antiviolence work should be situatedwithin a broader project of gender justice.

Although men must take action in supportof gender justice, this in no way meansthat women’s groups and campaigns mustinclude men. There continue to be reasons why“women’s space,” women-only, and women-focused campaigns are vital: to support thosewho are most disadvantaged by pervasive gen-der inequalities, to maintain women’s solidarityand leadership, and to foster women’s con-sciousness-raising and collective empowerment.Nor should growing attention to male involve-ment threaten resources for women andwomen’s programs. At the same time, reachingmen to reduce and prevent violence againstwomen is, by definition, spending money tomeet the interests and needs of women, andit will expand the financial and political supportavailable to women’s programs (Kaufman,2003, p. 11).

Men’s and mixed-sex antiviolence projectsare important sites for the daily reconstruction ofgender identities and relations. Antisexist men’sconsciousness-raising groups have been usedsince the early 1970s to facilitate a critical self-questioning of sexist practice, to build peer sup-port for new ways of being, and to provide a basisfor public activism. Antipatriarchal conscious-ness-raising can be effective in constructing pro-feminist subjectivities among men, and it is animportant element in wider articulations of acollective profeminist politics (Pease, 2000,p. 55). For example, an American women’s net-work that recruited male volunteers as antivio-lence educators reports that it now has strongmale allies, dedicated volunteers who are makinga difference to its social change work (Mohan &Schultz, 2001, pp. 29-30). In another example,although men in a campus-based Men AgainstViolence network showed defensive homophobicresponses to others’ perceptions of gaynessand effeminacy and espoused chivalric notionsof themselves as protectors and defenders ofwomen, they also engaged in a substantial



rejection or reformulation of key constructionsof stereotypical masculinity (Hong, 2000).

Men’s collective efforts to undermine patriar-chal inequalities are themselves shaped by thosesame inequalities. Although many men’s partici-pation in antiviolence movements is informedby their critical distance from hegemonic mas-culinity, they also may struggle with complicityin patriarchal behaviors and attitudes. Manymen have carried an “invisible backpack” ofprivilege, a taken-for-granted set of unearnedbenefits and assets (McIntosh, 1989). It isunderstandable, therefore, that feminist womenhave been hesitant about men’s participation incampaigns against violence (DeKeseredy et al.,2000, p. 922). The American women’s networkmentioned above also encountered sexism, lackof empathy for survivors, and stereotypicalexpectations of their roles as women (Mohan &Schultz, 2001). When women and men worktogether, gendered norms of male-female interac-tion can hinder egalitarian relationships and drainwomen’s labor and emotional energies. In waysthat mirror the patterns of traditional heterosexualrelationships (Duncombe & Marsden, 1995,p. 246), men may expect nurturance and emo-tional support from women, and women maycomply with unequal relations because of theirinternalized sexism.

The public reception of men’s antiviolencework also is shaped by patriarchal privilege.First, men’s groups receive greater media atten-tion and interest than similar groups of women(Luxton, 1993, p. 368). This is partly the resultof the former’s novelty, but it is also a functionof the status and cultural legitimacy granted tomen’s voices in general. Second, men acting forgender justice receive praise and credit (espe-cially from women) that often is out of propor-tion to their efforts. Any positive action by menmay be seen as gratifying in the face of othermen’s apathy about and complicity in violenceagainst women. Third, men are able to drawon their and other men’s institutional privilegeto attract levels of support and funding rarelygranted to women (Landsberg, 2000, p. 15).This can, of course, be turned to strategic advan-tage in pursuing an end to men’s violence.

Profeminist men’s public challenge to domi-nant masculinities also attracts the ridicule,contempt, and anger of men who consider themto be wimps and sissies, gay, or traitors (Luxton,1993, p. 360). For example, in response to my

articles on the profeminist Web site XYonline,one fathers’ rights advocate wrote by e-mail thatI was a “fucking faggot, feminazi pussy licker.”This response, with its hostility toward andconflation of homosexuality and femininity, istypical of the coercive ways in which dominantconstructions of masculinity are policed amongboys and men in general. Homophobia is a keymeans of policing heterosexual masculinities(Epstein & Johnson, 1994, p. 204), and amongadolescent boys, the term “gay” or other abusivesynonyms is a “principal repository for unaccept-able male ‘otherness’” (Plummer, 1999, p. 81).

Men’s collective activism is a vital elementin the struggle to end violence against women.As with international efforts on other gender-related issues such as HIV/AIDS, sexual andreproductive health, poverty, and development,in working against violence it is critical toinvolve men. Men’s participation must beguided by gender justice and gender partner-ship, as these principles are integral to men’sability to cultivate a lasting legacy of peace.

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INDEX

467

Aarseth, H., 19, 22, 24, 29Abdel Kader, S., 450Abortion, 119–120Abrahams, N., 105Abstract masculinity, 28Acevedo, O. F., 116Achatz, M., 259Acker, J., 148, 166, 297Ackerman, M. D., 332Ackroyd, S., 294Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS).

See HIV/AIDS researchAdam, B. D., 58Adam, I., 97Adams, A., 37Adams, J., 37Adams, M., 8, 233, 235Adams, M. C. C., 402Adams, P. F., 330Adams, R., 275, 279ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder), 337Adler, A., 217, 218, 220, 223, 236Adler, P., 217, 218, 220, 223, 236Adolescent males, 205–206, 236–239, 336–337Adolph, J. B., 6Adoptive fathers, 261The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert

(Elliott), 51Affleck, G., 332Afghanistan, 78, 404, 415Africa, 90, 97, 98, 101, 106African American feminist theory, 43–45African American men. See Men of color,

masculinity andAfrican Game Trails (Bederman), 406African National Congress, 75, 76, 95Afshar, H., 452Aggression. See Crime and gender; Family life,

gender in; Interpersonal violenceAhmad, A., 94Ahmad, L., 450AIDS. See HIV/AIDS researchAl Qaeda terrorists, 416, 417, 427–429, 429n 1Albert, M., 319Alcohol use, 330–331

Aldarondo, E., 354, 362Alexander, R., 214All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men,

But Some of Us are Brave: Black Women’sStudies (Hull), 43

Allan, K., 249Allegro, T., 235Allen, C., 75Allen, K. R., 192n 14Allen, L., 184Allen, R., 275Allen, W. D., 259Allievei, S., 455Allison, A., 134, 135Alloway, N., 216Almaguer, T., 368Alonso, A. M., 44Altholz, J., 332Altman, D., 6, 56, 61, 62, 63, 80, 85, 278Alvesson, M., 293, 301Alvi, S., 353, 357, 361, 362, 461Amadiume, I., 98Amato, P., 249, 254, 255American Academy of Pediatrics, 331American Cancer Society, 334American Medical Association (AMA), 337American Society for Reproductive Medicine, 337Anabolic steroid use, 331, 338Andelin, H. B., 241Anderson, B., 401Anderson, C., 242Anderson, E., 192n 7, 315Anderson, K. G., 255Anderson, S. W., 380Andrade, X., 121Ang, I., 279Angier, N., 370Annin, P., 237Anthias, F., 402, 403Anti-semitism. See Global hegemonic masculinityAntiviolence activism. See Men’s antiviolence

activismAntonowicz, D. H., 339Anzaldúa, G., 47Appadurai, A., 92

Ind-Kimmel.qxd 6/22/04 12:42 PM Page 467

Appiah, K. A., 92Applegate, J. S., 338Are We Not Men? Masculine Anxiety and the Problem

of African-American Identity (Harper), 44Are You Being Served? (Humphries), 51Arendell, T., 258Arilha, M., 2Aristotle, 36Arkin, W., 453Armbrust, W., 451Armed forces. See War, militarism and masculinitiesArnot, M., 215Aro, H. M., 238Aronson, A., 156, 429n 1Arriagada, P., 320Asch, A., 368, 372Ashenden, D. J., 215, 218Asia, 80, 90

See also East Asia, masculinities inAskew, S., 138Assie, F., 442Association for the Defense of Fathers’ Rights, 157Athletes. See Sports and genderAthreya, V. B., 234Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), 337Atyeo, D., 355Auerbach, C. F., 251, 252, 256, 263Augustin, E., 405Austin, N. K., 298Australia, 5, 75, 78, 80, 81, 93, 97, 106, 206, 213,

277, 282, 358, 460Autogynephilia, 390Aziz, D., 340Azuma, K., 136

Baagøe Nielsen, 25Baca Zinn, M., 81Badfellas (Winlow), 209Bahrke, M. S., 331Baigent, D., 175, 301, 438Bailey, M., 390Bairner, A., 321, 335Bakken, R., 25Bakshi, A., 236Balakrishnan, R., 234Balkans, 153Baltic states, 149Bananas, Beaches, and Bases (Enloe), 399Bangstad, S., 454Barak, G., 203, 363n 2Barbalet, J. M., 224Barber, B., 415Barclay, L., 249, 251Barker, G., 461Barnes, C., 368

Barnes, G. M., 319, 331, 334Barnett, A., 434Barocas, R., 254Barrett, D. C., 337Barrett, F., 295, 304Barrett, F. J., 18Barrett, M., 363n 1Barro, R., 416Barsukiewicz, A. N., 331Bart, P. B., 368Barthes, R., 280Bartko, W. T., 257Barton, L., 368Basic Law for the Gender-Equal Society

(Japan), 134Bastos, S., 116Baudrillard, J., 19Bauman, Z., 72, 154Baumeister, R. F., 201Bay, R. C., 255Bayat, A., 448Beams, M., 290Beattie, P. M., 123, 125Beautrais, A. L., 334Beauvoir, S. de, 37Bech, H., 63Becker, G., 337Becker, G. S., 30Becker, P., 418Bederman, G., 406Begley, S., 370Bekkengen, L., 18Belenky, M. F., 42Bell, C. C., 363n 13Bell, D., 277, 279Bell, M. M., 72Beller, A. H., 258, 259Bellin, E. Y., 340Belona, T., 332Belsky, J., 251, 255Bem, S. L., 46, 61, 234, 235Benavente, M. C., 124Bendelow, G., 371, 375Benedict, J., 237, 317Benjamin, H., 383, 390Benjamin, J., 202Benkert, K., 52Berberi, Y., 405Bergeissen, L., 340Berger, P., 231Berk, S. F., 27Berle, A. A., 293Bernard, J. S., 240Berry, B., 318Bersani, L., 46, 63, 190

468 • HANDBOOK OF MEN AND MASCULINITIES


Bertaux, D., 175Bertoia, C., 243, 263Bessant, J., 355Between Men (Sedgwick), 60Bhabha, H., 94Bhuiya, A., 234Biaggi, S., 332Bianchi, S., 257Bibbings, L., 435Biblarz, T. J., 250, 254, 255, 261Bickford, A., 441Biddle, N. A., 237Biddulph, S., 104Biernbaum, M., 459Bigner, J. J., 261Billings, A. C., 320Billson, J. M., 260Bin-Nun, S., 20Biological theory, 181Bird, S., 299Birrell, S., 314Birth control, 120Bitterli, U., 75Bjorgo, T., 423, 424, 425Blachford, G., 56Black feminist theory, 43–45Black identity, 95–97

See also Men of color, masculinity andThe Black Jacobins (James), 95Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman

(Wallace), 43Black Reconstruction (de Bois), 95Blagoevich, M., 158Blanchard, R., 390Blank, B., 333Blankenhorn, D., 250, 251, 253, 256Blazak, R., 422Blazer, D. G., 334Bleach, K., 219Blee, K. M., 404, 418Blesch, K., 334Blom, I., 149Blot, W. J., 334Blum, J. A., 294Blum, R., 334, 340Blumer, H., 231Bly, R., 42, 60, 124, 242Bockting, W. O., 391Boden, J. M., 201Bodies. See Bodily normativity, degrees ofBodily modification, 383

See also Transgender theoryBodily normativity, degrees of

biological perspectives, 369–370brief synthesis, 368–369

introduction, 367–368, 375–376nn. 1,2social constructionist perspectives, 370–375,

376nn. 3,4Body & Society, 271, 272tBody diversity. See Transgender theoryBody image literature, 275–276

See also Mass media, men’s bodies inBoeringer, S. D., 317Bolduc, D., 234Boli, J., 73Bologh, R. W., 296, 401Bonner, F., 282Booji, L., 103Booth, A., 256Booth, B., 439Borchgrevink, T, 24, 29Bordo, S., 38, 284, 368Bornstein, K., 368, 389Bose, C. E., 231, 232Bosse, H., 2Boswell, J., 29Boulding, E., 402Boulgarides, J. D., 306n 1Bouma, J., 136Bourdieu, P., 115, 149Bourgois, P., 357, 359Bowker, L. H., 196, 353, 356, 363Bowman, P. J., 260Boxer, M. J., 47Boy Scouts movement, 75, 82, 400, 434Boyd, T., 320Boyd-Franklin, N., 339Boyhood troubles, 236–238Boyle, M., 319, 320Boyle, P., 335Boys Brigades, 402, 434Bozett, F. W., 261, 262Bozinoff, L., 234Brackenridge, C., 317Bradshaw, D., 105Braidotti, R., 37Brake, M., 386Brandt, B., 277Brandth, B., 251Brannon, R., 181, 192n 5Braver, S. L., 255, 258Bray, A., 55Brazier, C., 85Brazil, 107, 117, 119, 121, 122, 123Breaux, C., 249Bredesen, O., 25Breen, J., 331Breines, I., 6, 73, 85Brenner, J., 231Brettell, C., 291

Index • 469


Brickell, C., 274Brickner, B. W., 251Brickner, P. W., 332Bristow, J., 53, 57, 58, 443Britain, 78, 165, 206, 315, 432, 434, 435,

436, 438, 440British India, 75, 415Brittan, A., 5, 18, 149, 433, 435, 436, 437Broadhurst, D. D., 256Brod, H., 2, 4, 327, 434, 459Brody, L. R., 259Bronski, M., 56, 185Broodryk, J., 99Brooks, K., 279, 280, 281, 282, 283Brott, A., 255Brown, J., 327Brown, J. A., 274, 275Brown, P. L., 239Brown, P. R., 258Brown, W., 397Brown, W. B., 360, 361, 363n 10Brownmiller, S., 335, 406Bruce, C., 263Bruce, M., 203Bruce, V., 385Brudner, L. A., 17Brugger, W., 131, 133Brusco, E. E., 123Brush, L. D., 233Bryson, L., 315Buchanan, C. M., 255Buchanan, J., 109nBuddhism, 129, 130Buehler, C., 258Bujra, J., 106Bulbeck, C., 44, 75, 82Bullard, R. D., 339Bullough, V. L., 380Burke, R., 296Burrell, G., 291Burroughs, A., 339Burrus, B. B., 339Bursik, R. J., 360Burstyn, V., 317Burton, C., 294Burton, J. M., 371, 374Bush, G. W., 84, 440, 442Bushfield, J., 240Butch identity, 46Butland, D. L., 326, 328, 330Butler, J., 25, 45, 46, 60, 61, 62, 116

Cáceres, C., 120, 121, 124Caesar, J., 406Cahill, S. E., 203, 233

Cain, P. J., 75Caldwell, D., 332Cale, K., 436Calhoun, A. D., 334Califia, P., 59, 386, 389Cameron, E., 107Campbell, C., 102, 107Campbell, H., 2, 72, 82Campbell, M., 442Canaan, J., 206Canada, 78, 85, 93, 99, 213, 234, 277, 318, 326,

330, 341, 437, 460Cancian, M., 258Canclini, N. G., 116Canetto, S. S., 333, 334Cantor, J., 279Caplan, G., 441Caplan, P., 52, 53Caputi, J., 179Cardoso, J. L., 117Caregiving roles, 24–25, 338

See also Family life, gender in; FatherhoodCarey, P. C., 332Caribbean, 106Carlen, P., 196Carnes, M. C., 400Carnes, P., 179Carpenter, E., 53, 55, 65n 3Carr, E. H., 95Carrier, J., 123Carrigan, T., 4, 5, 23, 59, 220, 294, 295Carrington, B., 320Carroll, J. C., 260Carter, S., 278Carton, B., 102, 104Carver, K., 256Carver, T., 335Cashmore, E., 284Castillo, S., 331Catlett, B. S., 258, 261Cauderay, M., 334Caulfield, S. L., 239Cauvin, H. E., 374Cavar, T., 321Cavender, G., 210Cavendish, M. L., 36Centers for Disease Control and

Prevention (CDC), 331, 332,334, 336, 337, 339

Central America, 104, 460Central Europe, 143, 146, 147, 149

See also Europe, masculinities inChamallas, M., 439Chambliss, W. J., 354Chan, J., 278



Chan, R. W., 261, 262Chandler, A. D., 293Chang, I., 335Chang, K. A., 74Chant, S., 100, 123, 124, 125n 1Chapman, R., 281Charlesworth, W. R., 236Charnov, E. L., 251, 254, 257Charter, D., 442Chase, C., 391Chavez, L., 251Chen, L. C., 234Cherlin, A. J., 258Chernova, J., 142, 145, 148, 151, 152, 153, 155,

334, 335, 342Chesney-Lind, M., 196, 354Chessler, P., 182Child abuse, 361–362Child development contributions. See FatherhoodChild support, 258, 263Chile, 79, 122Chin, J., 327Chin, M. H., 339China, 130, 131, 132, 133, 136, 138, 234, 249Chipika, J., 105Cho, H., 130Chodorow, N., 28, 40, 42, 202, 234, 235Chomsky, N., 442Chrisler, J. C., 275Chrisman, L., 98, 99Christianity, 79, 130, 401–402Christiansen, S. L., 257, 260Christmon, K., 259Christopher, F. S., 237Chung, C.-K., 135Chunkath, S. R., 234Circumcision, 105–106, 374Clare, D., 390Clark, D. A. T., 399Clark, S. A., 317Clarke, S., 294Clarke-Stewart, K. A., 236Clarsen, G., 276Class and gender

class of masculinity, 170–172concluding thoughts, 175–176definitions and distinctions, 167–168on fatherhood, 260–261introduction, 165–167late-modern developments, 172–175masculinities of class, 168–170See also specific structures

The Classic Slum (Roberts), 171Clatterbaught, K, 193n 16Claussen, D. S., 251

Cleaver, F., 2Clegg, L., 334Clift, S., 278Clinchy, B. M., 42Clinton, Bill, 275Close, E., 339Coakley, J., 319Cochran, D. L., 260Cock, J., 79Cockburn, A., 436Cockburn, C., 76, 294, 302Cockerham, D., 330Code of the Street (Anderson), 192n 7Coed sports, 319Coen, T., 123Coes, D. V., 454Cohan, M., 259, 263Cohen, A., 196, 360, 436Cohen, C., 401Cohen, J., 85Cohen, M., 216Cohn, C., 406, 407, 440Cohn, I., 102Coie, J. D., 236Colapinto, J., 374Cold War masculinities, 450–451Cole, C. L., 320Coleman, D., 2, 6, 72, 93, 95Coleman, E., 391College athletes. See Sports and genderCollier, R., 196, 203, 210, 210n 1, 239, 240, 297Collins, K. S., 339Collins, P. H., 38, 42, 95, 368Collins, R., 231, 242, 243Collinson, D. L., 8, 9, 16, 148, 292,

293, 294, 295, 296, 297, 299, 300,301, 303, 304

Collinson, M., 296, 297, 303Colonial masculinity, 74–76, 91–93, 103, 401

See also Global gender patternsColtrane, S., 8, 231, 233, 234, 235, 240, 241, 242,

243, 249, 251, 256, 274, 291Columbia, 122Comaroff, J., 96Comaroff, J., 96Combat roles. See War, militarism and masculinitiesComeaux, H., 319Complementarity principle, 30Conekin, B., 281Confucianism, 129, 130, 132Connell, R. W., 4, 5, 6, 7, 23, 24, 30, 59, 60, 71, 72,

78, 79, 84, 85, 92, 116, 129, 141, 147, 148,150, 157, 170, 180, 187, 196, 197, 198, 200,202, 204, 206, 207, 208, 209, 213, 214, 215,216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 226n

Index • 471


12, 231, 233, 235, 236, 238, 239, 242, 250,272, 278, 284, 294, 295, 305, 314, 315, 316,326, 328, 330, 335, 336, 340, 341, 342, 356,361, 362, 363, 368, 370, 371, 372, 373, 380,400, 402, 414, 415, 417, 425, 433, 458, 459

Connolly, P., 217Connor, S., 15Conway, G., 340Cook, L. S., 334Cook, S., 355Cooke, R., 436Cooksey, E. C., 257Cooky, C., 320Cooley, C. H., 52Cooley, M. E., 333Coontz, S., 243Cooper, M., 261Cooper, V., 379Copland (film), 275Coplon, J., 420Corman, J., 78Corneau, G., 104Cornell, D., 38Cornwall, A., 100, 147Cornwell, B., 320Correctional institutions, 340–341Corsaro, W. A., 218, 236Coscelli, C., 332Cosmopolitan, 281, 282Cosper, R., 331Cossette, L., 234Costello, B., 276Costello, C. Y., 369Coulter, J., 435Court, D., 402Courtenay, W. H., 326, 327, 328, 330, 339, 340Courtship. See Family life, gender inCoveney, L., 182Cowan, A., 236Cowan, G., 234Craig, S., 272Cram, B., 375Craven, D., 241Crime and gender

bodily differences and, 203–208, 210n 3concluding thoughts, 208–209future research, 209–210, 210n 5introduction, 196–197life-history dialogues, 204–208psychoanalysis theory, 198–203, 210n 1social-structural constraints, 197–198

Crime as Structured Action (Messerschmidt), 204,210n 3

Crimp, D., 62Crisp, Q., 51, 65n 1

Critcher, C., 294Crombie, G., 236Crompton, R., 166Cromwell, J., 381, 389, 391Crosbie-Burnett, M., 262Crosby, G. M., 337Cross dressing, 384–385Crosset, T., 315, 317Crossette, B., 428Crossley, N., 224Crouter, A. C., 257Cucinotta, D., 332Cultural feminist theory, 41–42Cummings, N., 461Cunneen, C., 74, 80Curriculum practices, 216–217

See also Education, masculinities inCurry, G. D., 360Curry, T., 318, 320Curtis, R. E., 168Cyberspace, men’s bodies in, 276–277Cypress, B. K., 330Cysling, J., 124Czech Republic, 158

Dahl-Iversen, E., 383Dale, D., 282Dalton, M., 293Daly, K., 196Daly, M., 39, 256, 257, 354, 358Dandeker, C., 437, 439, 440, 441, 442, 444Daniels, C. R., 250Daniluk, J. C., 337Darroch, J. E., 259Darwinian feminist theorists, 38–39Dasgupta, R., 78, 132D’Augelli, A. R., 334Davenport, A., 331David, D. S., 181, 192n 5David, M., 215Davidoff, L., 5, 172Davidson, M., 296Davies, D., 368Davis, K., 336, 368, 397Davis, L. L., 315Davis, R., 81Davis-Hean, P. E., 257Davison, B., 92Dawson, D. A., 330Dawson, G., 75, 433, 434, 441Day, R. D., 249, 263De Barbieri, T., 123, 124De Bois, W. E. B., 95De Groot, G. J., 442De Keijzer, B., 116, 120, 125



De Suremain, M. D., 116De Viggiani, N., 341De Vos, G. A., 130Deal, T. E., 298DeKeseredy, W. S., 8, 353, 354, 356, 357, 359, 361,

362, 363, 363nn. 3,8, 461, 464Del Rio, C., 337Delamont, S., 219Delaney, K., 318Deliverance (film), 277Deloria, P. J., 399Delph, E. W., 57, 186, 192n 11Demarest, J., 275Demeyere, G., 380D’Emilio, J., 46Demographic research. See Regional gender patternsDenborough, D., 461Denmark, 145Denny, D., 380, 389Denton, N., 361Depatriarchalization, dynamics of, 30–31Derne, S., 278, 279Desjardins, M. J., 236DesRoches, C., 336“Detecting Masculinity” (Cavender), 210Deutsch, F. M., 240Devesa, S. S., 334Devine, F., 166, 174Devine, J. A., 354Devor, H., 368, 380Dhaliwal, G. K., 339Diallo, D., 102Dicks, B., 294Digby, T., 330Dilemmas of Masculinity (Komarovsky), 137Dillon, P., 258Dine, P., 75Dinnerstein, D., 41, 183, 234Dippie, B. W., 408n 2Direct gender hierarchy

concluding thoughts, 31critique of, 20–24current research, 17–18introduction, 15–17

Disability and gender. See Bodily normativity,degrees of

Disability Rights Movement, 368Disability Studies Quarterly, 368Disch, L. J., 318Disorders of Desire (Irvine), 183The Dispossessed (LeGuin), 35Diverse gender, 29Division of labor, 24–25, 78, 122, 433

See also Family life, gender in; Work,organizations and management

Divorced fathers, 258–259Dobratz, B., 419, 420Dobrofsky, L. R., 453Dodge, K. A., 236Doherty, W. J., 258, 259Dolan, J., 2Dollimore, J., 97Domestic labor, 24–25, 78, 240–241, 290

See also Work, organizations and managementDomestic patterns. See Family life, gender in;

FatherhoodDonaldson, M., 2, 4, 77, 220, 284, 298, 299, 400Donovan, C., 189Dornbusch, S. M, 255Dorr Legg, W., 380Douglas, C. A., 436Douglas, P., 6Dover, P., 101, 102, 103, 104, 107, 108, 109Dowd, N. E., 250Dowdell, G., 331Dowsett, G., 58, 190, 215, 218Drakich, J., 243, 263Drucker, P., 293D’Souza, S., 234Du Gay, P., 278, 279, 282Dual-sphere theory, 27Due Billing, Y., 301Dunbar, M. D., 319, 320Duncan, M. C., 320Duncombe, J., 464Dunkel, F., 263Dunn, J., 437, 438, 440Dunning, E., 315Durham, M., 425Durkheim, E., 52Duroche, L., 449Durrheim, K., 283Dutton, D. G., 138Dworkin, A., 59, 182Dworkin, S. L., 274, 315, 319, 321, 367, 368Dyer, R., 179, 272Dzur, C., 236

Eagly, A. H., 306n 1Earle, J. P., 461East Africa, 103East Asia, masculinities in

after World War II, 132–133concluding thoughts, 137–138empirical research, 136–137impact of modernization, 131–132introduction, 129premodern society, 129–131recent changes, 134–136See also Regional gender patterns

Index • 473


East-Central Europe, 76, 143, 146, 147, 149, 151,154, 157

Easthope, A., 272Eastman, C. A., 408n 1Eastman, S. T., 320Eberstadt, N., 341Ecofeminist theory, 40Economic development, 414–415Economic divisions. See Class and genderEconomic Exclusion/Male Peer Support Model,

357, 358fThe Economist, 77EDD (erectile dysfunction disorder), 332Edelman, M. W., 253Eder, D., 236Edgerton, L., 403Edin, K., 357Edleson, J. L., 353Edley, N., 6, 80, 220, 299Education, masculinities in

concluding thoughts, 225defining embodiment, 223–225gender relationships and practices, 215–217homophobia, 222–223introduction, 213–214, 225nn. 1,2,3peer-group cultures, 217–218process of learning the norms, 218–219, 226nn.

10,11,12relations with girls, 223restructuring of U. K. education, 214–215,

225–226nn. 4,5,6,7,8,9schools as institutions, 215social theories, 220–221, 226nn. 13,14subordination pressures, 221–222

Edwards, B. K., 334Edwards, L., 130, 138Edwards, T., 7, 449Egert, J., 332Eglinton, J. Z., 54Egypt, 80, 450, 451, 454Ehara, Y., 137Ehrenreich, B., 38, 73, 190, 239, 242, 256, 416, 428Eichler, M., 5, 291Eide, I., 6, 85Eisenstein, H., 83, 397Eisler, R., 335Ekebert, O., 333Ekenstam, C., 19, 29Ekins, R., 8, 379, 380, 383, 384, 388, 390El-Solh, C. F., 405Eley, G., 150Elias, N., 115, 171Elkin, F., 233Ellicott, S., 436Elliott, S., 51

Ellis, H. H., 382, 390Emery, R. E., 258Emotional intimacy, 79–80, 230The Empire Strikes Back (Stone), 388Employment patterns. See Work, organizations and

managementEngels, F., 292Engle, P. L., 100, 249Enloe, C., 72, 397, 399, 400, 403, 404, 406, 408,

415, 433, 436, 439Entrepreneurialism, 297–298Entwisle, B., 136Eonism, 382Epistemology of the Closet (Sedgwick), 61Epprecht, M., 97, 98, 106Epstein, D., 464Epstein, S., 53, 213, 222, 223, 224Erectile dysfunction, 183, 192n 6Erickson, M. F., 258Erickson, R. J., 260Erkut, S., 319Eroticism. See Transgender theoryErvø, S., 2, 373, 376n 2Esack, F, 455Esping-Andersen, G., 148, 159Espiritu, Y. L., 372Esposito, J., 452Essentialism, 95, 97Estonia, 151, 152, 153, 154Europe, masculinities in

concluding thoughts, 159–160East-Central, Baltic, and Commonwealth of

Independent Statesgendered transitions, 149–152labor and family, 152–153unified Europe, 153–157, 160n 4

East-Central and Russia, 157–159European Union (EU) and, 146–149, 160n 2introduction, 141–143, 160n 1Northern, Southern, and Western,

143–146, 160n 3See also Regional gender patterns

European Commission policies, 148European Union (EU) policies, 2, 74, 142, 143,

146–149, 154, 160n 2Eustance, C., 462Evans, C. C., 236Evans, D., 53Evans, T., 344Evaratt, D., 104Eveslage, S., 318Evolutionary theory, 181Ewing, D. W., 456Expert Committee on AIDS (1994), 340Ezzamel, M., 291



Faderman, L., 54Fagot, B. I., 234Falabella, G., 100Faludi, S., 242Family life, gender in

concluding thoughts, 243–244domestic division of labor, 24–25, 78,

240–241, 290in Europe, 152–153introduction, 230in Latin America, 116–117, 125n 3male caregivers, 338masculinity and femininity ideology, 232–233men’s privileged status, 239–240men’s sense of involvement, 241–243separate spheres ideology, 231–232social constructionist perspective, 230–231socialization process, 233

boyhood troubles, 236–238boys-becoming-men, 238–239construction of gendered behavior, 236early gender differentiation, 233–236

in Third Worlds, 102–104Fangen, K., 422, 423, 424, 425Fanon, F., 95, 97Faraday, A., 58Farmer, P., 341Farrell, K., 277Farrell, M., 334Farrell, M. P., 319Farrell, W., 314, 327, 331Farry, M., 436Fatherhood

being “too” young, 259child development contributions, 252–255divorced fathers, 258–259essentialist perspective, 251future research, 262–264gay fatherhood, 261–262gender-differences in parenting, 251–252gender inequality and, 256introduction, 249–251marriage and relationships, 255–258race/ethnicity factors, 260social class and, 260–261unmarried fathers, 259See also Family life, gender in

Fatherhood Responsibility Movement, 263Fausto-Sterling, A., 38, 39, 370Featherstone, M., 280Fedele, D., 332Federal Interagency Forum and Child and Family

Statistics (1998), 263Feigen-Fasteau, M., 327Feinberg, L., 381, 389

Feinbloom, D. H., 390Feldberg, R. L., 289Feldman, D., 297Feldman, H. A., 192n 6, 332Female armed forces, 436–437

See also War, militarism and masculinitiesFemale nationalists, 402–403Feminism in Japan (Kasuga), 137Feminist theory, 35–47, 182–183Fengying, Z., 136Ferber, A. L., 420, 421, 422, 429nn. 1,2Fergus, K., 333Ferguson, H., 146, 148, 334, 335, 342Fergusson, D. M., 334Ferree, M. M., 256Ferron, C., 334Fertility, 119FHM magazine, 282, 283, 284Ficcarrotto, T., 327Figueroa-Perea, J.-G., 82, 119, 124Figueroa-Sarriera, H. J., 275Filer, A., 215, 218Film and TV. See Mass media, men’s bodies inFinch, J., 298Fine, G. A., 318Fine, M., 192n 13, 368, 372Fineman, S., 290Finkelhor, D., 363n 7Finland, 143, 145, 152Finnström, S., 91Fiori, G., 332Firearms and masculinity, 335–336

See also War, militarism and masculinitiesFisher, S., 460Fiske, J., 272, 280Fitch, M., 333Fitness and health. See Men’s health studiesFlaks, D., 261Flavin, J. M., 203Fleming, M., 390Fletcher, D. D., 340Flood, M., 2, 9, 193n 19, 459Fogas, B., 255Fondell, M. M., 257Fonseca, C., 71, 77, 121Foreman, A., 25, 31nForeman, M., 106Forsèn, R., 25Forti, G., 332Foubert, J. D., 461Foucault, M., 29, 52, 53, 188, 191, 224, 381Foundation for Full Personality Expression (FPE), 385Fower, B. J., 240Fowler, E., 133Fowler, L., 399

Index • 475


Fox, G. L., 256, 263Fox, J. A., 354Fox, J. G., 239Fox, K. K., 337Francis, B., 225n 4Frank, A. G., 94, 414Franklin, A. J., 339Franzway, W., 402Fraser, N., 180Fraumeni, J. F., 334Frederiksen, B. F., 101Freedman, E. B., 41, 46Freedman, H. P., 339Freedman, M., 98, 338Freedman, T. G., 333French, S., 334Freud, S., 38, 62Friedan, B., 37Friedman, S., 5Friends Committee on National Legislation, 442Fries, K., 375Fritner, M. P., 317Frontier masculinity, 74–76Frosh, S., 219, 221, 223Fuentes, A., 73Fujii, M., 134Fukaya, M., 131The Full Monty (film), 271, 277, 284Fuller, B., 460Fuller, N., 78, 83, 116, 123, 124Fulop, L., 294Fulton, R., 380Funk, R. E., 459, 463Fürst, E. L’o, 27, 28Furstenberg, F. F., 258, 259Furukawa, M., 130, 131Fuss, D., 95Fuyuno, I., 134

Gadgil, J. M., 249Gagnon, J. H., 188Gaines, J., 317Gaitskell, D., 405Gang violence, 237, 360–361, 363nn. 10,11,12Garber, M., 380Garber, M. B., 368García, C. I., 124Gardiner, J. K., 5, 7, 38, 42, 47Garfinkel, H., 231Garofalo, R., 334Garrett, L., 332, 341Gastaldo, E. L., 118Gates, H. L., 95Gauntlett, D., 283Gauzas, L., 339

Gavanas, A., 263Gay fatherhood, 261–262Gay liberation movement. See Gay masculinitiesGay masculinities

concluding thoughts, 65in East Asia, 130, 131–132fatherhood and, 261–262gay liberation complaints, 55–60, 65n 5health issues and, 337history of homosexuality, 52–55, 65nn. 1,2,3,4introduction, 51–52in Latin America, 120–121male sexuality stories, 185–186, 190–191,

192–193nn. 11,17,18poststructural theory, 60–64

Gay Sunshine Press, 186Gebhard, P. H., 183Gecas, V., 260Gee, J. P., 77Geertz, C., 190, 231Gelles, R. J., 354Gellner, E., 401Gemeda, A., 103Gender and class. See Class and genderGender and development (GAD), 99–101Gender and Power (Connell), 59Gender behavior, biological perspective to,

369–370See also Gender socialization process

Gender complementarity, 30, 42Gender discrimination, 26–27, 30

See also Social theoriesGender equality research. See Theoretical

perspectivesGender justice

introduction, 458–459men’s antiviolence activism, 459–462partnerships across gender, 463–464struggles for, 462–463

Gender market analysis, 27–29Gender-patriarchy relationships, 21–22, 417Gender-power dilemma, 22–24Gender research, introduction to, 1–3

future perspectives, 9–10global perspectives, 4–6overview and themes, 6–9social science perspectives, 3–4studies of men, 29–30

Gender schema, 235Gender socialization process, 233

boys-becoming-men, 238–239construction of gendered behavior, 236early gender differentiation, 233–236

Gender Trouble (Butler), 45, 61Gendered meaning, 21



Geneen, H. S., 293Geographical research. See Regional gender patternsGeorge, S., 234Geraghty, T., 335Gerami, S., 10, 450, 452, 453, 454Germany, 79, 143, 145Gerschick, T. J., 8, 368, 372, 373, 376n 4Gerth, H. H., 400Getecha, C., 105Getting Sex: New Approach—More Fun, Less Guilt

(Lee), 57Gevisser, M., 107Ghoussoub, M., 2, 6, 79, 80Gibbings, S., 297Gibbs, J. T., 339Gibson, J. W., 83, 239, 434Giddens, A., 115, 197Gidycz, C. A., 357Gierycz, D., 73, 74Gilbert, P., 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 225Gilbert, R., 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 225Gilbreth, J. G., 254, 255Giles-Sims, J., 256Gill, T., 133Gillborn, D., 219Gillespie-Sells, K., 368Gilligan, C., 42Gilmore, D. D., 256, 373, 375, 400Gilroy, P., 92Gislason, I., 25Gittings, C. E., 72Gittings, J., 442Givens, J., 330Glass Ceiling Commission, 76Glassner, B., 270, 331Glendinning, C., 435Glenn, E. N., 44, 289Global business masculinity, 84, 147–148, 342Global feminist theory, 44–45Global gender patterns

global sex industry, 342–344globalization process

concluding thoughts, 85economic development, 414–415introduction, 71–72local reconstruction, 77–78men’s bodies in, 81–82transnational arenas, 74–77world gender order, 72–74, 82–85

men’s health, 341–342postcolonial perspectives

analyzing literatures, 93development and gender, 99–101indigenous knowledge, 97–99postcolonial theory, 94–97

concluding thoughts, 109introduction, 91–93

Third World perspectivesAIDS, 106–109differences between, 90–91, 91tfeminine shame and honor, 405introduction, 101–102poverty, work and family, 78, 102–104violence, 104–106

See also Global hegemonic masculinity; Regionalgender patterns

Global hegemonic masculinityglobalization process and, 415–417, 429n 1introduction, 414–415Islamic radical organizations, 427–429right-wing militias, 417–427, 429n 2See also Politics, gender in

Global media industry, 278Global Network of Men and Mentors on Violence

Prevention, 41Global sex industry, 342–344Globalization, 72–73, 81, 92Glucksmann, M., 290, 305Godbey, G., 240Goddard, K., 277Godenzi, A., 9, 354, 357Goffee, R., 305n 1Goffman, E., 28, 231, 290, 372Goines, J. T., 298Golant, S. K., 138Goldberg, H., 137, 327Goldberg, S., 181Goldberger, N. R., 42Goldscheider, F. K., 243Goldstein, J., 434, 444Goldstein, L., 272, 332, 368Goldthorpe, J. H., 166, 168, 171Gomáriz, E., 82Gomensoro, A., 120Gomez, F., 345Gonzalez, R., 43Gooch, J., 293Goode, W., 240Goodey, J., 259Goodman, E., 240Goodwin, J., 404Goodwin-Gill, G., 102Gordon, D. F., 317, 326, 328, 335, 336, 344Gordon, F., 368Gordon, J., 340Gordon, L., 354Gordon, T., 214, 215, 217Gough, J., 57Gould, B., 192n 15Grace, D., 54

Index • 477


Graham, J. W., 258, 259Graham, W. A., 408n 2Granger, D. A., 256Grant, J., 402Grant, K. R., 330Grasmick, H. G., 360Grauman, D. G., 334Gray, J., 92, 178, 184, 185Gray, J. J., 275Gray, J. S., 398, 408n 1Gray, P., 320Gray, R. E., 333Greco, K. E., 333Greed, C., 438Green, G. E., 261Green, J., 123, 125Green, M., 402Greenberg, D. F., 52, 53Greene, M. E., 100Greenfield, L. A., 241Greenspan, S., 254Gregor, T., 122Greig, A., 100, 108, 153, 460Grey, C., 298Grieco, L., 263Griggs, C., 391Grindstaff, L., 279Griswold, R. L., 249, 255, 258Groholt, B., 333Grossberg, M., 240Growing Up With a Single Parent (McLanahan &

Sandefeur), 253Guatemala, 122Gubernick, D. J., 251Gubrium, J. F., 231, 243Guest, R. H., 293Gulf War, 407, 435–436Guns and masculinity, 335–336

See also War, militarism and masculinitiesGutmann, M. C., 7, 78, 91, 117, 123, 124Guzmán, V., 118

Haas, L., 263Haavind, H., 16, 19Hables-Gray, C., 440Hables Gray C., 275Haddad, T., 2Hagedorn, J. M., 361Hagemann, K., 149Halberstam, J., 46, 188, 388, 390Haldorsen, 333Hall, A., 339Hall, C., 5, 92, 149, 172Hall, E., 441Hall, K. Q., 37

Hall, M., 278Hall, M. A., 314Hall, R., 463Hall, S., 279, 284Hallam, R., 105Halli, S. S., 361Hamburger, C., 383Hamer, J., 260Hamilton, A., 442Hammer, G., 26Handel, G., 233Hands, J., 436Hanke, R., 279Hankey, B. F., 334Hanmer, J., 5, 16Hänninen-Salmelin, E., 296Hansot, E., 215Haraway, D., 47, 275Harder, M., 145, 147Hardesty, C., 235Hardorff, R. C., 398, 408n 1Hare-Mustin, R. T., 251Harman, B., 340Harper, P. B., 44Harris, I. M., 433Harris, J. R., 217Harris, L., 340Harris, M. B., 262Harris, O., 318Harris, P. B., 134Harrison, D., 435Harrison, J., 327Harrison, K., 279Hart, G., 403Hartmann, D., 319Hartsock, N., 406Harwood, V., 53Hasan, Z., 403Hasbrook, C. A., 318Hassan, N., 427Hassim, S., 99Hatty, S. E., 361, 362, 363Hatzichristou, D. G., 332Haugen, M. S., 277Haugen, T., 26Hawkins, A. J., 255, 257Hay Group (2001), 298Hayashi, M., 135Hayward, R., 462Haywood, C., 214, 216, 220The Hazards of Being Male (Goldberg), 137Head, B., 95Heald, S., 104, 105, 106, 107Health issues. See Men’s health studiesHeaphy, B., 189



Hearn, J., 2, 4, 8, 9, 16, 19, 24, 59, 72, 105, 142,143, 145, 146, 147, 148, 152, 160n 3, 189, 220,231, 232, 233, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241,250, 290, 292, 293, 294, 295, 296, 297, 298,299, 300, 301, 304, 305, 334, 335, 341, 362,373, 417, 433, 458

Heath, S., 30Hedren, P. L., 398Heft, M., 332Hegemonic femininity, 24–25Hegemonic male sexuality, 180–186, 191–192,

192n 4, 400See also Male sexualities

Hegland, M., 451Heikkinen, M. E., 238Heimer, G., 26, 145Heise, L. L., 463Heiskanen, M., 145Helie-Lucas, M.-A., 403Helle, M., 26Helmbrecht, L., 262Henao, H., 117Henderson, B., 259Henderson, G. E., 136Henderson, M., 282Henriksson, M. M., 238Henriques, J., 294Henry, J., 319Herdenfeldt, M., 333Herdt, G., 389Hermalin, B. E., 298Herman, E. S., 354Hermes, J., 279Hernández, C., 123Hernes, H. M., 401Hernnstein, R. J., 354, 363n 5Hershberger, S. L., 334Hess, E., 190Heston, C., 419Hetherington, E. M., 370Hetsroni, A., 279Hevey, C. M., 236Heward, C., 91, 213, 214Hewlett, B. S., 249, 252, 257, 262Hezbollah, 416, 427Hicklin, A., 443Hickman, N., 243Higate, P., 9, 438, 443Higgins, M., 123High school athletes. See Sports and genderHill, E. J., 257Hillyard, P., 435Hinsch, B., 130, 131Hirschfeld, M., 52, 382, 384, 390Hirst, P., 72

History of Sexuality (Foucault), 52Hite, S., 183, 184Hitz, D., 331HIV/AIDS research

male sexualities and, 186media coverage, 274in Third Worlds, 82, 106–109, 226n 10, 341–342in the United States, 62–63, 332, 333t, 337See also Men’s health studies

Hobbs, D., 196Hobsbawm, E., 401Hobson, B., 169, 249, 263Hoch, P., 92, 179Hochschild, A., 256, 257, 290Hockey, J., 433, 441Hocquenghem, G., 56Hoel, M., 19Hofferth, S. L., 255, 257, 258Hoffman, C., 234Hoffmann, D., 332Hofstadter, R., 419Hofstede, G., 295Holden, P., 76Holland, J., 184, 214, 215, 217Hollway, W., 178, 188, 294, 295Holmes, K. K., 337Holstein, J. A., 231, 243Holter, H., 17, 18, 19Holter, Ø. G., 5, 7, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26,

27, 28, 29, 30, 31n, 78, 79, 153, 334, 335,342, 429n 5

Homicide, 335, 356, 358–360Homophobia, 97, 118, 182, 222–223, 464Homophobic violence (gay bashing), 362Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation

(Altman), 61Homosexuality. See Gay masculinities; Male

sexualities; Transgender theoryHondagneu-Sotelo, P., 156, 438Hong, L., 464Honig, E., 133Honor, masculine, 404–406Hood-Williams, J., 198, 201Hook, E. W., III, 337Hooks, b, 44, 45, 96Hoop Dreams (film), 320Hooper, C., 6, 72, 77, 84, 397Hoopes, J. E., 383Hoover, R. N., 334Hopkins, A. G., 75Hopton, J., 9Horn, W., 251, 253Horrocks, R., 403Horwitz, A. V., 240Horwood, L. J., 334

Index • 479


Hoskin, K., 291, 293Hottocks, R., 354Housework. See Domestic laborHow to Be a Woman Though Male (Prince), 385Howell, D., 291Howell-White, S., 240Howes, C., 236Hudson, J., 337Huff, C. R., 360Hughes, J. S., 231Huhndorf, S., 399Hull, G., 77Hull, G. T., 43Hull, J. D., 337Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

See HIV/AIDS research; Men’s healthstudies

Human Rights Watch, 343Humphries, J., 51Hungary, 151Hunt, D., 320Hunt, K., 330Huq, E., 234Hurtado, A., 41, 43Hutcheon, L., 94Hutchins, B., 8Hutchinson, S., 259, 263Hwang, P., 263Hybridity (cultural mixing), 94, 116Hyslop, J., 109, 214, 218

Iacocca, L., 293Ihinger-Tallman, M., 258Imaizumi, N., 249Imperial Leather (McClintock), 92, 397Imperialism and masculinity, 72, 73, 74–76, 92

See also Global gender patternsImpotence, 332Imprisonment, 340–341Improved Order of Red Men, 400India, 96, 234, 460Indigenous gender orders, 75Indigenous knowledge, 97–99Industrial Revolution, 291Inequality theories. See Social theoriesInfertility, 337Ingrassia, M., 237Inoue, T., 137Institute of Management/Remunertion

Economics, 296International Bill of Gender Rights (1995), 389International Journal of Men’s Studies, 1, 342International Monetary Fund, 148International politics. See Global gender patternsInternet Relay Chat (IRC), 276–277

Interpersonal violencecultural prescriptions, 335forms of

child abuse, 361–362homicide, 335, 356, 358–360racist/homophobic violence, 362violence against women, 26, 356–358,

363nn. 7,8,9youth gang violence, 237–238, 360–361,

363nn. 10,11,12introduction, 353–355, 363nn. 1,2,3,4,5

concluding thoughts, 362–363, 363nn. 13,14definition of, 355–356, 363n 6policy and practice, 362

male athletes, 317–318male victims of sexual assault, 338–339in Third Worlds, 104–106See also Gender justice

Intersexed bodies, 374, 380“Invisible Masculinity” (Kimmel), 270Iran, 450, 451, 454Iraq, 81, 450Ireland, 148Irigiray, L., 38Iron Man athlete, 316Irvine, J., 183Isenhart, C. E., 330Ishii-Kuntz, M., 249Islamic radical organizations, 427–429Islamist and Muslim masculinities

concluding thoughts, 455–456global hegemonic masculinity, 449–450introduction, 448–449Islamist masculinity, 451–453Muslim masculinity, 453–455national construction of, 450–451

Isometsa, E. T., 238Israel, 75, 79Italy, 143Itô, K., 83, 134, 137Itô, S., 136Iwata, E., 372, 374

Jacklin, C. N., 235Jackson, D., 215, 216, 217, 219, 327Jackson, M., 182Jackson, P., 279, 280, 281, 282, 283Jackson, P. A., 380Jackson, P. G., 360Jackson, S., 188Jacobs, G., 190Jacobs, S., 380Jacobsen, R. B., 261Jaggar, A., 202Jalmert, L., 21, 23



James, C. L. R., 95, 315James, S. P., 334Janes, L., 275, 279Janeway, E., 368Jankowiak, W., 249Janowitz, M., 440Jansen, S. C., 321Jansson, Y., 137Japan, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 83, 130, 131, 132, 133,

134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 249Jardim, D. F., 116, 117Jargowsky, P. A., 363n 9Jay, K., 57Jayawardena, K., 403Jefferson, T., 96, 196, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203,

208, 435Jefferson Lenskyj, H., 282Jeffreys, S., 58, 59, 182, 386, 390Jenkins, J., 435, 442Jenkins, P., 354Jennings, C., 443Jennings-Dozier, K., 333Jewish men, 421–422Jewkes, R., 105, 107Jipson, A., 418Job structures. See Work, organizations and

managementJock: Sports and Male Identity (Sabo & Runfola), 314Johannesen-Schmidt, M. C., 306n 1Johansson, T., 2, 29, 373, 376n 2John, A. V., 462Johnsen, B., 341Johnson, A. G., 353Johnson, D., 92, 99Johnson, D. R., 240Johnson, G. R., 333, 336Johnson, M., 381Johnson, R., 222, 224, 464Johnson, V., 183Johnston, J. R., 369Jolly, M., 80Jonasdóttir, A., 19Jones, A., 30, 233Jones, J. H., 373Jordan, E., 236Journal of Men’s Studies, 1, 271, 272tJudson, F. N., 337Judt, T., 428Juergensmeyer, M., 415Julien, I., 55

Kaare, B., 104Kabira, W. M., 100Kagan, J., 236Kalliokoski, A.-M., 26, 145

Kamburov, D., 2, 154, 155Kampungu, L., 437Kandiyoti, D., 78, 242, 400Kandrack, M., 330Kane, M. J., 316, 318Kanin, E. J., 357Kanter, R. M., 25, 297, 305n 1Kaplan, D., 453Kaplan, H., 255Karlen, A., 402Karlsen, B., 19Karraker, K. H., 234Kashima, T., 134Kasuga, K., 137Katz, E., 334Katz, J., 52, 354Kauffman, C. J., 400Kaufman, M., 2, 4, 5, 42, 85, 232, 233, 237, 241,

335, 429n 1, 459, 461, 462, 463Kawaguchi, K., 136Kay, L., 182, 192n 15Kaye, L. W., 338Kazama, T., 136Kazemipur, A., 361Keefe, F., 332Keeling, R. R., 326, 330Kegan Gardiner, J., 449Kehily, M. J., 222Kelly, K., 354Kempadoo, K., 278Kendall, L., 278Kennedy, A. A., 298Kennedy Bergen, R., 353Kennelly, I., 369Kenway, J., 214Keough, E., 333Kepner, J., 380Kerfoot, D., 220, 282, 296, 299Kershner, R., 237Kersten, J., 135, 138Kessler, S. J., 215, 218, 219, 368, 391Kestnbaum, M., 439Khedimellah, M., 454Kibby, M., 276Kijewski, V., 390Kilmartin, C. T., 459, 461Kimmel, M., 2, 5, 6, 9, 100, 108, 153, 156, 231,

235, 238, 270, 371, 375, 416, 418, 429n 2, 449,453, 460

Kimmel, M. S., 22, 27, 42, 59, 62, 71, 233, 237,291, 299, 315, 337, 354, 355, 363n 4, 368, 369,371, 373, 375, 400, 459, 462

Kindlon, D., 206King, A. E. V., 102King, D., 8, 379, 380, 383, 384, 388, 390

Index • 481


King, S., 274, 320King, V., 2Kinmonth, E. H., 78Kinsey, A. C., 18352Kinsey, A. F., 52Kirk, D., 224Kirkham, P., 63Kirkup, G., 275Kiselica, M. A., 259Klaus, P. A., 241Klein, A., 315, 316, 317Klein, A. M., 331, 338, 374Klein, M., 199Klein, U., 82, 433Klich, N., 297Klitzman, R., 337Knapp, J. S., 337KNBC.COM, 361Knickmeyer, E., 371Knights, D., 282, 296, 299Knights of Columbus, 400Kolga, V., 151, 152, 153, 154, 334, 335Komarovsky, M., 137Kondo, D., 81, 294, 300, 303Koonz, C., 405Kopstein, A. N., 331Korea, 131, 133Korten, D., 305Kosary, C. L., 334Kosofsky, E., 60Koss, M., 317Koss, M. P., 357Kouneski, E. F., 258Kovalainen, A., 296Koven, S., 401Kovitz, M., 433Kramer, B. J., 338Kramer, J., 418Kramer, L., 58, 192n 11Krane, R. J., 332Krause, H. D., 258Krenske, L., 279Krieger, N., 332, 341Kristeva, J., 160n 4Kristof, N., 416Krøjer, J., 25Krug, E. G., 333, 336Ku, L. C., 237, 259, 336Ku Klux Klan, 418, 424Kulick, D., 123, 381Kuosmanen, J., 29Kupers, T. A., 196, 339, 340, 341Kurzman, C., 452Kusz, K., 319Kuwait, 81

Kuypers, J. A., 335Kuzmanic, T., 437

Laberge, S., 319Labor migration, 81–82, 103Labor patterns. See Work, organizations and

managementLabrecque, M., 333Lacan, Jacques, 38Lahelma, E., 214, 215, 217Lake, M., 74, 81Lamarine, R., 340Lamas, M., 115Lamb, M. E., 249, 251, 254, 255, 256, 257, 263Lancaster, J., 255Lancaster, R., 121, 123, 173Landford, W., 169Landry, D. J., 259Landsberg, M., 464Lang, J., 100, 108, 153, 460Lang, S., 380Lankshear, C., 77Large, J., 100LaRossa, R., 249, 257Laslett, B., 231Latapí, A. E., 122Latin America, masculinities in

acknowledgments, 125debates and controversies, 123–124empirical research, 116

ethnicity and race, 121–122, 260fatherhood and family, 116–117, 125n 3homosociality, 117–118identity construction, 118–119machismo, 123, 125n 4men’s health, 119–121, 344–345sexuality, 120–121work, 122–123

future research, 124–125historical background, 114–115, 125nn. 1,2introduction, 115–116See also Global gender patterns

Lattu, E., 142, 145, 148, 152, 334, 335, 341Latvia, 150, 153, 156LaVecchia, C., 335Lavezzari, M., 332Law, R., 2Lawrence, A., 390Lawrence, B., 452Lawrence, G., 321Lawrence, T. E., 400Layoun, M., 400Lazarus, N., 94Le Vay, S., 53Leadership styles, 298



Leal, O. F., 116, 122Leaman, O., 451Learning disabled, 237Lechner, F. J., 73Leckie, S. A., 398Leclerc-Madlala, S., 108Lee, B., 278, 285Lee, D. J., 166Lee, J., 4, 5, 23, 59, 220, 294Lee, J. A., 57, 192n 11, 193n 18Lee, K. K., 136Lefebvre, J., 332Lefkowitz, B., 237, 239Legato, M. J., 326, 327LeGuin, U., 35Lehigh, S., 285Leidholdt, D., 182Leighton, P. S., 203Leijenaar, M., 397Leinbach, M. D., 234Leit, R. A., 275Lemon, J., 102Lerman, R. I., 259Lerner, S., 119Lesko, N., 217Less-normative bodies. See Bodily normativity,

degrees ofLettiere, M., 203Leupp, G. P., 130Levant, R., 356Leverenz, D., 400Levi, F., 335Levin, I., 231Levin, J., 105, 354Levine, A. J., 240Levine, J. A., 236, 251, 254, 255Levine, M. P., 337Levine, W. C., 337Levit, N., 340Lewis, C., 169Lewis, D., 99Leys, C., 94Liberal feminist theory, 37–38Liberation, 55Liburd, L. C., 339Liepins, R., 277Lievesley, G., 404Life expectancy, 328–330, 329tLight, R., 224Lilleaas, U.-B., 29Limón, J., 123Lindberg, L. D., 259Lindisfarne, N., 147Ling, L. H. M., 74Lingard, B., 6

Linkogle, S., 104Linstead, S., 294Lister, R., 435Lithuanian Human Development Report (2000),

151, 152Little Bighorn battle, 398–399, 408n 1Lituania, 151Liu, H.-C. W., 5Livingstone, D. W., 78Loaded magazine, 282, 283Lober, J, 3Local gender order. See Global gender patternsLockwood, D., 169London, W., 196, 339, 340Long, J. D., 335Long, S. O., 134Longinovich, T., 158Lonnqvist, J. K., 238Loomba, A., 94Loow, H., 424, 427, 429n 4Lorber, J., 42, 46, 231, 234, 316, 326, 368Lorentzen, J., 19Louie, K., 2, 130, 138Low, M., 2Lubeck, P., 454Lucchini, F., 335Luckmann, T., 231Luker, K., 259Lukes, S., 25Lundberg, C., 6Lundgren, E., 23, 26, 145Lupton, D., 249, 251, 296Luria, Z., 223, 234Luszki, W., 406Lutz, H., 404Luxton, M., 78, 464Lyman, P., 238Lynch, K., 290Lyon, M. L., 224

Mabro, J., 405Mac an Ghaill, E., 5, 96, 173, 214, 216, 219, 220, 223MacAllum, C. A., 259MacAloon, J. J., 400Maccoby, E. E., 38, 42, 233, 235, 236, 255, 258MacCrae, S., 173MacDonald, R. H., 75Machismo, 123MacInnes, J., 4, 220, 301, 302, 433MacIntyre, S., 330Mackay, L., 279Mackenzie, G. O., 389MacKenzie, J. M., 82, 400Mackey, W. C., 249, 251, 252MacKinnon, C., 25, 39, 40, 59, 397

Index • 483


MacLeod, L., 353, 354, 357MacMurraugh-Kavanagh, M. K., 279Macnair, M., 435MacPhail, C., 107Macve, R., 293Madhubuti, H. R., 459Mager, A., 104Magic Johnson, 321Mahommed, P., 100Mahoney, P., 363n 7Mahony, P., 182Maier, M., 301Maitland, S., 380Majors, R., 96, 315, 316Majors, R. G., 260Makang, J.-M., 99Makgoba, M. W., 98The Making of the Modern Homosexual (Plummer),

56Malaysia, 80Malcom X, 204Malcuit, G., 234Male adolescent development, 205–206, 236–239,

336–337Male dominance. See Social theoriesThe Male Heterosexual (Morris), 192n 1Male sexualities

concluding thoughts, 191–192dismantling the hegemony, 186–187, 192n 12hegemonic male sexuality, 180–181

biology and evolutionary theory, 181clinical research, 183, 192n 6empirical research, 183–184, 192nn. 7,8feminist theory, 182–183gay male sexuality, 185–186, 192n 11popular cultural research, 184–185, 192nn. 9,10sociological theory, 181–182, 192n 5

introduction, 178–179, 192n 1new theories of, 187–189, 192n 13penis-centered model of sex, 179–180,

192nn. 2,3,4storied dialogues on

deconstruction, 189–190, 192nn. 14,15family-heterosexuality, 189gay male sexuality, 190–191, 193nn. 17,18sexual identities, 191sexual violence, 190, 193n. 16women’s sexuality, 190

See also specific subjectsMale violence. See Interpersonal violenceMalkin, C. M., 256Malszecki, G., 321, 335Mama, A., 104The Man on the Assembly Line

(Walker & Guest), 293

The “Man” Question in International Relations(Zalewski & Parpart), 74

Management structures. See Work, organizationsand management

Mangan, J. A., 315Mani, S., 332Manicom, L., 100Maniokas, K., 151, 152Manning, C. J., 404Manning, W. D., 258Månsson, S.-A., 146Mansurov, V., 225n 3Maoism, 133“Maps of White Supremacist Organizations”

(2002), 418Marchell, T., 461Marchioro, K., 260Maré, G., 79Marecek, J., 251Marks, J. S., 331Marks, N. F., 240Marqués, J. V., 117Marriage. See Family life, gender in; FatherhoodMarriott, D., 96Marriott, K. A., 461Marrs, T., 420Marsden, D., 464Marsden, P., 428Marshall, B., 183Marshall, G., 171Marsiglio, W., 8, 249, 251, 254, 255, 257, 259, 263Martin, C., 437Martin, C. E., 183Martin, J., 305n 1Martin, K. A., 206, 209, 371Martin, M., 333Martin, P. Y., 296Martin, R., 280Martin, S. E., 203Martinez, G., 259Martino, W., 219Marttunen, M. J., 238Marx, K., 292Masculine identity. See Male sexualitiesMasculinities and Crime (Messerschmidt), 197, 397Masculinities (Connell), 60Mason, D., 439Mason, G., 222Mass media, men’s bodies in

body image literature, 275–276concluding thoughts, 284–285future research, 278–280international media, 74, 80–81introduction, 270–271, 271t, 272tmen’s magazines, 280



“new lad” magazines, 282–284postmodern culture, 280–282selective overview, 272–273social constructionist perspective, 273

race, 274–275sexuality, 274

sport studies, 320–321understudied topics

cyberspace, 276–277local/global articulations, 278non-Western contexts, 278rural/urban masculinities, 277–278

Massad, J., 400Massey, D., 361Masters, W., 183Maternal and Child Health Bureau (1997), 331Maton, K. G., 334Mattis, J., 363n 13Mauer, M., 340Mauss, M., 28May, P., 340May, R. A. B., 279Mayekiso, T. V., 103Mayer, T., 404Mayo Clinic, 333Mbananga, N., 105Mbeki, T., 98McCartney, K., 250McCaughey, M., 279, 368McClintock, A., 150, 397, 403, 404McCord, C., 339McCormack, D., 276McCracken, E., 279McCreary, D. R., 330, 339McDonald, M., 317, 320McEachern, C., 279McEwen, M. K., 461McFarlan, D. M., 434McGowan, R., 436McGraw, L. A., 258McGreal, C., 226n 10McGregor, R., 433McHale, S. H., 257McIntosh, M., 59McIntosh, P., 464McKay, A., 344McKay, J., 8, 279, 280, 281, 317, 319, 320, 321McKee, A., 274McKenry, P. C., 258, 261McKinlay, J. B., 192n 6, 332McLanahan, S., 253McLelland, M. J., 136, 168McLintock, A., 92McMahon, A., 4, 240, 256, 257, 281, 282, 299McPherson, D. G., 317

McTeer, W. G., 316Mead, G. H., 231Mead, M., 52, 234Means, G. C., 293Means, R., 408n 1Mederos, F., 354, 362Media, Culture & Society, 271, 272tMedia, men’s bodies in. See Mass media, men’s

bodies inMedrado, B., 2Mehdid, M., 400Melichar, J., 436Mellen, J., 75Melli, M. S., 258Melnick, M. J., 319, 331, 334Men Against Abuse and Violence, 460Men Against Sexual Assault (MASA), 460Men and Masculinities, 1, 271, 272t, 342, 449Men and nations

concluding thoughts, 407–408, 408n 3construction of, 399–400culture and ideology of, 401–404feminine shame and honor, 404–405introduction, 397–398Little Bighorn battle, 398–399, 408nn. 1,2militarized heterosexuality, 406–407nationalism, 400–401

Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus(Gray), 184

Men of color, masculinity andbody image, 274–275fatherhood, 260feminist theory on, 43–45gang violence, 361health and illness, 332, 339–340male athletes, 317–318postcolonial theory on, 95–97

Men Overcoming Violence (MOVE), 460Men Who Manage (Dalton), 293MENA region, 449, 451, 453, 454Mendel, M. P., 339Men’s antiviolence activism

antiviolence efforts, 459–462introduction, 458–459partnerships across gender, 463–464promoting gender justice, 462–463

The Men’s Bibliography: A ComprehensiveBibliography of Writing on Men, Masculinities,Gender, and Sexualities (Flood), 2, 193n 19

Men’s health studiesconcluding thoughts, 344–345current issues

alcohol use, 330–331erectile disorders, 332HIV/AIDS, 62–63, 332, 333t

Index • 485


pain and symptom denial, 332–333prostate cancer, 333sports, 316–317steroid use, 331suicide, 333–334testicular cancer, 334–335violence, 335war and guns, 335–336

demographics of difference, 328–330, 329tglobal sex industry, 342–344globalization, gender and, 341–342groups with special needs

ADHD, 337gay/bisexual men, 337infertility, 337male athletes, 337–338male victims of sexual assault, 338–339men of color, 339–340prisoners, 340–341

introduction, 326–327in Latin America, 119–121males with special needs, 336

adolescent males, 336–337origins and history, 327–328

Mentor, S., 275Menzu Senta, 85Menzusentâ, 135Mercer, K., 55Merighi, J. R., 330Merrell, K., 339Merton, R., 24, 454Merz, S. M., 369Messerschmidt, J., 8, 105, 184, 196, 197, 198, 204,

205, 206, 207, 210nn. 1,5, 301, 343, 353, 355,356, 357, 360, 361, 362, 363, 363n 11, 397

Messineo, M., 274Messner, M. A., 5, 6, 8, 71, 81, 84, 242, 272, 315,

316, 317, 320, 331, 338, 368, 400, 416, 438,449, 458, 459

Messner, M. M., 156, 235Metler, R., 340Metropolitan Tokyo Women’s Foundation, 134Metz-Göckel, S., 5Mexico, 78, 80, 81, 122, 123, 231Meyer, J. K., 383Meyerowitz, J., 380Michaud, P. A., 334Michno, G., 398, 408n 1Middle East, 416, 427, 449, 452, 454, 456Middlemiss, I., 280Miedzian, M., 239, 433Mieli, M., 56Mies, M., 76, 78, 239Migrant labor, 81–82, 103Mikosza, J., 8, 282

Miles, M., 55Military masculinities. See Men and nations; War,

militarism and masculinitiesMilkin, A. R., 275Mill, H. T., 37Mill, J. S., 37Millar, J., 435Miller, A. S., 368, 373, 376n 4Miller, B. A., 334Miller, B. D., 234Miller, E. M., 369Miller, J., 209Miller, K., 331, 334Miller, K. E., 319Miller, S., 237, 435Miller, T., 280, 320, 321Mills, A., 148Mills, C. W., 171, 400Mills, M., 220Milovanovic, D., 203Minton, C., 236Mintzberg, H., 293Mir-Hosseini, Z., 452Mirandé, A., 123, 260Mirza, H. S., 96, 219Mladjenovic, L., 436Mnookin, R. H., 258Mocnik, R., 158Modood, T., 154Moeykens, B., 331Moghadam, V. M., 44, 404, 405Mohan, D., 331Mohan, L., 463, 464Mohanty, C. T., 44, 99Moletto, E., 2Monaghan, P., 368Money, J., 383Montagu, A., 328Montoya, O., 460Moodie, T. D., 76, 78, 81Moon, C., 439Mooney, J., 145Moore, B., 414, 416Moore, D., 340Moore, H., 115Moore, H. L., 104Moore, K., 379, 380Moore, L., 320Moore, R. A., 334Moore, S., 281Moore-Gilbert, B., 94, 95, 97Moraga, C. L., 45Moran, E. G., 368More, K., 380Moreau, R., 343



Morgan, C. S., 235Morgan, D., 2, 4, 8, 59, 400, 441Morgan, D. H. J., 166, 168, 169, 292, 296, 303Morgan, G., 298Morgan, R., 433Morley, D., 279Morrell, R., 2, 6, 7, 71, 73, 81, 91, 213, 214, 216, 218Morris, C., 239Morris, E., 400Morris, J., 379Morris, K., 119, 345Morris, L., 192n 1Mort, F., 6, 281, 282Mortality rates, 328–330, 329tMoscicki, E. K., 333Moskos, C., 439Mosmiller, T. E., 5, 462Mosse, G. L., 401, 405, 406Mother’s Taxi (Thompson), 319Moynihan, M., 362Msimang, S., 98Mudimbe, V. Y., 98Mueller, U., 142, 145, 147, 148, 152, 334, 335, 342Mugabe, S., 97Muir, K., 436Mukarker, F., 403Mulemfo, M. M., 98Mulholland, K., 297Müller, U., 5Multicultural feminist theory, 43–45Multiculturalism, 115, 125n 2Multiple masculinities, 290, 294–295, 298–304Muncie, J., 435Murdock, G. P., 291Murphy, P. F., 189Murry, C., 354, 363n 5Murry, M. V., 256Muslim and Islamist masculinities

concluding thoughts, 455–456global hegemonic masculinity, 449–450introduction, 448–449Islamist masculinity, 451–453Muslim masculinity, 453–455national construction of, 450–451

Mutchler, M., 188

Nabokov, P., 399Nachtigall, R. D., 337Naffine, N., 196Nagel, J., 8, 72, 192n 15, 399, 403, 406Nairn, T., 401Naison, M., 314Nakamura, T., 137, 138Nakazawa, J., 249Naked Civil Servant (Crisp), 51, 65n 1

Nanda, S., 380Nardi, P. M., 190, 193n 17Narring, F., 334Nataf, Z. I., 388Nategh, H., 403National Basketball Association (NBA), 317National Campaign Against Violence

and Crime, 461National Center for Health Statistics (2002), 328National Center for Policy Analysis, 432National Fatherhood Initiative, 251National Football League (NFL), 338National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey

(NHANES), 336National Hockey League (NHL), 356National Institute for Occupational Safety and

Health (NIOSAH), 338National Institutes of Health (NIH), 332National membership. See Men and nationsNational Organization for Women (NOW), 37National Organization of Fathers Club (NOFC), 135National Organization of Men Against Sexism

(NOMAS), 85, 462National Survey of Children (1981), 258National Survey of Families and Households

(1992–1994), 258National Vanguard, 422National Vital Statistics (2000), 339National Youth Gang Center, 237Nationalism. See Men and nationsNationhood. See Men and nationsNative Americans, 334, 340Native Life in South Africa (Plaatje & Head), 95NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization),

141, 439, 442Nayak, A., 222Nazism, 424, 429n 3Neale, S., 272Negri, E., 335Negus, K., 279Neiderhiser, J., 370Nelson, D. D., 399Neo-Nazi groups, 418Neoliberal theory, 76, 83–84, 148, 415Nespor, J., 224Neuhaus, C., 339Neuwirth, J., 404New, C., 15New Internationalist, 85The New Male Sexuality (Zilbergeld), 185, 192n 9New Men’s Movement, 60, 281–282New World Order, 420, 421The New World Order, 420, 421, 422New Zealand, 106, 184, 213, 277, 334Newburn, T., 196, 356, 363

Index • 487


Newby, H., 171Newman, G., 355Newman, R., 374Newsletter of the International Association for

Studies of Men (IASOM), 1, 16Newton, C., 340Nichols, J., 327Nicholson, L., 60Niehaus, I., 104Nielsen, L., 255Nilsson, S., 335Nishiyama, M., 131Niva, S., 81, 84Nixon, S., 280, 282Noble, G., 81Nock, S. L., 240, 241, 255, 256Nolasco, S., 116, 119Nordberg, M., 296North Africa, 449North America, 75, 79, 80, 148, 415, 460North American Free Trade Agreement

(NAFTA), 419North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 141,

439, 442North Korea, 133Northern Europe, 143, 144, 146, 147Norton, J., 51Norton-Taylor, R., 432Norway, 79, 143, 145, 341Nosaka, A., 234Novikova, I., 2, 76, 149, 150, 155, 157, 334, 335, 342Núñez Noriega, G., 121, 123Nyamnjoh, 92Nye, R. A., 400

Oakley, A., 290Oberg, P., 276Obesity, 336O’Brien, J., 369, 370O’Brien, M., 169, 240, 290Occupational structures. See Work, organizations

and managementO’Connell, D., 255, 258Odendaal, W., 460O’Donnell, M., 78O’Donohue, W. T., 461Oduol, W., 100Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED),

215, 225n 6OFSTED (Office for Standards in Education),

215, 225n 6Oftung, K., 85Ogasawara, Y., 9, 132, 134Ogilvie, E., 281Okamoto, T., 134

Okin, S. M., 258Ólafsdóttir, O., 85Olavarría, J., 2, 6, 79, 85, 116, 119, 122, 124Oldersma, J., 397Oldfield, S., 437O’Leary, P., 339Oleksy, E., 142, 145, 148, 151, 152, 153, 157, 158,

334, 335, 341Oliver, M., 368Olsson, L., 437Olsvik, E., 334, 335Olympic movement, 400One of the Guys (Miller), 209O’Neil, J., 334Onis, Z., 454Ooms, T. J., 259The Organization Man (Whyte), 293Organizations. See Work, organizations and

managementOrientalism (Said), 91, 94Orr, J., 400Osa, S., 132Ôsawa, M., 134Osgerby, B., 281Oslak, S., 259Osmond, M. W., 256Ostow, M., 383Ôtsuka, T., 135, 137Oushakine, S., 158Ouzgane, L., 2, 6, 72, 95Owens, C., 58Ôyama, H., 135, 137

Pagelow, M., 354Pahl, R., 297Pain thresholds, 332–333Pakistan, 344, 450, 453Pakulski, J., 166Palkovitz, R., 254, 257, 260Palmer, C. T., 181, 370Panos, 186Papic, Z., 149, 150Papua New Guinea, 75Parenting. See Family life, gender in; FatherhoodParke, R. D., 235, 249, 255Parker, A., 219, 223, 284Parker, R., 80, 120, 121, 123, 124Parker, S., 236Parkin, W., 72, 142, 145, 148, 189, 290,

292, 298, 305Parpart, J., 6, 74, 99Parrini, R., 119Parrot, A., 461Parsons, T., 22, 26Paslestine, 75, 79, 453



Pasley, K., 258Patriarchy, forms of, 16, 19–22, 417Patriotism, 402Patterson, C. J., 261, 262Pattman, R., 97, 219, 221, 223Patton, C., 53, 62Paul, J. P., 337Peace Support Operations (PSOs), 437, 439, 443Pearce, S., 277, 284Pearlman, C. L., 80Pease, B., 2, 83, 85, 141, 147, 291, 459, 463Peer-group cultures, 217–218, 222, 223

See also Education, masculinities inPellegrini, A. D., 335Penile enlargement, 374–375Penis-center model, of sex, 179–180, 192nn. 2,3,4Pennello, G., 334Percy-Smith, J., 435Perkins, C. A., 241Perkins, U. E., 361Pernas, M., 259Perry, B., 357, 362Perry, G., 374Person, E. S., 62, 180Personality structures, 42–43Peru, 78Peteet, J., 79, 403, 452, 453Peters, K., 102Peters, T. J., 298Petersen, A., 5, 308Petersen, A. C., 205, 206Petit, G. S., 236Pfannenschmidt, S., 344Pfeil, F., 284, 400Pfiefer, S. K., 250Pharris-Ciurej, N. D., 334Philaretou, A. G., 192n 14Philipsen, L., 236Phillips, A., 232, 238Phillips, C., 333Phillips, Jock, 6, 71, 75, 81Philo, G., 170Phoenix, A., 219, 221, 223, 404Pierce, J., 306n 1Pierce, W., 420, 422Piispa, M., 145Pilkington, N. W., 334Pillemer, K., 250Pinfold, J., 275Pizan, C. de, 36Plaatje, S. T., 95Platt, A. E., 341, 434Playboy, 281, 282Playgirl, 275Pleck, E. H., 249

Pleck, J. H., 5, 8, 237, 249, 251, 254, 255, 256, 257,258, 263, 336, 449

Plomin, R., 370Plummer, D., 464Plummer, K., 8, 52, 53, 56, 187, 188,

190, 192n 12Poggi, C., 276Poland, 150, 151, 153, 157Polatnick, M., 256Polikoff, N., 258Politics, gender in

global hegemonic masculinityglobalization process and, 415–417, 429n 1introduction, 414–415Islamic radical organizations, 427–429right-wing militias, 417–427, 429n 2

Islamist and Muslim masculinitiesconcluding thoughts, 455–456global hegemonic masculinity, 449–450introduction, 448–449Islamist masculinity, 451–453Muslim masculinity, 453–455national construction of, 450–451

men and nationsconcluding thoughts, 407–408, 408n 3construction of, 399–400culture and ideology of, 401–404feminine shame and honor, 404–405introduction, 397–398Little Bighorn battle, 398–399, 408nn. 1,2militarized heterosexuality, 406–407nationalism, 400–401

war and militarism1991 Gulf War, 435–436concluding thoughts, 443–444cultural influences, 433–434current and future trends, 440–441future contemporary military, 439–440gendered culture transformation, 437–439introduction, 432–434militarization of women, 436–437nationalism and, 441Peace Support Operations (PSOs), 443political changes in, 441–443reciprocal relationship, 434–435technology influence, 440

See also Gender justicePolk, K., 196, 356, 358, 359Pollak, M., 57, 58Pollak, W., 237, 241Pollard, A., 215, 218Pollert, A., 306n 2Polych, C., 339, 340Pomerance, M., 284Pomerleau, A., 234

Index • 489


Pomeroy, W. B., 183Pong, S.-L., 214Popay, J., 294Pope, H., 337Pope, H. G., 275Popenoe, D., 250, 251, 253Popular media. See Mass media, men’s bodies inPopulation Reference Bureau, 102, 106Pornography, 39, 40, 342–343Porter, M., 169Portner, J., 333Portocarrero, P., 118Postcolonial theory, 94–97

See also Global gender patternsPostman, N., 331Postone, M., 29Poststructuralists, 16, 45, 47Potter, L. B., 333, 336Potts, A., 179, 185, 189Poverty, 102–104

See also specific structuresPowell, G., 148, 306n 1Powell, K. E., 334Power, S., 214The Power Elite (Mills), 171Power relations, of masculinity, 78–79Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (Kristeva),

160n 4Poynting, S., 81Preuss, A., 400Price, D., 332Prieur, A., 22, 121, 123Prince, V., 384, 385, 386, 388, 390, 391Pringle, K., 2, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147,

148, 159, 160n 3, 291, 334, 335, 341, 463Pringle, R., 294, 297, 438Prison Masculinities (Sabo et al.), 210Prison populations, 340–341Procop, G. W., 337Professional Golfer’s Association (PGA), 313Promise Keepers, 135, 242, 251, 263, 416Pronger, B., 315, 316, 320Proprietariness, male, 358–359Prosser, J., 380, 389Prostate cancer, 333Protection of Women Against Violence, 363n 6Protest masculinity, 417Provenzano, R., 234Psychology of Men and Masculinities, 1Ptacek, J., 317Public patriarchy, 417Public/private divisions, 232Puerto Rico, 119, 123Pulp Fiction (film), 277Pursch, J. A., 331

Queer theory, 45–47Quinn, K., 334Quintín, P., 122Quirin, J., 405

Raasch, C., 408Race, Gender, and Class in Criminology: The

Intersection (Schwartz & Milovanovic), 203Race and gender, 92, 95–97, 121–122, 247–275

See also specific studiesRacial Loyalty magazine, 421Radical feminist theory, 40–41, 42Radin, N., 235Radway, J., 279Rajan, R. S., 96Rajaratnam, A., 234Ralph magazine, 282, 283Ramazanoglu, C., 184Ramet, S., 380Ramírez, R., 119, 123Rand, M. R., 241Randall, P. K., 276Ranger, T., 401Raphael, J., 357Rashbaum, B., 233, 236Rashid, C., 404Ratele, K., 97, 107Ratnesar, R., 449Raymond, J., 182, 386, 387, 389, 390Real, T., 138“Reaping the Whirlwind,” 429Reardon, B., 73Rechy, J., 57, 192n 11Redman, P., 222Reed, M., 293Reed, R., 215, 297Rees, M., 443Refusing to Be a Man (Stoltenberg), 41Regehr, E., 102Regional gender patterns

East Asiaafter World War II, 132–133concluding thoughts, 137–138empirical research, 136–137impact of modernization, 131–132introduction, 129premodern society, 129–131recent changes, 134–136

Europeconcluding thoughts, 159–160East-Central, Baltic, and Commonwealth of

Independent Statesgendered transitions, 149–152labor and family, 152–153unified Europe, 153–157, 160n 4



East-Central and Russia, 157–159European Union (EU) and, 146–149, 160n 2introduction, 141–143, 160n 1Northern, Southern, and Western, 143–146,

160n 3Latin America

acknowledgments, 125debates and controversies, 123–124empirical research, 116

ethnicity and race, 121–122fatherhood and family, 116–117, 125n 3homosociality, 117–118identity construction, 118–119machismo, 123reproductive health, 119–121sexuality, 120–121work, 122–123

future research, 124–125historical background, 114–115, 125nn. 1,2introduction, 115–116

Rehn, E., 443Reich, R. B., 361Reilly, R., 356Reis, C., 290, 298Reiser, K., 279Reiss, D., 370Reitzes, D. C., 249Religious nationalism, 404Remafedi, G., 334Remy, J., 238Rendel, M., 214Reno Court of Inquiry (1879), 408n 2Renold, E., 223Renzetti, C. M., 353Resnick, M. D., 334Restrick, M., 340Reynaud, E., 179Rhodes, T., 442Rich, A., 60Richards, F., 442Richards, P., 102Riddell, C., 386, 387Ridgeway, J., 429Ries, L. A. G., 334Rifkin, J., 102Right-wing militias, 417–427, 429n 2Riley, D., 53Riley, J., 332Ringel, C., 241Ripploh, F., 192n 11Risman, B. J., 235, 369Rivara, F., 259Rivera, F., 254, 340Robbins, R. H., 341Roberson, J. E., 133

Robert, E. R., 76Roberts, D. E., 368Roberts, I., 331Roberts, R., 171Robertson, R., 305Robinson, J. P., 240Robinson, L., 317, 339Robinson, M., 332Rodman, D., 320Rogers, B., 433, 437Rogers, D. E., 332Rogness, M., 359Rojas, O. L., 82Romero, M., 119, 345Romney, D. M., 257Ron, A., 332Rongevær, Ø., 25Roper, B., 429Roper, M., 5, 84Roper, M. R., 296Rose, D., 171Rose, S., 363n 13Rosenfeld, R., 293Ross, C., 138Ross, M., 43Ross, M. B., 96Ross, R. R., 339Rotundo, A., 400Rowe, D., 280, 320, 321Roy, R., 85, 461Rubin, G., 46, 58, 59, 115, 240Rubin, J., 234Rubin, L. B., 241, 419, 429n 1Rudberg, L., 335Ruddock, A., 279Rudolf, V., 334Ruhlman, R., 130Rumania, 150Runfola R., 314Rural masculinities, 277Russia, 151, 153, 155, 158, 341, 344Russo, A., 44, 99Rutherdale, R., 279Rutter, P. A., 334Rutter, V., 187, 237Ryan, C., 278

Sabo, D., 8, 196, 210, 241, 314, 315, 316, 317, 319,320, 321, 326, 327, 328, 331, 334, 336, 338,339, 340, 344, 368

Sacs, S., 454Saenz de Tejada, I., 332Safiri, M., 452Safyer, S. M., 340Sagi, R. J., 355

Index • 491


Said, E., 91, 94, 448Salamon, S., 132, 135, 138Salaryman culture (Japan), 132–133, 134, 135Salcedo, H., 119, 120, 124Salehi Esfahani, H., 453Salisbury, J., 215, 216, 217Salo, E., 98Salomon, R., 19Sameroff, A., 254Sampath, N., 101Sanday, P. R., 237, 239, 240, 291Sandberg, J. F., 257Sandefeur, G., 253Sanders, R., 260Sanders, T., 104Sandler, I. N., 255Santeusanio, F., 332Sapiro, V., 405Sarah, E., 5Sargent, C., 291Sargent, K. P., 257Sartre, J. P., 208Sasano, E., 134SATs (Standard Assessment Tasks), 215, 219, 226n 7Saunders, K., 405Savage, M., 166, 172, 174, 297Sawyer, J., 5, 449Sayer, L., 257Sayers, J., 263Sayigh, R., 403Scandinavian Aryans, 416, 422–427, 429nn. 4,5,6Scase, R., 395n 1Schacht, S. P., 456Schafer, W. S., 314Schein, E., 298Schermerhorn, C., 375Scheuble, L. K., 240Schewe, P. A., 461Schirato, T., 283Schissel, B., 360Schoen, C., 336Schofield, T., 326, 328, 330School culture. See Education, masculinities inSchool social structure, 205–208, 216

See also Education, masculinities inSchulte, P., 340Schulter, M. P., 390Schultz, A., 463, 464Schutz, A., 231Schwalbe, M. L., 4, 108, 263, 399Schwartz, M. D., 8, 203, 353, 354, 356, 357, 358,

359, 361, 362, 363, 363nn. 3,8, 461Schwartz, P., 187, 237Schwarzenegger, A., 284, 285Schwendinger, H., 361

Schwendinger, J., 361Scotland, 330, 341Scotson, J. L., 171Scott, J., 115, 175, 403Scott, P. B., 43Scraton, P., 435Scruton, R., 178Seager, J., 40Seccombe, W., 78Sechiyama, K., 131, 132, 133, 138The Second Sex (Beauvoir), 37Second Wave feminists, 327, 330Sedgwick, E. K., 46, 60, 61, 63Sedlak, A. J., 256Segal, D. R., 439Segal, L., 5, 47, 53, 59, 149, 180, 434, 435, 437Segall, A., 330Seidler, V. J., 59, 85Seidman, S., 60, 64, 83Seifer, R., 254Seltzer, J. A., 255, 257Sen, G., 335, 343Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention, 37Sentencing Project (2003), 340Sernau, S., 357, 363n 8Serothe, P., 99Serrano, J. F., 120Servicemen. See War, militarism and masculinitiesSeton-Watson, H., 401Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Lawrence), 400Sewell, T., 219Sex change surgery, 386–387Sex-role theory, 71, 181–182, 295, 314Sexual addiction theory, 63, 179The Sexual Behavior of the Human Female

(Kinsey et al.), 183Sexual identity. See Gay masculinities;

Male sexualitiesSexual violence. See Interpersonal violenceSexuality and Homosexuality (Karlen), 402Shakespeare, T., 368, 372Shakib, S., 319Shakur, S., 360, 361Shanks-McElroy, H. A., 338Shanks-Meile, S., 419, 420Shapiro, J. P., 372Sharp, S., 78Sharpe, A., 380Sharpe, S., 184Shaw, M., 441, 442She is Goddess (Marrs), 420Sheets, V., 255Shehadeh, L. R., 452Shehkdar, A., 336Shelden, R. G., 360, 361, 363n 10



Shen, H., 404Shepherd, S., 435Sheppard, D., 296, 305n 1Sheridan, S., 279Shiers, J., 57Shilling, C., 224, 271, 280Shilts, R., 62Shimomura, M., 137Shinozaki, M., 132Shiraishi, T., 136Shirakawa, Y., 136Shirazi, F., 405Shire, C., 75, 108Shire, K. A., 135Short, J. F., 360Short, S. E., 136Showalter, E., 434Shuster, T., 241Shwalb, D. W., 249Sickmund, M., 237, 238Siebel, B. J., 336Sieber, K., 340Siege magazine, 424Sighieh, H., 450Silberschmidt, M., 102, 103, 104, 107The Silent Community (Delph), 57Silverman, K., 46Silversmith, D. J., 330Silverstein, L. B., 250, 251, 252, 256, 263Silverstein, O., 233, 236Sim, J., 435Simon, W., 188Simpson, A., 79Simpson, M., 63, 284, 440Simpson, O. J., 317Sinclair, R. L., 356, 358Sinclair-Webb, E., 2, 6, 449, 453Sinelnikov, A., 85Singapore, 80Singh, D., 276Singh, V., 313Sinha, M., 71, 75, 95, 401, 415Sinkkonen, S., 296Sirleaf, E. J., 443Skaine, R., 437, 440Skelton, C., 213, 214, 217, 225n 4, 226n 14Skidmore, P., 435Skow, J., 257Skurski, J., 404Slater, D., 276, 277Slave trade, 92Slovenia, 158Smart, L., 201Smidova, E., 158Smith, B., 43

Smith, C., 327Smith, D. E., 242Smith, E., 318Smith, J., 436Smith, M. D., 355, 356, 358Smith, P., 461Smith, R. J., 336Smith, S., 72Smith, T. W., 336Smock, P. J., 257, 258Smuts, B. B., 39, 251Snarey, J., 255Snipes, W., 285Snipp, C. M., 231Snodgrass, J., 327Snyder, H. N., 237, 238Socarides, C., 383Social class. See Class and gender; FatherhoodSocial systems. See specific structuresSocial theories

applications of, 24–29, 31nconcluding thoughts, 31critique of, 20–24depatriarchalization and, 30–31direct gender hierarchy perspective, 17–18implications of, 29–30introduction, 15–17structural inequality perspective, 18–20

Socialization. See Gender socialization processSoderberg, R., 340Soh, C.-H. S., 135Sole, K., 94Solheim, J., 19, 29Solomon, Y., 169Solórzano, I., 460Sômuchô-Tôkeikyoku, 136Søndergaard, D. M., 21Sonenstein, F. L., 237, 259, 336Sons of Liberty, 419Soprano, T., 284Sørensen, B. A., 29Sorenstam, A., 313, 316Sørhaug, T., 19Soroush, A., 452, 455Soucar, E., 334South Africa, 73, 75, 79, 82, 83, 91, 96, 98, 99, 107,

108, 213, 214, 216, 277, 415, 454, 460, 461South America, 90, 91, 97South Asia, 146South Korea, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138Southern Europe, 143, 144, 146, 147Soviet Union, 76Spada, J., 52Spanish American War, 400Special Air Service (SAS), 435

Index • 493


Spergel, I. A., 360Spivak, G., 94, 95, 96, 97Sport, Men, and the Gender Order: Critical

Feminist Perspectives (Messner & Sabo), 315Sports and gender

concluding thoughts, 321contradictions and paradoxes, 314–315

bodies, 315–316health and fitness, 316–317, 337–338violence, 317–318

cultural analysis, 319–321introduction, 313–314relational studies, 318–319

Sprecher, S., 237Springhall, J., 401Stacey, J., 231, 250, 254, 255, 261Stall, R. D., 337Stallone, S., 275Stanko, E. A., 196, 356, 358, 363, 435Stanley, L., 54, 58, 59, 185, 433Stanton, E. C., 37Staples, R., 92, 334, 339Stecopoulos, H., 92Steenland, K., 340Stehr-Green, J., 340Stein, A., 183Steinem, G., 30, 47Steiner, B. W., 381Steinfels, P., 404Stekel, W., 382Stepfathers, 255–256

See also Family life, gender in; FatherhoodStereotypes, 232, 235, 372Sterilization, 119Stern, M., 234Stern, S. J., 123, 125Steroid use, 331, 338Stevens, M., 318Stevenson, N., 279, 280, 281, 282, 283Stewart, K., 259Stewart, R., 293Stichter, S. B., 99Stillion, J. M., 326, 327, 333Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 432Stodder, J., 368, 375Stolcke, V., 115Stoler, A., 92Stoller, R., 179Stoller, R. J., 382, 383Stoltenberg, J., 41, 59, 190, 433, 435, 437, 461, 462Stoltzfus, B., 406Stone, S., 387, 388, 389Stonewall rebellion (1969), 56, 65n 5Story, M., 334Strate, L., 331

Stratton, J., 276Straus, M. A., 354, 355Strauss, S., 5, 462Streatfield, K., 234Streicker, J., 122Strobino, J., 338Strong, S. M., 276Structural inequality

concluding thoughts, 31current research, 18–20introduction on, 15–17

Stryker, S., 368, 375n 1, 379Stubbs, J., 74, 80Stueve, J. L., 257Sturdevant, S. P., 406Stürup, G. K., 383Sub-Saharan Africa, 90, 106Sugarman, J., 340Suicide risks, 238, 333–334Sukemune, S., 136Sullivan, G., 380Sullivan, M., 332Sunaga, F., 137Sunter, C., 106Surowiecki, J., 298Sussman, M. B., 250Sutherland, E., 196Sutton, P., 5Suzuki, A., 136Swain, J., 8, 218, 219, 221, 222, 223, 225, 442Swart, S., 7, 83, 102Sweden, 143, 145Sweeney, P., 259Sweeting, H., 330Sweetman, C., 100Switzerland, 143Symbolization, 80–81

See also Mass media, men’s bodies inSymptom denial, 332–333Synnott, A., 224System of National Accounts (SNA), 290

Tabar, P., 81Taga, F., 71, 77, 135, 137Taheripour, F., 453Taksdal, A., 22Tallberg, T., 296, 334, 335, 342Tallis, V., 106Tanaka, K., 83Tancred, P., 148, 402Taoism, 129, 130Tarule, J. M., 42Tarzian, A., 332Tatchell, P., 441Taylor, D., 82



Taylor, R., 434, 443Teachman, J. D., 243Technology and gender, 440Teh, Y. K., 381Terrorism, political economy of. See Global

hegemonic masculinityTerto, V, Jr., 121Testicular cancer, 334–335Theberge, N., 314Theoretical perspectives

feminist theory, 35–47gay masculinities

concluding thoughts, 65gay liberation complaints, 55–60, 65n 5history of homosexuality, 52–55, 65nn. 1,2,3,4introduction, 51–52poststructural theory, 60–64

social theoriesapplications of, 24–29, 31nconcluding thoughts, 31critique of, 20–24depatriarchalization, 30–31direct gender hierarchy, 17–18implications of, 29–30introduction, 15–17structural inequality, 18–20

Theweleit, K., 192n 2, 272, 276, 405, 429n 3, 436Thinking Sex (Rubin), 58Third World perspectives. See under Global gender

patternsThom, B., 379, 380Thomas, C., 46, 279Thomas, D. Q., 405Thomas, W., 380Thompson, B. W., 368Thompson, E. H., 373Thompson, G., 72Thompson, L., 256Thompson, M., 206Thompson, P., 172, 294Thompson, S., 319Thomson, R., 184Thorne, B., 9, 205, 223, 236, 256, 318Thorne-Finch, R., 335, 353Thornhill, R., 181, 370Thornton, S., 221Thumin, J., 63The Thunderbolt, 420, 421Tiefer, L., 179, 183Tiffin, H., 97Tillner, G., 82, 83Title IX law, 313, 314Toepell, A. R., 340Toerien, M., 283Tohidi, N., 403, 405

Tolbert, K., 119, 345Tolson, A., 170, 294Tomaszewski, E. A., 357, 361Tomlinson, A., 319Tomlinson, J., 156Tomori, M., 334Tomsen, S., 2, 71“Tony,” 435Toombs, S. K., 369Topping, A., 334Tornstam, L., 276Torres, L., 44, 99Torres, R. A., 332Tosh, J., 5Totman, R., 380“Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity” (Carrigan

et. al.), 59Trachtenberg, A., 400Tracy, A. J., 319Tracy, S. K., 360, 361, 363n 10Transgender theory

concluding thoughts, 390–391feminism and, 386–388introduction, 379–381medical discourse, pathology and, 381–384postmodern perspective, 388–390self-identified transvestite perspective, 384–386

Transgendering. See Transgender theoryTranshomosexuality, 390Transnational business masculinity,

84, 147–148, 342The Transsexual Empire (Wilchins), 387Transsexualism: The Current Medical Viewpoint

(Press for Change), 383Transsexuals. See Bodily normativity, degrees of;

Transgender theoryTransvestia magazine, 385Transvestism, 384–385

See also Transgender theoryTransvestites. See Transgender theoryTripp-Reimer, T., 249Trost, J., 231Trujillo, N., 320, 321The Truth at Last, 419Tu, W.-M., 130Tucker, P., 383Turcotte, A., 234Turkey, 450, 451, 454Turner, B. S., 166, 224Turner, P. H., 262The Turner Diaries (Pierce), 420TV and film. See Mass media, men’s bodies inTwine, F. W., 404Two Steps Forward, One Step Back (Shiers), 57Tyack, D., 215

Index • 495


U. N. Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), 462U. N. Development Programme, 290U. N. Division for the Advancement of Women,

85, 460U. N. International Children’s Emergency Fund

(UNICEF), 462U. N. Population Division, 454U. N. (United Nations), 2, 74, 85, 100, 332, 442U. S. Bureau of Census (1999), 258U. S. Bureau of Census (2000), 363n 9U. S. Bureau of Census (2001), 331U. S. Department of Health and Human Services

(DHHS), 339U. S. Department of Justice, 335U. S. Navy, 295, 304U. S. Public Health Service, 373Ubuntuism, 99Udomsak, N., 381Udry, J. R., 369, 370Uebel, M., 92Ueno, C., 132, 137Ukabiala, Blondle, 437Ukai, M., 137Ukraine, 150Unbehaum Ridenti, S. G., 2Unemployment, 78, 102UNESCO, 454UNICEF, 214United Kingdom, 76, 143, 145, 166, 174, 184, 214,

217, 296, 330, 433, 441, 462United Nations (UN), 2, 74, 85, 100, 332, 442United States, 93, 151, 174, 206, 213, 238, 277,

296, 315, 330, 332, 361, 449, 460Unmarried fathers, 259Unpaid domestic labor, 290Unterhalter, E., 405Update: Mortality attributable to HIV infection

/AIDS, 332Urban masculinities, 277–278Urdang, S., 403Urrea, F., 122Urry, J., 175Ursel, E., 363n 1Urwin, C., 294

Vaage, O. F., 23Valdés, T., 6, 79, 82, 85, 124Van den Berghe, P., 404Vance, C. S., 59, 182, 190Varga, C., 108Veikkola, E.-S., 296Venn, C., 294Ventimiglia, C., 334, 335, 342Verbrugge, L. M., 326, 329Viagra, 183, 332

Vickers, J., 402Videon, T. M., 319Vietnam War, 339, 407Vigoya, M. V., 6, 7, 82, 344Vigrid newspaper, 426Villarosa, L., 338Vincent, K., 136Vinnicombe, S., 296Viola, H. J., 398, 408n 1Violence against women, 26, 356–358, 363nn. 7,8,9

See also Gender justice; Interpersonal violenceViveros, M., 116, 118, 122, 124, 345Vogler, C., 171Volcano, D., 389, 390

Wachs, F. L., 274, 319, 320, 321Waddington, D., 294Waetjen, T., 79Wage gap, 26Wainana, N., 460Wajcman, J., 73, 76, 77, 306nn. 1,2Wakabayashi, K., 136Walby, S., 19, 24, 26, 169, 294, 397, 403Waldman, A., 427Waldron, I., 326, 329, 330Walk Across America campaign, 461Walker, A., 256Walker, A. J., 258Walker, C., 99Walker, C. R., 293Walker, J., 213, 219Walker, L., 326, 328, 330Walker, M., 435Walkerdine, V., 216, 294Wallace, A., 359Wallace, L. J., 334Wallace, M., 43Wallace, R., 332Wallensteen, P., 437Wallis, M., 435Walter, A., 53, 56Walvin, J., 401Wang, S. A., 337W.A.R. magazine, 417, 420, 422War, militarism and masculinities

1991 Gulf War, 435–436concluding thoughts, 443–444cultural influences, 433–434current and future trends, 440–441future contemporary military, 439–440gendered culture transformation, 437–439health consequences of, 335–336introduction, 432–434militarization of women, 436–437nationalism and, 406–407, 441



Peace Support Operations (PSOs), 443political changes in, 441–443reciprocal relationship, 434–435technology influence, 440in Third Worlds, 104–106

Wardrop, J., 105Warin, J., 169Warner, P., 435, 443Warr, M., 360, 363Warren, A., 400Warsaw Pact, 436Warshaw, R., 459Watanabe, T., 132, 137Waterman, R. H., 298Waters, M., 166, 175Watney, S., 62Watson, J., 344Watson, P., 150Watson, T., 293Watson, W., 172Waylen, G., 404Weale, A., 443Webb, R. E., 337Webb, S. B., 454Weber, M., 17, 218Websdale, N., 354Wechler, H., 331Weeks, J., 6, 52, 53, 56, 189, 434Weinberg, J., 459Weiner, G., 215Weiner, N. A., 355Weingartner, C., 331Weisbach, M. S., 298Weiss, G., 234Weiss, N. S., 334Weitzman, L., 240Welchans, S., 461Wellings, K., 52Welzer-Lang, D., 2Wenk, S., 150, 235Wenner, L. A., 320Werbner, P., 154Wernick, A., 280, 281West, C., 373West, C. M., 43, 197, 231, 233, 343, 356, 363n 13West Africa, 78Western Europe, 144, 146, 147, 148, 151Westerstrand, J., 26, 145Weston, K., 189Westwood, S., 96, 306n 2Wetherell, M., 6, 80, 220, 299Whannel, G., 284, 320Wheaton, B., 319Wheelwright, J., 433, 437When Men Meet (Bech), 63

Whipple, J., 374White, D. R., 17White, E., 57, 192n 11White, H. R., 240White, L., 255White, M., 432White, P. G., 316White, S., 6, 73, 100, 101White Aryan Resistance, 417, 418, 422White Ribbon Campaign, 459–460White supremacists, in Scandinavia, 416, 422–427,

429nn. 4,5,6Whitehead, H., 380Whitehead, M., 344Whitehead, S. M., 4, 18, 155, 156, 180,

188, 220, 299Whitehorse, D., 399Whiteside, A., 106Whitson, D., 315Whittington, W. L., 337Whittle, S., 380, 389Whitty, G., 214“Who They Are” (2002), 427Whyte, W. H., 293Wichstrom, L., 333Wickham, C., 453Wienke, C., 275Wikan, U., 380Wikblad, K., 335Wikorowicz, Q., 453Wilchins, R., 386, 387, 388Wilcox, L. S., 331Wilde, E., 53, 65n 4Wiley, J., 337Williams, B. F., 404Williams, C. L., 24, 183Williams, E., 235Williams, J. A., 439Williams, L. M., 363n 7Williams, P. J., 43, 98, 99Williams, S., 259Williams, S. J., 371, 375Williams, W. L., 79, 368, 372Willis, P., 294, 315, 424Willis, R., 291Willis, S., 214, 219, 275Willmott, H., 293Wilson, A., 53Wilson, D., 293Wilson, E. O., 369Wilson, M., 256, 354, 358Wilson, M. N., 253Wilson, S. E., 249Wilson, W. J., 361, 363n 8Winegard, W. C., 329

Index • 497


Wingo, P. A., 339Winlow, S., 196, 209Winslow, D., 437, 438, 440Winter, M. F., 76Winter, S., 381Wintour, P., 442Wise, E., 332Wise, S., 433Wisensale, S. K., 263Wisniewski, W., 357Wittig, M., 53Witz, A., 270, 271, 279, 280, 297Wolchik, S. A., 255, 258Wolkomir, M., 4, 263Wollstonecraft, M., 36Women’s rights movement, 36, 82–83, 241Wonders, N. A., 239Wood, J., 234Wood, J. F., 326, 328, 330Wood, K., 107Woodbury, M. A., 334Woods, P., 218Woodward, A. E., 295Woodward, K., 275Work, organizations and management

in Europe, 152–153introduction, 289–290

concluding thoughts, 304–305gendered studies, 293–298, 305–306n 1hegemonic/multiple masculinities (HM/MM)

descriptive orientation, 300–301meaning of, 298–300, 306n 2negative orientation, 301obsolescent emphasis, 301–302oversimplification emphasis, 302–304

meaning of management, 292–293meaning of organizations, 291–292meaning of work, 27, 290–291

in Latin America, 122–123in Third Worlds, 78, 102–104

Workplace masculinities. See Work, organizationsand management

World Bank, 148World gender order, 72–74, 82–85

See also Global gender patterns

World War I, 434World War II, 327, 402, 405, 433World Wrestling Federation (WWF), 338Wornian, K., 275Wozny, M., 337Wretched of the Earth (Fanon), 95Wright, E. O., 17Wright, J. D., 354

Xaba, T., 76, 104, 107

Yajima, M., 136Yardley, J., 429n 7Yell, S., 283Yellowbird, M., 231Yesalis, C. E., 331Yeung, W. J., 257Yllö, K., 363n 7Young, A., 57, 210, 380Young, C., 408Young, J., 363n 8Young, K., 316Young, N., 434, 443Young, R., 94Youth gang violence, 237, 360–361, 363nn.

10,11,12Yugoslavia, 158, 415

Zabriskis, P., 449Zahn, M. A., 355Zalar, B., 334Zalewski, M., 6, 73Zambrana, R. E., 260Zax, M., 254Zeeland, S., 440Zero tolerance, 215, 226n 9Zhang, J. X., 339Zielenbach, S., 361Zierler, S., 332, 341Zilbergeld, B., 185, 188, 189, 192n 9, 332Zimmerman, D. H., 197, 231, 233, 343, 356, 373Zimring, F. E., 360Zingoni, E. L., 85Zola, I. K., 372Zulehner, P. M., 21, 23, 26, 79



ABOUT THE EDITORS

499

Michael S. Kimmel is Professor of Sociology at theState University of New York at Stony Brook. Hisbooks include Changing Men (1987), MenConfront Pornography (1990), Men’s Lives (6thedition, 2003), Against the Tide: Profeminist Men inthe United States, 1776-1990 (1992), The Politicsof Manhood (1996), Manhood: A Cultural History(1996), The Gendered Society (2nd edition, 2003),and the Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities(2004). He edits Men and Masculinities, an inter-disciplinary scholarly journal. He is the spokes-person for the National Organization for MenAgainst Sexism (NOMAS) and lectures extensivelyon campuses in the United States and abroad.

Jeff Hearn is Academy Fellow and Professor,Swedish School of Economics, Helsinki,Finland, and Research Professor, University ofHuddersfield, United Kingdom. His authoredand coauthored books include The Gender ofOppression (1987), Men in the Public Eye(1992), “Sex” at “Work” (1987/1995), TheViolences of Men (1998), Gender, Sexuality andViolence in Organizations (2001), and GenderDivisions and Gender Policies in Top Finnish

Companies (2002). Coedited books includeThe Sexuality of Organization (1989), Men, Mas-culinities, and Social Theory (1990), Violenceand Gender Relations (1996), Men as Managers,Managers as Men (1996), Men, Gender Divi-sions, and Welfare (1998), Consuming Cultures(1999), Transforming Politics (1999), and HardWork in the Academy (1999). He has just com-pleted coediting Information Society and theWorkplace (2004). He was Principal Contractorin the EU FP5 Research Network “The SocialProblem of Men” (2000-2003) (www.cromenet.org) and is currently researching men, genderrelations and transnational organizing, organiza-tions, and management.

R. W. Connell, Professor of Education at theUniversity of Sydney, formerly was at theUniversity of California, Santa Cruz, and Mac-quarie University. A researcher on gender, mas-culinities, education, social class, intellectuals, andsocial theory, he is the author of Gender (2002),The Men and the Boys (2000), Masculinities(1995), and Gender and Power (1987), amongother books.

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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

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Michele Adams is Assistant Professor at TulaneUniversity. She has published in the areas offamily and gender. Her present research examinesthe cultural impacts of marriage and the genderimplications of the pro-marriage movement.

David L. Collinson is FME Professor of StrategicLearning and Leadership in the Department ofManagement Learning at Lancaster UniversityManagement School. Formerly at the Universitiesof Warwick, Manchester, St. Andrews, and SouthFlorida, he was also Hallsworth Visiting Professorat Manchester Business School in 2001. Adoptinga critical approach to management and organiza-tion studies, he has published on power, resistance,gender, subjectivity, safety, and humor. Through-out his career, he has been particularly concerned toexamine the significance of men and masculinityin shaping workplace processes of control, oppo-sition, and survival. His current research focuseson the development of critical approaches toleadership.

Scott Coltrane is Professor of Sociology at theUniversity of California, Riverside; AssociateDirector of the UCR Center for Family Studies;recipient of the UCR Distinguished TeachingAward; and former President of the PacificSociological Association. He completed hisundergraduate studies at Yale University andthe University of California, Santa Cruz, andreceived MA and PhD degrees in sociologyfrom the University of California, Santa Cruz.Coltrane studies gender equity and family func-tioning, with particular attention to the allocationof housework and child care. He has writtenabout the interrelationships among fatherhood,motherhood, marriage, parenting, domesticlabor, popular culture, ethnicity, and structuralinequality. He is the author of Family Man:Fatherhood, Housework, and Gender Equity(1996; winner of the American LibraryAssociation CHOICE Outstanding AcademicBook Award), Gender and Families (1998), and

Sociology of Marriage and the Family: Gender,Love, and Property (5th edition, 2001, withRandall Collins), and editor of Families andSociety (2004). His research has been publishedin various scholarly journals, including theAmerican Journal of Sociology, Social Problems,Sociological Perspectives, Journal of Marriageand the Family, Journal of Family Issues, Gender& Society, Sex Roles, and Masculinities.

Critical Research on Men in Europe(CROME) consists of Irina Novikova, Director ofthe Center for Gender Studies, University ofLatvia; Keith Pringle, Professor of Social Work,Aalborg University, Denmark, Honorary Profes-sor, University of Warwick, United Kingdom, andProfessor in Social Research, MalardalensHogskola, Sweden; Jeff Hearn, Academy Fellowand Professor, Swedish School of Economics,Helsinki, Finland, and University of Huddersfield,United Kingdom; Ursula Müller, Professor ofSociology and Women’s Studies and Director ofthe Interdisciplinary Women’s Studies Center,University of Bielefeld, Germany; ElzbietaOleksy, Professor of Humanities, University ofLodz and University of Warsaw; Emmi Lattu,doctoral researcher, Tampere University, Finland;Janna Chernova, Department of Political Scienceand Sociology, European University at St.Petersburg, Russia; Harry Ferguson, Professor ofSocial Work, University of West of England,Bristol, U.K.; Øystein Gullvåg Holter, SeniorResearcher, Work Research Institute, Oslo,Norway; Voldemar Kolga, Professor of Personal-ity and Developmental Psychology and Chair ofthe Women’s Studies Center, University ofTallinn, Estonia; Carmine Ventimiglia, Professorof Family Sociology, University of Parma, Italy;Eivind Olsvik, formerly Nordic Co-ordinator forCritical Studies on Men, Nordic Institute ofWomen’s Studies and Gender Research, Oslo,Norway; and Teemu Tallberg, doctoral researcher,Swedish School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland.The CROME Web site (including the European


Documentation Centre and Database on Men’sPractices) may be found at www.cromenet.org

Walter S. DeKeseredy is Professor ofCriminology at the University of OntarioInstitute of Technology and recently served asChair of the American Society of Criminology’sDivision on Critical Criminology. He andKatharine Kelly conducted the first Canadiannational representative sample survey of womanabuse, including sexual assault, in university/college dating. For this work, he was given theDivision’s Critical Criminologist of the YearAward in 1995. DeKeseredy, who receivedhis PhD in sociology from York University inToronto, has also published dozens of scientificarticles and book chapters on woman abuse,criminological theory, and crime in public hous-ing. He is the author of Woman Abuse in DatingRelationships: The Role of Male Peer Support(1988) and is the coauthor of Woman Abuse:Sociological Perspectives (1991, with RonaldHinch), the second edition of The Wrong Stuff:An Introduction to the Sociological Study ofDeviance (1996, with Desmond Ellis), WomanAbuse: A Sociological Story (1997), SexualAssault on the College Campus: The Role ofMale Peer Support (1997, with Martin D.Schwartz), Woman Abuse on Campus: ResultsFrom the Canadian National Survey (1998,with Martin D. Schwartz), Contemporary Crim-inology, Contemporary Social Problems inNorth American Society (2000, with Shahid Alviand Desmond Ellis), and Under Siege: Povertyand Crime in a Public Housing Community(2003, with Shahid Alvi, Martin D. Schwartz,and E. Andreas Tomaszewski).

Tim Edwards is Lecturer in sociology at theUniversity of Leicester. He is currently writing abook on masculinities and cultural theory, isediting a collection on cultural theory, and holdsan Economic and Social Research Council grantto research children’s consumption of fashion.Major previous publications include Contradic-tions of Consumption (2000), Men in the Mirror(1997), and Erotics & Politics (1994).

Richard Ekins is a psychoanalyst in privatepractice and Reader in Cultural and MediaStudies in the School of Media and PerformingArts at the University of Ulster at Coleraine,where he is Director of the TransgenderResearch Unit and Archive. He coedits the

International Journal of Transgenderism. Hisedited and authored books include Centres andPeripheries of Psychoanalysis (1994, with RuthFreeman), Blending Genders (1996, with DaveKing), Male Femaling (1997), Selected Writingsby Anna Freud (1998, with Ruth Freeman), andUnconscious Mental Life and Reality (2002).

Michael Flood is Research Fellow at theAustralia Institute, a public interest think tank.He has also held positions as a Lecturer inWomen’s and Gender Studies at the AustralianNational University, and as the Sexual HealthPromotion Coordinator at Sexual Health andFamily Planning ACT (Australian Capital Terri-tory). His research interests include men andmasculinities, sexualities and especially malesexuality and heterosexuality, interpersonal vio-lence, sexual and reproductive health, and boysand youth cultures. He has been involved in pro-feminist men’s activism since 1987.

Judith Kegan Gardiner is Professor of Englishand of Gender and Women’s Studies as wellas being Interim Director of the Center forResearch on Women and Gender at the Univer-sity of Illinois at Chicago. She is a member ofthe editorial collective of the interdisciplinaryjournal Feminist Studies. Her books includeCraftsmanship in Context: The Development ofBen Jonson’s Poetry (1975), Rhys, Stead, Lessing,and the Politics of Empathy (1989), and twoedited volumes, Provoking Agents: Gender andAgency in Theory and Practice (1995) andMasculinity Studies and Feminist Theory: NewDirections (2002). Currently she is coediting theRoutledge International Encyclopedia of Menand Masculinity.

Shahin Gerami is Professor of Sociology andGender Studies at Southwest Missouri StateUniversity. She is a native of Iran and has a lawdegree from the University of Tehran, as well asa master’s and PhD in sociology from theUniversity of Oklahoma. Her research interestsfocus on gender issues within the context of reli-gious fundamentalism, economic development,and modernization. Her publications in theseareas include the book Women and Fundamen-talism: Islam and Christianity (1996); articles inGender and Society, Social Science Quarterly,and Early Child Development; and chapters inbooks and encyclopedias.



Thomas J. Gerschick is Associate Professorof sociology at Illinois State University, wherehe teaches about social inequality. His researchfocuses on the intersection of gender and dis-ability, especially how people with disabilitiescreate self-satisfying gender identities. Outsideof academia, he loves to build with Habitat forHumanity.

Matthew C. Gutmann is Associate Professorof Anthropology at Brown University, where heteaches classes on gender, ethnicity-race, health,and ethnography in the Americas. Among hispublications are The Meanings of Macho: Beinga Man in Mexico City (1996), The Romance ofDemocracy: Compliant Defiance in Contempo-rary Mexico (2002), Mainstreaming Men IntoGender and Development: Debates, Reflections,and Experiences (2000, with Sylvia Chant), andthe edited volumes Changing Men and Mas-culinities in Latin America (2003) and Perspec-tives on Las Americas: A Reader in Culture,History and Representation (2003, with FelixMatos Rodriguez, Lynn Stephen, and PatriciaZavella).

Paul Higate is Lecturer in Social Policy at theSchool for Policy Studies at the University ofBristol, United Kingdom. He has a backgroundin the British armed forces. His research inter-ests have developed in recent years to focus onmilitary masculinities within the context ofpeacekeeping operations. In Spring, 2003, heundertook a period of fieldwork in the PeaceSupport Missions in the Democratic Republic ofCongo and Sierra Leone. He is editor of MilitaryMasculinities: Identity and the State (2003) anda research monograph, Men, Masculinities andPeacekeeping in Sub-Saharan Africa (in press).

Øystein Gullvåg Holter, PhD in sociology, isSenior Researcher at the Work Research Institute,Oslo, Norway. His background is in genderresearch, work/family studies, and studies ofmen. He has worked as Nordic coordinator forstudies of men at the University of Oslo. He haswritten extensively on gender, masculinities, andequality theory, and currently participates inseveral Nordic and European projects in this field.

John Hopton completed most of his primaryand secondary education after moving to Sloughin 1963. He originally pursued a career inmental health nursing and nurse education,undertaking higher education courses in the

1980s and completing an MA and PhD withinthe Centre for Crime and Social Justice, EdgeHill College, in the 1990s. He has been a socialscience lecturer at Manchester University since1995 and has published extensively in a range ofjournals, mostly about mental health. His workin the field of gender studies includes work onmasculinity and militarism, the links betweenhegemonic masculinity and managerialistideologies, and an exploration of the predomi-nantly masculine culture of the sport known asmixed martial arts or submission fighting.

Brett Hutchins is Lecturer in the School ofSociology and Social Work at the University ofTasmania, where he teaches media studies andsocial theory. He is currently researching thetopic of regional media and globalization. He isthe author of Don Bradman: Challenging theMyth (2002).

Dave King is Senior Lecturer in theDepartment of Sociology, Social Policy andSocial Work Studies at the University ofLiverpool. He has been researching and writingon the sociological aspects of transgender for anumber of years. He coedits the InternationalJournal of Transgenderism. In addition toseveral articles, he has written The Transvestiteand the Transsexual: Public Categories andPrivate Identities (1993) and is the coeditor(with Richard Ekins) of Blending Genders:Social Aspects of Cross-dressing and Sex-changing (1996). He is currently interested inexploring issues and problems around agingand transgendering.

William Marsiglio is Professor of Sociology atthe University of Florida. Much of his writing hasfocused on the social psychology of fatherhood,broadly defined. In addition to his numerousarticles on various aspects of men’s reproduc-tive and fathering experiences, Marsiglio haswritten several books on these topics, includingStepdads: Stories of Love, Hope, and Repair(2004), Sex, Men, and Babies: Stories of Aware-ness and Responsibility (2002), and ProcreativeMan (1998). He also edited Fatherhood: Con-temporary Theory, Research, and Social Policy(1995). He and his colleagues coauthored thedecade review on fatherhood for the Journal ofMarriage and Family (2000). He has served as aconsultant for major national surveys on menand sexuality/fatherhood issues.

About the Contributors • 503


Jim McKay is Associate Professor in theSchool of Social Science at the University ofQueensland, where he teaches courses on gen-der and popular culture. His most recent booksare Managing Gender: Affirmative Action andOrganizational Power in Australian, Canadian,and New Zealand Sport (1997), Men, Mascu-linities, and Sport (2000, with Michael Messnerand Donald Sabo), and Globalization and Sport(2001, with Toby Miller, Geoffrey Lawrence,and David Rowe).

James W. Messerschmidt is Professor ofSociology in the Criminology Department atthe University of Southern Maine. He is theauthor of numerous books and articles on men,masculinities, and crime, including Masculini-ties and Crime (1993), Crime as StructuredAction (1995), and Nine Lives (2000). Hiscurrent work involves life-history research ongirls, gender, and violence and is published inhis newest work, Embodied Masculinities,Embodied Violence: Boys, Girls, the Body, andAssault (2004).

Michael A. Messner is Professor of Sociologyand Gender Studies at the University ofSouthern California, where he currently chairsthe sociology department. His books includeTaking the Field: Women, Men, and Sports(2002), Paradoxes of Youth and Sport (2002),and Power at Play: Sports and the Problem ofMasculinity (1992). He has conducted severalcommissioned studies on gender and sportsmedia, and he is a past President of the NorthAmerican Society for the Sociology of Sport.

Janine Mikosza is a PhD candidate in theSchool of Social Science at the University ofQueensland. Her thesis topic is the cultural pro-duction of men’s magazines in Australia. Shehas authored various journal articles and bookchapters on gender, the media, and the body.

David Morgan recently retired from theUniversity of Manchester, where he taughtsociology for more than 35 years. He currentlyhas an emeritus professorship at Manchesterand a part-time position as “Professor 2” atNorwegian Technological University, Trond-heim. He is the author of a number of booksand articles on gender and family, includingDiscovering Men (1992) and Family Connections(1996).

Robert Morrell is Professor of Education at theUniversity of Natal. He is a historian by trainingbut currently focuses his research on masculini-ties in South Africa and the continent morebroadly and on the gendered dimensions of sex-uality in a context of AIDS. He is the author ofFrom Boys to Gentlemen: Settler Masculinity inColonial Natal, 1880-1920 (2001) and editor ofChanging Men in Southern Africa (2001).

Joane Nagel is University DistinguishedProfessor of Sociology at the University ofKansas. She is author of American IndianEthnic Renewal (1996) and Race, Ethnicity, andSexuality: Intimate Intersections, ForbiddenFrontiers (2003).

Joseph H. Pleck is Professor of HumanDevelopment and Family Studies at theUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Hisbooks include The Myth of Masculinity (1981),Working Wives, Working Husbands (1985), andThe Impact of Work Schedules on the Family(1985). He has also published numerous articlesand chapters on adolescent male contraception,attitudes toward masculinity, and father involve-ment. His current work focuses on paternalidentity in residential fathers and on the devel-opment of stable romantic unions in young adultmen. He is Co-Principal Investigator of theNational Survey of Adolescent Males program.

Ken Plummer is Professor of Sociology at theUniversity of Essex, England. His main booksare Sexual Stigma (1975), Documents of Life(1983), Documents of Life-2 (2001), TellingSexual Stories (1995), and Intimate Citizenship(2003); he also coauthored Sociology: A GlobalIntroduction (2nd ed., 2002, with John Macio-nis). He has written numerous articles on sexu-ality, life stories, symbolic interactionism, andlesbian and gay studies. He is the founder andeditor of the journal Sexualities.

Don Sabo is Professor of Sociology at D’YouvilleCollege in Buffalo, New York, and Director ofthe Center for Research on Physical Activity,Sport & Health (www.sporthealthresearch.org).He is a recognized expert on gender relationsand has been writing and lecturing about issuesincluding physical activity and health, genderequity in athletics, sport and masculinity, andmen’s violence since 1980. His research andwriting also focus on linkages among gender,



health, and illness, and he has spearheaded thedevelopment of “men’s health studies.” His latestbook, Prison Masculinities (2001, coeditedwith T. A. Kupers and W. London), explores theways that American prisons mirror the worstaspects of society-wide gender relations. He isan eye-to-eye scholar, an avid keynoter, and apublic intellectual who is regularly quoted in thenational media.

Martin D. Schwartz is Professor of Sociologyand Presidential Research Scholar at OhioUniversity and is now Visiting Research Fellowat the National Institute of Justice, U.S.Department of Justice. He has written or edited11 books, more than 60 refereed journal articles,and another 40 book chapters, governmentreports, and essays. A former officer of severalorganizations, he received the lifetime achieve-ment award of the American Society ofCriminology’s Division on Critical Criminologyand currently serves as coeditor of the journalCriminal Justice: An International Journal ofPolicy and Practice. He serves on or has servedon the editorial boards or as deputy editor of 11journals, including the top American criminologyjournals Criminology and Justice Quarterly. Hehas done manuscript reviews for 55 journals andpublishers. At Ohio University, he has won avariety of teaching and service awards, includingGraduate Professor of the Year and Best Arts andSciences Professor (twice), while being the firstsocial scientist to win the university’s researchachievement award, the title of PresidentialResearch Scholar. His PhD is from the Universityof Kentucky, where he was awarded the 2002Thomas R. Ford Distinguished Alumni Award.

Jon Swain worked for 17 years as a primaryschool teacher in the United Kingdom beforeearning a PhD at the Institute of Education,University of London, with a thesis on the con-struction of boys’ masculinities. His particular

academic interests are gender, education, andidentities. He is currently working as ResearchFellow at King’s College, London, on twoprojects concerning adult numeracy.

Sandra Swart is a socioenvironmental historianof southern Africa and lectures at the Universityof Stellenbosch. She received both her doctoratein history and a master’s degree in environmen-tal change and management from OxfordUniversity. She has published on Afrikaner mas-culinity and on the socio-environmental historyof the dog and horse in southern Africa.

Futoshi Taga is Associate Professor in theFaculty of Literature, Kurume University,Japan, where he teaches sociology, education,and gender studies. He was the first person inJapan to complete a PhD on a topic relatedto masculinities; his thesis was subsequentlypublished as the book Dansei no Jenda Keisei(The Gender Formation of Men). He also hasa chapter, “Rethinking Male Socialisation:Life Histories of Japanese Male Youth,” in thecollection Asian Masculinities (2003).

Mara Viveros Vigoya is Associate Professor ofAnthropology at the Universidad Nacional deColombia in Bogotá, where she also directs themaster’s program in cultural anthropology. Sheis the author of Hombres e identidades degénero: Investigaciones desde América Latina(2001, with José Olavarría and Norma Fuller)and De quebradores y cumplidores: Sobre hom-bres, masculinidades y relaciones de género enColombia (2002), as well as being the coeditorof Mujeres de los Andes: Condiciones de vida ysalud (1992, with Anne-Claire Defossez andDidier Fassin), Genero e identidad: Ensayossobre lo femenino y lo masculino (1995, withLuz Gabriela Arango and Magdalena León), andCuerpo, diferencias y desigualdades (1999,with Gloria Garay).

About the Contributors • 505

