http://www.raewynconnell.net/p/masculinities_20.html
MASCULINITIES
To speak of masculinities is to speak about gender relations. Masculinities are not equivalent to men; they concern the position of men in a gender order. They can be defined as the patterns of practice by which people (both men and women, though predominantly men) engage that position.
There is abundant evidence that masculinities are multiple, with internal complexities and even contradictions; also that masculinities change in history, and that women have a considerable role in making them, in interaction with boys and men.
I have been an interested observer of masculinities all my life, but began to think of this as a researchable issue in the late 1970s. At that time, anyone interested in power structures could see that the feminist challenge to patriarchy must mean changes in the lives of men.
A research project on secondary schools, described in the Education section, crystallized this idea. Interviewing boys, teachers and parents, we could see active hierarchies of masculinity in school settings. The term ‘hegemonic masculinity’ was first used in a 1982 report from this project, and my first essay on men and masculinities was published in the same year.
I managed to get funding for a study of social theories of gender. The research assistant job was taken as a job-share by John Lee and Tim Carrigan, both knowledgeable about gay theory and politics. We were soon developing a synthesis of ideas about masculinity from psychoanalysis, feminist theory, gay theory, and structural sociology. This was published in 1985 in a long article, 'Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity', that appeared just as a wave of interest in questions about men and masculinity was building up internationally. Our paper was widely cited, several times reprinted and translated, and was seen as a founding text of ‘the new men’s studies’.
I didn’t think of it that way. My theoretical concern was the gender order as a whole; masculinity was one piece of the jigsaw. As an empirical researcher, I was very conscious of the thin base of evidence on which all discussions of masculinities rested at that time. So I set up a fieldwork project, which was denounced by a right-wing group in federal parliament, before it even began.
The project turned out well, with a series of papers that described the dynamics of masculinities in different social settings. Eventually this became the core of the book Masculinities. I had been reluctant to write such a book, as I thought the genre of ‘Books About Men’ – astonishingly popular in the early 1990s – fostered the illusion of one fixed natural masculinity. When I did start writing, the draft was promptly rejected by a well-known US publisher.
Other publishers kindly launched the book in 1995, and it seemed to meet a need. It has been very widely cited, translated into six other languages, and went into a second edition in 2005. It is in fact my best-known work, and I am charmed that it is cited in places as diverse as Voprosi Filosofii (Problems of Philosophy), the Shakespeare Quarterly, and Social Science & Medicine.
Social research on masculinities had obvious implications for practical problems, including violence prevention, the education of boys, action on men’s health, and the promotion of gender equality. With different groups of colleagues, I have written reports and papers that gather the research findings and concepts together to help activists and policy makers in all of those fields. A number were collected in The Men and the Boys.
There is abundant evidence that masculinities are multiple, with internal complexities and even contradictions; also that masculinities change in history, and that women have a considerable role in making them, in interaction with boys and men.
I have been an interested observer of masculinities all my life, but began to think of this as a researchable issue in the late 1970s. At that time, anyone interested in power structures could see that the feminist challenge to patriarchy must mean changes in the lives of men.
A research project on secondary schools, described in the Education section, crystallized this idea. Interviewing boys, teachers and parents, we could see active hierarchies of masculinity in school settings. The term ‘hegemonic masculinity’ was first used in a 1982 report from this project, and my first essay on men and masculinities was published in the same year.
I managed to get funding for a study of social theories of gender. The research assistant job was taken as a job-share by John Lee and Tim Carrigan, both knowledgeable about gay theory and politics. We were soon developing a synthesis of ideas about masculinity from psychoanalysis, feminist theory, gay theory, and structural sociology. This was published in 1985 in a long article, 'Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity', that appeared just as a wave of interest in questions about men and masculinity was building up internationally. Our paper was widely cited, several times reprinted and translated, and was seen as a founding text of ‘the new men’s studies’.I didn’t think of it that way. My theoretical concern was the gender order as a whole; masculinity was one piece of the jigsaw. As an empirical researcher, I was very conscious of the thin base of evidence on which all discussions of masculinities rested at that time. So I set up a fieldwork project, which was denounced by a right-wing group in federal parliament, before it even began.
The project turned out well, with a series of papers that described the dynamics of masculinities in different social settings. Eventually this became the core of the book Masculinities. I had been reluctant to write such a book, as I thought the genre of ‘Books About Men’ – astonishingly popular in the early 1990s – fostered the illusion of one fixed natural masculinity. When I did start writing, the draft was promptly rejected by a well-known US publisher.
Other publishers kindly launched the book in 1995, and it seemed to meet a need. It has been very widely cited, translated into six other languages, and went into a second edition in 2005. It is in fact my best-known work, and I am charmed that it is cited in places as diverse as Voprosi Filosofii (Problems of Philosophy), the Shakespeare Quarterly, and Social Science & Medicine.
Social research on masculinities had obvious implications for practical problems, including violence prevention, the education of boys, action on men’s health, and the promotion of gender equality. With different groups of colleagues, I have written reports and papers that gather the research findings and concepts together to help activists and policy makers in all of those fields. A number were collected in The Men and the Boys.
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