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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In recent years, questions about men and boys have aroused remarkable media interest, public concern and controversy. Across the world, health services are noticing the relevance of men's gender to problems as diverse as road accidents, diet and sexually transmitted disease. Teachers are increasingly preoccupied with the poor educational performance of boys, and criminologists have begun to explore why men and boys continue to dominate the crime statistics. In this timely new volume, one of the world's leading authorities on masculinity helps us to understand these developments, and make sense of the multiplying issues about men and boys. Five years on from the publication of the seminal study Masculinities, this book reflects on the growing social scientific research in this area. Connell assesses its strengths and weaknesses and explores its implications for contemporary problems from boys' education and men's health to international peacemaking. Written in a lively and accessible way, this book will be essential reading for all students of sociology, politics and gender studies, as well as anyone interested in the future of gender relations.
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Seitenzahl: 407
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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Copyright © R.W. Connell 2000 Chapter 7 © R.W. Connell, M.D. Davis and G.W. Dowsett 2000
The right of R.W. Connell to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2000 by Polity Pressin association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd
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ISBN 978-0-7456-6602-0 (Multi-user ebook)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Set in 11/13 pt Bembo by DOCUPRO, Sydney
Printed in Great Britain by T.J. International, Padstow, Cornwall
To Kylie
PART 1 EXAMINING MASCULINITIES
1 Debates about men, new research on masculinities
Issues about men and boys
The new social research on masculinity
Key conclusions of recent research
2 New directions in theory and research
Current debate: Concepts of gender and approaches to masculinity
The gender relations approach
Conceptualizing masculinities
Agenda for research
PART 2 GLOBALIZATION
3 Masculinities and globalization
The world gender order
The repositioning of men and the remaking of masculinities
Globalizing masculinities
Masculinity politics on a world scale
4 Globalization and men’s bodies
Understanding men’s bodies
Imperialism and men’s bodies
Contemporary globalization and men’s bodies
Implications for gender reform
PART 3 BODIES AND DESIRES
5 An iron man
Being a champion
Soft path, hard goal
The body and the self
Wanting to win: The ideology of competitive sport
Reflections
6 ‘I threw it like a girl’: Some difficulties with male bodies
Looking at jelly: Adam Singer
Burning up the body: Tip Southern
Reflections
7 Man to man: Homosexual desire and practice among working-class men (written with M.D. Davis and G.W. Dowsett)
The working-class setting
The social framework of male-to-male sex
Sexual practice
Desire and identity
The HIV/AIDS epidemic
Reflections
PART 4 PRACTICALITIES
8 Cool guys, swots and wimps
Getting into trouble
Knowing where you stand
Over the hump
Dry sciences
Reading feminism
Reflections
9 Teaching the boys
Schools and gender
Schools as agents in the making of masculinities
Pupils as agents, school as setting
Educational strategies in work with boys
The process of change
10 Men’s health
Research evidence on men’s health
Sex differences in health
The health of specific groups of men
How some masculinizing practices damage bodies
Attempts to make men’s bodies healthy
The ‘cradle to grave’ health disadvantage of men
Reflections
PART 5 CHANGING MASCULINITIES
11 The politics of change in masculinity
The historical moment
Men’s interests
Purposes
A men’s movement?
12 Arms and the man: The question of peace
Why war?
The problem of men and violence
Implications of masculinity research
Global patterns
Peace strategies and masculinities
Acknowledgments and sources
References
Index
ISSUES ABOUT MEN AND BOYS
In recent years, questions about men and boys have aroused remarkable media interest, public concern and controversy.
In the United States two ‘men’s movements’ gained large, if temporary, followings in the 1990s, one based on new-age therapy, the other on right-wing evangelism. Both raised questions about men’s identity and offered remedies for troubles in men’s lives. In other English-speaking countries such as Australia and Canada, where identity movements have been weaker, there have been vigorous and sometimes bitter public debates about men’s violence, men’s health and boys’ supposed ‘disadvantage’ in education.
There is no doubt about the historical source of these debates. The new feminism of the 1970s not only gave voice to women’s concerns, it challenged all assumptions about the gender system and raised a series of problems about men. Over the decades since, the disturbance in the gender system caused by the women’s movement has been felt by very large numbers of men. A growing minority of men has attempted to grapple with these issues in practice or in the realm of ideas.
Concern with questions about boys and men is now worldwide. Germany has seen pioneering feminist research on men, programs for male youth, and debates on strategies of change for men. There is an active network of researchers on men and masculinity in Scandinavian countries, where the post of Nordic coordinator for men’s studies has recently been created. In 1998 Chile hosted a conference on masculinities in Latin America, which drew researchers and activists from as far apart as Brazil and Nicaragua.
In Japan there have been changes in media images of men, companionate marriages and shared child care, renegotiations of sexuality, and explicit critiques (by men as well as women) of traditional Japanese ideals of masculinity. A new ‘men’s centre’ publishes papers and books exploring new patterns of masculinity and family life. In 1998 the South African feminist journal Agenda published an issue on new directions for men in the democratic transition after apartheid. In 1997 UNESCO sponsored a conference in Norway on the implications of male roles and masculinities for the creation of a culture of peace, which drew participants from all over Europe and some other parts of the world.
Concern with issues about masculinity has not only spread to many countries, but also into many fields. Health services are noticing the relevance of men’s gender to problems such as road accidents, industrial injury, diet, heart disease and, of course, sexually transmitted diseases. Educators are discussing not just the idea of programs for boys, but also the practical details of how to run them. Criminologists have begun to explore why boys and men dominate the crime statistics, and violence prevention programs are taking increasing notice of gender issues.
Questions about men, boys and gender have thus ceased to be a specialist concern of a small group of intellectuals. They have moved into the public arena, and though media attention will wax and wane, there is no reversing that move.
So the intellectual debate on masculinity now has practical consequences. How we understand men and gender, what we believe about masculinity, what we know (or think we know) about the development of boys, may have large effects—for good or ill—in therapy, education, health services, violence prevention, policing, and social services.
It matters, therefore, to get our understanding of these issues straight. We need to know the facts, connect policy debates with the best available research, and use the most effective theories. That is the principle on which this book is written.
Issues about masculinity are important but not easy. They are made no easier by the recent influence of a school of pop psychologists who offer a highly simplified view of the problems of men. Their central idea is that modern men are suffering from a psychological wound, being cut off from the true or deep masculinity that is their heritage. A whole therapeutic movement offers to heal the wound by re-establishing bonds among men, with initiation rituals, retreats etc.
The popularity of books like Iron John by Robert Bly, Fire in the Belly by Sam Keen and Manhood by Bly’s Australian follower Steve Biddulph, suggests that they have tapped into some real problems, at least among the middle-class white men who are their main audience. I think the key point they have realized is the importance of men’s emotional lives—which strikes many in this audience as a revelation, precisely because conventional middle-class western masculinity tends to suppress emotion and deny vulnerability.
To emphasize that men do have emotional troubles, that masculine stereotypes can be damaging, that men suffer from isolation, and that men too can hold hands and cry—this is not a bad thing. Writers like Keen, especially, have eloquent things to say about the distortions of men’s emotional lives, and how they are connected with violence, alienation, and environmental destruction.
But in pop psychology these understandings come at a considerable price. With the aid of the later and crazier works of Carl Jung, this school of thought has constructed a fantasy of the universal ‘deep masculine’, which is as stereotyped as anything in Hollywood (and which is contradicted by actual research, as will be seen throughout this book). Trying to find cross-cultural proof of the deep masculine, Bly and his followers raid non-western cultures for stories and symbols of masculinity which they rip out of context in a startling display of disrespect. The ‘rituals’ invented to fill the void in men’s lives, though they can have an emotional impact, are as authentic as Disney World. Pop psychology itself rests on the authors’ ability to tell persuasive and entertaining stories, not on their grasp of the facts. Some of the ‘cases’ in the American pop psychology literature about men are undoubtedly faked.
But the biggest problem of all in the pop-psychology approach to masculinity is its nostalgia, a persistent belief that solutions to the problems of men can be found by looking backwards. Pop psychology idealizes a pre-industrial past (a mythical one, in fact), when men knew how to be men, women knew how to be mothers, and there was no homosexuality or equal opportunity legislation to muddy the waters. Hence the weird result that pop psychologists’ solution to the current problems of alienation and misunderstanding between men and women is often to argue for more gender segregation.
I was trained as a historian, I love studying the past, and I am confident that the human spirit is enriched by knowing the tumultuous path human society has travelled. But I also know that we cannot solve contemporary problems by nostalgia. We need new and more democratic patterns in gender relations, not re-runs of discredited patriarchies.
THE NEW SOCIAL RESEARCH ON MASCULINITY
To build a more civilized, more survivable, more just world is not a matter of wishful thinking. It is a difficult task, in which all the resources we can gather will be necessary. One of the more important of those resources is knowledge.
In grappling with problems about men, boys, and masculinity we have an important new resource, the social-scientific research on masculinities that has been building up over the past fifteen years or so.
This recent research has a pre-history, which goes back as far as Freud. From the beginning of the twentieth century, psychoanalytic research has shown how adult personality, including one’s sexual orientation and sense of identity, is constructed via conflict-ridden processes of development in which the gender dynamics of families are central (Lewes 1988). Psychoanalytic case studies showed men’s character structures to be internally divided, even contradictory; and showed both masculinity and femininity as the product of psychological compromises, often tense and unstable (Chodorow 1994).
Some researchers—most famously the Frankfurt School in its studies of the ‘authoritarian personality’—grafted a social analysis onto the psychoanalytic base. This work began to trace alternative paths of masculine development and to debate their role as underpinnings of democracy and fascism (Holter 1996). In due course feminist psychoanalysis picked up this form of argument, though focussing on patriarchy rather than class as the structural background (Dinnerstein 1976).
Psychoanalysis, however, was regarded with suspicion by many in the social sciences. Around the mid-century a different framework became more influential. The concept of ‘social role’, which developed in anthropology in the 1930s, became immensely popular as a common language for the social sciences. A social-psychological version of role theory was applied to gender, producing the idea of ‘sex roles’.
Sex roles were understood as patterns of social expectation, norms for the behaviour of men and women, which were transmitted to youth in a process of ‘socialization’. In effect, social behaviour was explained as a massive display of conformity—which somehow seemed appropriate in the 1950s. A great amount of thin paper-and-pencil research was produced around this idea. Nevertheless the idea of a ‘male role’ also led to some intelligent studies of changing gender expectations for men, and difficulties faced by men and boys in conforming to the norms (Hacker 1957).
In the 1970s the ‘sex role’ idea was radicalized by feminism. The idea of gender-as-conformity became an object of dismay rather than celebration. Feminist analysis of how women’s sex role oppressed women soon led to a discussion, among both feminist women and pro-feminist men, of the way men’s sex role oppressed men.
This idea underpinned a burst of writing, even a small social movement, on the theme of men’s liberation as a parallel endeavour to women’s liberation (Pleck & Sawyer 1974). But it led to little new research beyond the existing conventions of paper-and-pencil masculinity/femininity scales. A vague concept of ‘the male role’ or ‘men’s role’ persists in much recent talk and writing, but means little more than stereotypes or norms or even just sex differences.
In the 1980s a third approach to the gender of men matured, sometimes called social constructionism. Its main academic base is in sociology but there are vigorous branches in anthropology, history and media studies. Key intellectual underpinnings are the feminist analysis of gender as a structure of social relations, especially a structure of power relations; sociological concerns with subcultures and issues of marginalization and resistance; and post-structuralist analyses of the making of identities in discourse, and the interplay of gender with race, sexuality, class and nationality.
With ethnographic and life-history methods as key research techniques, in the last two decades there has been a cascade of studies of the social construction of masculinity in particular times and places. The locales include:
a highland community in Papua New Guinea (Herdt 1981);a private school in inter-war England (Heward 1988);Hollywood films after the Vietnam war (Jeffords 1989);a high school in rural Texas (Foley 1990);a clergyman’s family in nineteenth-century England (Tosh 1991);two body-building gyms in California (Klein 1993);a gold mine in South Africa under apartheid (Moodie 1994);an urban police force in the United States (McElhinny 1994);British industrial management (Roper 1994);official debates in colonial India (Sinha 1995);two gay communities in Australia (Dowsett 1996);the US Navy (Barrett 1996);drinking groups in Australian bars (Tomsen 1997);a US corporate office on the verge of a fatal decision (Messerschmidt 1997);garages in an Australian working-class suburb (Walker 1998b).We might think of this as the ‘ethnographic moment’ in masculinity research, in which the specific and the local is in focus. To say this is not to suggest the work lacks awareness of broader issues—Moodie’s research on South African mining, for instance, is a classic study of the interplay of race, class and gender structures. Nor is ethnography, in the strict sense of anthropological field observation, its only method. Life-history studies are almost as common, and there are even some broad statistical surveys, especially in Europe (Holter 1989, Metz-Göckel & Müller 1985). The historical work of course uses archives, private letters, diaries and other documents as its sources.
There is, nevertheless, in most of this work a focus on the construction of masculinity in a specific setting, a concern to document and explain the particular patterns to be found in a definite locale.
The ethnographic moment brought a much-needed gust of realism to debates on men and masculinity, a corrective to the abstractions of role theory. This social research moved in a very different direction from the trend in popular culture at the same time, where vague discussions of men’s sex roles were giving way to the mystical generalities of the ‘mythopoetic’ movement and the extreme simplifications of religious revivalism.
KEY CONCLUSIONS OF RECENT RESEARCH
Though the rich detail of individual historical and field studies defies easy summary, certain empirical conclusions emerge from this body of research as a whole, which have more than local significance. I will present them here, as a general introduction to the field. These conclusions as a group are relevant to many practical problems, so I will refer back to this summary in a number of later chapters.
Multiple masculinities
It is clear from the new social research as a whole that there is no one pattern of masculinity that is found everywhere. We need to speak of ‘masculinities’, not masculinity. Different cultures, and different periods of history, construct gender differently.
There is now massive proof of this fact in comparative studies, especially ethnographies (e.g. Cornwall & Lindisfarne 1994). Striking differences exist, for instance, in the relationship of homosexual practice to dominant forms of masculinity. Some societies treat homosexual practices as a regular part of the making of masculinity (Herdt 1984); others regard homosexuality as incompatible with true masculinity.
We might therefore expect that in multicultural societies there will be multiple definitions and dynamics of masculinity. This proves to be true. The importance of ethnicity in the construction of masculinity is emerging strongly in recent work (e.g. Hondagneu-Sotelo & Messner 1994 [USA], Poynting et al. 1998 [Australia], Tillner 1997 [Austria]).
Diversity is not just a matter of difference between communities. Diversity also exists within a given setting. Within the one school, or workplace, or ethnic group, there will be different ways of enacting manhood, different ways of learning to be a man, different conceptions of the self and different ways of using a male body. This is particularly well documented in research on schools (Foley 1990), but can also be observed in workplaces (Messerschmidt 1997) and the military (Barrett 1996).
Hierarchy and hegemony
Different masculinities do not sit side-by-side like dishes on a smorgasbord. There are definite social relations between them. Especially, there are relations of hierarchy, for some masculinities are dominant while others are subordinated or marginalized.
In most of the situations that have been closely studied, there is some hegemonic form of masculinity—the most honoured or desired. For Western popular culture, this is extensively documented in research on media representations of masculinity (McKay & Huber 1992).
The hegemonic form need not be the most common form of masculinity, let alone the most comfortable. Indeed many men live in a state of some tension with, or distance from, the hegemonic masculinity of their culture or community. Other men, such as sporting heroes, are taken as exemplars of hegemonic masculinity and are required to live up to it strenuously—at what may be severe cost, in terms of injury, ill health, and other constraints on life (Messner 1992). The dominance of hegemonic masculinity over other forms may be quiet and implicit, but may also be vehement and violent, as in the case of homophobic violence (Herek & Berrill 1992).
Collective masculinities
The patterns of conduct our society defines as masculine may be seen in the lives of individuals, but they also have an existence beyond the individual. Masculinities are defined collectively in culture, and are sustained in institutions. This fact was visible in Cockburn’s (1983) pioneering research on the informal workplace culture of printing workers, and has been confirmed over and over since.
Institutions may construct multiple masculinities and define relationships between them. Barrett’s (1996) illuminating study of the ‘organizational construction’ of hegemonic masculinity in the US Navy shows different forms in the different sub-branches of the one military organization.
This collective process of constructing and enacting masculinities can be traced in an enormous range of settings, from the face-to-face interactions in the classrooms and playgrounds of an elementary school (Thorne 1993) to the august public institutions of imperial Britain at the height of world power (Hearn 1992). In different historical circumstances, of course, different institutions will be more or less prominent in the construction of masculinity. The institutions of competitive sport seem peculiarly important for contemporary western masculinities (Whitson 1990).
Bodies as arenas
Men’s bodies do not determine the patterns of masculinity, as biological essentialism and pop psychology would have it. Men’s bodies are addressed, defined and disciplined (as in sport: Theberge 1991), and given outlets and pleasures, by the gender order of society.
But men’s bodies are not blank slates. The enactment of masculinity reaches certain limits, for instance in the destruction of the industrial worker’s body (Donaldson 1991). Masculine conduct combined with a female body is felt to be anomalous or transgressive, like feminine conduct combined with a male body. Research on gender crossing (Bolin 1988) shows that a lot of work must be done to sustain an anomalous gender.
Gender is the way bodies are drawn into history; bodies are arenas for the making of gender patterns. This was a point underplayed by ‘male role’ discussions, and is underplayed even in some of the more recent research. It is important, then, to register the importance of such processes as violence (Tomsen 1997) and body culture (Klein 1993) in the construction and politics of masculinities.
Active construction
Masculinities are neither programmed in our genes, nor fixed by social structure, prior to social interaction. They come into existence as people act. They are actively produced, using the resources and strategies available in a given social setting.
Thus, the exemplary masculinities of sports professionals are not a product of passive disciplining. As Messner (1992) shows, they result from a sustained, active engagement with the demands of the institutional setting, even to the point of serious bodily damage from ‘playing hurt’ and accumulated stress. With boys learning masculinities, much of what was previously taken as ‘socialization’ appears, in detailed studies of schools (Thorne 1993, Walker 1988), as the outcome of intricate and intense manoeuvering in peer groups, classes and adult—child relationships.
Walker (1998a, 1998b), in a study of young working-class men and car culture, gives a striking example of the collective construction of masculinities in adult peer groups. The friendship groups not only draw lines to fend off women’s intrusion into masculine social space, but draw in a whole technology as part of the definition of masculinity.
Internal complexity and contradiction
One of the key reasons why masculinities are not fixed is that they are not homogeneous, simple states of being. Close-focus research on masculinities commonly identifies contradictory desires and conduct. A striking example, in Klein’s (1993) study of bodybuilders, is the conflict between the heterosexual definition of hegemonic masculinity and the homosexual practice through which some bodybuilders finance the making of an exemplary body.
Psychoanalytic research on men has long been aware of contradictory desires and conduct, though the emphasis on this point has fluctuated. Recent psychoanalytic writing (Chodorow 1994, Lewes 1988) has laid some emphasis on the conflicts and emotional compromises within both hegemonic and subordinated forms of masculinity. Life-history research influenced by existential psychoanalysis (Connell 1995) has similarly traced contradictory projects and commitments within particular forms of masculinity.
In Chapter 5, I document some contradictions within the exemplary masculinity of a professional sportsman. Tomsen (1998) points to another example, the ambivalence in anti-gay violence, which helps to make such violence a systemic feature of contemporary Western life, not just a matter of individual pathology. Poynting et al. (1998) describe, for an ethnic minority, the contradiction between young men’s claim to authority and their experience of subordination under the pressure of racism. Masculinities are often in tension, within and without. It seems likely that such tensions are important sources of change.
Dynamics
There is abundant evidence that masculinities do change. Masculinities are created in specific historical circumstances and, as those circumstances change, the gender practices can be contested and reconstructed. Heward (1988) shows the changing gender regime of a boys’ school responding to the changed economic and social strategies of the families in its clientele. Roper (1994) shows the displacement of a production-oriented masculinity among engineering managers by new financially oriented generic managers.
Since the 1970s the reconstruction of masculinities has been pursued as a conscious politics. Schwalbe’s (1996) close examination of an American mythopoetic group shows the complexity of the practice and the limits of the reconstruction. In a very different context, a conscious reconstruction of gender practices is now on the agenda in southern Africa (Morrell 1998).
Yet the gender order does not blow away at a breath. Donaldson’s (1998) study of ruling-class men shows a major reason why—the persistence of power and wealth, and the active defence of privilege. The eight ‘men’s movements’ which Messner (1997) has traced in the United States have different, and sometimes sharply conflicting, agendas for the remaking of masculinity. The historical process around masculinities is a process of struggle in which, ultimately, large resources are at stake.
These emerging conclusions represent a major advance over earlier understandings of masculinity. They are, I think, the necessary starting point for all future work on problems about masculinity.
Nevertheless there are limits to what has been accomplished, and we still need to move forward. The descriptive work on masculinities must be thought through conceptually, and linked to a workable theory of gender. I will attempt this in Chapter 2, which discusses theories of masculinity and proposes a research agenda. A key argument is that the ‘ethnographic moment’ in masculinity research, just reviewed, needs to be supplemented by work on a larger scale. This problem is taken up in Chapters 3 and 4, which address issues about masculinities on the scale of world society.
The studies summarized in Chapter 1 represent important gains over earlier, mostly speculative, discussions of men and gender. But to say this is not to suggest the new work is free of doubt or controversy.
Indeed several writers have recently emphasized the problems. Hearn (1996) has raised doubts about the usefulness of the concept of ‘masculinities’, and more recently (1998b) has spelt out the very diverse, and to some degree incompatible, positions that have been adopted in men’s theorizing of men. Petersen (1998) has charged men’s studies with epistemological naivety, narrow-mindedness and lack of concern with power. Clatterbaugh (1998), working through definitions of ‘masculinity’, has found them mostly vague, circular, inconsistent, or in other ways unsatisfactory.
While some degree of inconsistency is not a bad thing in a rapidly growing field—as this has been in the last ten years—it is also important to debate criticisms and try to improve the theoretical frameworks that we have. In this chapter I will look at some of the currently influential ways of thinking about men, gender and masculinities. I will develop the approach I think most helpful, and suggest the most promising directions for research and debate.
CURRENT DEBATE: CONCEPTS OF GENDER AND APPROACHES TO MASCULINITY
Hearn and Clatterbaugh are undoubtedly right: there are real difficulties in defining ‘masculinity’ or ‘masculinities’. These terms are certainly used in inconsistent ways by different authors. They are often used in ways that imply a simplified and static notion of identity, or rest on a simplified and unrealistic notion of difference between men and women. Social science has put a lot of effort into mapping masculinities as actual patterns of conduct or representation. But in the language of the mythopoetic movement, ‘masculinity’ stood for an ideal existence of men, or a deep essence within men, set against the disappointing empirical reality—and this is a usage that seems to have had more resonance outside the academy.
Faced with difficulties in definition, we can abandon the field. Hearn and Clatterbaugh both, in a sense, wish to do this, because they both think the real object of concern is something else—‘men’. If, as Clatterbaugh (1998, p. 41) puts it, ‘talking about men seems to be what we want to do’, why bother to introduce the muddy concept of ‘masculinities’ at all?
There is, I think, a good answer to this question. Why would we talk about ‘men’ in the first place? To talk at all about a group called ‘men’ presupposes a distinction from and relation with another group, ‘women’. That is to say, it presupposes an account of gender. And whichever conceptual language we use, we need some way of talking about men’s and women’s involvement in that domain of gender. We need some way of naming conduct which is oriented to or shaped by that domain, as distinct from conduct related to other patterns in social life.
Unless we subside into defining masculinity as equivalent to men, we must acknowledge that sometimes masculine conduct or masculine identity goes together with a female body. It is actually very common for a (biological) man to have elements of ‘feminine’ identity, desire and patterns of conduct. This might be expected, if only from the fact that the upbringing of young children is, in our society’s division of labour, mainly done by women. Without concepts such as ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ we would be unable to talk about the questions of gender ambiguity that have been so important in recent cultural studies, or about the contradictions in personality that are so important in psychoanalysis. If we give up such terms, we merely create a need for other gender concepts that perform the same tasks.
And of course, we might want to talk about a lot more than ‘men’. We might want to talk about democracy in gender relations, the many-layered resistances to equality, and how to form alliances to move towards it. We might want to talk about desire, its intractabilities, complexities and reversals. We might want to talk about work and its relation to consciousness, or about education and its vicissitudes. In all these cases we will need concepts that go beyond the categories of ‘men’ and ‘women’ to the many forms of practice through which they are involved in the world of gender.
There is, then, a need for concepts that name patterns of gender practice, not just groups of people. But the ambiguity of current concepts of ‘masculinity’ remains of interest. It is, surely, one marker of the current cultural flux in gender relations. To use the conceptual language I suggest below, the difficulty in formulating widely acceptable definitions of masculinity is one sign of the crisis tendencies in gender relations which have in a number of ways destabilized the situation of men.
To understand ‘men’ or ‘masculinity’ we must first have some idea of how to understand gender. There is, of course, a great deal of assistance available here. Stimulated by the new feminism, research on questions of gender has increased tremendously in volume over the last generation, and has become conceptually more profound. Gender research offers a critique of all existing fields of social science as well as exploring new subject matter. And it has reshaped the relation between social-scientific knowledge and social practice.
These changes have all depended on the recognition of the profoundly social character of gender. Gender is far more than an individual trait somehow connected with bodily difference, like red hair or left-handedness. With gender, we are dealing with a complex, and powerfully effective, domain of social practice.
But how is this domain to be understood? In recent decades, the two most politically influential accounts of gender are accounts that we know to be wrong.
The first is the theory of ‘sex roles’. Role theory explains gender patterns by appealing to the social expectations that define proper behaviour for women and for men. Exposing the irrationality of these norms, or their oppressive effects, has been a key to the popular success of feminism in fields like girls’ education. In the school system this approach has underpinned an impressive growth of special programs to expand girls’ options (Yates 1993).
Yet the intellectual weaknesses of sex-role theory are well understood. A theory based on ‘expectations’ or norms gives no grasp on issues of power, violence, or material inequality. It misses the complexities within femininity and masculinity, and it offers very limited strategies of change. Even in a field like education, role theory offered no protection against the backlash that emerged in the 1990s, which proposed an expansion of special programs for boys.
The second unsatisfactory account, which I call ‘categorical theory’, treats women and men as pre-formed categories. Biological essentialism is one version of this, but there are many writings about gender which are categorical without being biological-reductionist. The focus in this approach to gender is on some relationship between the categories which is external to their constitution as categories.
This is the concept of gender underlying most pop psychologies of masculinity, and also the huge literature of quantitative ‘sex difference’ research. It is not necessarily a conservative view. It is, for instance, the logical structure underlying most discussions of Equal Employment Opportunity (based on statistics contrasting men’s employment with women’s employment). It is also found in much of the discussion of sexual harassment and gender violence.
The categorical approach more readily addresses issues of power than sex-role theory did. But categorical theory too has difficulty grasping the complexities of gender, such as gendered violence within either of the two main categories (e.g. violence against gays). It has had little use for industrial politics and misses such issues as the importance of unionism for working-class women. And it readily leads to ethnocentric generalizations about women and men, which miss the importance of the global structures of exploitation and underdevelopment.
If role theory and categoricalism are unsatisfactory, what remains? Two significant alternatives can be found in recent debates: post-structuralist and materialist. By contrast to categoricalism, the issues of complexity, ambiguity and fluidity are central themes in post-structuralist and post-modernist theories of gender. Though these themes are not logically necessary consequences of a concern with discourse, in practice they have gone together. Perhaps writers who emphasized that gender was discursively constructed needed at the start to reject both biological categoricalism and concepts of fixed psychological identity (e.g. Hollway 1984).
Under the influence of Foucault, a school of gender researchers has studied how discourses ranging from medicine to fashion have classified, represented and helped to control human bodies, emphasizing how systems of knowledge function as part of an apparatus of power. The approach has been particularly fruitful in relation to sport, where the interweaving of cultural images of masculinity with the management and training of bodies has been powerfully effective (Rowe & McKay 1998).
Foucault’s work on power/knowledge is employed by Petersen (1998) for a tilt at the whole basis of research and analysis on masculinity. Implausibly claiming that masculinity research neglects power (which is, in fact, a central theme in the field), Petersen more accurately argues that much of the discussion of masculinity smuggles in a kind of gender-essentialism, while conversely those arguments that are anti-essentialist have difficulty in conceptualizing the relationship between bodies and social processes. But what alternative can be found? What Petersen commends as ‘a recent shift in our theoretical understanding of the world’ is actually a very specific school of cultural theory with well-recognized weaknesses in gender analysis. Foucault had no gender theory at all, though others have built gender analyses using some of his ideas. Butler (1990), the main proponent of a ‘performative’ account of gender, is strikingly unable to account for work, child care, institutional life, violence, resistance (except as individual choice), and material inequality. These are not trivial aspects of gender.
But a concern with the discursive construction of gender can also point in directions other than the Foucauldian focus on the subjection of bodies. In the innovative educational work of Davies (1993), for instance, the way people are positioned within discourses of gender is something that children in school can learn about, and can learn to change. It is possible to teach this skill, to develop classroom exercises where it becomes visible and discussable. Children can, in effect, be post-structuralists. In quite practical ways Davies shows how both boys and girls can move into and out of a masculine identity or subject position.
Recognizing this possibility raises important questions about when, and why, people hold on to a certain subject position, adopt or reject the possibility of movement. This issue has become important in recent discussion of boys’ education, especially around boys’ involvement in humanities (Martino 1994). Certain kinds of school subject matter are liable to be rejected because the boys associate them with femininity, wimpishness or being homosexual. We cannot get far with such questions without asking questions about boys’ and men’s interests in maintaining a particular status quo in gender arrangements and a particular position within them.
The importance of material interests in accounting for men’s gender conduct is forcibly argued by McMahon (1999) in a brilliant critique of journalistic, psychological and academic talk about the ‘new man’ and the ‘new father’. Indeed McMahon suggests that the absence of any discussion of interests in most of this literature is itself an ideological move favouring men—and a move that has parallels in other structures of inequality. To recognize the interests that men have in patriarchal society is not necessarily to fall back into categoricalism. McMahon avoids this trap by emphasizing how the social being of men is historically produced—in large measure, by the labour of women.
Though one could hardly speak of a ‘school’ comparable to post-structuralism, it is noticeable that the question of material interests and material practices has emerged in several recent contributions. Godenzi (2000), one of the few people to have offered a serious economic analysis of masculine practices, points to the diverse and sometimes indirect strategies by which men protect their interests in the face of challenges from women. Hearn (1996), like McMahon, emphasizes the material interests at play in gender practice, and raises the politically vital question of what mechanisms bind men together as a group. Hearn’s (1998a) research on men’s violence to women is an important example of how material practices—indeed, practices addressed to bodies—can be linked to the construction of meaning, the making of ideology.
But of all materialist analyses of men and masculinity, the most original and far-reaching is the work of Holter (1995, 1997), unfortunately still little known outside Scandinavia. Holter’s full argument is much too complex to present here, but a key point is that masculinity and femininity are not simple opposites, are not even initially constituted as a gender opposition—as in role theory, categoricalism and most discursive accounts of gender. Rather, gender emerges as an
expression of the whole relationship between the spheres of production and reproduction. Industrial capitalism itself ‘engendered’ its opposite, the world of domesticity as against the world of wage work, and women as the other of men. Modern gender is remarkable for its ability to absorb just about any social contradiction, shedding any concrete limitation and particularity. Thereby it emerges as a highly abstract system, a value system, yet posited as value’s opposite . . .
In this view, gender articulates a basic class relationship, inherent in the wage labour relationship itself. The ‘one’ of wage labour is work, and the one doing it is a he. The ‘other’ is free time, freedom, not as universal freedom, but as posited by the first, relative to work. And the one making this free time possible, once more, is also positioned very specifically as against the first. Many traits of femininity may be interpreted on this background—woman as the larger ground, the larger ideal being, beyond work, related to pure consumption and a superior kind of freedom . . . (Holter 1995, p. 102).
Holter’s ‘social forms analysis’ gives an account of gender, masculinity and femininity, as historically specific features of social life in modernity. They arise not from a timeless dichotomy of bodies but from the specific course of development of the large-scale structures of society. Holter is able to show that the association of men with wage labour and women with domesticity is neither biologically determined nor arbitrary. He is able to show how women come to be seen as bearers of gender, not just of femininity. We see how masculinity is in a certain sense an escape from gender, how men have a struggle to re-enter the gender institution of the family as full participants. Thus Holter can show why the political project of gender reform constantly strikes difficulties around the division of labour and institutional spheres.
Holter’s argument is striking in its emphasis on institutions— the family and the workplace under industrial capitalism—as keys to the problems of gender. I am convinced he is right in this view, though I think his analysis suffers from being Eurocentric. The fact that capitalism is a global system, is not just industrialism but is also imperialism (see Chapter 3), has not yet become significant in Holter’s analysis. But it is not hard to see how that connection could be made, and I think that will be an important basis of the next generation of theory.
Research on masculinities has sometimes been criticized for a focus on fixed identities, or for a presumption of stability in masculinity. I do not find this criticism a very compelling one. Research on the social construction of masculinities has placed a good deal of emphasis on the uncertainties, difficulties, and contradictions of the process (Messner 1992, Thorne 1993, and Chapters 5 and 6). Whether the outcomes are stable or unstable, mostly fluid or mostly fixed, is surely an empirical question, not one to be settled in advance by theory.
There are some cases, both in research and in practice (e.g. in anti-violence work), where patterns of masculinity are quite tough and resistant to change. There are other situations where they are unstable, or where commitment to a gender position is negotiable—which educators such as Davies and Martino make use of in their classroom work. Investigating the circumstances where gender patterns are less or more open to change seems an important task for research. It is the point of the theoretical discussion of crisis tendencies in gender relations.
A more convincing criticism has been directed at the concept of ‘hegemonic masculinity’, at least in some of its uses. Critics have pointed out a tendency to reify this term, so that it becomes effectively a fixed character type, something like the once-famous ‘Type A personality’. Given this tendency, all the objectionable things men do—rape, assault, environmental degradation, dog-eat-dog business practices, etc.—can be loaded into the bag of ‘hegemonic masculinity’. And the more extreme this image becomes, the less it has to be owned by the majority of men.
To put it more formally, there is a tendency in many discussions towards a psychologization of problems arising from gender relations, and a drift away from concern with institutions, power relations, and social inequalities. It may be helpful to recall that the concept of hegemony was introduced into discussions of masculinity to deal with relational issues—most importantly, the connections between the differences and hierarchies among men, and the relations between men and women (e.g. Connell 1983, Kimmel 1987).
THE GENDER RELATIONS APPROACH
The problems of role theory, categoricalism and more recently post-structuralism have led a number of theorists towards a relational account of gender. This gives us a way of understanding the different dimensions or structures of gender, the relation between bodies and society, and the patterning or configuration of gender.
Structures
In relational approaches, gender is seen as a way in which social practice is organized, whether in personal life, interpersonal interaction, or on the larger scale. It is common to refer to the patterning in social relations as ‘structure’, so the relational approach is sometimes summarized by describing gender as a social structure.
But as soon as one looks at the detail of interactions and institutions, it is clear that gender is not just one structure. For instance, different patterns emerge in emotional relationships from those that can be seen in economic relationships. Accordingly it has become familiar to identify multiple structures. In a previous book (Connell 1987) I suggested that the analysis of gender had to recognize at least three structures: the division of labour, power relations, and relations of emotional attachment or cathexis. Walby’s (1990) analysis of modern patriarchy identifies six structures: the patriarchal mode of production, patriarchal relations in paid work, patriarchal relations in the state, male violence, patriarchal relations in sexuality, and patriarchal relations in cultural institutions.
Walby’s distinctions seem uneven. It is difficult to deny that household production and paid employment are closely linked, and it seems more reasonable to treat them as part of the one structure of economic relations. Similarly, power in the state is continuous with power expressed as ‘male violence’, not least in war. But there seems a better case for recognizing the structure of relations in communication and culture as irreducible to the others.
Accordingly, I suggest a four-fold model of the structure of gender relations, which is used throughout this book:
Power relations The main axis of power in the contemporary European/US gender order is the overall subordination of women and dominance of men—the structure that women’s liberation named ‘patriarchy’. This general structure exists despite many local reversals (e.g. woman-headed households, female teachers with male students). It persists despite resistance of many kinds, now articulated in feminism and in gay and lesbian movements. These reversals and resistances mean a continuing problem of legitimacy for patriarchy, a problem which has been very effectively used by liberal feminism in rights-based campaigns (e.g. for equal employment opportunity).
Production relations (division of labour) Gender divisions of labour are familiar in the form of task allocations, sometimes reaching extraordinarily fine detail. In the English village studied by Hunt (1980), it was customary for women to wash the inside of windows, men to wash the outside.
Equal attention should be paid to the economic consequences of gender divisions of labour, specifically the benefits accruing to men from unequal shares of the products of social labour. This may be called the patriarchal dividend.
This dividend is most often discussed in terms of unequal wage rates, but attention should also be paid to the gendered character of capital. A capitalist economy that operates through a gender division of labour is, necessarily, a gendered accumulation process. So it is not a statistical accident, but a part of the social construction of masculinity, that men and not women control the major corporations and the great private fortunes. Implausible as it sounds, the accumulation of wealth has become firmly linked to the reproductive arena, through the social relations of gender.
Cathexis (emotional relations) Desire is so often seen as natural that it is commonly excluded from social theory. Emotion is, however, increasingly seen as an important topic for social theory (Barbalet 1998). When we consider desire in Freudian terms, as emotional energy being attached to an object, its gendered character is clear. This is true both for heterosexual and homosexual desire. The practices that shape and realize desire are thus an aspect of the gender order.
Accordingly we can ask political questions about the relationships involved: whether they are consensual or coercive, whether pleasure is equally given and received. In feminist analyses of sexuality these have become sharp questions about the connection of heterosexuality to men’s position of social dominance (e.g. Buchbinder et al. 1987).
Symbolism The process of communication is increasingly recognized as a vital element of social processes. The symbolic structures called into play in communication—grammatical and syntactic rules, visual and sound vocabularies etc.—are important sites of gender practice. For instance, we often understand gender differences through symbolic oppositions rather than through images of gradation, and this reinforces belief in gender dichotomy.
Gender subordination may be reproduced through subtle and not-so-subtle linguistic practices, such as addressing women by titles that define them through their marital relationships to men. The symbolic presentation of gender through dress, makeup, body culture, gesture, tone of voice etc. is an important part of the everyday experience of gender. As feminist dress reformers knew (Wilson 1985), this presentation can be a locus of political struggle and social change.
Bodies and gender
How do we know that these structures are all part of the same thing, ‘gender’? They are all linked by a specific involvement with bodies. In gender processes, the everyday conduct of life is organized in relation to a reproductive arena, defined by the bodily structures and processes of human reproduction. This arena includes sexual arousal and intercourse, childbirth and infant care, bodily sex difference and similarity.
The relationship of bodies to social processes is difficult to analyze, constantly a sore point for theory. I think this is because a logically complex pattern of practice is involved, where bodies are both agents and objects of practice.
Such body-reflexive practices are not internal to the individual. They involve social relations and symbolism; they may well involve large-scale social institutions. Through body-reflexive practices, more than individual lives are formed: a social world is formed.
Through body-reflexive practices, bodies are addressed by social process and drawn into history, without ceasing to be bodies. They do not turn into symbols, signs, or positions in discourse. Their materiality (including material capacities to engender, to give birth, to give milk, to menstruate, to open, to penetrate, to ejaculate) is not erased, it continues to matter. The social process of gender includes childbirth and child care, youth and aging, the pleasures of sport and sex, labour, injury, death from AIDS and the struggle to live with AIDS.
