Masculinity Studies

Overview

Masculinity studies grew, in large part, out of accomplishments of the feminist movement and the growth of women studies. For most of recorded history, few questioned conceptions of masculinity, manhood, maleness, or the category male. In the context of shifting social relations that feminism helped to produce and with theories from feminist scholarship on women, gender, sexuality, and identity, interest in exploring masculinity grew. Although there have always been writings about men as the subject, it has been only in the past 20 to 30 years that male gender and masculinity have become a subject of disciplinary study and investigation.

Many countries have seen considerable social change in the past 40 to 50 years that has challenged the stability and privilege of men and male identity, precipitating what some have called a “crisis of masculinity.” The combination of relatively greater privilege for women and people of color in the United States, shifting economic resources away from many men globally, decreased means of obtaining economic resources, and movement away from the two-parent nuclear family have left many men wondering about male identity and traditional male roles, such as leader, moneymaker, and head of the family.

Masculinity studies covers these issues from identity and how masculinity has been constructed both historically and currently to the impact of race, equality with women, economics, and globalization on male roles. Over the past 30 years, many popular culture books and academic texts have been published [Page 513]on men and masculinities. In 1998, Men and Masculinities, a journal devoted to masculinity studies, began quarterly publication.

Masculinity studies often has an explicit political agenda. While work in this area focuses on men, much of the work is explicitly concerned about systematic or institutional issues related to (a) masculinity and relationships between men and among men and women and (b) more equal and less oppressive and violent societies, both locally and globally.

Male Gender Norms

One significant area of focus is examining masculinity norms in diverse contexts, such as work settings, ethnic groups, historical times, the media, and different cultures. Feminists were the first to question the male norm, criticizing it as the gender norm against which women are measured. Increasingly, scholars have begun to question this norm as an unhealthy and unrealistic male “ideal” that is neither natural nor singular for men.

In his book Manhood in America, Michael Kimmel tracks ideal white American masculinity and other forms of masculinity from the late 1770s. Manhood in the United States has been primarily an effort to achieve male status as powerful, strong, rich, and successful. How that was done depended on the time in history. For example, in the 1800s, land ownership or possession of a trade could provide access to ideal manhood. Later, success in industry and accumulation of capital were used to fulfill the social definition of the ideal.

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