Gender and Masculinity: White Masculinity

Social Constructions of White Masculinity

Ideas about gender and masculinity vary over time and across cultures. For instance, although tights and heels were considered masculine in 17th-century France, this fashion would not uphold 21st-century expectations of masculinity. Gender identity is impacted by sociopolitical, cultural, and economic factors, including ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, transgender status, and class status. Gender refers to the complex web of social meanings—qualities like “pretty,” “tough,” and “reckless”—that are attached to biological sex. This process gets started early, sometimes before birth. When parents decide on decorating a baby's nursery in pink or blue or when they choose a baseball theme for baby-shower invitations instead of ballerinas, the process of gender differentiation is constructed and reinforced. Even though culture constantly creates and identifies gender roles, we do not tend to think about it if we are not taught to recognize the social dimensions of gender construction. Likewise, because “whiteness” is a position of relative power, it is often a default setting that is not questioned.

Masculinity is historically contingent, but so is the linking of gender expectations and stereotypes to ethnicity and class. References to the generic term masculinity often involve the invalid or unspoken assumption that when we say “men” we are talking about white, heterosexual, American, able-bodied, and middle-class males. This unexamined default setting reinforces privilege by making entire groups of men invisible. We often also assume that masculinity equals dominance and aggression, yet this invokes unrealistic expectations that men are by nature stoic, unemotional, aggressive, and interpersonally detached.

Popular culture is a powerful source of the stories we are taught about masculinity. Contemporary social meanings about white masculinity are conveyed through various media outlets, such as video games, sports, magazines, pornography, advertising, and music videos. The image of working-class white men as bumbling idiots or as hyperaggressive or criminal is a routine component of movie lines and sitcom plots. Sports culture often promotes the stereotypes of dominant masculinity, especially by establishing masculinity as distinct and different from gay men and all women. At the same time that these media constructs reinforce hegemonic ideology, such images can restrict white masculinity to what is called the Man Box.

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