Ethnicity

Negotiating Ethnicity and Masculinity

Competing ethnic masculinities generally occur in cultures where immigrant groups are present. The United States is a particular example because of its lack of a single original culture. Ethnic conflicts also occur when ethnically diverse (and previously autonomous) groups are brought together under the control of a dominating group, as occurred in the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia.

A major concern of masculinity is the notion of dominance, with ethnic masculinity frequently operating as the effort to maintain or achieve power. Ethnic prejudices often develop as different ethnic groups perceive the ethnic masculinities of others as actual or potential threats to their control. The construction of a hegemonic masculinity creates differences that legitimize the masculine privileges and power of a socially dominant group over marginalized groups. This illusion of a superior masculinity possessed by the group in power may work to deny, confine, and erase alternate ethnic masculinities. Dominance becomes a continual negotiation of identities, a process of constructing “the other” (a primitive, unknowable, alien masculinity that through its alleged difference and cultural inferiority defines and justifies the position of the dominant group) in an oppositional, hierarchical relation. Ironically, though this desire for dominance may divide men, unions are most likely to occur between ethnically diverse masculine groups when they perceive a shared threat, whether it be from hostile nations, women, “lesser” men, or challenges to physical or economic survival. In these alliances, a few differences will come to be perceived as assets that can benefit all the allied groups, and the valued attributes of one masculine group might even be emulated by the others, while some differences may be replaced, de-emphasized, or eliminated.

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