Men's Studies

Generally described as the critical analysis of men and masculinities, men's studies emerged as a legitimate field of academic inquiry in the early 1990s. Although men's studies has not yet been widely adopted as a major program at most American colleges and universities, its increasing incorporation and success suggests a growing tendency to rethink the meaning of masculinity in the United States.

Like women's studies, its more widely accepted sister discipline, men's studies is based on the premise that society views all human beings through a gendered lens—a distortion that has traditionally resulted in the general privileging of men over women. While recognizing the inequality of this history, contemporary men's studies also examines aspects of patriarchy not often broached during discussions of gender, particularly the complex, contradictory and at times oppressive cloak of masculinity men are expected to assume. Of highest priority within the discipline is the study of men as unique gendered beings, rather than as the paradigm for generic human existence. As such, men's studies scholars seek to deconstruct terms such as mankind that imply a homogenous worldview and experience shared by men and women of varying age, race, and socioeconomic status.

Men's studies first emerged during the late 1960s and the 1970s as a response, in part, to the second wave of American feminism. Scholarship within the discipline was also influenced by the widespread disillusionment over the Vietnam War, a cynicism that sparked a questioning of patriarchal power structures, traditional male roles, and the male behavioral expectations encouraged by World War II and the Cold War. Courses focusing on men and masculinities began appearing at some of the nation's more liberal institutions in the mid-1970s. The University of California at Berkeley led the way by incorporating the topic into its curriculum in 1976.

Since that time, men's studies scholarship has gone through two discernable waves. The first, running roughly from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, was concerned primarily with the lived experience of white middle-class men. Much important scholarship resulted from this first wave, most notably Joseph Pleck's The Myth of Masculinity (1981) and Peter Filene's Him/Her/Self: Sex Roles in Modern America (1986). The establishment and rapid growth of the field were indicated first by the appearance and then by the expansion of Eugene August's 1985 annotated bibliography Men's Studies. Originally including about six hundred entries, the book contained over one thousand when it was updated as The New Men's Studies less than a decade later. The field's early indebtedness to women's studies and feminist thought was apparent in the theories and observations of Judith Butler, Carol Gilligan, and Barbara Ehrenreich, who produced significant scholarship during this time period.

By the late 1980s, the same rethinking of American masculinity that had produced men's studies had also sparked the emergence of four major men's movements—the profeminist movement, the Promise Keepers, the men's rights movement, and the mythopoetic men's movement. Although the academic examination of men and masculinity is most commonly derived from a profeminist perspective, popular men's studies books tend to focus on the mythopoetic movement and the topics of men's rights, therefore distorting the public's perception of the discipline. For example, mythopoetic men are commonly characterized as New Age fanatics who beat drums and read poetry. Such images have negatively influenced both popular and academic attitudes toward men's studies, although they have had little influence on the academic study of men and masculinities.

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