Abstract
Care relations force us to confront inherent human vulnerabilities that stand in contradiction to the power and privileges associated with hegemonic masculinity. This tension serves as Hanlon’s inspiration, as he explores the relationship between care, identity, and masculinity. Masculinities, Care and Equality aims to initiate a conversation about how men value care, assign meaning to care, and define their masculinity in relation to care. Hanlon’s call for masculinity studies to explore care in men’s lives is likely to resonate with a wide audience of gender scholars who are familiar with the material consequences of gendered divisions of labor but less informed of men’s subjective relationships to care.
Hanlon argues that hegemonic masculinities have written out care from men’s lives, and the book aims to build a pathway toward “affective equality,” which would allow men to enjoy the emotional rewards of providing care as they share its burdens. Hanlon emphasizes the emotional dimensions of care throughout the book, beginning with an overview of gendered care practices that depicts care as a complex landscape of emotion, love, work, and obligation. Hanlon defines care as distinct from other forms of emotional labor because of its focus on nurturing the well-being of others. Care and nurture signify empathy, warmth, vulnerability, and dependency, all of which are constructed as feminine. As masculinity is constructed in opposition to femininity, the accomplishment of hegemonic masculinity requires that men operate care-free lives focused on paid work and productivity.
Hanlon’s original data, consisting of thirty-one in-depth interviews with Irish men, ground his connections between men’s emotional lives, their definitions of masculinity, and their relationships to care. Through these interviews, Hanlon first traces the affective relations embedded in masculine hierarchies. Doing dominance means avoiding emotional engagement and denying weakness, thus limiting men’s access to love and care. Hanlon also finds that men recognize the physical and emotional demands of care, even as they define care as feminine. Performing care work would mean taking on a subordinated, feminized identity, so men deploy an individualistic “free choice” ideology and describe themselves as inadequate, incompetent, or uninterested nurturers to avoid care. Hanlon also identifies a discursive strategy in which some men frame breadwinning as an expression of care, thus allowing men to practice traditional divisions of labor while conforming to normative ideals of gender equality. Overall, men’s resistance to care is rationalized through four distinct narratives: performing care is either unnatural, dysfunctional to social order, economically impractical, or abnormal according to prevailing social conventions. Hanlon emphasizes the ways in which men and society overall can benefit from a more equal distribution of care, and the book gives special attention to men who do not conform to gendered patterns of caring, including “sharers,” “carers,” and father’s rights advocates, each of whom offer alternative discourses of emotion and care in men’s lives.
Masculinities, Care and Equality offers an excellent introduction to understanding care in men’s lives, but it is not without flaws. The author implicitly defines care throughout the text as unpaid labor that occurs within families, and in doing so, he often romanticizes the emotional rewards and bonds that can result from performing care work. The rewards and burdens of care work vary widely between paid and unpaid contexts, and a more in-depth analysis of men’s relationship to paid care work could have interesting implications for affective equality and the tension men feel between imperatives of paid labor and provisions of care at home. By focusing on unpaid labor within families, the author also underemphasizes the racial and international inequalities that characterize care work in Western societies. While the author acknowledges that care is distributed along multiple axes of inequality, his definition of care as “above all” gendered may be controversial among scholars more focused on the intersections of race, immigration, and gender embedded in care work globally.
Gendered care relations have proven to be a persistent driving force of gender inequality, and Masculinities, Care and Equality offers valuable insight into the social mechanisms that prevent men from sharing the burdens of care work. By examining how masculinity is defined in relation to care, Hanlon identifies key sources of men’s resistance to care and possibilities for affective equality. Masculinities, Care and Equality succeeds as an introductory text both for those new to masculinities and for experts interested in masculinities and care.