Abstract
Masculinities and Place, edited by Andrew Gorman-Murray and Peter Hopkins, is a twenty-seven-chapter collection of original research and writing from scholars representing interdisciplinary fields and varying geographic locations, all with an emphasis on the multiplicity of masculinities in literal and figurative spaces and places in contemporary society. This is not your grandfather’s dusty geography text, unless your grandfather is into critical theory, figurative mappings of space and embodiment, and critique of the neoliberal academic masculinity that has been part of the history of geography as a discipline. This is a good thing for those readers who are looking for a book that offers not only a self-conscious story and history of the disciplinary and epistemological lenses from which it hails but also a collection of smart voices and intriguing topics that somehow, when aggregated, come across as simultaneously diverse and unified.
Beginning with the title and introduction, the editors describe the fields of geography and men’s studies, citing key works and change in focus over time, and then move to a discussion of the book’s decidedly contemporary and critical theoretical framing. That masculinities is plural in the title and referenced as such by the book’s disparate authors demonstrate the ethos of intersectionality, multiplicity, performativity, and fluid representation of men’s lives. The use of the term “place” throughout the book sometimes references the more traditional geographic space that is the nation–state, region, neighborhood, business, school, or home. But “place” also refers to the significance of locating masculinities on (and in) the body, in imagined space, and within the movement across and between spaces. “Where men are” and “who men are” are thus both represented as dynamic throughout the book.
The two fields of geography and men’s studies are bridged in the book by a consistent focus on inequalities and injustice. The intent of the work is political, meant to be useful for enhancing gender equity; the bulk of the collection reads as academic. And it contains a set of reflexive voices that thoughtfully acknowledge the masculinist history of geography that feminist scholars have challenged and the dearth of focus on space and place in men’s studies. More explicitly, the book’s tone is set when the editors introduce its place in a new (third) phase of “masculinities studies, where masculinities can be understood as strategic accomplishments [emphasis in original]” (pp. 8–9) or performances where context and social setting matter. For this reason, the focus on the qualitative spatialization of masculinities seems particular current, useful, and able to bridge geography and men’s studies in a way that is innovative for both fields of inquiry.
The specific sections are organized sensibly for use in a classroom as an aggregated volume, but also as a way to highlight topics for a more specific and portioned read. After the editors’ introduction, several pieces add support to the theoretical focus of the book by: offering wisdom on the significance of local, national, and transnational framing of spaces regarding men’s roles, sexualities, and bodies; aligning the study of place and masculinities with contemporary theoretical lenses from Guattari, Appadurai, Giroux, Giddens, and others in an accessible discussion of spatio-sensual assemblages and the importance of “scapes” in our understanding of men’s lives; and by critiquing contemporary neoliberal academic masculinity as itself a place in which masculinist framing has occurred in the construction of knowledge. The pieces in this section frame the disciplines of geography and men’s studies as necessarily reflexive, allowing subsequent authors the ability to add their own concerns about their roles as researchers, their position as academics, or their places as men in the academy.
Part 2 (“Masculinities, Intersectionality and Relationality”), via seemingly distinct topics of migrant men’s sexuality, migration and cosmopolitanism, the primarily gay International Mr. Leather competition, and cowboy masculinities, helps the reader to understand how place is itself a construction, unfixed, and subject to impacts of movement and representation of bodies-as-places, and how everyday neighborhood and domestic venues are places for citizenship and new forms of masculinity to take shape.
Parts 3–8 offer institutional and relational locations that will be familiar to readers of both geography and men’s studies: homes, families, care work, health, and work. At times, the chapters focus on a singular place where the assumption of one type of masculinity is challenged (e.g., domestic roles in military housing), or they focus on multiple types of places that all serve to challenge a perceived fixed type of masculinity (e.g., imagined homogenous Irish diasporic masculinity for working-class men evident in clubs, pubs, homes, schools, and workplaces in Ireland).
While the collection does focus primarily on the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Northern Europe, the authors of all of these chapters do an excellent job of transcending the traditional notions of geographic place by virtue of their careful inclusion of figurative and dynamic places, including not-so-common locations such as surfboard factories and the neighborhood gay bar. And by virtue of their careful rendering of topics such as domestic violence, HIV/AIDS, racial inequality, homelessness, migration, and youth criminality. Because of this, readers will be able to see ways that the topics and stories of men’s lives contained in this collection may echo in other places and with other people.
These chapters can stand alone as vivid and unique locations for discovering the bridge between place and masculinities. But they are more iterative than they are additive, such that readers of the entire collection are reminded of the multiplicity of masculinities even in one place and of the multiplicity of places even in one dominant (and critiqued) form of prescribed masculinity. From pieces on men’s contributions to foodwork and interior decorating, to shared places for care work, fatherhood, grandfatherhood, and paid work, this book offers a fugue of men’s stories and places that remind the reader that both masculinities and places are subsumed in, built upon, and constitutive of, each other.