Abstract
Men and Masculinities was founded twenty years ago based on the idea that a new subfield of Gender Studies, notably Masculinity Studies, had begun to emerge and that there was sufficient research and scholarship to warrant a scholarly journal.
At first, to be honest, SAGE was a bit skeptical. When first approached, they thought it more advisable to produce a series of edited volumes that would address themes in the emerging field. The SAGE Series on Men and Masculinities published twelve volumes and culminated with the Handbook on Studies of Men and Masculinities in 2005. By then, the journal was launched and had become the flagship journal in the field.
Men and Masculinities is regularly ranked in the top 10 percent of all scholarly journals worldwide by the British and Australian evaluation schemes. According to the 2015 Journal Citation Reports, our impact factor rose 68 percent to 1.451. This year our impact factor is 1.863 and we are ranked 35th out of 146 journals in sociology—and we’re not even a sociology journal! We’re very selective, accepting less that 10 percent of all submissions, and even after revision cycles, our publication rate remains at about 25 percent.
From the outset, we saw the journal as international and interdisciplinary. We recognized that scholarship and research on masculinity were emerging around the world, and though we were constrained by linguistic issues (we only published articles in English), we always had coeditors based in Great Britain, Australia, continental Europe, and North America. We tried to balance the geographic representation of articles with a team of both corresponding editors, drawn entirely in North America, where the journal was institutionally based, and also internationally, as our masthead would show.
As a field, Gender Studies is also irrevocably interdisciplinary, drawing from the humanities and social sciences in equal measure. While we have published a few articles from the biological sciences over the years, we have remained resolute in soliciting work from both the humanities and social sciences.
Among our proudest achievements has been to maintain that balance of North American and other geographic arenas as well as between the humanities and social sciences. In addition, we’ve been very diligent about the gender identities of our contributors, and we’ve maintained a near-perfect balance between women and men and have published many articles about gay and bisexual men over the years. (We have not been as successful in attracting articles from gender nonconforming and nonbinary individuals, but we believe that is because their work is just now emerging and there may be a few very specialized places where those people publish first to establish their research. We anticipate an increase in such articles over the next decade.)
Finally, we believe that we are equally balanced between established and emerging scholars and researchers. Many are PhD students developing research projects, and others are well-established scholars publishing their latest work.
But don’t just take my word for it. Our managing editor, Robert Cserni, has assembled an empirical look at these data over the span of the journal, and it’s evident that we have accomplished the goal we set for ourselves in geographic, gender, and disciplinary balance. And Tristan Bridges, our Book Review Editor’s essay shows some of these metrics as well.
This bodes well for the future of the journal and the field. Today, there are several scholarly journals in Masculinity Studies, some specializing even further to focus on boyhood, fatherhood, or within specific disciplines. It’s equally true that the success of the field has also depended on its mainstreaming into both mainstream general journals in the social sciences and humanities but also into the wide array of Gender Studies journals.
All Gender Studies journals have a politics because gender is such a contested field. We’ve remained constant in our initial founding vision to publish work that articulated with those positions within Gender Studies that were feminist-inspired, nonheteronormative, and intersectional. We have published critiques of other political perspectives over the years and expanded the scope of our work, but we have tried to remain committed to those political perspectives.
Twenty years is a long time for a scholarly journal to have a single home—longer if you count the years we transformed a newsletter into a book series into the journal—and Stony Brook has been supportive of the project over these decades. But twenty years is more than a generation, especially in academia, and it is time to allow the journal to grow and develop under new guidance. At the end of the next volume year, I will step down as Editor, and ask the remaining coeditors to convene, enter into discussions with our corresponding editors and with our publisher to find a suitable second home for the journal, so that it can continue under other leadership. The field is young, dynamic, and exciting, and it is time for the journal to be led by a new team.
Men and Masculinities will continue to provide a place for younger scholars and established ones, a place for the continuing conversation about gender relations and masculinities.