Abstract
Feminist scholarship on masculinities ossified into a recognizable “subfield” of gender studies, in part, through systematically centering the work of a very small group of white men. This process of collective centering works as an effective “exclusionary practice” that I argue hinders both the scholarly and political potential of this field. This article examines the transformation of the status of the subfield alongside an examination of women’s contributions to feminist scholarship on masculinities, and an emergent politics of citation that works to reproduce inequality within this subfield. In addition to identifying the processes by which a small group of white men have accumulated a disproportionate amount of power and status within “masculinities studies” as problematic, I also question the lack of critical dialogue and debate between various subfields examining systems of power and structured advantage. Here, I put masculinities studies into conversation with whiteness studies, critical heterosexualities studies, research on elites, and more to argue that there should be more dialogue between scholars doing research in these areas. Disrupting exclusionary practices in masculinities studies with both political and practical intent will better situate feminist scholars of masculinities to adapt their scholarship to transformations in the character and form of durable systems of inequality as well as identifying emergent processes and mechanisms of social reproduction.
Scholarship on “masculinities” emerged formally as a gender studies subfield in the 1970s. I reflected on this after reading and reviewing Messner, Greenberg, and Peretz’s (2015) book, Some Men: Feminist Allies and the Movement to End Violence against Women. In it, they interviewed over fifty men and some women born over the course of half a century (1941–1991). They asked them about their politics, how they started getting interested in doing feminist work, what brought them in, and they thought critically about the kinds of feminist work they were doing. Age intersected with their stories of engagement in important ways. Perhaps selfishly, I was most interested in the stories of the men among whom I am counted—that youngest generation of feminist activists Messner, Greenberg, and Peretz call “the professional cohort,” a group for whom a place was already set at the table. Their entry into feminist work came more easily, in large part due to the work of earlier feminists who helped to institutionalize some of the work so that colleges, universities, and professional organizations have positions for people who “do this work.”
For scholars of my generation, this “field” was under way well before we arrived. And that means that we encountered the field on different terms. In graduate school, I think I tried to steer clear of being described as a “masculinities scholar” as long as I could. I thought of myself as a feminist gender scholar who just happened to study (mostly) men. And part of my hesitance was that the field appeared to me to be dominated by men—a curious pocket of gender studies. It seemed to me that it did not start out this way but that this is what it had become.
Messner, Greeberg, and Peretz (2015) stress that this shift was associated with new opportunities for new groups of men to get involved with feminist work addressing issues of violence against women such that the men doing this work today are, for instance, more racially diverse than earlier generations of men who got involved. When I reviewed the book though, I also noted that the feminism of this youngest cohort appeared to be more scripted, less fraught. Institutionalizing feminist work by and for men came at a cost—the “feminist” part of this work seemed watered down when compared with the older cohorts they interviewed. This is, of course, my reading of their discoveries—not necessarily their argument.
Even in my short time as a part of this field, it has changed enormously. In looking back over the twenty years Men and Masculinities has been a journal, I address shifts in the status of the journal, the question of who it is who publishes here, and how that has changed over two decades as a way of addressing larger transformations in the field. Here, I discuss the institutionalization of what Baca Zinn et al. (1986) call “exclusionary practices” as well as the politics of citation during both the emergence of masculinities as a subfield of gender studies and more recent citational practices in the field to address some of the consequences of this transformation.
Finally, I address what I see as one of the central shifts in the field. Masculinities have always been objects of inquiry often “on the move.” That is, scholars have always been interested in those moments when gender structures and enactments of gender appear to rupture, shift, or transform. And questions of how we make sense of transformations in inequality and privilege continue to motivate a great deal of scholarship in the field today. And, over the last thirty to fifty years, we also have new methods, tools, and a larger body of research and theory to document, analyze, and explain transformations in durable systems of inequality as they are happening. And I argue that, as a field, we can and should be making better use of them as well as the diverse perspectives and standpoints that make up this field of study.
Men and Masculinities Then and Now
Judith Lorber came to my graduate institution to give a colloquium a little over a decade ago and sat down with me when I was initially formulating my dissertation. We went out to breakfast and I told her about the project on men’s gender politics I was devising at the time. She smiled and joked, “So, which one of the Michaels do you like?” It’s true. There is an incredible collection of “Michaels” who play a crucial role in masculinities studies: Michael Messner, Michael Kimmel, Michael Kaufman, Michael Flood, Michael Schwalbe, just to name some. It makes sense. Michael is a popular name (in the United States and abroad) and, in the United States at least, its popularity started to peek right around the time many of our field’s Michaels were born. (As a side note, there’s a similar case to be made about the quantity of “Judiths” in gender and feminist studies as well—though I wasn’t clever enough to have thought of that in the moment nor would I have been bold enough to share it.) The conversation helped me shape what became my dissertation, but it also made me think about how many men make up this field, make a living by doing work in this field, and more.
But feminist women have always been a part of this field, too. In fact, since Men and Masculinities was first published in 1998, the journal has published more scholarship by scholars who do not identify as men over time than men (see Figure 1). In only one issue were all of the contributing authors of articles men. This is interesting and important, but it is also only one metric of change in the field. It says something about who is publishing in the field—but not about influence.
Proportion of article authors who are men, by year and issue (Men and Masculinities 1998–2018). [Note: Each data point represents a single issue of the journal. Authors are coded as “men” if they use “he” or “him” or “his” to describe themselves presently (as of June 2018). Source: Author’s calculations from data collected from the journal website (journals-sagepub-com.web.bisu.edu.cn/home/jmm).]
Measuring the “status” of masculinities studies involves a more complicated bit of data: data on influence. Men and Masculinities is only one journal. But it has also become the flagship journal in this subfield of gender studies. So, tracking the influence of this journal is one small indication of shifts in the field as well. Gender & Society has a more prestigious ranking both within sociology and in gender studies. Yet measures of influence used to assess the status of academic journals find that while Men and Masculinities was ranked beneath other important interdisciplinary journals of feminist gender studies scholarship such as Signs and Sex Roles when it was first published, the influence of the journal has steadily increased such that, by 2017, Men and Masculinities had a higher influence ranking than both Signs and Sex Roles (see Figure 2). And this shift primarily occurred over the past decade alone.
Scientific influence journal rankings of select journals in gender studies, 1999–2017. SCImago Journal Ranking (SJR) is an indicator used to measure journal prestige that ranks journals by the average “prestige” per article published. This is measured by both the number of citations average articles receive in a given journal and the status of journal in which those citations are made (i.e., citations in journals with higher SJR scores are more heavily weighted in a given journal’s SJR score than citations in journals with lower SJR scores). Source: SCImago Journal & Country Rank (https://www.scimagojr.com/).
So, Figure 1 shows us that the journal has steadily published less work by men over time, and Figure 2 demonstrates that the influence of the journal has grown over time. This is all well and good as an indication of status and growth of the journal itself and of the journal as one representation of growth in feminist scholarship on masculinities more broadly. But the measure of impact used for Figure 2 rests on a very specific and common metric of influence within academia: citations. And as with any measure of status or influence, citations are not without a politics.
The Politics of Citation and the Institutionalization of Privilege in Masculinities Studies
Early scholarship on masculinities was fiercely interdisciplinary. If you look at citations in some of the early feminist scholarship that helped to produce “the field,” the citations come from all over the place. This was important for many reasons, but one was to establish research in the field as explicitly feminist—indeed, the field started to coalesce alongside a sustained critique of the inability of sex role theory to adequately make sense of power, inequality, and social change in the 1970s and 1980s. And the first feminist theories of masculinities relied on an incredible interdisciplinary array of feminist scholarship, much of it by women. Indeed, as the intersectional, feminist, queer, and critical race theorist Sara Ahmed (2017) writes, “Citations can be feminist bricks: they are the materials through which, from which, we create our dwellings” (p. 16). And citational streams emerged from this early scholarship that began as small tributaries connected with and parallel to feminist scholarship more broadly conceived. But as those tributaries continued to produce scholarship, they gradually emptied into what has become a “subfield” with newly ossified boundaries that help delineate what actually qualifies as “Masculinities Scholarship” in the first place. As Ahmed later comments, “When citational practices become habits, bricks form walls” (p. 148). And part of understanding shifts in this “field” necessitates a discussion of the walls and the dwelling produced, in part, by citation practices and engagement with existing scholarship.
As “masculinities studies” gained field-like status, new institutional opportunities were opened up to do feminist research and work on masculinity, and the risks associated with participation were lowered, providing more opportunities for more people to get involved. As with the incorporation of feminism into society more generally, elements of feminist scholarship on masculinities became institutionalized. This means that there are new opportunities on college campuses, in workplaces, to establish “training seminars” and more that resulted in part from this institutionalization. Career opportunities doing feminist work on masculinities are available today that did not exist in very recent history. And this has resulted in, among other things, the sense that the feminism of today is, as Reger (2012) found, simultaneously “everywhere and nowhere.”
Organizational barriers still exist that work to systematically exclude women, scholars of color, scholarship outside of the United States (and globally, beyond the global north [e.g., Connell 2007] and in consideration of postcoloniality [e.g., Orloff, Ray, and Savci 2016]). Indeed, in 1986, Baca Zinn et al. authored a similar critique of women’s studies journals and what they called “exclusionary practices” in Signs. They noted the few and tokenized positions on editorial boards occupied by women of color as well as women disadvantaged by class background. “The result is that women of color and women from working-class backgrounds have few opportunities to become part of the networks that produce or monitor knowledge in women’s studies” (pp. 292, 293). In addition to institutionalizing privilege, they argued that this operated as a kind of reproductive apparatus and helped create the false universalization of white middle-class women in women’s studies more broadly. This produced systemic biases that emerged out of a collective failure to acknowledge how a lack of diversity in positions of power and authority trickled down and had the effect of systematically excluding not only specific groups of scholars but standpoints, topics of scholarship, and more.
Today, the editorial boards of the majority of gender studies journals publishing masculinities scholarship are dominated by men, most of whom are white—Men and Masculinities is no exception (see Table 1). Women comprise less than 10 percent of editorial board seats at three of the four journals listed in Table 1 and about one-third of board seats in the remaining journal (NORMA—International Journal for Masculinities Studies). And to suggest that this does not result in similar “costs of exclusionary practices” within masculinties studies to those identified by Baca Zinn et al. (1986) would be wrong.
Gender Representation on Editorial Boards for Masculinties Studies Journals, 2018.
Note: White scholars are also overrepresented among the editorial boards of each of these journals (some much more so than others). I did not count white scholars and compare them with scholars of color as racial categories differ around the world and each of these editorial boards is made up of scholars from around the world. I did not infer or impose racial classifications.
Emergent citational practices offer another way of thinking about some of the consequences of exclusionary practices. The citation practices in a great deal of scholarship on masculinities have been a consequence of this early scholarship but not necessarily by design. Reference lists are a highly politicized discursive site where alliances and allegiances are forged and, like editorial boards, dominant forms of privilege within the academy harden into concrete forms that are traded for status in the form of academic positions, presumed authority within the field, income, and more (Ahmed 2017). And I hope it is clear that while I am arguing that while all of this results in disciplinary exclusion and discrimination, neither of these social practices need to be consciously practiced to be successful (Baca Zinn et al. 1986).
Consider the politics of citation in a separate context. When the critical race theorist and legal scholar Richard Delgado (1984) published “The Imperial Scholar,” he argued that white scholars so dominated publications on civil rights that their dominance worked as an effective means of exclusion of minority scholars. This was, Delgado argued, a consequence of their status and of the citation networks in which they were enmeshed and to which they contributed. As Delgado wrote of civil rights scholarship over three decades ago, there existed “an inner circle of about a dozen white, male writers who comment on, take polite issue with, extol, criticize, and expand on each other’s ideas” (p. 563). Discussion of the politics of citations exists in different ways in every field (and if there are fields in which this discussion does not exist, it should). My sense is that a great deal of masculinities scholarship is subject to a similar critique—centering the work of precious few scholars who share a collection of demographic characteristics. Distinct from Delgado’s critique, however, is the fact that work that has come to be situated as central and foundational in the field was in conversation with and cited a diverse body of scholarship. Less scholarship published in masculinities studies today, however, continues this tradition.
The boundaries and walls that created masculinities studies emerged as subsequent scholarship began citing and centering a specific body of work. Indeed, it is not much of an exaggeration to say that masculinities scholarship started to be recognized by both specific citations and citations to specific scholars. Many of those citations are of work by men, most of whom are white. Gradually, the diverse and interdisciplinary bodies of feminist scholarship that early scholarship cited stopped showing up as regularly in reference sections. And somewhere both during and after this process, publications in the field began to multiply exponentially. This is, of course, not true of all masculinities scholarship. But, it is true of a growing body of scholarship within what is commonly held to be “the field.” At some point over the last fifty years, masculinity went from being from a topic of scholarship to also an orientation toward scholarship. That is, masculinity has shifted from being an object of inquiry to also a perspective with and through which to approach that object. For instance, I think it is possible today to suggest that scholars are taking a “masculinities perspective” in their analysis. Demonstrating an ability to use or take this perspective has become synonymous with positioning one’s work relative to a very specific body of ideas, theory, and scholars. Citation practices and networks provide one kind of evidence of this shift.
While I did not collect these data for this publication, I would guess that a review of citations of the work in Men and Masculinities as well as other journals publishing feminist scholarship on masculinities would produce a very different result from Figure 1. The proportion of citations to work by men has likely increased, particularly those citations dominantly positioned in published research. And, I would also suspect that citation diversity to have declined over time as well—again, particularly among those citations dominantly positioned. This is part of what it looks like when fields of study emerge; but this process is not without consequences. Indeed, citational practices and structures are part of what gives rise to disciplines and fields of scholarship within them.
But, as Ahmed (2013) writes, citations are also a kind of “reproductive technology” in that they center certain ideas, theories, perspectives, and bodies themselves. Early work of feminist masculinities scholars was often reflexively positioned as a collective antithesis to androcentric scholarship. Once institutionalized, however (as with Messner, Greeberg, and Peretz’s [2015] “professional cohort” of men doing feminist activist work), a new synthesis emerged accompanied by new reproductive dynamics, contradictions, and crisis tendencies. This may not have been by design in terms of being intentionally practiced. Yet durable systems of inequalities have a kind of momentum that does not always require conscious action and deliberation. Sometimes it is simply a matter of following tradition, a well-worn path, or simply allowing things to fall where they appear to have fallen before. Thus, we do not necessarily need to intend to reproduce inequalities in this manner to be complicit in this process. And it will take active work to reinvigorate the debates that help other fields to sustain and grow over time.
Scholarship on self-citation practices by journal authors offers evidence of a related practice that extends far beyond masculinities studies. Few readers who will have wandered this far will be surprised to learn that citation practices differ by gender. But they do. And one of the largest differences in citation practices is with respect to self-citation practices. Men cite their own work more often than women. Since 1991, a big data project assessing citation practices of more than 1.5 million articles published on the online scholarly database JSTOR found that men self-cited approximately 70 percent more often than women and also that men’s self-citing practices have increased over time (King et al. 2017). But this is not only a result of men citing themselves. The citational practices that have helped to structure masculinities studies are also built around citing a great deal of work by men more generally.
The editorial boards and citational practices, networks, and chains that make up masculinities studies deserve to be shaken up from time to time to remind scholars to connect with research and ideas produced in different corners of feminist, gender, and sexualities studies as well as beyond these borders to incorporate work and ideas that will inspire debate and exchange. Citations also serve as intellectual homage to those on whose work we build. As Ahmed (2017) writes, “Citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the paths we were told to follow” (p. 17). There is much to be gained in finding new paths, connecting with a much larger body of work that has much to teach scholars of masculinities but often appears as beyond our borders.
This matters for a collection of reasons. It matters because the field is centering work by a small number of people who make up this field. It matters when we think about whether those being centered represent the diversity of those who comprise this field. It matters because it reproduces power and inequality under the more politically palatable notions of “authority“ and “expertise.” If citational practices are the reproductive technology Ahmed suggests, they are one that contains an implicit justificational account. There is a momentum to systems of inequality; they are easier to keep in motion than to disrupt. And citational practices offer an illustration of this larger process. It matters because the boundaries of masculinities studies sometimes leave out important scholarship than can help us better understand the questions we seek to answer. 1 And it is to this latter issue that I will briefly turn to illustrate the importance of looking beyond our boundaries in search of answers to questions we should not pretend we are alone in asking. One such question is about addressing transformations in the meanings and enactment of masculinity.
The Transformation of Masculinity and Inequality
How do we actually assess change in masculinities and gender inequality? How do we make sense of multiple metrics for change? And has the very “object” of inquiry the field is organized around been subject to so much change that the theories that galvanized the field in the 1980s and 1990s are no longer relevant? Or did they anticipate this change and do they simply need to be used to make sense of new issues and new configurations of privilege and inequality that emerge in the wake of any social change?
These are big questions. And I will spoil it a bit and let you know they will not all be answered in the remainder of this essay. But, some radical social structural shifts have changed the study of masculinity today alongside a host of political, economic, and larger sociocultural transformations that have fundamentally altered the world in which masculinities are mobilized and understood. One such transformation in which I have been interested is the notion of the relative (in)visibility of masculinity and gender privilege, whether, how, and for whom that visibility has changed, and how to address consequences associated with any shifts that may have occurred.
A collection of subfields emerged around the time masculinities studies did seeking to examine social privilege. During the end of the twentieth century, we saw the emergence of masculinities studies, whiteness studies, critical heterosexualities studies, (dis)abilities studies, studies of elites and elitism, and more. Most of these fields started with a conversation not so dissimilar to those that motivated a great deal of work in masculinities studies: they began with important statements about the relative invisibility of privileged social categories. McIntosh (1988) talked about an invisible collection of privileges white people carry with them. Kimmel (1993) discussed the work that the invisibility of men’s gender does in terms of preserving it. Katz (1995) discussed the invisibility of heterosexuality as a named sexual identity and how that worked to help reiterate heteronormativity. Invisibility, in each of these subfields, was framed as more than a fact or observation of social privilege and structured advantage—invisibility was one of the principle mechanisms of social reproduction.
The problem with the “invisibility of masculinity” debate today is that masculinity is no longer as invisible as it may have been. Indeed, masculinity has arguably never been more visible in our history. And what historical research has documented about periods during which we seem obsessed with masculinity is not that it becomes undone. Rather, it is most often “redone” (West and Zimmerman 2009). Privilege goes unrecognized as privilege when it is understood as earned, or just. But positions of socially structured advantage are not toppled through recognition alone. Visibility has not “undone” privileges associated with masculinity. Yet it may have structurally altered the experience of privilege. And this change could precipitate a great deal of attendant shifts. Increased visibility of privilege structurally requires increasing levels of reflexivity on the part of structurally advantaged groups and individuals. But it can also result in a backlash of men who feel aggrieved by this—a collection of emotional dynamics that fuel phenomena such as “Trumpism” as well as organized opposition (e.g., Barber 2017; Pascoe 2017; Smirnova 2018). And, far from “undoing” privilege, backlash efforts and rhetoric work to systematically mute or delegitimate feminist critique.
Indeed, Connell (1995) suggested that this “historical consciousness” associated with masculinity, gender privilege, and inequality are distinctive features of contemporary gender identities and politics (p. 228). Patriarchy has been put in the historical spotlight, possibly more visible today than ever before in history. Connell argued that these shifts, in addition to others, have intensified crisis tendencies that structure the gender order and that this has resulted “in a major loss of legitimacy for patriarchy” (p. 202). She suggests that different groups navigate this loss in different ways. But Connell also suggested that while moments like this present ruptures in gender relations that can sometimes promote progressive change (in addition to and sometimes alongside a backlash), this is not an inherent property of such crises. Patriarchy, as with any other durable inequality, is perfectly capable of adopting new legitimating stories and strategies (e.g., Demetriou 2001; Ozyegin 2015). And if we have learned anything from existing feminist scholarship and work addressing social inequalities of all forms, it is that we ought to anticipate change in the structure, enactment, and collection of social advantage during these moments as this is how privilege has historically operated.
By way of considering the politics of citation and the relative insularity of a good deal of masculinities scholarship as it pertains to this debate, consider the following. There is less work examining whether the tools used by critical race theorists examining whiteness are applicable to addressing masculinity than there ought to be. There is less work looking at whether scholarship on heterosexuality can teach masculinities scholars to examine elements of social life to which our subfield has paid less attention. There is less work looking at how scholarship on elites might motivate us to think through how social advantage is passed on, reproduced, and justified at the same time than we ought to expect in our field. And there is less international dialogue (particularly among US scholars) asking whether scholars in other nations are asking similar questions, producing relevant theory, and more than we should expect from contemporary masculinities scholarship.
The increasing visibility of privilege is an important process in the reproduction of many different forms of inequality. And those of us studying this ought to consider multiple perspectives, tools developed by scholars asking similar questions about different forms of inequality that intersect with those we choose to center in our work. In this next section, I hope to illustrate the utility of this approach—one that I think challenges emergent politics of citation in masculinities studies while simultaneously engaging with a larger body of scholarship that will provoke debates, disagreement, and a larger collection of research, tools, ideas, standpoints, and perspectives with which to make sense of the questions feminist scholars of masculinities seek to answer today.
Theorizing Transformations in Masculinities and Inequality
Within academia, the notion of “theory” holds a great deal of status. And, as there exists a politics of citation, so too does there exist a politics of theorizing. Indeed, as Connell (1987) noted in the preface to Gender and Power over three decades ago, “theories don’t grow on trees; theorizing is itself a social practice with a politics” (p. xi; see also Ferree 2018). When Connell (1987, 1995) first constructed her theory of gender relations that has influenced masculinities studies ever since, she understood this. She wanted a theory capable of addressing the major criticisms of the reigning theory used in sociology to make sense of sex and gender at the time: sex role theory. Among many failings, sex role theory was framed as unconcerned with gender politics and inequality. And yet, as Connell so precisely demonstrated, it was this very lack of concern that was a fundamental illustration of the theory’s politics. In ignoring power and inequality, sex role theory provided an implicit justification for the reproduction of power and inequality (see also Stacey and Thorne 1985; Connell 1985).
Connell wanted to help propose a theoretical framework that foregrounded power and inequality but also anticipated ruptures, crises, and transformations in the very system it sought to explain. Connell understood that both gender and gender inequality are subject to substantial shifts. And she sought to create a theory flexible enough to adapt to changing historical contingencies; cultural contexts; and economic, political, and cultural transformations (e.g., Demetriou 2001, 2005). And she drew on a diverse body of feminist, social, and critical theory and scholarship from around the world to do so. As with other social theories, different concepts and ideas within the theory sometimes garner greater visibility and are judged to have more general utility than others. And for Connell’s theory, the concept of hegemonic masculinity did just this.
Connell initially proposed the concept of hegemonic masculinity to address a more general question related to better understanding systems of durable social inequality. The question that interested Connell was how unequal and oppressive systems of social relations stabilize and continue to reproduce themselves over time—how they persist and adapt to historical and contextual shifts, challenges, and contingencies. Connell borrowed Antonio Gramsci’s theory and use of “hegemony” which Gramsci had used to explore class relations and the durability of class inequality. As with class relations, Connell wanted a theory capable of acknowledging that gender relations change over time. And cultural hegemony referred to, as Connell (1995) wrote, “a historically mobile relation” (p. 77).
As hegemonic masculinity gained popularity as a concept in scholarship on masculinity across the social sciences and humanities and around the world, it started to be used in ways both more and less consistent with Connell’s original intentions. Indeed, some suggest that we refer to the concept itself as a theory in its own right—“hegemonic masculinity theory” (something Connell never suggested and a practice often associated with misrepresentations of both the concept and the historical dynamism of the theory in which it was intended to be understood, contributing to a rendering of hegemonic masculinity Connell explicitly argues against—as a static list of characteristics that make up a “type”). Indeed, Martin (1998) was concerned about the possibility of inconsistent appropriations of the concept in a symposium on Connell’s (1995) book after it was published. Connell’s theory of gender relations and the status and meaning of “hegemonic masculinity” within that theoretical framework has generated a great deal of attention and recognition, an enormous body of scholarship, some critique, and ultimately, some theoretical reformulation (e.g., Connell 2002; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005; Messerschmidt 2012, 2018).
And yet, a great deal of scholarship published on masculinities continues to address hegemonic masculinity as a fixed character type, a list of characteristics we can point to and identify, and sometimes, as a historically specific set of gender relations. This is problematic for a collection of reasons. Among them is that this mischaracterization of Connell’s work does not help us appreciate, study, and seek to better understand perhaps the most pernicious quality of gender inequality—its elasticity. In fact, what hegemonic masculinity actually looks like is less important, within Connell’s theory, than what it accomplishes. Hegemonic masculinity is best recognized by identifying social consequences associated with patterns in social interactions, identify formations, and configurations of gender practice. Hegemonic masculinity refers to those configuration of gender practice that work to legitimate and shore up patriarchy (Connell 1995, 77). Just how this happens and what this looks like has been and will continue to be subject to a great deal of change. And considering how other scholars examining similar issues have sought to address this ought to inform our own inquiries and scholarship more than they often have.
Consider how scholars of whiteness have addressed this issue in terms of racial inequality—identifying what Duster (2001) refers to as “the morphing properties of whiteness.” In Duster’s (2001) essay, he compares whiteness to water to address the ways that it shifts and reacts to different environmental conditions. Race, like H2O, can take many forms, but unlike H2O it can transform itself in a nanosecond. It takes time for ice to boil or for vapor to condense and freeze, but race can be simultaneously Janus-faced and multifac(et)ed—and also produce a singularly dominant social hierarchy. Indeed, if we make the fundamental mistake of reifying any one of those states as more real than another, we will lose basic insights into the nature and character of social stratification in America. (p. 115)
Scholars studying elites too have been paying attention to shifts in the ways that privilege is preserved among economic elites. Khan’s (2011) ethnography of an elite college-preparatory school provides one example of how the enactment and collection of privilege among economic elites has changed shape in ways that give the process a more democratic appearance while continuing to preserve a collection of advantages that still benefit them—if in historically novel ways. Currid-Halkett (2017) mined data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to demonstrate that elites went from practicing what Thorstein Veblen famously called “conspicuous consumption” to something Currid-Halkett calls “inconspicuous consumption.” Elites today, Currid-Halkett discovered, engage in spending habits that reproduce their privilege that are “more subtle, less materialistic forms of conveying status particularly to others in-the-know” (p. 49). Sherman’s (2017) interviews with economic elites support these findings and provides new information about how elites today discursively construct “legitimate entitlements” that work to morally justify enduring forms of inequality even as they are called into question.
So too has masculinities scholarship examined some of these questions when we explore research and theory produced beyond the United States and a small collection of Western European nations. For instance, Ratele’s (2013, 2018) analysis of Nelson Mandela’s strategic negotiation of his abaThembu heritage theorizes the notion of tradition associated with “traditional masculinity”—a concept often treated as static and inherently patriarchal. Relying on Mandela as a case study, however, Ratele illustrates how tradition itself is discursively and strategically mobilized and subject to ongoing interrogation and transformation. Similarly, Ozyegin’s (2015, 2018) analysis of shifts in gender and constructions of masculinity in neoliberal Turkey calls for masculinities scholarship (and gender scholarship more generally) to recall the utility of patriarchy—but not as a static or universal structure. Rather, Ozyegin retheorizes patriarchy as flexible and providing a new kind of utility to scholars studying new and emerging forms of gendered power. This work and these ideas have relevance beyond Turkey and South Africa, though work outside a small collection of nations worldwide rarely receives this treatment and attention on a global scale in masculinities studies. As with sociology and gender studies, the decolonizing of the field (e.g., Connell 2018) will only result in better scholarship, novel approaches, and a greater diversity of perspectives and standpoints. To paraphrase a quote from a short acceptance speech by Connell (2017), “We have nothing to lose but our founding fathers.”
Masculinities scholars should be paying attention to this kind of work and other work “beyond our borders” (in terms of both field and nation) as these scholars too are searching for ways to study shifts in durable systems of privilege and inequality. And we ought to be engaging with that work to more thoughtfully participate in intersectional research that will motivate better work on systems of inequality that cut across many axes of identity and geographic place. This challenges us to read across and outside of “the field” more, will necessarily involve challenging the politics of citation that structures a good deal of masculinities scholarship, and it ought to provoke new dialogues and debates. But I think that understanding how masculinities shift, transform, and adapt to new historical and contextual circumstances demands more of this work.
Conclusion
Durable social inequalities achieve resilience through adaptation. The feminist legal scholar Reva Siegel (1996) gave a name to this quality of social reproduction: “preservation through transformation.” She coined this concept to make sense of the ways that social inequalities are sometimes reproduced in ways that involve the appearance of great change, but little else. Siegel came up with this framework to make sense of shifts in domestic assault legislation in the United States “as it evolved in rule structure and rationale from a law of marital prerogative to a law of marital privacy” (p. 2119). She showed how the means through which the legal system enforced social stratification transformed other time.
Siegel does not suggest that this social dynamic—preservation through transformation—requires conspiracy or malevolence. Rather, she suggests we can consider this social process when dramatic shifts impact the rules by which and discourses through which systems of inequality are perpetuated yet simultaneously “continue to distribute material and dignitary privileges in such a way as to maintain the distinctions that comprise the regime…in relatively continuous terms” (Siegel 1996, 2184).
Measuring “change” is and has always been a challenging and political issue in masculinities studies. What real and meaningful change might look like is, like the category of “masculinity” itself, a moving target and will require ongoing research to chart and trace shifts as they occur.
Whether and how masculinities can be subject to this analysis requires more scholarship. But what I appreciate about Siegel’s conceptualization is a quality her work shares with Connell’s understanding of inequality: the idea that the ways it is perpetuated has been and will continue to be subject to a great deal of change. We can do more to address this issue. Part of this work will involve working more diligently to recognize the diverse scholars who already are doing this work both within and beyond the boundaries of masculinities studies. And part of this involves both recognizing and disrupting what Baca Zinn et al. (1986) refer to as “exclusionary practices” within masculinities studies with both political and practical intent.
Footnotes
Author’s Note
This article is based in part on a presentation at the winter meeting of Sociologists for Women in Society, Albuquerque, NM, February 2017.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Tara Leigh Tober, Michael Messner, Kristen Barber, France Winddance Twine, D’Lane Compton, Michael Kimmel, C. J. Pascoe, and Cliff Leek for discussions that led to this article and for advanced comments, edits, and suggestions on drafts. The author expressed his gratitude to the graduate students in his winter 2018 masculinities graduate seminar whose discussion and conversation informed and enriched this article a great deal: Nicholas Farley, Aracely Garcia Gonzalez, Kendall Ota, Allison Pierce, Sekani Robinson, Amanda Rodriguez, Cierra Sorrin, and Fátima Suarez. Finally, the author would also like to acknowledge Maxine Baca Zinn, Lynn Weber Cannon, Elizabeth Higginbotham, and Bonnie Thornton Dill who, in 1986, published a viewpoint essay in Signs entitled “The Costs of Exclusion in Women’s Studies” proposing a series of intersectional critiques of women’s studies and an analysis of the gendered and racialized power structure associated with key journals in the field here proposed about masculinities studies. It was both their title and analysis the author acknowledges here and to which this article is indebted.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.