Men and Masculinities

The criminalization of poverty, the process in which recipients of social security benefits are construed as frauds, is a well-documented phenomenon. Two aspects of this process are the use of stereotypes as a tool in fraud accusations and the targeting of marginalized populations. In this article, I wish to expand the gendered discussion of this phenomenon to men by examining the process of the construction of Israeli fathers wishing to take parental leave as welfare frauds. I will claim that this process is based on gendered assumptions that deny the possibility of fathers wishing to care for their children. The program that allows fathers to share parental leave experiences a high reported rate of fraud by fathers claiming parental leave benefits. However, analysis shows that the evidence does not support these reports and that claims on fraud and abuse are the result of a tendentious interpretation of the data by bureaucrats. This tendentiousness is based, I argue, on implicit assumptions about the nature of men. As this case shows, criminalization of benefit recipients can be targeted at nonmarginalized or even privileged groups. This sheds new light both on the criminalization process and on the workings of the gendered power structure.

This article analyzes the sartorial biographies of four Canadian men to explore how the suit is understood and embodied in everyday life. Each of these men varied in their subject positions—body shape, ethnicity, age, and gender identity—which allowed us to look at the influence of men’s intersectional identities on their relationship with their suits. The men in our research all understood the suit according to its most common representation in popular culture: a symbol of hegemonic masculinity. While they wore the suit to embody hegemonic masculine configurations of practice—power, status, and rationality—most of these men were simultaneously marginalized by the gender hierarchy. We explain this disjuncture by using the concept of hybrid masculinity and illustrate that changes in the style of hegemonic masculinity leave its substance intact. Our findings expand thinking about hybrid masculinity by revealing the ways subordinated masculinities appropriate and reinforce hegemonic masculinity.

This article adds to the understanding of men’s discursive resistance in relation to gender-equality interventions at work. Using Swedish men forestry professionals as the empirical base, the result shows how discursive resistance were performative acts, part of the construction of the same gender-equality interventions and organizational contexts that they were perceived to describe. In this case, direct opposition to gender equality provided a limited discursive position and sets of logics available in practice. Instead, the possibilities to renegotiate gender-equality interventions as unjust and unnecessary required, we conclude that the industry’s ambition to hire and promote more women was perceived to have led to the use of affirmative action and the disruption of meritocratic principles and that the problems of gender equality were placed in the traditional forestry and among “prejudiced old men,” as oppose to the more “modern” and “women friendly” forestry of today.

We use data collected from in-depth interviews with men (n = 30) in the Dominican Republic to explore how men’s concern about being perceived as masculine influences their interactions with their social networks and how those interactions drive men’s sexual behaviors and use of violence. Men’s sexual and violent behaviors were shaped by the need to compete with other men for social status. This sense of competition also generated fear of humiliation for failing to provide for their families, satisfy sexual partners, or being openly disrespected. In an effort to avoid humiliation within a specific social group, men adapted their behaviors to emphasize their masculinity. Additionally, men who were humiliated recouped their masculinity by perpetrating physical or emotional violence or finding new sexual partners. These findings emphasize the need for understanding these social dynamics to better understand men’s violent and sexual behaviors.

This article examines the construction of “unfit” black masculinity in institutional and medical discourses of the American military during World War II. Examining the military medical literature on “maladjustment” in context of the armed forces practice of segregation, I argue that by ignoring the impact of segregation, military psychiatrists reproduced linkages between blackness and “defect.” Despite the absence of direct assertions of racial hierarchy, these discourses thus implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, construed black manhood as alternately feeble and menacing, but above all as “abnormal” in both mind and body. Examining articles from psychiatric and military medical journals, as well as the internal documents of military officials, I investigate these claims in regard to the conceptualization and management of “constitutional defects” and psychosomatic illness.

The article explores Darwyn Cooke’s 2004 comic DC: The New Frontier as a retrospective history for DC’s comic book characters of the 1950s; though this history takes into account certain problematic aspects of 1950s American culture—in particular the problem of racism and fear of the minoritized other—the comic does not in any way produce a critique of normative American masculinity. Making use of a critical framework that discusses white masculinity, nostalgia, and the “falling” man, and the conceptual work of scholars such as Sally Robinson, Michael Kimmel, Elizabeth Anker, and Hamilton Carroll, this article argues that Cooke’s comic recenters the white male adventurer/hero not only as a product of nostalgia but also as a post-9/11 response to the idea of the “falling man.” Cooke promotes a fraternal code as a way to resolve the problematics of diversity, constructs the flyboy as a falling man, whose rehabilitation as an everyday hero reflects the text’s idealization of retrograde masculinity, and transforms narratives about othering into celebrations of colonialism and American manifest destiny.

This article looks at a 2011 incident which led to a soldier (Marine A) being convicted of murdering an Afghan insurgent. It focuses on the words (quoting from Hamlet) spoken by the Marine as he carried out the killing: “shuffle off this mortal coil, you cunt” and examines the link that these words establish between the war in Afghanistan and Shakespeare’s play. The article explores the connections between Hamlet and Marine A and how their actions can be understood to both parallel each other and diverge around ethical contemplation; access to military masculinity; the banishing of the feminine; and a process of mediation, performance, and interpretation.

This article discusses the discursive and narrative intersections between two moral panics that appeared in the white South African press in the last years of apartheid: the first around the claimed danger posed by white male homosexuals, the second around the alleged incursion of a criminal cult of white Satanists. This connection was sometimes implicit, when the rhetoric attached to one was repeated with reference to the other, and sometimes explicit, when journalists and moral entrepreneurs conflated the two in public dialogue. Both Satanists and gay white men were characterized as indulging in abnormal practices that were dangerous to the health of the nation, using a long-standing colonial metaphor of sanitation and hygiene. I argue that fears of homosexuality and beliefs in Satanism operated as social control measures for disciplining potentially unruly groups whose sexual or personal practices were not admissible within apartheid’s injunctions on homogenous conformity among whites. The connection between homosexuality and Satanism, like the connection between homosexuality and communism, served to pathologize whites whose disobedient bodies and beliefs were considered treacherous.

Using interviews with twenty-five male Beijingers in their final year of upper secondary school, this article shows that their construction of masculinities in all cases revolves around the importance of chenggong (outstanding accomplishment). They perceived chenggong as a prerequisite for the “the good life,” “the good person,” and “the good man.” But striving for chenggong entails much personal cost. Chenggong’s strong assertion by all these young men, notwithstanding intragroup differences, may indicate its contemporary hegemonic status. Suggested explanations are: the general importance of exemplary norms in China, the influence of neoliberalism and consumerism (and the attendant individualism) in post-Mao China, and their being “only children” from urban and mostly middle-class background; in particular, there is the competitive advantage which men derive from their prospective chenggong in a marriage market where a strong hypergamy norm for women is combined with a discourse of “natural sex differences” and notorious sex ratio imbalances.

Discussions of cross-border marriages between women from developing countries and men from economically advanced countries often focus on the objectification of women, while the process through which men are presented as “marriageable entities” is rarely examined. In this article, I explore the case of China, where middle-aged, divorced women are seeking second-chance marriages with Western men via international cyber-dating agencies. Contrary to the stereotypical portrayal of Western men as rich and powerful in the Chinese media, many of the Western men enrolled at the cyber-dating agencies I am studying earn a modest income. I analyze the agencies’ portrayal of their Western male clients as caring, family oriented, and worthy of marrying despite their lack of wealth. Results from this article show that masculinity is fluid, malleable, and continuously being reconstructed in accordance with the changing demographic and socioeconomic patterns of the globalizing world.

This article explores the development of gender equality-oriented (heterosexual) masculinity discussing the challenges of constructing nondominant masculine identities in the context of the Danish welfare state. Combining narrative methods with the theoretical framework of masculinity as cultural repertoire, the article offers a qualitative study examining how three Danish men construct (gender) identity in relation to being the partners of career-oriented and high-achieving women. Analyzing the men’s narrative negotiations of power, gender, and self, the article identifies three central narratives produced by the men to render themselves and their family arrangements intelligible and desirable. Considering how the narratives of (1) choice, (2) involved fatherhood, and (3) gender equality work as strategies to negotiate and reconstruct the meaning of compliance and autonomy, I delineate and discuss how traditional notions of what it means to be a man are simultaneously preserved and destabilized. Thus, the article demonstrates that, while nurturing practices and the loss of traditional male breadwinner authority can be positively reconstituted within the Nordic ideals of intensive parenting and gender equality, a fear of male subordination still seems to affect the construction of masculine selves even among gender equality–oriented “new” men.

We used content analysis methodology to examine the reasons newspaper articles (n = 121) provide for why we do not have new male contraceptives (NMCs). Articles were six times more likely to state that developing NMCs is good than bad. Yet half of all articles noted the safety or side effects of NMCs, which could leave the public with a sense of confusion or hesitation around the science and interest in NMCs. Our results indicate that while articles recognize the advantages of NMCs and are ostensibly supportive of them, we as a society are not yet culturally ready for them. We highlight the emergence of a new cultural narrative regarding men and contraceptive responsibility, which we refer as the “reproductive man” because he considers himself a reproductive being who needs to take ownership and responsibility for his reproductive activity and decisions.

It has generally been taken for granted within the field of Critical Studies of Men and Masculinities (CSMM) that the object of attention and concern is to be found within “the social” and in opposition to naturalizing claims about gender. Nature is not entirely absent from CSMM, often appearing either as malleable material or as a stable basis for the social construction of bodies. In this article, however, I suggest that the time is ripe to develop new concepts of nature by drawing on new materialist theories that are increasingly influential within feminist theory. This move opens up the possibility of strengthening the connections between materialist traditions in CSMM and contemporary developments in feminist theory. This article proceeds by reviewing different forms of materialism within feminist theory and argues that new materialist theories offer insights that can benefit CSMM. In particular, I argue that the theory of hegemonic masculinity needs to be expanded beyond the framework of patriarchy and recast in relation to the place of nature in the complex ecology of human social relations.

For many young men, enhancing their attractiveness as perceived by the opposite sex could be a potential reason for beginning physical activity. The aim of the study was to assess how women perceive male muscularity and how it could affect social relations between sexes. The intention was also to compare this assessment with the male view of the issue. An anonymous survey was conducted in electronic form and shared to Polish students. The questionnaire was completed by 5,190 respondents (4,043 women and 1,147 men). Women preferred a less muscular body than men. All muscle groups apart from the buttocks were also rated as more important by men than by women. The social role of muscularity, for example, in forming relationships with women was exaggerated by men. Men’s perception of their muscularity is not coherent with the way females perceive it.