Men and Masculinities

“Dad bloggers” are an emerging community of fathers in North America. These men use social media to document and discuss their experiences as parents and gather annually at the Dad 2.0 Summit. A central topic of discussion both online and offline is how involved fathers negotiate and rework gender roles and expectations. This study examines how dad bloggers create and engage with discourse about masculinities. Using blog posts, fieldwork observations, and interviews as data, I present qualitative findings illustrating the ways in which dad bloggers challenge traditional notions of masculinity, construct “caring masculinities,” and adopt a pro-feminist perspective. Despite certain tensions and contradictions within the community, I argue that dad bloggers are reconstructing fatherhood and masculinities in ways that promote care and equality overall.

This article contributes to theoretical debates around caring masculinity, especially attempts to integrate feminist ethics of care with masculinities scholarship. I apply ethics of care and masculinities theories to an illustrative case study of fathers’ rights group (FRG), (Real) Fathers 4 Justice, who, I argue, employ aspects of care perspectives framed as a “new man/new father” masculinity. Applying ethics of care to analyze caring masculinities demonstrates that men care and that caring masculinity can potentially destabilize dominant notions of masculinity. However, care is also coded masculine in complex, sometimes troubling, ways. The promise of masculinized care in the context of fathers’ rights is limited as, ultimately, gender binaries are reinforced more than they are rendered contingent. As well as contributing to analyses of the gender politics of FRGs, I argue that we should pay careful attention to the contexts within which caring masculinities may be strategically and problematically employed.

Using in-depth interviews with twenty-six teen fathers, I explore how these young men negotiate the absent-father discourse in making sense of their identities as young dads. I find that teen fathers draw on culturally available notions of gender and age in their attempts to construct and maintain good-dad identities. Teen fathers deploy the expectation that “most dad’s aren’t around” to “lower the bar” and elevate their own performance by comparison. Teen fathers also feel the need to defend themselves from the discourse’s assumptions by invoking tropes of adult masculinity—insisting that “fatherhood means stepping up” and “being a man.” Because the fathers are unable to meet all the expectations of adult manhood, they create an escape hatch for themselves by citing their own adolescence and claiming a need for youthful freedom. Ironically, by invoking gendered and aged norms of adulthood, the fathers reify those norms into something harder to escape.

Although women are the focal point of abortion care, a woman’s male partner may accompany her to the abortion appointment. Using Connell’s “hierarchy of masculinities” framework, this study examines how male partners negotiate their identity and role in an unfamiliar setting while their female partners undergo an abortion. Twenty-seven in-depth interviews with male partners of women obtaining abortions at a community-based and a university-based abortion clinic were conducted. The interviews reflected the tension male partners felt while attempting to maintain characteristics of hegemonic masculinity (e.g., dominance, stoicism, ambition, and fatherhood) in an environment where their female partner’s needs were prioritized. Some male partners expressed distress about their inexperience with the process and procedure as well as their inability to participate or better care for their partners. Others negotiated alternative definitions of masculinity, emphasizing a duty and/or desire to provide support during his female partner’s pregnancy decision-making and abortion experience.

While recent scholarship has documented a growth of same-sex, nonsexual kissing among young men in Western societies, this may reflect a weakening, rather than complete transformation, of hegemonic gender structures. Critically engaging with current theorizing of “inclusive masculinities,” this article reports the findings from a study of young Australian men’s views on what constitutes acceptable forms of homosocial intimacy and how they attach meaning to these behaviors. Using qualitative data from focus groups with twenty-two men from five different subcultural peer groups and eight follow-up individual interviews, we illustrate that exaggerated intimate behaviors are not considered authentic displays of affection, and therefore do not meaningfully challenge gendered power structures. Rather, they have been adopted into the repertoire of ways men can perform masculinity. However, this hybridity is neither a means of reconfiguring male power, nor evidence of entirely inclusive masculinities, but instead constitutes an initial step toward inclusivity.

Gender-transformative interventions have been found to help ameliorate gender-inequitable norms and improve health outcomes for women and men. While narrative-based strategies are increasingly being used in public health programs, no evaluation publications exist to date for gender-transformative programming that employs men’s public narrative-sharing as a central means for promoting healthy masculinities. The Men’s Story Project (MSP) creates live productions in which diverse men publicly perform personal narratives that challenge hegemonic masculinity, promote gender equality, and highlight intersections of masculinity with other social identities. This study draws upon six focus groups with thirty-one audience members (AMs), two weeks after an MSP production at a US public university. The MSP led AMs to reevaluate key pillars of hegemonic masculinity, including a singular conception of masculinity, essentialist notions of gender, restricted emotional expression, and use of violence; AMs also gained an expanded understanding of intersectionality. Directions for future research are discussed.

Teenage boys are a source of considerable concern in society, with generally poorer health, educational, and social outcomes than their female counterparts. Of particular concern are “at-risk” adolescents, who by definition are liable to poorer outcomes than peers not deemed at-risk. However, there are indications that activities such as mindfulness may offer opportunities for such adolescents to negotiate more positive constructions of masculinity. This study piloted a new four-week mindfulness-based intervention, created specifically for a group of eight at-risk adolescent boys at a school in London. In-depth, semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with participants before and after the intervention and analyzed using grounded theory. The data revealed an overarching theme of “pressure control.” Participants depicted themselves as facing multiple pressures, many of which related to making the difficult transition from childhood to adulthood. However, the context of the intervention enabled them to generate a masculine construction in which they were able to reclaim agency and self-control. Notably, such control was often exercised in the direction of facilitating emotional connection and agility, thus subverting traditional masculine expectations. The results show that at-risk adolescent boys are capable of more nuanced and skilled emotional competencies than they are often given credit for.

Expectations and norms of fatherhood are evolving, with fathers now expected to be more involved in childcare. These changes have made it possible for a growing number of fathers to assume a primary caregiving role. Catering to these fathers, a growing number of books have been published focusing on primary caregiving fathers. The present article reports on a discourse analysis of nine such books. Four interpretative repertoires were identified, suggesting very specific ways in which it is deemed appropriate for men to take on primary caregiving. The findings emphasize the need to pay ongoing attention to popular parenting texts since, despite claims they encourage and support involved models of fathering, the books present and reproduce potentially limited accounts of fathers who are primary caregivers. As such, the findings highlight the importance of being critical of claims that fatherhood is evolving, given such evolution may be mitigated by ongoing normativity with regard to fathering.

Rarely addressed in academic scholarship, the puttan tour is a well-known form of entertainment in Italy where young men drive around in small groups with the aim of spotting street sex workers. On some occasions, the participants will approach the sex workers to strike up a conversation. On others, they will shout out insults from their car then drive away. This article aims to advance a detailed analysis of this underexplored cultural practice drawing on a diverse body of scholarship exploring the intersection of masculinity, leisure, and homosociality. By analyzing stories of puttan tours gathered mostly online, including written accounts and YouTube videos, our aim is to explore the appeal of the puttan tour through an analysis of how homosociality, humor, and laughter operate in this example of gendered fun. To this end, we look at the multiple and often equivocal meanings of this homosocial male-bonding ritual, its emotional and affective dynamics, and the ways in which it reproduces structures of inequality while normalizing violence against sex workers.