CONCEPTS OF MASCULINITY AND MASCULINITY STUDIES

TODD W. REESER

Abstract
This essay provides a conceptual history of the study of masculinity in
the English-speaking academy from the birth of “men’s studies” in the
1980s to current work on global masculinities. With a move away
from masculinity as singular toward a focus on multiple masculinities,
the influential system of theoretical types of masculinities largely at-
tributed to the work of sociologist R.W. Connell – including especially
the concept of “hegemonic masculinity” – set the stage for later work
that extended or critiqued the relation between power and categories
of masculinities. During this period, sociologists and historians such
as Michael Kimmel demonstrated that there was a history of men and
masculinity, and that historical crises of masculinity were possible
and worthy objects of study. The importance accorded to questions of
identities led to a large body of work on the relations between mascu-
linity and homosexuality, women, transgender, race, colonialism, and
ethnicity. In what might be considered a branch of masculinity studies
that came of age under the influence of Eve Sedgwick, scholars invest-
ed in post-structuralist thought or in questions of literary/cultural
representation, increasingly considered how masculinity is a complex
phenomenon often or always defined by movement and change.

As Stefan Horlacher discusses in his introductory article to this vol-

ume, literature and masculinity go hand in hand. As a kind of con-
scious or unconscious fantasy or projection of other worlds, literature
can reveal aspects of masculinity that might not come out or be visible
in daily life or in other types of cultural artifacts. While it is true that
film, painting, sculpture, performance art, and music channel and

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12 Todd W. Reeser

question masculinity and while it is true that literature is in no way the

only purveyor of gendered representation, literary form necessarily
produces its own unique representation of masculinity, and for this
reason, literary analysis in the twenty-first century constitutes a crucial
and vibrant wing of masculinity studies. Consequently, many academ-
ics and graduate students in the US take it for granted that literary rep-
resentations of masculinity are a viable and desirable object of intel-
lectual inquiry. In hindsight, it seems inevitable that literary scholars,
with their interest in textual subjectivities more broadly, would take
up questions around this type of subjectivity too.
But it was not always so. Early work on literary masculinity such
as Coppélia Kahn’s Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare
(1981) and Peter Schwenger’s Phallic Critiques: Masculinity and
Twentieth-century Literature (1984) broke new ground, proving by
example that masculinity could be a viable object of inquiry in the
analysis of fiction. 1 It was, however, Eve Sedgwick’s Between Men
(1985) that radically changed the terms of both literary studies and
gender studies, as “homosocial” became a staple term in the acade-
my. 2 Despite this important work in literary criticism, the birth of the
study of masculinity in the 1980s can be characterized as largely non-
literary in nature, with the social sciences taking the most visible lead
in what was then a new and sometimes controversial approach to gen-
der.
Meant to complement Horlacher’s Introduction, this article focuses
not on the question of the relation between literature and masculinity
in theoretical terms, but rather on the actual trajectory of the study of
men and masculinity in the English-speaking academy. It traces the
trajectory of academic work among both literary scholars and social
scientists, revealing both overlaps and disjunctions between the two
sets of scholars. As a kind of introduction to the field of masculinity
studies, it is intended especially for readers interested in the genealogy
of the field of inquiry and in the concomitant history of the articula-
tion of conceptual or theoretical elements around men and masculini-

1
Coppélia Kahn, Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare, Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1981; Peter Schwenger, Phallic Critiques: Masculinity and
Twentieth-century Literature, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984.
2
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial
Desire, New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

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 Concepts of Masculinity and Masculinity Studies 13

ty, most of which come to inflect readings of literary masculinity to-

day.
In nearly all cases, questions of identity – whether cultural or indi-
vidual – are central to masculinity studies, meaning that approaches to
flesh-and-blood human beings and approaches to literary representa-
tions are not fully distinct. Sociological or anthropological under-
standings of masculinity can be and were in many ways imported to
literary studies: literary constructs of masculinity may validate con-
ceptions of gender in the social sciences, but literariness may also
transform such conceptions in ways that only take place within the
fictional text.

The birth of “men’s studies”

Work on masculinity in the 1980s was often responding, directly or
indirectly, to the idea that masculinity was natural or essential, or, in
the social sciences, was responding to sex role theory, in which the
male sex role was taken as a uniform, stable, and normative configura-
tion to which actual males do or do not conform. In his pioneering
book The Myth of Masculinity, the psychologist Joseph Pleck ex-
plained that there was at the time no systematic formulation of the
male sex role identity paradigm (MSRI). 3 Although his book aimed to
critique that approach to gender, he provided a comprehensive over-
view of the paradigm in a series of eleven propositions.
The first and most important proposition was: “Sex role identity is
operationally defined by measures of psychological sex typing, con-
ceptualized in terms of psychological masculinity and/or femininity
dimensions.” 4 A man might be measured as falling along a continuum
defined by traits or characteristics considered appropriate for his sex,
with male traits at one end female traits at the other. 5 In more complex
cases, the unconscious might be part of this measurement, so that a
man might be taken to have a conscious masculinity and an uncon-
scious femininity. Or, psychological masculinity and femininity might
be taken as independent of each other instead of as opposites on the
same continuum (the “dual-unipolar conception”, or the “androgynous
conception”). But in all of these cases, Pleck points out, “sex-typed
characteristics [are] organized along dimensions of psychological

3
Joseph H. Pleck, The Myth of Masculinity, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981.
4
Ibid., 16.
5
Ibid., 17.

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14 Todd W. Reeser

masculinity and/or femininity” and they “assume dimensions of the

personality experienced by the individual as masculine and/or femi-
nine”. 6 Sex role identity was considered “necessary for good psycho-
logical adjustment because of an inner psychological need for it”, with
homosexuality considered a disturbance of an appropriate identity. 7
Despite the seeming normativity of the propositions, sex role identity
was not natural or God-given, but rather learned behavior (in particu-
lar, from adults, parents, and, especially, a parent of the same sex). 8
Appropriate identity was seen as difficult to develop, especially for
black males, and this difficulty could explain boys’ trouble in school.
Against an intellectual background that tended to consider gender
as singular, scholars increasingly moved to treating masculinity as
plural, while not forgetting that it tends to manifest certain recurring
characteristics such as homophobia, power, and dominance over
women. After presenting the MSRI paradigm, for instance, Pleck took
the approach to task, positing an alternative approach to the study of
masculinity, termed the sex role strain (SRS) paradigm. His fundamen-
tal proposition in this paradigm was: “Sex roles are operationally de-
fined by sex role stereotypes and norms.” 9 The male sex role is prob-
lematic in the sense that traits or qualities taken to define that role are
based on shared ideas about what a man is or ought to be. Those defi-
nitions are not simple, Pleck explains, but are based in contradiction
and inconsistency, and the percentage of men who violate such roles is
high. 10 Since roles change over time, this is another cause of sex role
strain. 11 Pleck’s new model thus rejects simple notions of what a man
is or should be as definitional of gender, and helps move the study of
psychological masculinity toward the idea that the male sex role needs
to be imagined as complicated and multiple. For if violation of the
male sex role is normal, then that role cannot in fact define any single
norm.
As new approaches came to be articulated, gender (even if cultural-
ly defined) was not assumed simply to precede human acts, but to be
created by them. Consequently, revisioning masculinity as a critical
enterprise meant that new types of masculinity could be created aca-
6
Ibid., 18.
7
Ibid., 21.
8
Ibid., 19-20.
9
Ibid., 135.
10
Ibid., 143-44.
11
Ibid., 152-53.

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 Concepts of Masculinity and Masculinity Studies 15

demically and pedagogically. A defining moment – perhaps the defin-

ing moment – in the move toward multiplicity was the publication of
the collection of essays The Making of Masculinities: The New Men’s
Studies (1987). In his Introduction, the editor Harry Brod (a humani-
ties-based scholar) wrote that the volume is critical of the idea that “all
too often, scholars have tended to write too simplistically of the male
sex role, rather than the multiplicity of male roles”. 12 As the first
chapter of the volume, Joseph Pleck’s own essay offered a history of
male sex-role identity since 1936, 13 which other authors played off as
an outdated approach. Following Pleck’s essay, Brod’s own essay in
the volume, “The Case for Men’s Studies”, articulated what this new
approach to gender might mean. For him, one of the problems in the
academy is that “while women’s studies corrects the exclusion of
women from the traditional canon caused by androcentric scholar-
ship’s elevation of man as male to man as generic human, the implica-
tions of this fallacy for our understanding of men have gone largely
unrecognized”.
Brod’s volume, then, called for – but also put into practice – an ap-
proach to men as gendered beings, and positioned an emerging field of
study as “a necessary complement to women’s studies”. Toward these
ends, Brod defined the new men’s studies in general terms as “the
study of masculinities and male experiences as specific and varying
social-historical-cultural formations”. 14 During this time, generally
viewed as a second stage in men’s studies, scholars increasingly
thought through the specificity of masculinities – in time, place, and
culture. The volume included essays on a wide variety of topics (for
instance, race, athletics, career, myth, biology, male bonding) and
from a variety of disciplines (especially sociology, history, literature).
Brod’s volume can be taken as a beacon of a new body of research,
which included new journals, conferences, and a growing number of
publications in the social sciences and humanities on men and mascu-
linities. As a sign that men’s studies was reaching a wider audience,
an article penned by Brod appeared in 1990 in the American main-
stream academic publication The Chronicle of Higher Education un-

12
Harry Brod, Introduction, in The Making of Masculinities: The New Men’s Studies,
ed. Harry Brod, Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1987, 7 (emphasis in the original).
13
Joseph H. Pleck, “The Theory of Male Sex-Role Identity: Its Rise and Fall, 1936 to
the Present”, in ibid., 21-38.
14
Harry Brod, “The Case for Men’s Studies”, in ibid., 40 (emphasis in the original).

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16 Todd W. Reeser

der the title “Scholarly Studies of Men: An Essential Complement to

Women’s Studies”. 15
One element of the coming of age of men’s studies was the idea
that masculinity had to be made visible, to be brought out as an object
of study, and to not be considered an unmarked category (in the way
that woman or homosexuality as categories were marked and could
not easily be ignored or forgotten). Masculinity’s traditional invisibil-
ity, it was widely thought, was one way in which it maintained its
power: by denying implicitly or explicitly that men were gendered,
they could escape close scrutiny and resist critique or the need to
change. As Antony Easthope wrote: “Social change is necessary and a
precondition of such change is an attempt to understand masculinity,
to make it visible.” 16 For this to take place, various questions about
masculinity would have to be explicitly asked, including questions
about the male body, history, and cultural images. As Michael Kim-
mel asked in his essay “Invisible Masculinity”: “If the pursuit of man-
hood has been a dominant theme in American history, at least rhetori-
cally and metaphorically, why do American men still have no
history?” For him, the response was: “In part because they do not even
know what questions to ask.” 17 Of particular importance in making
the male body visible as a gendered body was the presence of
masculinity on screen, which, consequently, led to an increase in
studies of masculinity in film and in the media. 18
During the period of transition in the 1980s, the study of men and
masculinity remained in close dialogue with feminism. In fact, in
some cases the line between feminism and masculinity studies was not
entirely clear, with volumes such as Alice Jardine and Paul Smith’s
Men in Feminism (1987) and Joseph Boone and Michael Cadden’s

15
Harry Brod, “Scholarly Studies of Men: An Essential Complement to Women’s
Studies”, Chronicle of Higher Education, 21 March 1990: http://chronicle.com/article/
Scholarly-Studies-of-Men-an/70081/.
16
Antony Easthope, What a Man’s Gotta Do: The Masculine Myth in Popular Cul-
ture, Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990, 7 (emphasis in the original).
17
Michael S. Kimmel, “Invisible Masculinity”, in The History of Men: Essays in the
History of American and British Masculinities, ed. Michael S. Kimmel, Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2005, 4.
18
See e.g. Steve Neale, “Masculinity as Spectacle”, Screen, XXIV/6 (November
1983), 2-16; Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, eds
Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, London: Routledge, 1993; Susan Bordo, “Reading
the Male Body”, Michigan Quarterly, XXXII/4 (Fall 1993), 696-737.

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 Concepts of Masculinity and Masculinity Studies 17

Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism (1990). 19

It was considered crucial that the study of men and masculinity be
articulated as part of a feminist project, or as “male feminist criti-
cism”. At the same time, an explicit element of the study of men and
masculinity came to be a consideration of whether men were in fact
co-opting women or feminine positions as a way to outdo or outwit
women and, in this sense, issuing a backlash against feminism and the
gains of women. Elaine Showalter’s essay, titled “Critical Cross-
Dressing: Male Feminists and the Woman of the Year”, asks whether
male feminism is “a form of critical cross-dressing, a fashion risk of
the 1980s that is both radical chic and power play”, and considers the
question of male appropriation of power in texts such as the film Toot-
sie, in which a male character cross-dresses and becomes a better
woman than the women characters. 20 Considerations of whether a man
who “becomes” a woman (by cross-dressing, by reading as a woman,
by appropriating birth, etc.) was re-empowering men were feminist in
origin, but this critical approach provided what became (and remains)
a current of masculinity studies in which similar critical questions can
be asked in configurations in which a man takes on characteristics not
generally attributed to him.
The continuing relation between feminism and masculinity meant
that, in other cases, scholars were suspicious of mythopoetic or
Jungian-influenced attempts to reposition masculinity as essential or
natural, to the point that such suspiciousness helped define men’s
studies in the 1990s. Most famously in an American context, the 1990
publication of Robert Bly’s best-selling book Iron John: A Book about
Men provoked scholarly discourse that was largely critical of the
book. Bly posited some basic myths of manhood through ancient
stories and legends, to give birth to a new, vigorous manhood
simultaneously centered on emotion. Bly wrote in his Preface that his
book “does not seek to turn men against women, not to return men to
the domineering mode that has led to repression of women and their
values for centuries”. He viewed the men’s movement as operating
“on a separate timetable” from the women’s movement, and as not
19
Men in Feminism, eds Alice Jardine and Paul Smith, New York: Methuen, 1987;
Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism, eds Joseph A. Boone
and Michael Cadden, New York: Routledge, 1990.
20
Elaine Showalter, “Critical Cross-Dressing: Male Feminists and the Woman of the
Year”, in Men in Feminism, 120; see also Tania Modleski, Feminism Without Women:
Culture and Criticism in a ‘Postfeminist’ Age, New York: Routledge, 1991.

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18 Todd W. Reeser

excluding gay men. 21 Scholars in men’s studies from the early 1990s,
however, often responded rather negatively to the book, the book’s
popularity, and the mythopoetic approach in a larger sense, viewing
the book as a challenge to many of the presuppositions about the study
of men that they had worked to popularize and as perhaps
symptomatic of the continuing need or desire to view masculinity as
natural or essential.
Several of the essays in the important volume Theorizing Mascu-
linities were specific in their critiques. 22 Scott Coltrane, for instance,
commented on the “misogynist overtones” of the community conjured
up by Bly and critiqued such approaches to gender as reducing “his-
torically and culturally specific myths and practices to universal psy-
chological or biological truths, thereby ignoring the social structural
conditions that produced them”. 23 Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and
Michael Messner concluded that “the mythopoetic men’s movement
may be seen as facilitating the reconstruction of a new form of hege-
monic masculinity – a masculinity that is less self-destructive, that has
revalued and reconstructed men’s emotional bonds with each other,
and that has learned to feel good about its own Zeus power”. 24 The
popularity of these kinds of mythopoetic approaches challenged the
profeminist men’s movement, and for scholars engaged in men’s stud-
ies, brought concern that these two movements might be viewed as
one and the same. However the mythopoetic movement helped men’s
studies define itself as an academic movement based not on an essen-
tial core of masculinity, but on an assumption of multiple masculini-
ties.
As Brod had suggested in his call for a new men’s studies, one el-
ement of a paradigm shift was to consider how masculinity had
changed over time. To study historical changes of masculinity was to
show its plurality. The historian-sociologist Michael Kimmel, one of

21
Robert Bly, Preface, in Iron John: A Book about Men, New York: Random House,
1990, x.
22
See Scott Coltrane, “Theorizing Masculinities in Contemporary Social Science”, in
Theorizing Masculinities, eds Harry Brod and Michael Kaufman, Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage, 1994, 39-60; Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Michael A. Messner, “Gen-
der Displays and Men’s Power: The ‘New Man’ and the Mexican Immigrant Man”, in
ibid., 200-18; Michael S. Kimmel and Michael Kaufman, “Weekend Warriors: The
New Men’s Movement”, in ibid., 259-88.
23
Coltrane, “Theorizing Masculinities in Contemporary Social Science”, 45.
24
Hondagneu-Sotelo and Messner, “Gender Displays and Men’s Power”, 204.

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 Concepts of Masculinity and Masculinity Studies 19

the best known and prolific scholars of men and masculinity, has pub-
lished extensively on ways in which masculinity is constructed cultur-
ally and historically, especially in the US. In the Introduction to his
comprehensive historical study Manhood in America, Kimmel defined
the two key elements of writing about men as men: “first, to chart how
the definition of masculinity has changed over time; second, to ex-
plore how the experience of manhood has shaped the activities of
American men.” 25 His approach allowed for examinations of key as-
pects or morphologies of masculinity, such as “the self-made man”.
Whereas traditionally women’s history was taken as reacting to men’s
history, the direction of the influence could be reversed, since, in his
words, “definitions of masculinity are historically reactive to changing
definitions of femininity”. 26 Historians in British history who have
worked on men and masculinity include John Tosh, whose work on
Victorian England traces key shifts in what it meant to be a man, and
in Australian history, Martin Crotty who traces shifts in ideal middle-
class masculinity in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Aus-
tralia. 27
While this kind of diachronic change might be taken as the domain
of history, literary representation, too, charts changing definitions of
masculinity. Moderation, for instance, was a key definitional element
of early-modern European masculinity, but today in much of the West
may be seen quite differently. 28 A key component of the study of the
history of masculinity or of the representation of masculinity is the
definition of cultural morphologies that change over time (for exam-
ple, the courtier, the dandy, the gentleman, the metrosexual), and the
question of the unstable relation among similar morphologies across
time periods. 29 The history of masculinity does not have to be studied,
however, as morphologies or as a series of traits culturally associated

25
Michael Kimmel, Introduction, in Manhood in America: A Cultural History, New
York: Free Press, 1996, 2.
26
Michael Kimmel, “The Contemporary ‘Crisis’ of Masculinity in Historical Perspec-
tive”, in The Making of Masculinities, 123 (emphasis in the original).
27
John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-class Home in Victorian
England, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999; Martin Crotty, Making the
Australian Male: Middle-Class Masculinity, 1870-1920, Carlton South: Melbourne
University Press, 2001.
28
See Todd W. Reeser, Moderating Masculinity in Early Modern Culture, Chapel
Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
29
See Todd W. Reeser, Masculinities in Theory: An Introduction, Malden, MA:
Wiley Blackwell, 2010, 216-26.

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20 Todd W. Reeser

with men, but can also be studied as a series of tensions or contradic-

tions within definitions of what a man means, mirroring Pleck’s psy-
chological ideas on masculinity as inherently contradictory.
One key strain of approaches to masculinity considers when and
why men are in a state of crisis, or considers the socio-historical mo-
ments in which definitions of what a man is or should be change. The
idea that masculinities change over time, and that certain historical
moments are more stressful for men than others became canonical in
thinking about historicity. While some took certain historical moments
as more crisis-filled than other ones, other scholars viewed masculini-
ty as always, in a certain sense, in a state of crisis and considered that
labeling a given period as a crisis assumes that there are other periods
when masculinity is somehow free of anxiety or crisis. Crises might
be provoked by changes in the status or women or homosexuality, or
by cultural shifts in labor, capital, or the nation. Within the area of
American cultural studies, Bryce Traister isolated a crisis theory
“rooted in a new historiography of American masculinity that locates
instability at the base of all masculine identities constructed within
American cultural matrices”. 30 As Traister’s article suggests, the crisis
model of masculinity has inflected historical studies as well as literary
criticism. Consequently, what happens in a literary text might be taken
to signify not a character’s own crisis, but embody a larger cultural
crisis resulting from shifts in what masculinity is taken to mean.

Hegemonic masculinity
Often considered the most influential theoretical concept in the history
of the study of men and masculinity, “hegemonic masculinity” is
widely attributed to R.W. Connell’s seminal book Masculinities
(1995). 31 Tim Carrigan, Bob Connell, and John Lee’s earlier essay,
“Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity” (1987), however, also
discussed the concept at length. Responding to assumptions of mascu-
linity as stable, the three authors defined hegemonic masculinity as “a
question of how particular groups of men inhabit positions of power
and wealth, and how they legitimate and reproduce the social relation-
30
Bryce Traister, “Academic Viagra: The Rise of American Masculinity Studies”,
American Quarterly, LII/2 (June 2000), 276.
31
R.W. Connell, Masculinities, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. But
see also R.W. Connell, Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics,
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987; and R.W. Connell, Which Way Is Up?
Essays on Sex, Class and Culture, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1983.

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 Concepts of Masculinity and Masculinity Studies 21

ships that generate their dominance”. In a given culture, even if hege-

monic masculinity may not be so common but “may only correspond
to the actual characters of a small number of men”, nonetheless “large
numbers of men are complicit in sustaining the hegemonic model”. 32
Men’s dominance over women was central to this definition, but so
was the heterosexuality of hegemonic masculinity, at least in most
modern cultures. One advantage of this approach to gender, then, was
that it married “the gay movement’s” and feminist approaches to mas-
culinity by considering that hegemonic masculinity usually situates
itself negatively vis-à-vis both gay men and women. The model also
helped make historicity central to de-essentializing masculinity: “‘He-
gemony’ ... always refers to a historical situation, a set of circum-
stances in which power is won and held. The construction of hegemo-
ny is not a matter of pushing and pulling between ready-formed
groupings but is partly a matter of the formation of those
groupings.” 33 In particular, that construction takes place, the authors
suggested, through commercial mass media, the gendered division of
labor, and the state. These social relations are inextricably linked to
the gendered psyche, meaning that the study of hegemonic
masculinity should take both socio-historical as well as psychological
factors into account.
To study hegemonic masculinity is essentially to employ a rela-
tional model predicated on power as the central organizing element of
gender. In his book Masculinities, Connell called for considerations
not only of diversity in considering masculinities, but also of “the
relations between the different kinds of masculinity: relations of alli-
ance, dominance and subordination”. 34 Such relations between types
of masculinity are dynamic, not static, and a shift or change with re-
spect to gender entails a corresponding shift or change in definitions
of hegemonic masculinity. This approach transformed the study of
masculinity in part by disbanding the idea that to study masculinity
was to study types or static characteristics of men. Hegemonic mascu-
linity should not be seen, then, as “a fixed character type, always and
everywhere the same”, but rather as “the masculinity that occupies the

32
Tim Carrigan, Bob Connell and John Lee, “Toward a New Sociology of Masculini-
ty”, in The Making of Masculinities, 92.
33
Ibid., 94 (emphasis in the original).
34
R.W. Connell, Masculinities, 37 (emphasis in the original).

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22 Todd W. Reeser

hegemonic position in a given pattern of gender relations, a position

always contestable”. 35
In order to sketch out the key relations in the model, Connell fa-
mously lays out four categories: hegemony, subordination, complicity,
and marginalization. Taking the idea of hegemony from the Italian
political theorist Antonio Gramsci, Connell defines a gendered revi-
sion of Gramsci’s concept as “the configuration of gender practice
which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the
legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee)
the dominant position of men and the subordination of women”. 36
Hegemonic masculinity in a given context establishes subordinate
masculinities, especially but not exclusively male homosexuality. Men
who may benefit from gender hegemony, but may not actually meet
its criteria, fall into the category of complicity: “Masculinities con-
structed in ways that realize the patriarchal dividend, without the ten-
sions or risks of being the frontline troops of patriarchy, are complicit
in this sense.” 37 Marginalized masculinities are not so much subordi-
nate as much as they are dependent on hegemonic masculinity for
authorization. Connell’s examples in this category pertain largely to
race: “in the United States, particular black athletes may be exemplars
for hegemonic masculinity. But the fame and wealth of individual
stars has no trickle-down effect; it does not yield social authority to
black men generally.” While these categories of analysis became
widespread in academic studies, they were nonetheless sketchy and
meant to be what Connell herself calls “a sparse framework” intended
to bring about further study. 38
The large scope of the concept of hegemonic masculinity meant
that it was widely employed as a theoretical model, but also that it was
criticized, often because of what it left out. Michael Flood studies the
slippage in Connell’s own use of the term. It is unclear, he writes,
whether hegemonic masculinity represents “a particular configuration
of gender practice related to patriarchal authority, or describes what-
ever type of masculinity is dominant in a given social order”. 39 For

35
Ibid., 76.
36
Ibid., 77.
37
Ibid., 79.
38
Ibid., 81.
39
Michael Flood, “Between Men and Masculinity: An Assessment of the Term ‘Mas-
culinity’ in Recent Scholarship on Men”, in Manning the Next Millennium: Studies in
Masculinities, eds Sharyn Pearce and Vivienne Muller, Bentley, WA: Black Swan

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 Concepts of Masculinity and Masculinity Studies 23

Flood, Connell’s linkage between hegemonic masculinity as “cultural

ideal” and as “patriarchal gender practice” is problematic since influ-
ential representations of masculinity circulating in culture may or may
not correspond to practices of masculinity. 40
Margaret Wetherell and Nigel Edley criticized the model because it
does not treat the question of how the four categories “actually pre-
scribe or regulate men’s lives”. 41 Taking a discourse-centered ap-
proach, they articulate the concepts of “imaginary positions” and
“psycho-discursive practices” as linguistic techniques whereby indi-
vidual men create relations to hegemonic masculinity in everyday
interactions with other people. Another recurring critique resided in
the idea that the model does not suggest the possibility that a minority
or subordinate position can come to influence the hegemonic, but as-
sumes discrete relations between types of masculinities.
For Demetrakis Demetriou, hegemonic masculinity should be tak-
en not as pure, but as hybrid: by virtue of appropriating non-
hegemonic elements, it can transform itself “in a very deceptive and
unrecognizable way” by appropriating and transforming “what ap-
pears counter-hegemonic and progressive into an instrument of back-
wardness and patriarchal reproduction”. 42 While a man may seek to
subordinate women, for instance, he may also incorporate elements of
women or femininity into his own hegemonic identity. As was the
case in the feminist work discussed earlier, men who cross-dress as
women, for instance, may not become subordinate or marginal men at
all, but rather reaffirm their status as hegemonic.
Connell’s model could be taken as not creating sufficient space for
resistance to masculine hegemony by subordinate groups. While Con-
nell emphasizes the constant contestation of hegemonic masculinity,
the question of how that contestation takes place or what its results
might be is not articulated at much length. Conversely, the question of
how women might in fact function as part of hegemonic masculinity

Press 2002, 208; see also Patricia Yancey Martin, “Why Can’t a Man Be More Like a
Woman? Reflections on Connell’s Masculinities”, Gender and Society, XII/4 (August
1998), 473.
40
Flood, “Between Men and Masculinity”, 208.
41
Margaret Wetherell and Nigel Edley, “Negotiating Hegemonic Masculinity: Imagi-
nary Positions and Psycho-Discursive Practices”, Feminism and Psychology, IX/3
(August 1999), 336.
42
Demetrakis Z. Demetriou, “Connell’s Concept of Hegemonic Masculinity: A Cri-
tique”, Theory and Society, XXX/3 (June 2001), 355 (emphasis in the original).

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24 Todd W. Reeser

except as subordinate is not a major concern in the model, as the male

dominance of women is taken as a stable given. Could, for instance, a
woman leader or businesswoman in fact be more hegemonic than a
man? Challenging the theoretical hegemony of hegemonic masculini-
ty, Eric Anderson allows for the concept of “inclusive masculinity” in
contexts in which cultural homophobia is diminished or diminishing. 43
In a recent essay, Connell and Messerschmidt responded to the
lengthy reception of the concept of hegemonic masculinity. For them,
two aspects of the early discussion of hegemonic masculinity should
be rejected: first, “a single pattern of power, the ‘global dominance’ of
men over women” and, second, the idea that masculinity is “an as-
semblage of traits”. 44 In their article, they defend the continuing use of
hegemonic masculinity in academic work, but they also suggest ways
to update and reformulate the concept through expanded thinking
about gender hierarchy, geography (including the local, regional, and
global), embodiment, and the dynamics of the concept itself.

Race and masculinity

Hegemonic masculinity relates not only to women and homosexuality,
but also to race. Connell had labeled black masculinity in the US as
marginal, because, while it may exemplify certain elements of hege-
monic masculinity, it is still not recognized, nor can it remain as such,
meaning that the whiteness of hegemonic masculinity cannot be ig-
nored. Predating the publication of Connell’s Masculinities by more
than a decade, Robert Staples’ landmark Black Masculinity: The Black
Male’s Role in American Society, took a conflict theory perspective,
positioning black masculinity as inherently oppositional: “As a start-
ing point, I see the black male as being in conflict with the normative
definition of masculinity.” 45 Staples defined black men’s “dual di-
lemma”: “their subordination as a racial minority has more than can-
celled out their advantages as males in the larger society.” 46 Importing

43
Eric Anderson, Inclusive Masculinity: The Changing Nature of Masculinities, New
York: Routledge, 2009; see also Mark McCormack, The Declining Significance of
Homophobia: How Teenage Boys Are Redefining Masculinity and Heterosexuality,
New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
44
R.W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking
the Concept”, Gender and Society, XIX/6 (December 2005), 846-47.
45
Robert Staples, Black Masculinity: The Black Male’s Role in American Society, San
Francisco, CA: Black Scholar Press, 1982, 2.
46
Ibid., 7.

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 Concepts of Masculinity and Masculinity Studies 25

the Francophone theorist Frantz Fanon’s model of blackness and co-

lonialism in an innovative way, Staples considered African American
masculinity as a form of gender colonized through the history of slav-
ery in the US. Yet, his study does not consider masculinity solely as a
black man-white man conflict, as it takes homosexuality and relations
with women into account as well.
Despite Staples’ ground-breaking book, the role of blackness was
far from a major concern of work in the 1980s, but since then black or
African American masculinity has come to play an increasingly im-
portant role in the field. Majors and Billson treat a specific form of
black masculinity – the cool pose, “a ritualized form of masculinity
that entails behaviors, scripts, physical posturing, impression man-
agement, and carefully crafted performances that deliver a single,
critical message: pride, strength, and control”. 47 Maurice Wallace’s
Constructing the Black Masculine participates in a new wave of work
post-1994, with the express aim of “bringing race to bear on a crisis
theory in order precisely to deny the normativity of those erstwhile
deployments”. 48 Part of such a de-normatizing process is to focus not
simply on how the black man is represented or relates to hegemonic
masculinity, but on the question of how racialized bodies are framed
visually. As Wallace explains his subject matter: “enframement ... is
the ur-trope of black male specularity for this study.”49
While blackness might be the most widely considered racial con-
figuration, scholars focusing on race and ethnicity in the Anglophone
world have considered how given masculinities are analogically
linked with the feminine or with effeminacy, how they relate to hyper-
masculinity or machismo, and how such analogies break down or do
not function. Extending parallels between the primitive and castration
in Freud, David Eng analyzes cultural representations of Asian Amer-
ican masculinity as symbolically castrated. His approach, however, is
dual as he identifies “not only textual moments in which the Asian
American male subject is coerced and held to certain (de)idealized
sexual and racial identifications but also instances when these identifi-

47
Richard Majors and Janet Mancini Billson, Cool Pose: The Dilemmas of Black
Manhood in America, New York: Macmillan, 1992, 4.
48
Maurice O. Wallace, Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in
African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775-1995, Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2002, 6.
49
Ibid., 8.

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26 Todd W. Reeser

cations fail or threaten to break down”. 50 Asian American masculinity

has provoked a fair amount of discussion in American studies. 51 In a
different context, Mrinalini Sinha studies gender constructs of Asian
men as effeminate during the British empire. 52 Under the influence of
Said’s Orientalism, representations of a lacking masculinity in non-
western men are often taken as viewed through an orientalizing lens
by which European hegemony is established via gender. In addition,
work on Jewish masculinity treats a variety of questions related to
culture, ethnicity, and religion, including its perceived effeminacy and
its status as marginalized. 53 While Latino and Native American mas-
culinity in the US have been discussed with less frequency than black
masculinity, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Michael Messner put
Connell’s model of hegemonic/marginalized/subordinated masculini-
ties into dialogue with Mexican immigrant men, Alfredo Mirandé
made a case for a profeminist Chicano/Latino men’s studies, Richard
Rogers studies visual representations of Native American masculinity
in the figure of the Kokopelli, and Kathleen Glenister Roberts studied
Native Americans and masculinity within the context of war. 54 Shino

50
David L. Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America,
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001, 29.
51
See, for instance, King-Kok Cheung, “Of Men and Men: Reconstructing Chinese
American Masculinity”, in Other Sisterhoods: Literary Theory and U.S. Women of
Color, ed. Sandra Kumamoto Stanley, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998, 173-
99; Jinqi Ling, “Identity Crisis and Gender Politics: Reappropriating Asian American
Masculinity”, in An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature, ed. King-
Kok Cheung, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 312-37; Joon Oluchi
Lee, “The Joy of the Castrated Boy”, Social Text, XXIII/3-4 (Fall-Winter 2005), 35-
56.
52
Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effemi-
nate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century, Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1995.
53
See e.g. A Mensch Among Men: Explorations in Jewish Masculinity, ed. Harry
Brod, Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1988; Harry Brod, “Some Thoughts on Some
Histories of Some Masculinities: Jews and Other Others”, in Theorizing Masculini-
ties, 82-96.
54
Hondagneu-Sotelo and Messner, “Gender Displays and Men’s Power”; Alfredo
Mirandé, Hombres y Machos: Masculinity and Latino Culture, Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1997; Richard A. Rogers, “Deciphering Kokopelli: Masculinity in
Commodified Appropriations of Native American Imagery”, Communication and
Critical/Cultural Studies, IV/3 (September 2007), 233-55; Kathleen Glenister
Roberts, “War, Masculinity, and Native Americans”, in Global Masculinities and
Manhood, eds Ronald Jackson II and Murali Balaji, Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2011, 141-60.

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 Concepts of Masculinity and Masculinity Studies 27

Konishi engages with the question of the whiteness of hegemonic

masculinity within the context of Australian Aboriginal masculinity.55
If masculinity should no longer be taken to be invisible, the same
should be said of whiteness as a racial construct. To study white mas-
culinity as racialized and as gendered, then, is to render visible two
types of identities often invisible. Analogies between race and gender
that privilege white masculinity include muscularity, 56 and explain,
for instance, why bodybuilding may be imagined as a white sport or
why muscular heroes such as Tarzan, Hercules, or Rambo are so often
white, or perceived as white. Work on race and masculinity grew in
other directions as well, as evidenced for instance by the essays col-
lected in Stecopoulos and Uebel. 57 Discussions of interracial mascu-
linity show, too, how connections or relations between men of diverse
races are gendered. With an American tradition of white-black males
who love each other – as represented most famously by Huckleberry
Finn and the slave Jim – interracial masculinities in US film have been
a particular focus of this kind of work. 58

Complicating masculinity
Over the course of the 1990s, “masculinity” or “masculinities” as
terms increasingly came to replace “men’s studies”. To take one ex-
ample, the name of the Men’s Studies Review was changed to mascu-
linities in 1993, a change implying that “men’s studies” is not a direct
reaction against “women’s studies”. Often, the phrase “men and mas-
culinities” is employed in English to simultaneously allow for links
and disjunctures between sex and gender. But the increasing use of the
terms “masculinity” or “masculinities” is often thought to suggest that
they do not have to be directly or naturally linked with the male body
or with men, and that they are complicated and unstable phenomena,
not easily pinned down and not necessarily what they appear to be,
thus much more than simply the lives of actual men. Many scholars in

55
Shino Konishi, “Aboriginal Masculinity in Howard’s Australia”, in ibid., 161-85.
56
See Richard Dyer, White, New York: Routledge, 1997.
57
Race and the Subject of Masculinities, eds Harry Stecopoulos and Michael Uebel,
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.
58
See Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive
History of Blacks in American Films, New York: Continuum, 2001; Melvin Donalson,
Masculinity in the Interracial Buddy Film, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006; Brian
Locke, Racial Stigma on the Hollywood Screen from World War II to the Present: The
Orientalist Buddy Film, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

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28 Todd W. Reeser

humanities fields such as literature, film, or cultural studies prefer the

terms, possibly rejecting “men’s studies” altogether, because they
suggest a focus on questions of representation. This semantic shift is
indicative, too, of other changes in the field, including the move away
from an almost exclusive focus on male bodies and the move toward
approaches inflected with post-structuralist thought.
The term “masculinity” may emphasize its social-constructedness,
and consequently, that it is open to reconstruction. The plural “mascu-
linities” is taken to reflect multiplicity, including those related to race
and nation. While some scholars consider the vagueness and expan-
siveness of masculinity as a positive because it reflects the fact that
gender itself is difficult to pin down, for others the shift creates confu-
sion around the seemingly nebulous term or diverts attention from
men’s gendered practices. 59 Clatterbaugh suggests some specific se-
mantic confusions in this regard, including incoherencies produced by
taking masculinity as discursively constructed. 60
One way to study how masculinity is not what it appears to be is
not to separate masculinity and homosexuality as two separate ele-
ments (as hegemonic and marginal for instance), but to consider them
as overlapping identities. Men may not make direct reference to ho-
mosexuality, but it may nonetheless subtend masculine relations.
While homophobia and the objectification of women were both often
taken as central defining elements of masculinity in the 1980s, Eve
Sedgwick’s Between Men (1985) articulated a widely influential mod-
el of homosociality that brought together feminist and gay approaches
to the study of literary representations of masculinity. Some scholars
in literary studies consider it an inaugural book in the move from fem-
inism to gender studies. Sedgwick herself writes that she is “assimilat-
ing ‘French’ feminist – deconstructive and/or Lacanian-oriented femi-
nism – to the radical-feminist end of this spectrum”. 61
While Sedgwick’s ground-breaking book made its way into some
contemporaneous work in social-science work in men’s studies, it is
rarely cited or discussed, suggesting a rather strict separation between

59
Jeff Hearn, “Is Masculinity Dead? A Critique of the Concept of Masculini-
ty/masculinities”, in Understanding Masculinities: Social Relations and Cultural
Arenas, ed. Máirtín Mac an Ghaill, Buckingham: Open University Press, 1996, 202-
17.
60
Kenneth Clatterbaugh, “What Is Problematic about Masculinities?”, Men and Mas-
culinities, I/1 (July 1998), 24-45.
61
Sedgwick, Between Men, 11.

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 Concepts of Masculinity and Masculinity Studies 29

more literary/cultural approaches and social science ones, even as

Sedgwick’s work resembled that of other scholars in that it aimed to
incorporate both feminist and gay approaches. Based partially on an-
thropological theory, Sedgwick’s study posits that the relation be-
tween two seemingly heterosexual men and certain relations of desire
between men and women should not be considered separate. Two men
might desire the same woman as a way to displace the possibility of
homoerotic desire for each other, meaning that the stronger interper-
sonal relation is not the heterosexual one, but that between the two
men. That male-male relation, with patriarchal undertones, suggests
that men are sharing power as much as desire through the objectifica-
tion of the women mutually desired. Behind the triangular model of
desire lies the presupposition that male-male relations are located on a
continuum of desire that ultimately cannot locate or cannot stabilize
male-male relations as strictly “heterosexual”. As she writes: “To
draw the ‘homosocial’ back into the orbit of ‘desire,’ of the potentially
erotic ... is to hypothesize the potential unbrokenness of a continuum
between homosocial and homosexual.” 62 Her notion of a continuum of
desire mirrored previous work in feminist thought that considered
women’s relation with women on a continuum of desire, and disband-
ed the over-simple idea that women’s sexuality is fluid while men’s is
not.
As a result of Sedgwick’s book, the words “homosocial” and “ho-
mosociality” became widely used in the study of men and masculinity,
as male-male interactions – even when two men do not specifically
desire the same women – are taken to fall on a continuum of male
homosocial desire and as the instability of men’s interactions makes it
difficult to term them purely heterosexual. The role of female homo-
sociality is hardly discussed in Between Men, and Sedgwick herself
calls for more work on “the relations between female-homosocial and
male-homosocial structures”. 63 In addition, the question of whether
her model could be taken to apply to non-European cultures is one that
she raises: “any attempt to treat [this book’s formulations] as cross-
cultural or (far more) as universal ought to involve the most searching
and particular analysis.” 64 In terms of the analytic practice of mascu-
linity, Sedgwick makes a case for thinking in sophisticated ways about

62
Ibid., 1.
63
Ibid., 18.
64
Ibid., 19.

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30 Todd W. Reeser

representation as integral to the way in which power functions: “Be-

fore we can fully achieve and use our intuitive grasp of the leverage
that sexual relations seem to offer on the relations of oppression, we
need more – more different, more complicated, more diachronically
apt, more off-centered – more daring and prehensile applications of
our present understanding of what it may mean for one thing to signify
another.” 65 From her first textual reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnets to
her last one on Charles Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood, histo-
ricity and contextualization are central to reading homosociality, leav-
ing open the adaption of her approach to other time periods that she
does not specifically treat.
With her focus on interpretive complexity in the representation of
gender relations, Sedgwick sets the stage to consider movement-
centered approaches to masculinity, including the queerness within
heterosexual masculinity. If one of the presuppositions of queer theory
is that male homophobia is attempting to expel the abject queer from
within, then there is necessarily something queer about or within mas-
culinity in the first place. Or, alternately, excessive forms of masculin-
ity may point to an instability of masculinity that contains something
queer. An anti-normative gender presentation, the hypersexual man,
for instance, may act the way he does because he is attempting to ex-
pel, or is responding to, an anxiety of queerness within.
If heterosexual masculinity can be taken as queer in some sense, it
can also be taken as “performative”. Judith Butler famously articulates
the idea that gender is performative in her ground-breaking Gender
Trouble. 66 While the book focuses on gender and not masculinity spe-
cifically, her theoretical concepts can be brought to bear on masculini-
ty in productive ways, 67 and have had an immense influence on mas-
culinity studies, particularly in the humanities. Butler famously
suggests that the traditional distinction between sex and gender is no
distinction at all, but that gender should be taken as “the very appa-
ratus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established”. 68
In this sense, then, “maleness” or “manhood” in its biological configu-
ration (as influenced by testosterone, the male sex drive, or the penis,

65
Ibid., 11.
66
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New
York: Routledge, 1990.
67
See Reeser, Masculinities in Theory, Chapter 3.
68
Butler, Gender Trouble, 7.

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 Concepts of Masculinity and Masculinity Studies 31

for instance) can be understood as elements of gender as constructed

through the medium of language. It is not testosterone itself that
makes a man, but how we understand this element of biology or what
we make of it. The male body (like the sexed body in a larger sense)
does not have inherent meaning, except as we ascribe meaning to it. In
this sense, as per Butler’s ideas in Bodies that Matter, 69 men have to
“assume” their maleness. They both take it on and take it for granted.
In addition, men are not acting masculine because of something in
their genes or in their blood, but by virtue of the fact that their gen-
dered acts implicitly refer to or cite innumerable actions that others
have already undertaken – actions that provide authority, meaning,
and stability for the current act. So the masculinity of a given cowboy
in a film is supported and made possible by an entire host of links
between masculinity and space, the frontier, guns, etc. that have been
previously made and repeated. From a Butlerian approach, masculini-
ty can be considered as a “corporeal style”, 70 not unchanging and open
to change over an individual’s life or over a historical time period.
In parallel with the post-structuralist commonplace that signifier
and signified do not naturally correspond, the term “masculinity” no
longer has to be taken with respect to its supposedly natural recepta-
cle, the male body. While almost all early work on masculinity fo-
cused on masculinity and the male body, American studies scholar
Judith “Jack” Halberstam’s influential book Female Masculinity broke
new ground by arguing that a full understanding of masculinity re-
quires that we include considerations of it as separate from the male
body: “far from being an imitation of maleness, female masculinity
actually affords us a glimpse of how masculinity is constructed as
masculinity.” 71 This argument is part of a larger claim that
masculinity “becomes legible as masculinity where and when it leaves
the white male middle-class body”. 72 For Halberstam, then, it is
necessary to maintain “a degree of indifference to the whiteness of the
male and the masculinity of the white male and the project of naming
his power” and to consider male masculinity as a “counterexample to

69
Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter, New York: Routledge, 1993.
70
Butler, Gender Trouble, 139.
71
Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998,
1.
72
Ibid., 2.

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32 Todd W. Reeser

the kinds of masculinity that seem most informative about gender

relations and most generative of social change”. 73
But if female masculinity should be integral to the study of gender,
Halberstam is asking, then why has female masculinity not been an
object of study? In the same way that cultural discourses may render
female masculinity a non-ideal gender presentation that should not
exist, scholars of (male) masculinity may have been participating in an
academic discourse in which masculinity can only be male. While
Halberstam’s book begins to fill the lacuna in the field, this lack in
masculinity studies has still not been sufficiently filled, 74 particularly
with respect to heterosexual female masculinities. Aiming to position
female masculinity as a diachronic phenomenon that should be inte-
grated into histories of masculinity, Halberstam also established a
methodology (termed “perverse presentism”) by which previous mor-
phologies of female masculinity can be studied.
If a complete study of masculinity must consider the role of wom-
en, the same must be said with respect to disabled, gay male, and
transgender subjects. Analogies might be made between disability and
lack of masculinity, or conversely between ability and masculinity,
but more complicated relations between disability and masculinity
might also obtain. 75 Similarly, gay male masculinities have a varying
relation to masculinity, and should be taken in their plurality. 76 The
historically recent notion that male homosexuality is closely connect-
ed to effeminacy is challenged in part by considering a range of gen-
der presentations among gay men, including the rejection of effemina-
cy in favor of gay hegemonic masculinity and racial homosexualities.
Gay male masculinity might also be taken as an oscillation between
hegemonic and non-hegemonic positions, as dependent on situation,
with the closet, passing, and “straight acting” as key elements of such
a consideration.
73
Ibid., 3.
74
But in the literary realm, see Jean Bobby Noble, Masculinities without Men? Fe-
male Masculinity in Twentieth-Century Fictions, Vancouver: University of British
Columbia Press, 2004.
75
See Gill Valentine, “What It Means to be a Man: The Body, Masculinities, Disabil-
ity”, in Mind and Body Spaces: Geographies of Disability, Illness, and Impairment,
eds Ruth Butler and Hester Parr, London: Routledge, 1999, 167-80; Nicole Markotiü
and Robert McRuer, “Leading with Your Head: On the Borders of Disability, Sexuali-
ty, and the Nation”, in Sex and Disability, eds Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow,
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012, 165-82.
76
See Peter M. Nardi, Gay Masculinities, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000.

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 Concepts of Masculinity and Masculinity Studies 33

Recent work in transgender studies rethinks masculinity from a

new perspective barely acknowledged in the 1980s and 1990s. One of
the major sections in the field-defining The Transgender Studies
Reader focuses of transgender masculinities. 77 Taking transgender
into account means that masculinity cannot a priori be taken as natural
or as the strict province of men, at least in the traditional sense of the
word. That a woman can transition and be considered or pass as a man
implies that the signifier “masculinity” does not correspond in any
direct or natural way to a given signified. Perhaps more radically, if
transgender is taken as a transition toward movement itself, not as a
change from one discrete sex to another, then the trans body might
destabilize stable definitions of masculinity by inventing new gen-
dered configurations. Transgender as an analytic category forces a
reconsideration of hegemonic masculinity as well. To transition to
becoming a man might (re)affirm the desirability of hegemonic mas-
culinity or, on the other hand, might permit it to be destabilized from
within (as a man who challenges gender hegemony). Trans or drag
king performance may also question assumptions of male biology as
the basis of masculinity. 78 Female-to-male transgender subjects may
or may not challenge masculine hegemony, and if they believe that
testosterone creates maleness, may envision sex in a non-Butlerian
way as biological. In short, as Henry Rubin writes: “Transgender men
have the potential to generate either alternative or hegemonic forms of
masculinity.” 79 Jason Cromwell discusses the cases of transmen who
queer masculinity by revamping cultural discourses to construct a
transidentity that can be conveyed to or understood by others. Further,
the notion of a masculinity continuum (often thought of as masculinity
opposed to femininity, or homosocial opposed to homoerotic) can be
reconsidered in light of transgender. 80 The sometimes very fluid bor-
derline between butch and female-to-male transgender permits con-

77
See The Transgender Studies Reader, eds Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, New
York: Routledge, 2006.
78
See Diane Torr and Stephen Bottoms, Sex, Drag, and Male Roles: Investigating
Gender as Performance, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2010.
79
Henry Rubin, Self-Made Men: Identity and Embodiment among Transsexual Men,
Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2003, 145.
80
Jason Cromwell, “Queering the Binaries: Transsituated Identities, Bodies, and
Sexualities”, in The Transgender Studies Reader, 509-20.

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34 Todd W. Reeser

siderations of the fluidity of masculinity itself, and of the value at-

tached to sex and masculinity in butch and trans subjects. 81
If some work takes for granted that the unstable signifier masculin-
ity has no natural referent, it may also assume that masculinity is con-
stituted through complicated forms of representation. Most of this
work comes not out of social sciences, but out of the humanities, and
is often directly or indirectly subtended by post-structuralist thought.
An early example of theoretically-informed work, Victor Seidler’s
Rediscovering Masculinity took a discourse-centered perspective to
masculinity and aimed in part to “reclaim language as a facet of expe-
rience”. 82 Under the influence of the French philosopher Jacques Der-
rida’s notions of deferral, some thinkers cast masculinity as an unend-
ing, ultimately un-definable phenomenon, composed not so much of
social constructs per se but of an unending series of questions. As the
cultural critic Homi Bhabha writes in an essay on masculinity: “my
own masculinity is strangely separating from me, turning into my
shadow, the place of my filiation and my fading. My attempt to con-
ceptualize its conditionality becomes a compulsion to question it.” 83
My own Masculinities in Theory takes a systematic and comprehen-
sive approach to masculinity as movement-centered, not as a fixed
object of inquiry, and discusses how select post-structuralist theories
that do not take masculinity as an object of inquiry can nonetheless be
brought to bear on its analysis. Although, for instance, the French
philosopher Michel Foucault’s theoretical models on power and dis-
course do not refer to masculinity per se, and have been considered
with respect to women, homosexuality, and other non-hegemonic
categories, masculinity can be taken in Foucauldian terms as discur-
sively constructed. 84 One can argue that there is no original form of
masculinity, and that its inherent diffuseness means that it cannot ul-
timately be located in a single place and that it needs to be considered
as a fragmented phenomenon a priori. Work on masculine anxiety is
also, in a different way, part of a movement-centered approach since it

81
See Halberstam, Female Masculinity, Chapter 5; Gayle Rubin, “Of Catamites and
Kings: Reflections on Butch, Gender, and Boundaries”, in The Transgender Studies
Reader, 471-81.
82
Victor J. Seidler, Rediscovering Masculinity: Reason, Language, and Sexuality,
London: Routledge, 1989, 5.
83
Homi K. Bhabha, “Are You a Man or a Mouse?”, in Constructing Masculinity, eds
Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis and Simon Watson, New York: Routledge, 1995, 58.
84
See Reeser, Masculinities in Theory, 29-35.

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 Concepts of Masculinity and Masculinity Studies 35

assumes masculinity has to respond, perhaps constantly, to anxiety in

order to be, or to give the impression of being, stable and static. 85
While there is often an academic split between these kinds of
movement-centered approaches and social-science approaches in
men’s studies, the former approaches are politically engaged in the
sense that they attempt to upend the perception of masculinity as uni-
versal and stable and allow for numerous other possibilities. If inher-
ently unstable, hegemonic masculinity cannot maintain its dominance
or the perception of dominance. As David S. Gutterman writes in his
outline of postmodern interrogations of masculinity: “Postmodern
theories of subjectivity, identity, and agency ... can be useful not only
for rethinking governing cultural values but also as a framework for
actively seeking social change.” 86 In his discussion, Gutterman makes
a case for such approaches to be considered in political coalition
building, which depends on gathering fractured constituencies togeth-
er for a common goal: “the appreciation of difference enables a coali-
tion ... not to try to figure out what a new cultural script for masculini-
ty ought to be. Instead, the coalition could focus on destabilizing and
denaturalizing the scripts in place and create the space for a variety of
different masculinities to be performed.” 87
If stable or movement-centered approaches are, however, taken as
antithetical to each other, a possible compromise position between
them would be to consider that the experience of masculinity (and of
gender in a larger sense) is predicated on a movement between stabil-
ity or essentialism on the one hand, and free play on the other. 88 While
masculinity itself may be essential or fluid, the experience of mascu-
linity on a daily basis likely oscillates between the sense that it has a
core or is natural, and the sense that it is fluid or fragmented. Or, as I
have discussed with respect to what I call “a moderate approach to
masculinity”: “The essentialism that I experience might also place me

85
See also Calvin Thomas who takes the writing of the male body as his topic, argu-
ing that “the mechanisms of assuagement are ideologically embedded in cultural
modes of representational containment that govern and restrict the visibility of male
bodies and male bodily productions” (Calvin Thomas, Male Matters: Masculinity,
Anxiety, and the Male Body on the Line, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996, 3).
86
David S. Gutterman, “Postmodernism and the Interrogation of Masculinity”, in
Theorizing Masculinities, 224.
87
Ibid., 234.
88
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “‘Gosh, Boy George, You Must Be Awfully Secure in
Your Masculinity!’”, in Constructing Masculinity, 18.

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36 Todd W. Reeser

in a position in which essentialism is not exactly opposed to free play

since essentialism might actually help me to understand that free play
better.” Or conversely, “because I focus on my masculinity as free-
floating and non-essential, I might have moments in which I feel mas-
culinity as a core”. 89 While a substantial body of work that takes such
a moderate approach and seeks to destabilize the split between stabil-
ity or essentialism and free-play has yet to appear, this theoretical
approach gestures toward a theoretical apparatus that has the potential
better to link together humanities-based and other types of work.

Anthropology and the global turn

A recent, growing body of research gestures toward a key future direc-
tion in the study of masculinity, namely the global and the transna-
tional. In 1990, patterns of masculinity within the context of cultural
difference were already the focus of anthropologist David Gilmore’s
Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity. Taking
into account a number of western and non-western cultures, he studies
what it means to be a man or to be a “real man” in selected cultures.
The “regularity” that interests him “is the often dramatic ways in
which cultures construct an appropriate manhood – the presentation or
‘imaging’ of the male role”. 90 Among his material-based conclusions
is the idea that “Manhood is the social barrier that societies must erect
against entropy, human enemies, the forces of nature, time, and all the
human weaknesses that endanger group life”. 91 A groundbreaking and
innovative book at the time of its publication, Gilmore’s book was
subsequently viewed by some as lacking sufficient plurality in its view
of masculinity. In his survey of anthropological approaches to mascu-
linity up until the mid-1990s, Don Conway-Long, for instance, com-
ments on Gilmore’s failure to recognize “the plurality of masculinities
within any of the cultures he analyzed”. 92 As Conway-Long also sug-
gests, the anthropological work of Gilbert Herdt from the 1980s on
South-Pacific-islander cultures and initiation ceremonies could be
taken as part of the history of anthropological approaches to masculin-

89
Reeser, Masculinities in Theory, 51.
90
David D. Gilmore, Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity, New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1990, 11.
91
Ibid., 226.
92
Don Conway-Long, “Ethnographies and Masculinities”, in Theorizing Masculini-
ties, 61 (emphasis in the original).

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 Concepts of Masculinity and Masculinity Studies 37

ity, 93 even if Herdt’s work is not necessarily often imagined in that

trajectory.
Despite the growing body of work on non-western masculinities, as
Ronald Jackson II and Murali Balaji write, “masculinity studies has
generally been ghettoized by a Eurocentric paradigm of whiteness and
its Others, the latter most closely associated with the representations
and assumed practices of black masculinity”. 94 Scholars are, however,
increasingly working on how masculinity is constructed in cultures
around the globe, but they are also increasingly interested in how
masculinities travel or transition from one cultural zone to another.
Connell calls for work on global masculinities, and sketches out
three major types of globalizing masculinity: masculinities of con-
quest and settlement, masculinities of empire, and masculinities of
postcolonialism and neoliberalism. 95 The small amount of work on the
topic largely relates to transnational business or corporate masculinity
or to global politics and militarism. Christine Beasley rethinks hege-
monic masculinity for consideration of a global context, one aspect of
her argument being that the term should focus “on its meaning as a
political mechanism involving the bonding together of different mas-
culinities in a hierarchical order”. 96 One might consider what happens
to an Asian form of hegemonic masculinity when it encounters an
African form, for example. Beasley also calls for thinking about “plu-
ral hegemonic masculinities” in a global context with “the language of
‘supra’ and ‘sub’ hegemonic” that allow for a range of masculinities
to be placed in global dialogue. 97 Connell and Messerschmidt call for
hegemonic masculinities to be studied at the local, regional, and glo-
bal level, but also to take the links between the three levels into ac-
count. 98 As the world continues to become increasingly global and as
the study of masculinity follows suit, scholars are likely to imagine
what specific interactions between spatially-defined masculinities will

93
Ibid., 66-70.
94
Ronald Jackson II and Murali Balaji, Introduction, in Global Masculinities and
Manhood, 21.
95
R.W. Connell, “Masculinties and Globalization”, Men and Masculinities, I/1 (July
1998), 12-16; see also Connell in this volume.
96
Christine Beasley, “Rethinking Hegemonic Masculinity in a Globalizing World”,
Men and Masculinities, XI/1 (October 2008), 99.
97
Ibid., 100.
98
Connell and Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity”, 849.

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38 Todd W. Reeser

take place, and in turn how those interactions will wash back onto the
study of gender itself. 99

99
This article is a shortened and thoroughly reworked version of Todd Reeser,
“Englischsprachige Männlichkeitsforschung”, in Handbuch Männlichkeit, eds Stefan
Horlacher, Bettina Schötz and Wieland Schwanebeck, Stuttgart: Metzler, forthcom-
ing.

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