American and European masculinity: a transatlantic dialogue

Abstract

ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT ASPECTS OF THE FEMINIST PROJECT INVOLVES the more nuanced exploration of female subjectivity--that is, the recognition that the construction of female consciousness involves an ongoing series of critical edeavours, rather than an assumed set of conclusions. This critical approach is also imperative when one considers the construction of masculinity in both American and European culture. In the scholarship of Harry Brod, Maurice Berger, and Michael Kimmel, for example, masculinity as a subject of inquiry in American culture is being revisited; in this sense, the contemporary interest in masculinity shares some basic tenets with feminism. The cultural assumptions which attend its construction in the West are now part of the men's studies movement of which John Bly is most readily associated; his memoir, Iron John (1990), has become part of the men's studies canon. In XY On Masculine Identity, Elisabeth Badinter invites us to explore masculinity, what she refers to as the quality of a man (9), in its distinctive forms but also to imagine it as a way of being that does not have