Critical Studies Of Masculinities Research Articles

‘All about Eve’: Mothers, Masculinities and the 2011 UK Riots

The riots that erupted in English cities in August 2011 were provoked by a complex mix of socio-economic factors. Sidelining structural explanations for the civil disorder, conservative commentators argued that dysfunctional families had caused the riots. Reinforcing traditional connections between criminality, the family and welfare, conservatives contended that the absence of fathers in lone mother-headed families explained both the dynamics of the civil disorder and the aggressive behaviour of some of the young men involved. Such claims located both the causes of the riots and solutions to expressions of violent masculinities in the familial sphere. Employing the framework of critical studies of men and masculinities this article interrogates these narratives and maps their depoliticising effects. Additionally, it exposes how the effects of a range of social problems were projected on to poor, lone mothers, reinforcing a range of regulatory narratives and practices that target this social group.

The Stage Hip-Hop Feminism Built: A New Directions Essay

This new directions essay traces the most recent trajectory in the field of hip-hop feminism. To that end, we map the current terrain of hip-hop feminist studies, first by identifying challenges and tensions, then by reviewing current literature and its engagement with these issues, and finally by identifying new and emergent areas for further development of the field. We argue that hip-hop feminism has effectively made space for itself in the broader fields of black and women-of-color feminisms and remains deeply invested in the intersectional approaches developed by earlier black feminists. We also insist that women and girls of color remain central to our analyses, particularly in light of the proliferation of critical masculinity studies within the broader field of hip-hop studies. Furthermore, our discussion of hip-hop feminism contends that within hip-hop feminist studies, hip-hop and feminism act as discrete but constitutive categories that share a dialogic relationship. Rather than treating feminism as though it lends a certain intellectual gravity to hip-hop, we consider how creative, intellectual hip-hop feminist work invites new questions about representation, provides additional insight about embodied experience, and offers alternative models for critical engagement.

The Dilemma of Disabled Masculinity

A much-cited point by those who study the intersection of gender and disability is that masculinity and disability are in conflict with each other because disability is associated with being dependent and helpless whereas masculinity is associated with being powerful and autonomous, thus creating a lived and embodied dilemma for disabled men. This article maps and critically evaluates the conceptual development of this dilemma of disabled masculinity, tracing how several developments in the fields of disability studies and the critical study of men and masculinities have shaped sociological understandings of disabled masculinity. We suggest that, while social science scholarship has increasingly moved beyond a static understanding and toward a dynamic view of the articulation and interaction between masculinity and disability, there are nevertheless several problems that require attention. The most critical issue conceptually is that the focus of study has been more on masculinity and how it intersects with ‘disability’ as an almost generic category, rather than on how masculinity (or masculinities) intersect(s) differently with various types of impairment. Thus, though there is quite a bit of research on the dilemma of disabled masculinity for men who acquire a physical impairment post-childhood and for groups of men with diverse impairments studied as if they were a homogenous group, less research has been conducted with men who have specific impairments, particularly early-onset, intellectual or degenerative impairments. In this paper we urge researchers to open up the concept of intersectionality to accommodate a range of differences in bodily, cognitive, intellectual and behavioral types (impairments) in their interaction with various masculinities and to show more explicitly how context and life phase contribute to this dynamism.

The politics of gendered emotions: disrupting men's emotional investment in privilege

This paper explores the implications of the neglect of emotions in critical masculinity studies and profeminist masculinity politics. This neglect in part results from feminist and profeminist critiques of the literature on emotional inexpressiveness as a tragedy for men that ignores male privilege and men's social power. To focus on men's emotions is seen by some profeminist commentators as psychologising men at the expense of sociological understandings of men's social power. However, in neglecting the place of emotions in men's lives, critical masculinity studies has overlooked the ways in which men's emotional attachment to privilege can perpetuate oppressive gender relations and male violence against women. By exploring men's emotional investment in unequal gender relations, the article outlines ways in which emotions can also be used as a catalyst to disrupt men's attachment to male privilege.

Hegemony, Marginalization, and Feminine Masculinity: Antje Rávic Strubel’s Unter Schnee

Hegemony, Marginalization, and Feminine Masculinity: Antje Rávic Strubel’s Unter Schnee Claudia Breger (bio) Postunification German culture has been marked by its ambivalent fascination with masculinity in crisis. Films and literary texts as diverse as Sönke Wortmann’s Der bewegte Mann ( 1994), Benjamin Stuckrad-Barre’s Soloalbum (2001), Helmut Dietl’s Rossini (1996), Thomas Brussig’s Helden wie wir (1995), Caroline Link’s Nirgendwo in Afrika (2001), and Feridun Zaimoglu’s Liebesmale, scharlachrot (2000) have presented multifaceted spectacles of weakness, confusion and the hyperbolic reassertion of power. While this trend attests to the de-authorization of clear-cut gender boundaries and heteronormative assumptions, it also suggests that the egalitarian discourses of feminism and queer activism have not fully succeeded in resolving anxieties about gender identity and difference. Apart from the often ridiculed “Softie,” alternative figures of masculinity seem slow to emerge, and instead well-known heroic templates are reactivated (Bogdal). This apparent need for masculinity gains its cultural significance as part of a broader configuration of “identity longing” in contemporary Germany. Beyond national borders, the 1990s registered as an era of “categorical disorientation and historic reorientation” at the transition from the Cold War into today’s world of globalization, and in Germany specifically the process was dramatized through the “rocky transition from national division to unification” (Adelson 15). In its aftermath, the increased public presence of national rhetoric has underlined intense negotiations of collective identity in the face of troublesome historical memories and contemporary challenges. While ongoing attempts to “normalize” Germany’s relationship to the memories of fascism encountered the split resonances of half the country’s socialist past, the accelerating process of European integration included, not least, controversies on the membership candidacy of Turkey, the country of origin of Germany’s largest minority. The events of 11 September 2001 and the following debates on Islam merely highlighted ongoing conflicts about cultural identity in a society still hesitant to accept the realities of its immigration. In this ongoing quest for identification, masculinity has functioned as a crucial site. For example, Brussig’s parodic investigations of East German heroism respond to, and reiterate, prevailing moves of gendering German unification as a (hetero)sexual union, with the GDR in the role of the female (see Carstens-Wickham), and a novel like Zaimoglu’s Liebesmale, scharlachrot playfully rearticulates ethnic stereotypes [End Page 154] through theatrical stagings of “poetic,” Werther-inflected German emasculation and Turkish masculinity. Critical investigations into these contemporary processes of cultural gendering are much needed. At the same time, it does not seem altogether far-fetched to wonder whether the recent growth of masculinity studies attests to contemporary culture’s fascination with masculinity as well. After a belated start in comparison to Anglo-American developments, the analysis of masculinities has become a dominant paradigm in German gender studies at the beginning of the twenty-first century (e.g. Bosse and King; Brandes; Döge and Meuser; Erhart; Jerome; Schmale; Steffen; Stephan and Benthien). For some feminist critics, this recent trend confirms fears that were articulated early on, when the study of men and masculinities first gained momentum in the 1980s, The study of masculinities could turn into a new strategy of marginalizing women, usurping gender studies resources and venues for a potentially antifeminist focus on masculine identities and experiences (Brod). Of course, matters are much more complex than such a wording suggests. At least part of the current academic fascination with masculinity can be attributed to the long-term academic neglect of this “other” gender. Eventually, this neglect was challenged by a fuller realization that gender works as a relational category, requiring a comparative look at the mutual constitution of masculinity and femininity in specific texts and contexts. Furthermore, the belated start of masculinity studies has turned into a methodological advantage: Building on several decades of academic discussion in women’s and gender, queer, and postcolonial studies, the paradigm established itself in the Anglo-American realm in the 1990s as a highly sophisticated approach. Critical masculinity studies have begun to investigate, for example, the performative character of apparently “unmarked,” naturalized masculinity, relations between hegemonic and marginalized identities, and female masculinities (e.g. example, Connell, Masculinities; Halberstam; Sedgwick, “Gosh, Boy...

The Male Consumer as Loser: Beer and Liquor Ads in Mega Sports Media Events

The Male Consumer as Loser: Beer and Liquor Ads in Mega Sports Media Events

Women's Studies and Men's Studies: Friends or Foes?

The article identifies some major issues at play in the conversation between women's and men's studies scholars and activists. This is done from a profeminist perspective, laying out potential points of convergence and conflict between the two areas of scholarship. The article also renews the argument for the place of the critical study of men and masculinities in the movement toward gender equality on a broad scale. The article reflects a call for a critical yet complimentary relationship between men's and women's studies scholars and activists.