Discourses Of Masculinity Research Articles

Cross-situational Consistency of Female Politicians’ Language Use

This article seeks to study political discourses of American female politicians, specifically Madeleine Albright, the first female United States Secretary of State in the history of the United States of America, from 1997 to 2001, Condoleezza Rice, the 66th United States Secretary of State, and Hillary Clinton, the 67th United States Secretary of State. Different in age, ethnicity, political views, educational and social backgrounds, they reveal that in order to succeed in the political arena, women are bound to hide their female personality. Examples in question are Madeline Albright and Condoleezza Rice, recurrent users of such male discursive features as rhetorical questions, logical order of arguments, conceptual metaphors of war, sports, and hunting. Gender-marked female discourse is characterized by hesitation, use of standard speech, cognitive, social words, and hedges. Research shows that Hilary Clinton is a typical example of the female-marked political discourse. This has enabled her to pursue, among others, a feminist agenda, which has proved an efficient communicative tactic. Drawing on the socialization specifics of Albright, Rice, and Clinton, the paper explains why Albright and Rice tend to have a male-marked discourse and Clinton a female-marked discourse, as the first female Secretary of State, Albright simply had no female role models, with only male predecessors before her. She seeks to make her speech as neutral as possible, just at times exploiting female discursive patterns. Condoleezza Rice, Albright’s successor, uses characteristically male discourse the most. It can be attributable to the fact that she belongs to two ‘minority’ groups: women and African Americans. Sounding femalish might have weakened her chances to stay the strong Secretary of State that the geopolitical situation would demand. It is noteworthy that female politicians can, or have to, switch between male-marked and female-marked discourses in order to achieve certain goals and preserve their current status.

Discourses of “Herbivore Masculinity” in Japanese Love Advice Books

Abstract In the last decade, discourses of non-conforming masculinities have become increasingly prominent in Japanese mass media. In particular, the so-called “herbivore men” have been made infamous by Japanese newspapers and were accused of being responsible for sinking birth rates and economic stagnation in Japan (Schad-Seifert 2016). In this article, I explore the discourse on the “herbivore men” in Japanese love advice books which are meant to guide and inform the (female) reader’s assessment of potential romantic partners. Utilising Siegfried Jäger’s methodological approach (2015), this discursive analysis focuses on the line of discourse that implicitly criticises the “herbivore men” and rejects their turn away from hegemonic images of masculinity. The analysis yields that the “herbivore man” is constructed as an ‘unnatural’ form of masculinity in these publications, which allegedly causes women to become sexually active and career-driven “carnivores.” Japanese women’s empowerment from hegemonic gender ideals is thereby misrepresented as a symptom of psychological distress due to changing masculinities. By perpetuating ideas of biological determinism linked to the backlash against the “gender-free” movement in the early 2000s, this line of discourse propagates problematic relations of gender and power in Japanese society.

Female Sexuality in Contemporary Pakistani English Fiction

Female sexuality has remained a taboo subject in Pakistani literary and cultural representations. However, a considerable shift has occurred in contemporary Pakistani English fiction. Focusing on female bodily behaviour, the fiction explicates multiple shades of female sexual relations and experiences outside the cultural and religious norms in an unusually direct and explicit fashion. This study analyses the way Pakistani fiction, written in English, responds to the variety of different ideologies imposed upon women’s bodies and sexuality. It analyses some key sexual experiences of pubertal sexual awakening, postmarital sex, women’s urge for proactive sexual intercourse, and disavowal of motherhood, pregnancy and birthing. The collective representation of female sexuality in each case embodies a transgressive experience outside the shame/shameless, licit/illicit binaries. However, the representation, despite its explicitness, does not constitute in any way women’s sexual autonomy against the predominant masculine discourses. The issues have been analyzed within the framework of debates on the female body, heterosexuality, the male gaze and commodity fetishism.

Extremism and toxic masculinity: the man question re-posed

Abstract It is more than 20 years since Marysia Zalewski and feminist scholars posed ‘the man question’ in International Relations, repositioning the gaze from female subjectivities to a problematization of the subjecthood of man. The field of masculinity studies has developed this initial question to a deep interrogation of the relationship between maleness and violence. Yet public and policy discourse often reduce the complexity of masculinities within extremism to issues of crisis and toxicity. Governments have prioritized the prevention of extremism, particularly violent Islamism, and in so doing have produced as ‘risk’ particular racialized and marginalized men. This article asks, what are the effects of the toxic masculinity discourse in understanding the British radical right? It argues that current understandings of extremism neglect the central aim of Zalewski's ‘man’ question to destabilize the field and deconstruct patriarchy. They instead position Islamophobia—which is institutionalized in state discourse—as the responsibility of particular ‘extreme’ and ‘toxic’ groups. In particular, the article outlines two ways in which ‘toxic masculinity’ is an inadequate concept to describe activism in the anti-Islam(ist) movement the English Defence League (EDL). First, the term ‘toxic masculinity’ occludes the continuities of EDL masculinities with wider patriarchal norms; second, it neglects the role of women as significant actors in the movement. Using an ethnographic and empathetic approach to this case-study, the article explores how Zalewski's theoretical position offers a route to analysis of the ways in which masculinities and patriarchy entwine in producing power and violence; and to a discussion of masculinities that need not equate manhood with threat.

HEGEMONIC MASCULINITY: Wacana Relasi Gender dalam Tinjauan Psikologi Sosial

Today, the world is languishing in a patriarchal structure. This patriarchal domination not only harms women, but also men, children, the elderly, and marginalized groups. Gender mainstreaming extends its studies not only to femininity but to parenting (motherhood and fatherhood), early childhood. In addition, gender also extends to the realm of masculinity or male studies. In this case, the psychology of gender underlines this phenomenon with hegemonic masculinity discourse. Masculinity is seen from the dominance of the spaces of life both public and private. This paper examines the ideology of hegemonic masculinity as the most desirable theoretical response to Critical Men Studies (CSM). This elaboration of the Hegemonic Masculinity concept is useful as a 'binocular tool' that is operational for empirical studies of masculinity.

Questões de gênero feminino: análise multimodal de um anúncio publicitário de cerveja

O presente artigo tem como objetivo analisar de que modo os significados multimodais contribuem na representação do corpo feminino no discurso de um anúncio da cerveja Itaipava. Como pressupostos teóricos que embasam os estudos feministas, trazemos uma abordagem do gênero feminino e do corpo como inscrito na própria figura da mulher representada na imagem do anúncio. Em seguida, evocamos os pressupostos teórico-metodológicos da Gramática do Design Visual de Kress e van Leeuwen ([1996] 2006) a fim de analisar a imagem do anúncio publicitário a partir das metafunções representacional, interativa e composicional. Do ponto de vista metodológico, fazemos uma análise dos significados visuais inscritos discursivamente no corpo feminino representado no anúncio. Dessa forma, compreendemos que o anúncio em questão remete, principalmente, aos elementos composicionais e interativos da imagem na reprodução do discurso masculinista que instiga uma espécie de objetivação do corpo feminino. Percebemos, assim, que a análise da representação do corpo feminino pode levar ao reconhecimento de significados tidos como tácitos, a partir de uma conscientização do nosso uso da linguagem.

Cinsiyetlendirilmiş Bir Egzersizin Sınırlarında: Ada-na’daki Erkeklerin Pilates Deneyimleri

This study examines Pilates as a gendered exercise focusing on men doing this exercise in Adana. Pilates is considered as a socially inappropriate exercise for male identity and patriarchal masculinities. In this context, our aim is to examine the experiences of educated and middle-class men who attend to the tennis club in Adana, a city known for patriarchal qualities; and the meanings they attribute to pilates, which is built as a gendered exercise, coded peculiar to women. In this study, in-depth interviews were conducted with six men pilates using qualitative research methods. The collected data were analyzed using content analysis method. The findings of the study reveal that the participants identified pilates as an exercise that would support the tennis, which they considered as a performance sport, not as an independent exercise. This study shows that the motivation of participating men to start and maintain pilates is intertwined with the effort to maintain healthy lifestyle discourse and masculine performance and that the participants' own discourse and practices of masculinity are prominent in their pilates experience. As a result, it is seen that the patriarchal masculinity codes of the participating males doing pilates in Adana also spread to the meanings they impose on this exercise.

Unravelling gendered practices in the public water sector in Nepal

Abstract Despite decades of gender mainstreaming in the water sector, a wide gap between policy commitments and outcomes remains. This study aims at offering a fresh perspective on such policy gaps, by analysing how gendered discourses, institutions and professional culture contribute to policy gaps. We rely on a conceptual framework originally developed for analysing strategic change, which is used to analyse gender in the public water sector in Nepal. Our analysis relies on a review of national water policies and a series of semi-structured interviews with male and female water professionals from several public agencies. Our findings evidence how dominant discourses, formal rules and professional culture intersect to support and reproduce hegemonic masculine attitudes and practices of water professionals. Such attitudes and practices in turn favour a technocratic implementation of policy measures. We argue that gender equality policy initiatives in the water sector have overly focused on local level formal institutions and have not adequately considered the effects of masculine discourses, norms and culture to be effective in making progress towards gender equity. We conclude with policy recommendations.

“Backwards and in High Heels”: The Invisibility and Underrepresentation of Femme(inist) Administrative Labor in Academia

This article examines the ways in which embodiments of femme within administrative academic settings intervene in dominant discourses that (incorrectly) frame us as being “in service” of male-identified colleagues, supervisors, and institutionalized heteropatriarchies. We posit femme as an important and complex counternarrative to the heterocentric, cissexist, and masculinist discourses that are ubiquitous within academic administration in both historical and present-day contexts. Additionally, we consider femme as a site of resistance to feminized discourses of nurturance and of (re)productivity. In this collaborative project, we study the labor involved in administering an English Department and a Writing Program at a four-year public college, interrogating, through autoethnographic reflections and analyses, the ways in which this service labor often falls to/gets thrust upon those of us who identify as femme faculty members. Our article illustrates how we resist the imposition of care work and assert our own agency while conducting administrative work on our own, femme, terms. We offer a list of usable interventions to common, predictable, yet sometimes disorienting situations, and although we do not advance these responses as easy conclusions to problematic interactions, we consider how this list might aid femme administrators in managing quotidian, misguided, at times hostile scenarios. Our work calls allies and comrades to identify systemic asymmetries and generate collaborative solutions within a paradigm of affirmation: One that places a commitment to “femme witnessing” at its center.

“How Godfather Part II of You”: The Gangster Figure and Transnational Masculinities in Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings

Set in Kingston, New York and Miami in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, James’s novel A Brief History of Seven Killings charts the transformation of politically affiliated Jamaican gangs into transnational criminal organizations. The novel references various incarnations of the “gangster” in the context of mid- to late-twentieth-century Jamaica: the rudie, the shotta and the don. In this essay I consider how, through its engagement with the iconography surrounding the gangster figure both within Jamaican popular culture and in the global mass media, A Brief History examines and complicates models of masculinity associated with this figure. In the process, I suggest, the novel at once reflects on and contributes to evolving Jamaican and transnational discourses of masculinity. Reading A Brief History as a gangster narrative, I position it within an increasingly global tradition of gangster fiction and film. The novel’s multiple narrative voices and perspectives, along with its eclectic range of cultural reference points, render the gangster icon – a central component of the genre – ambiguous and plural. I argue that through his reworking of the gangster figure, James both queers the gangster genre and extends its transnational reach.

The Power of Women’s Laughter in Carol Ann Duffy’s “The Laughter of Stafford Girls’ High”

Previous scholarship on Carol Ann Duffy has focused on the enactment of humor in her poetry as a useful vehicle for feminist subversion, but the effects of women’s laughter have not been scrutinized in critical terms. My argument takes up “The Laughter of Stafford Girls’ High” in Feminine Gospels (2002) to explore how women’s laughter arises and spreads, and what it reveals. By tracking the ways in which women’s laughter frustrates the masculinist discourse and enacts the feminist order, this essay will demonstrate how Duffy imagines a transformative space of laughter.

“I don’t want to be seen as a screaming queen”: An interpretative phenomenological analysis of gay men’s masculine identities.

It has been argued that gay men who live in Western societies must negotiate masculine identities against a cultural backdrop where the most desirable and locally hegemonic masculinity is heterosexual. However, contemporary masculinity theories conceptualize masculinities as increasingly inclusive of gay men. The purpose of this study was to use a discourse-dynamic approach to studying masculine subjectivity to identify how gay men in England and Wales negotiated masculinity discourses to construct their masculine identities. One-to-one, semi-structured interviews were undertaken with six younger gay men aged 20 to 24, and 11 older gay men aged 30 to 42. Participants were asked to describe their subjective experiences of masculinity. The results of an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis indicated that discourses of hegemonic and alternative masculinities had implications for lived experiences of masculinity. Older participants in particular emphasized their attributes they associated with masculine dominance, including anti-effeminacy attitudes. The majority of younger participants did not feel masculine. Irrespective of age, many participants resisted hegemonic masculinity by highlighting the value of “gayness” at times. The findings suggested that hegemonic masculinity was the most readily available discourse for conceptualizing masculinity, but that lived experiences of masculinity were not necessarily located within this discourse.

Discursive construction of hegemonic masculinity and emphasised femininity in the textbooks of primary education: children’s discursive agency and polysemy of the narratives

ABSTRACT Gender-normative discursive representations in textbooks could have deleterious impacts on pupils’ gender identity development. This study sets out to explore the discursive construction of femininity and masculinity in anthology textbooks for primary education and scrutinize children’s sense-making of gender-normative discourses. Grounded in a poststructuralist theorization of gender and Connell’s [(1995). Masculinities. Oxford: Blackwell] theory of masculinities, this qualitative study employs a Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA) to explore the discursive positioning of femininity and masculinity in school manuals. Additionally, semi-structured group interviews were conducted in two Athenian elementary schools with 40 boys and 40 girls, aged 8–10 years old. The findings revealed that, in addition to androcentrism, textbooks were overwhelmingly defined by emphasized femininity and hegemonic masculinity discourses. Analyses of pupils’ accounts demonstrated that the children negotiated normative discourses in idiosyncratic ways, and that boys were less prepared than girls to subvert the anachronistic discourses of gender promoted by textbooks. It was also found that the mother’s employment status may exert a broadening influence on pupils’ understanding of gender.

The embodied politics of climate change: analysing the gendered division of environmental labour in the UK

ABSTRACT The intersection between gender and climate change action has received little scholarly attention. To facilitate a critical orientation towards the informal economies of social reproduction, the ways that the UK’s climate politics are rooted in masculinist discourses of a green economy are illustrated. Adopting an intersectional approach, it is argued that such a green economy perspective diverts attention from labouring bodies in climate politics, invisibilising the ‘who’ in the experience of climate solutions. Through critically engaging divisions of labour in climate policy, evidenced through a feminist critical discourse analysis, it is shown how a surface-level inclusion of gender perpetuates the labouring bodies associated with specific labour markets. In response, it is suggested that an intersectional approach to climate policy can account for these omissions and highlights the ways in which a more just, intersectional climate politics might be formulated.

To Be Black and Beautiful in Israel

This article reviews works of contemporary female artists of Ethiopian origin active in the Israeli art field. I analyse the subjects in their work and argue these artists are presenting their attitudes towards the ‘white gaze’. Though constantly subjected to it by the Israeli hegemony and the Western masculine discourse, they are notably decreasing their consideration of it. They broaden the restricted field of action that seems designated for them and alter its boundaries. Drawing on theorists of gender, postcolonial theory and theory of art, I demonstrate how these artists are promoting an agenda that reflects their lives as black women in Israel. Influenced by recent socio-political changes and a decline in representations of black women on TV and in visual arts, these artworks were increasingly exhibited in solo and group exhibitions.

A feminist poststructuralist critique of talent management: Toward a more gender sensitive body of knowledge

The field of talent management (TM) has grown over the last two decades, and much theoretical and methodological progress has been made in an effort to better conceptualize the field. Despite these efforts, the construction of knowledge within TM research has ignored power and gender dynamics. In this paper, we adopt a feminist poststructuralist perspective and unveil how talent management theory is underpinned by predominant masculinist discourses that create and sustain business elites in a neoliberal world order. Based on a textual and discourse analysis of foundational texts on TM, we identify the power effects of language in shaping current TM theory. This study raises questions concerning the epistemological foundations of talent management as objective, neutral, and observable. We suggest that future researchers adopt critical methods of inquiry to ensure that gender and equity issues are interrogated within dominant talent management writings.

Change and Continuation: Masculinity, Driving, and Disability in the Lives of “Young Problem Drivers” in the Aftermath of Severe Road Traffic Accidents

ABSTRACTIn research on traffic injury prevention, young male drivers willing to take risks are known as “young problem drivers” and have been identified as the greatest road safety challenge. This intersectional study draws on interviews and participant observation, and employs a masculinity perspective to explore how 12 young, male drivers who were injured in severe accidents assess driving after their accidents and ways in which they construct their identities as disabled men. While the participants cited their accidents as a turning point that prompted a change in their attitudes and practices regarding driving, they often continued to engage in deviant driving practices, especially speeding. In addition, the men tended to distance themselves from the social category of disability. We propose that the field of traffic injury prevention would benefit from supplementing the biological approach in the research literature with cultural perspectives on the internal logics and prevailing masculinity discourses that guide the choices of young, male drivers. Also, we argue that the men’s negotiation of disability illustrates the stigma still attached to the social category of disability.

Full Moon Masculinities: Masculine Werewolves, Emotional Repression, and Violence in Young Adult Paranormal Romance Fiction

Gothic monsters have recently experienced a period of focused scholarly analysis, although few studies have engaged with the werewolf in terms of its overt alignment with masculinity. Yet the werewolves of young adult fantasy fiction both support and subvert dominant masculine discourses through their complex negotiation with emotional repression and violence. These performative masculine practices are the focus of this article, which analyses how hegemonic masculine ideals are reinforced or rejected in a corpus of young adult fantasy texts, including Cassandra Clare's young adult series The Mortal Instruments (2007–2014) and Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga (2005–2010). Both texts feature masculine characters whose lycanthropic experiences implicitly comment upon gender norms, which may shape young adult audiences' understanding of their own and others' gender identities.

White Male Masculinity in Coetzee's Waiting for Barbarians

This article will investigate how Coetzee's white male characters confront their pasts that revolve around the abuse of power in both familial relations and the community. Most importantly, I will examine how masculine identities in the novels fit in the wider society and how they respond to changing power structures because they influence their behavior. My objective is to investigate whether Coetzee ascribed to the patriarchal Boer societal values that marginalized both women and servants into silence. Since masculine discourse is recurring in his other works, it is both an ideological and political discourse representing oppression and colonialism.

Constructions of sexuality and HIV risk among young people in Venda, South Africa: implications for HIV prevention

The study explored constructions of sexuality among young people of Venda in Limpopo, South Africa, and cultural practices that can be used to develop context-specific HIV prevention programmes. HIV prevention can be promoted by including some cultural practices in prevention programmes and changing some aspects of culture that may contribute negatively to health. Six focus group discussions were held with school-going young people (Grades 10 to 12) in urban and rural areas to explore their constructions of sexuality and HIV risk. Four focus group discussions were held with community leaders in the same areas to explore their constructions of young people’s sexuality and cultural practices relevant to HIV prevention. Through discourse analysis, the following dominant discourses that influence young people’s sexual risk behaviour were identified: rite of passage, the male sexual drive discourse (sex is natural and unavoidable); discourse of hegemonic masculinity (sex to prove masculinity); sex as a commodity; non-adherence to cultural practices; and HIV is normalised (AIDS is like flu). Some alternative constructions and shifts in gender norms were noticed, especially among female participants. The constructions of young people were not culture-specific but similar to those identified in other South African cultures. Community leaders identified a few cultural practices that could be considered in HIV prevention, for example, reinstating the rite of passage to provide age-appropriate sex and HIV education (behavioural intervention), and promoting traditional male circumcision (biological intervention). Cultural practices that contribute negatively to health should be challenged such as current constructions of gender roles (masculinity and femininity) and the practice that parents do not talk to young people about sex (both structural interventions).