Hierarchy Of Masculinities Research Articles

‘Justin Bieber Sounds Girlie’: Young People's Celebrity Talk and Contemporary Masculinities

In this article, we explore the ways that contemporary young masculinities are performed and regulated through young people's relationship with celebrity. We address the relative paucity of work on young men's engagements with popular culture. Drawing on qualitative data from group interviews with 148 young people (aged 14-17) in England, we identify ‘celebrity talk’ as a site in which gender identities are governed, negotiated and resisted. Specifically we argue that celebrity as a space of imagination can bring to the study of masculinities a focus on their affective and collective mobilisation. Unpicking young men's and women's talk about Canadian pop star Justin Bieber and British boyband One Direction, we show how disgust and humour operate as discursive-affective practices which open up and close down certain meanings and identities. We conclude that while there have been shifts in the ways that masculinities are performed and regulated, hierarchies of masculinities anchored through hegemonic masculinity remain significant.

Masculine hierarchies in Roman ecclesiastical households

A specific genre of early-modern domestic-management handbook devoted to the running of cardinals' households enjoyed widespread popularity in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Such households were staffed by dozens of male servants whose requisites and tasks were minutely described in this literature. This article uses the descriptions of the types of men who should be hired for service posts in ecclesiastical households to analyse the construction of gender in the papal capital. It argues that the clerical ideal of manliness was an emergent but not hegemonic style of masculinity in Baroque Rome.

Popular Perceptions of Masculinity in Rural North Indian Oral Traditions

In the oral tradition of rural north India, especially the Haryana region, hegemonic masculinity emerges as an ideological construct in the structure of patriarchy firmly located in materiality. This creates and consolidates male power over various categories of people and highlights several hierarchies of masculinities, caste, class, and gender, including those between males and females as well as those between males and males. The oral tradition, which includes folktales, myths, folk songs, popular sayings, and proverbs, enjoys a common currency of social interaction among a wide range of social groups. Together these have been evaluated to provide valuable insights into how masculinities are perceived, lived, or practiced at the local level, and molded or remolded in response to the socioeconomic shifts that are taking place. However, in this region there is also a contrary imaging of masculinity that demolishes all that is regarded as the hallmark of hegemonic masculinity. Registered in women’s folk songs, this imaging is considered a threat to male power, authority, and what is perceived to be “masculine.” All attempts by upper caste males to censor these songs or replace them have been unsuccessful, thereby highlighting the ongoing contradiction and contest around the concept of masculinity itself.

Outlawed desires: punishing “homosexuals” in annexed Alsace (1940-1945)

This article questions how criminal decisions were made in a situation of wartime and territorial annexation. The sources are based on the sentences passed for homosexuality by the Strasbourg court between 1942 and 1945. Statistical data shows that the Alsatians who were put on trial during this time period were mostly young and belonged to the working classes. Moreover, most were condemned to heavy prison sentences “in the interest of preserving the people.” As an indication of the arbitrary effect of the “sexual annexation”, some were prosecuted for acts committed prior to the introduction of the German criminal law in Alsace (1942); others were immediately interned in a concentration camp after their release. But more than simply condemning acts, the judges considered deviant identities. On the one hand they registered the numbers of accused men’s orgasms, considered to be both purpose and evidence of abnormal sexual activity; and on the other, they established a hierarchy of masculinities, which created the criminal before the crime.

Flirting with Capital

This study highlights how two developments in global finance—the 2008 financial crisis centered in the United States and Central Europe and the expansion of East Asian economies—created new openings for us to rethink the multiply inflected hierarchies woven through racialized, national, and class-based relations, which produce competing hierarchies of global masculinities. Drawing on 23 months of participant observation and ethnographic research from 2006-2007 and 2009-2010 in four niche markets of Vietnam’s global sex industry catering to Western budget tourists, Western transnational businessmen, Viet Kieu (overseas Vietnamese) men, and wealthy local Vietnamese entrepreneurs, I strategically bring together multiple performances of masculinities that simultaneously affirm and contest Western superiority. In lower-paying niche markets that cater to Western businessmen and Western budget travelers, sex bars provide men with the space to project their status anxieties onto women’s bodies, affirming Western superiority. In contrast, more expensive bars catering to Viet Kieu and local elite Vietnamese businessmen provide men with the stage to contest Western superiority by capitalizing on this particular moment of economic flux and engaging in acts of conspicuous consumption to display their financial dominance. Together, these four niche markets of Vietnam’s global sex industry provide a unique window to examine how multiple performances of masculinity unfold in relation to each other in the context of rapid economic change.

Sex, gender and money in African teenage conceptions of love in HIV contexts

In much of Africa, teenage sexualities are often understood through the optic of danger, violence and disease without much attention to love within relationship dynamics. There is a strong case to be made for the continued focus on African teenage sexualities within unequal relations of power. However, whilst focusing on the structural factors that expand sexually aggressive masculinities and limit teenage women's sexual agency, the expression of teenage love in the daily battle for power remains neglected. Drawing on an interview study of teenage Africans, aged 16–17 years, in the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa, the paper focuses on the micro-dynamics of love, sex and gender. Teenagers account of love highlights changing discourses and include relationships based on care, negotiation and agency showing potential for equality. Such constructions however sit in tension with teenage women's vulnerability in relation to the sexual economy and money, masculine power and gender hierarchies. Intervention programmes that address teenage sexuality must pay careful attention to how love matters in their conceptualisation of relationships and requires consideration of the social and economic context within which they are located. The challenge is to build on equality, address gender hierarchies and ideologies within relationships which create vulnerability.

Cohabitations, Household Structures, and Gender Identities in Seventeenth-Century Rome

Previous articleNext article No AccessGender in Early Modern RomeCohabitations, Household Structures, and Gender Identities in Seventeenth-Century RomeEleonora CanepariEleonora CanepariUniversity of Oxford/Sapienza Università di Roma Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance Volume 17, Number 1Spring 2014 Published for Villa I Tatti: The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/675766 Views: 147Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref © 2014 by Villa I Tatti: The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Laurie Nussdorfer Masculine hierarchies in Roman ecclesiastical households, European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire 22, no.44 (Jul 2015): 620–642.https://doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2015.1028336

Men at Home in Baroque Rome

Previous articleNext article No AccessGender in Early Modern RomeMen at Home in Baroque RomeLaurie NussdorferLaurie NussdorferWesleyan University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance Volume 17, Number 1Spring 2014 Published for Villa I Tatti: The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/675765 Views: 198Total views on this site Citations: 2Citations are reported from Crossref © 2014 by Villa I Tatti: The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Elizabeth FitzPatrick THE EXILIC BURIAL PLACE OF A GAELIC IRISH COMMUNITY AT SAN PIETRO IN MONTORIO, ROME, Papers of the British School at Rome 85 (Jul 2017): 205–239.https://doi.org/10.1017/S006824621700006XLaurie Nussdorfer Masculine hierarchies in Roman ecclesiastical households, European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire 22, no.44 (Jul 2015): 620–642.https://doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2015.1028336

Masculinities of drinking as described by Swedish and Finnish age-based focus groups

This article deals with masculinities in drinking by analysing how focus groups from Sweden and Finland discuss male and female drinking in diverse drinking situations. It argues that women's strengthened independency in working life, their increased drinking in domestic and public settings, and their entrance into drinking situations that used to be male dominated have challenged the cultural domination of traditional masculinity in drinking and made drinking styles a more diverse and heterogeneous phenomenon within and across gender groups. The analysis shows that the focus groups construct masculinities in which manhood is associated with creativity, depression, violence, virility, flâneurism, nurture, homosociability, business masculinity and weakness. These masculinities oppose, interlace or intermingle with femininities and change the shape depending on the situation, drinking company and the perspective of the viewer. Their broad spectrum shows that, in Finland and Sweden, there are multiple independent and strong drinking masculinities and femininities, none of which is given a self-evident hegemony over the others. Thus, the study points out that the masculinities and femininities of today are not reducible to any single hierarchy of dominant and subordinate masculinities. For the current hegemonic masculinities, it seems to be typical that they vary locally, regionally and globally, intersect in specific ways with class, age and generation, and form multidimensional, paradoxical and tension-driven relationships with each other and with femininities.

Masculinities, ‘guy talk’ and ‘manning up’: a discourse analysis of how young men talk about sexual health

Sexually transmitted infection testing rates among young men remain low, and their disengagement from sexual health services has been linked to enactments of masculinity that prohibit or truncate discussions of sexual health. Understanding how men align with multiple masculinities is therefore important for tailoring interventions that appropriately respond to their needs. We draw on 32 in-depth interviews with 15-24-year-old men to explore the discourses that facilitate or shut down sexual health communication with peers and sex partners. We employ a critical discourse analysis to explore how men's conversations about sexual health are constituted by masculine hierarchies (such as the ways in which masculinities influence men's ability to construct or challenge and contest dominant discourses about sexual health). Men's conversations about sexual health focused primarily around their sexual encounters - something frequently referred to as 'guy talk'. Also described were situations whereby participants employed a discourse of 'manning up' to (i) exert power over others with disregard for potential repercussions and (ii) deploy power to affirm and reify their own hyper-masculine identities, while using their personal (masculine) power to help others (who are subordinate in the social ordering of men). By better understanding how masculine discourses are employed by men, their sexual health needs can be advanced.

Black Masculinity and Sexual Politics

Preface 1. Black Masculinity as Sexual Politics 2. Controlling Masculine Hierarchies 3. Penetrating Matters in Black Male Domination 4. Black Masculinity and Ideologies of Inferiority 5. Black Male Citizenship Trouble 6. Black Male Homosexual Gender Trouble 7. Feminizing and Hypermasculizing Black Male Socialization: Rehabilitating Black Masculine Heterosexuality 8. Expectations for Black Male Futures

Managing multiple masculinities in donor insemination: doctors configuring infertile men and sperm donors in Taiwan

This article investigates how doctors configured infertile men and sperm donors in the development of donor insemination (DI) in Taiwan. In the initial stage (1950s-1970s) doctors adjusted clinical procedures to repair the deformed gender identities of infertile men. To expand DI in the late 1970s and early 1980s, doctors stressed the positive eugenics of DI by spotlighting the high intelligence of donors, playing down biological patrilineage and re-emphasising the contribution of men of higher rank in society. In the mid-1980s, when donors came to be seen as potential carriers of fatal diseases like acquired immune deficiency syndrome, doctors managed to associate risky donors with socially stigmatised men, and therefore perpetuate the conventional hierarchy of masculinities. As the intracytoplasmic sperm injection emerged in the early 1990s doctors quickly presented infertile men as universally longing for biological fatherhood and hence devalued DI in an attempt to augment paternal masculinity. These diverse configuration activities come together to create a socio-technical network of DI that most of the time perpetuates the reigning gender order, rather than destabilising it. I argue the importance of incorporating various types of participants in analysis to understand the changing dynamics of multiple masculinities along with the development of DI.

A Social Network Analysis of Hegemonic and other Masculinities

This paper examines Connell's social theory of gender in two secondary schools. Using statistical models for social networks, relations of power, violence, liking and disliking are investigated with regard to students' male dominance attitudes. While one school demonstrates support for local-level hypotheses articulated for Connell's theory, and thus for the conception of hegemonic masculinity as sitting atop a hierarchy of masculinities, another school does not. However, support for the more fundamental notion that gender is relational is found within both contexts. This research represents the first assessment of Connell's theory in local contexts using a quantitative relational methodology. That hypothesised effects are found, even after controlling for many other explanatory factors, demonstrates impressive empirical support for Connell's theory.

More Than a Sex Machine: Accomplishing Masculinity Among Chinese Male Sex Workers in the Hong Kong Sex Industry

Situated in the masculinity and deviance literature, this article examines a “deviant” masculinity, that of the male sex worker, and presents the ways men who engage in sex work cope with the job. Based on in-depth interviews of Chinese male sex workers (n = 18) in the Hong Kong sex industry, I argue that the stigma management techniques these men employ are simultaneously gender strategies they use to accomplish masculinity. It is through this process that they negotiate a masculine identity within the hierarchy of masculinities in order to become “respectable” and “responsible” Chinese men.

Humoristiske bøsserier og latterens perversiteter - tilblivelse af heteroseksuel maskulinitet i skolelivet på automekanikeruddannelsen

Frisky Faggoting and the Perversity of Laughter - the Production of Heterosexual Masculinity in the School life at a Car mechanic programme.Humour is conceptualized as a subjectification in the formation of masculinity and the processes of inclusion and exclusion. The article produces knowledge about the creation of hierarchy among boys in a homosocial educational context. Inspired by British educational and youth studies and Danish poststructuralist informed empirical gender studies a theoretical perspective is established on intersections between masculinity and locally composed categories in school life. The point of empirical departure is homosocial relations among boys and between boys and teachers where a dynamic hierarchy of masculinities are produced. The article shows a dominant masculinity revolving around humour and laughter, use of sexual language, ‘disgusting' practices and desires directed at imaginary female bodies. Humour enables a play with homoerotic relations and non-heterosexual desires, but at the same time a heterosexual masculinity is valued, which eliminates and subordinates the perversions of laughter and the frisky faggoting among the boys at the Car mechanic programme.

Old Gay Men’s Bodies and Masculinities

In the hierarchy of masculinities, old men and gay men are clearly subordinated. Many assume, therefore, that old gay men are doubly stigmatized; however, we argue that the picture is decidedly more complex. In this article, we explore the bodily experiences of aging through analysis of intensive interviews with 10 gay men who are in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. We focus on the interpretations and strategies these gay men use to make sense of their aging bodies. We identify several themes relating to how these men think about their own bodies, the bodies of other gay men, and their place within gay communities. Their aging corporeal experiences allow us to examine ageist notions about aging and being old and to explore how this thinking, which valorizes youthfulness, shapes their aging experiences.

“We Be Killin’ Them”: Hierarchies of Black Masculinity in Urban Basketball Spaces

This article examines a local park basketball culture and shows how discursive practices constituted masculine hierarchies and proliferated black masculinities. Through pickup basketball, several young black men took up various positions of power and were able to determine access to neighborhood parks and dictate the codes of behavior. Drawing on poststructural and social geography theories, we argue that male power became authorized through the community’s privileging of basketball and led to the hierarchical distribution of black masculinities within park spaces. The young black men psychically and materially invested in black masculinities, which were aligned with the logics of “heroic” and responsible citizenship; these notions had prominence because of the strong (re)production of the “Sport vs. Gangs” discourse (Cole, 1996) in their neighborhoods. Rather than providing an essentialist reading of these young men as positioned by this neo-liberal discourse, however, we also pay attention to the possibilities that the young men used basketball to invest in diverse life pathways involving alternative versions of the self.

Making a Fur Coat: Women, the Labouring Body, and Working-Class History

This article historicizes the making of a fur coat in post-1940 Canada, exploring the social relationships and forms of labour that made the fur coat possible: skinning, sewing, and selling. Focusing especially on women's labour, the author examines the significance of Aboriginal women's work, often unwaged, and seldom recognized in many fur-trade sources, as well as the way in which racial constructions of Aboriginal women intersected with the appropriation of their labour. The wage labour of women in a manufacturing sector dominated by eastern European Jewish immigrants, and by a masculine hierarchy of skill, as well as working women's protests and unionization, are also examined, as is retail selling labour in large and small stores. An exploration of these forms of labour, with a focus on gender, provides insights into discussions about the body and working-class history. While many feminist works have emphasized the cultural and discursive in their explorations of fur, the author argues for a theoretical perspective that fuses a feminist critique of race and gender hierarchies with a materialist understanding of labour, class, and alienation. While embracing a feminist scepticism about the existence of a “natural” body, she argues for the need to avoid the dematerialized body of much postmodern theory in explorations of the body and working-class history.

American mentality? Trauma, imperialism and the authentic veteran in mainstream Hollywood narrative

This paper deals with one contemporary ‘myth’ circulated within mainstream cinema; the validation of masculine purpose through ‘heroic’ action. This is exemplified within Hollywood narratives by the recurrence of particular scenes, interludes which attempt to dramatise the experience of male characters (usually middle-ranking veteran officers) who are presented as traumatised and also, in some cases, apparently ‘conscience-stricken’. The representation of these supposedly ‘psychological’ phenomena are the subject of controversy; quite apart from their uncertain status as references to a ‘post-traumatic’ and the concentration of emotional resource on male rather than female sufferers, they produce ambivalent accounts of American military power. Using reference to The Last Samurai (Zwick, 2003), Windtalkers (Woo, 2002), and Glory (Zwick, 1989), the work investigates the discursive purposes of such typification, asking to what degree it may represent a series of expressive or ‘ideological’ acts in the guise of a standard cinematic technique (the ‘flashback’). The piece studies the retrospective attribution of ‘modern’ sensibilities to earlier periods, the narrative strategies which assign authenticity to the actions of protagonists whose ‘word’/honour falls under scrutiny, and argues that the neurotic deployment of alibis is used to assist in the reconstruction of stable masculine hierarchies.

Whom do you fight?

Whom do you fight?