Real Men Research Articles

Moral Mobility

In 2014, a group of male Syrian refugees organized a sit-in protest in Greece. They demanded and gained permission to travel further into Europe. In a world where mobility has become a marker of men’s success, Europe’s border regime tests “other” men’s aspiration for mobility through images of good morality and provider’s capability. Within this system, male asylum seekers tend to be rejected as too pitiful, as not real men, or as dangerous distorted men. However, in Greece, the discourse of human dignity has reconstructed people’s perceptions of other men’s vulnerability. Thus, we argue that the young Syrians could embody an emergent refugee masculinity by visibly performing responsibility, democracy, and strength and by navigating their desires through moral subjectivity. Moreover, they rejected personal political sensibilities in order to maintain solidarity within the group. Thus, the performance by the Syrian refugee men has paved the way for emergent refugee masculinities in Greece, which have since then gained worldwide attention.

American Writers and the Approach of World War II, 1935–1941: A Literary HistoryShell Shock, Memory, and the Novel in the Wake of World War I

American Writers and the Approach of World War II, 1935–1941: A Literary HistoryShell Shock, Memory, and the Novel in the Wake of World War I

Online Commenting About a Victim of Female-on-Male Rape: The Case of Shia LaBeouf’s Sexual Victimization

The present study explored social responses toward male victims of female-perpetrated rape by analyzing 505 comments posted on www.theGuardian.com in response to the report that Shia LaBeouf, an American actor and director, was raped by a woman. Using inductive thematic analysis, three themes were generated: Victim’s Character, Victim’s Behavior and Victim’s Story. In addition, each comment was rated regarding its general attitude toward the victim: negative, positive, or mixed. We found that 55% of the comments expressed negative, blaming attitudes toward the victim, 35% were positive and supportive, and 10% were mixed. The findings show that negative comments depict rape as a sexual act against the victim’s will, whereas positive comments portray rape as sexual acts without the victim’s consent. Additionally, negative comments addressed expectation regarding “real men” and “real rape,” whereas positive comments emphasized gender equality in rape comprehension and victim treatment. Our discussion addresses the findings within the context of traditional gender roles and perceptions of “real” rape and presents implications for education and training. Furthermore, we suggest that the existence of positive and mixed responses may indicate a possible change in boundaries of social responses not just regarding male rape victims, but for all rape victims.

How We Become Real: The Making of Jewish and Transsexual Identities

How We Become Real:The Making of Jewish and Transsexual Identities Joy Ladin (bio) The American poet Marianne Moore said that a poem is "an imaginary garden with real toads in it."1 That is the way I understand the symbolic systems that define and sustain gender and Jewish identities, giving meaning to terms such as "Jew," "man," and "woman," and enabling us to recognize, signify, and express these identities. These symbolic systems are "imaginary gardens" with "real toads"—real people—living in them, people who depend upon the identities those symbolic systems define and sustain in order to understand themselves in relation to others. The fraught, fascinating intersection between symbolic systems and those who live in and through them has been a focus of feminist, queer, and trans-gender theory. In much of this work, these symbolic systems are described neither as imaginary nor as gardens, but as sites or channels of social coercion and violence. Feminist scholars, for example, have extensively demonstrated how women have been "disciplined and punished" by the symbolic system—transgender theorists call it the "gender binary"—that defines female identity and turns biology into social destiny. Women are born into this "imaginary garden"—assigned to the female gender at birth, as transgender theorists say—and though feminists have shown that women can resist binary gender definitions, the gender binary itself offers no way out. In this imaginary garden, gender is defined as fixed at birth, and the only alternative to being a woman is being a man. From the perspective of these critiques, the gender binary and, by extension, other identity-constituting symbolic systems, represent an institutionalization of power as unilateral and univocal as prison. Its subjects may try to revolt, escape, negotiate its rules, or break down the walls, but no one would, or at least should, want to live within it. Some queer and transgender theorists invert this top-down model of the relationship between imaginary gardens and their real inhabitants. Their arguments hold that rather than being defined by symbolic systems, we can constitute our identities individually, mixing and matching signs, conventions, and other identity-signaling symbols to define ourselves. According to these accounts, identities are individually determined, rather than being fixed [End Page 67] at birth. For example, Sandy Stone's landmark essay, "The 'Empire' Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto," often credited with launching transgender studies, argues that instead of trying to "pass" as men who were born male or women who were born female, transsexuals (those whose gender identifications as male or female conflict with their physical sex) should highlight their "dissonance" with the gender binary, and express their identities in ways that embrace "physicalities of constantly shifting figure and ground that exceed the frame of any possible representation."2 In other words, Stone calls for transsexuals to stop trying to tailor our bodies and life stories to the readily intelligible but inadequate terms of binary gender—terms which require us to hide any aspects of ourselves that would be "dissonant" with binary gender. Stone argues that we transsexuals should define our identities individually rather than communally, and express those individualistic identities in idiosyncratic ways that defy and confound the gender binary. According to Stone and others who embrace this approach, identity is self-determined, defined not by communal symbolic systems that govern how others see us but by how we see ourselves.3 From this perspective, none of us are bound to or defined by imaginary gardens such as that of binary gender. And whatever we choose to do with the signifiers of identity they offer, we should be completely unconcerned with whether we are seen as "real toads"—real men, real women, real Jews, or real exemplars of whatever identity they sustain—because we always are, and only are, really ourselves. Both the top-down and self-determination approaches to identity have proven theoretically powerful and politically useful. However, both tend to overlook the fact that to many people, identity-constituting symbolic systems, whatever their drawbacks, represent neither institutionalized oppression nor obstacles to self-determination; rather, these imaginary gardens represent home and community. For better and, always, of course, for worse, we willingly dwell within them, because...

Homososyal birliktelik örneği olarak mahalleyi korumak: sıfır bir dizisinde erkeklik halleri

Protecting the Neighborhood as an Example of Homosocial Collaboration: Masculinities in Sifir Bir Series One of the areas in which different representations of gender can be seen is the TV series and characters in them. The viewer can identify themselves with the characters. S/He gets closer to the heroes; a connection between them is established. For this reason, this study examines the homosocial relationships of the male characters who come together to protect the neighborhood in Sifir Bir series. While doing this, the masculine discourse in Sifir Bir series were analyzed in the article. A semi- structured interview was conducted with 15 university students to examine the effects of the masculinity on the male audience. It has been seen that the series establish a relationship with the young male audience that reinforces and normalizes the bond between being male and violence. The real man perception was created through the series, and it was seen that the characters who swear, perpetrate and kill are seen as real men in Sifir Bir series compared to the beautiful men in prime time series

Real men can't get raped: an examination of gendered rape myths and sexual assault among undergraduates

PurposeWhile awareness of sexual assaults on college campuses has increased, the majority of efforts to address it are focused on female victims. The relative neglect of male victims may be due in part to problematic rape myths that suggest men cannot be sexually assaulted, especially by women. The purpose of this paper is to compare rates of different types of sexual assault between male and female undergraduates, and explore the relationship between acceptance of traditional rape myths focused on female victims, and rape myths surrounding male victims.Design/methodology/approachStudents at a mid-sized university in Pennsylvania (n=526) answered an online questionnaire about their own experiences of sexual assault since coming to college, as well as their endorsement of male and female rape myths.FindingsWhile women experienced more sexual assault overall, men were just as likely to have experienced rape (i.e. forced penetration) or attempted rape. Acceptance of male and female rape myths was significantly correlated and men were more likely than women to endorse both. Participants were also more likely to endorse female than male rape myths.Research limitations/implicationsBy analyzing sexual assaults in terms of distinct behaviors instead of one composite score, the authors can get a more nuanced picture of how men and women experience assault.Practical implicationsCampus-based efforts to address sexual assault need to be aware that male students also experience assault and that myths surrounding men as victims may impede their ability to access services.Originality/valueThis paper contributes to our knowledge of a relatively understudied topic: undergraduate male victims of sexual assault.

Work as a Masculinity Contest: Measurement, Manifestation, and Management

This symposium presents an integrated set of studies that examine norms and values in organizational cultures of masculinity contest. We examine how what it takes to succeed in male-dominated occupations and roles may appear neutral on the surface yet implicitly engage gender identities so that “real men&x201D; are the ones most likely to thrive. This work is the culmination of a large group effort of scholars led by Jennifer Berdahl and Joan Williams, including sociologists, organizational researchers, psychologists, and diversity practitioners and consultants who have met over two years to theorize and design studies. The first paper discusses the conceptualization of masculinity contest organizational cultures, and presents the development of a measure (Berdahl, Glick, Alonso et al.). The second paper compares masculinity contest cultures in three different male-dominated occupations (Reid, O'Neill & Blair-Loy). The third paper examines male- on-male gender harassment as a masculinity contest (Alonso & Berdahl). The fourth paper presents questions raised by sexual harassment training, and new theory on approaching it, the masculinity contest culture of policing (Rawski & Workman-Stark).

Real men set norms? Anti-trafficking campaigns and the limits of celebrity norm entrepreneurship

This article analyzes celebrities’ norm entrepreneurship through a specific instance of its enactment: Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore’s media campaign against human trafficking (the K&M Campaign). Drawing from literatures about celebrities and politics and norm entrepreneurship, and using qualitative-interpretive methods of data collection and analysis, I show how the K&M Campaign provides an early, high-profile example of this norm entrepreneurship that demonstrates why and how celebrities communicate norms to the broader public. To illustrate, I show how changing political-economic conditions have facilitated celebrities’ ascendance in the polity, and I argue that Kutcher and Moore have emerged under these conditions to actively oppose human trafficking. Using their considerable resources, they have promoted an “individual responsibility” norm that instructs the public to avoid coercive sexual and labor activities and trafficking situations. I then argue further that the K&M Campaign provides broader lessons about norms’ fluidity: even when they are seemingly incontrovertible and their entrepreneurial proponents (celebrities) have extensive resources, norms may be contradicted and contentious nonetheless. In this case, by promoting an individual responsibility norm, Kutcher and Moore inadvertently conveyed retrograde gender norms and minimized the importance of broader structural solutions to human trafficking.

“Soccer is a matter of real men?” Sexist and homophobic attitudes in three Italian soccer teams differentiated by sexual orientation and gender identity

During the 1980s and early 1990s, homophobia and sexism were pervasive in sport contexts due to their sex-segregation, male-domination, and heteronormative culture. In the last two decades, a change in attitudes toward gender and sexuality, in particular within typically masculine sports, has been observed. Notwithstanding that, no research assessing if this change also occurred in Italy was conducted. Using semi-structured focus groups and adopting the framework of Inclusive Masculinity Theory, the current study explored sexist and homophobic attitudes in three Italian soccer teams differentiated by gender and sexual orientation. Team 1 comprised openly gay male athletes, Team 2 comprised both lesbian and heterosexual women, and Team 3 comprised heterosexual men. Narratives were analysed through constant comparison analysis. Specific macro-categories were identified in each team, as follows: Team 1: need for affiliation, in/visibility, perceived homophobia, and perceived institutionalised homophobia; Team 2: need for affiliation, masculine dominance, equal opportunities, and crossing gender boundaries; and Team 3: presumption of heterosexuality, female inferiority, and tendency toward a homosocial law. The results suggest that soccer, in Italy, still represents a context organised around men’s dominance over women and the stigmatisation of gay men. Notwithstanding, they suggest also that we are witnessing an interlocutory phase where some heterosexual soccer players are starting to challenge homophobia but, at the same time, women and openly gay players still perceive a homohysteric culture. The discussion is contextualised in the social context where discourses arose.

Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction

Since its publication in 1971, Allen Trelease's White Terror has remained the definitive study of the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan. One of the first white scholars to reject the Dunning school's sympathetic portrayal of the group, Trelease convincingly demonstrated that the Klan was a terrorist organization used by the Democratic party to restore “home rule” in the South. Led by the planter elite, Klan members relied on violence to intimidate African Americans and white Republicans. “The Ku Klux Klan was a mass movement of many sides, but nearly all of them slanted toward white supremacy,” Trelease concluded. “It provided the collective means to do a job that many Conservatives felt needed to be done” (Allen Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction, 1971, xlviii). But, as Elaine Frantz Parsons points out in Ku-Klux, Trelease and subsequent historians—though correctly highlighting the violent and racist nature of the Klan—have overlooked the role that public discourse about the Klan played in shaping “what the Ku-Klux became” (p. 11). According to Parsons, two Ku Klux Klans existed during Reconstruction: the embodied Klan, which “consisted of thousands of real men on the ground inflicting real pain, injury, and death on the bodies of freedpeople and those who allied with them,” and the disembodied Klan or “the abstract idea of the Klan as it was represented in public discourse” (p. 10). It is the latter Klan that interests Parsons the most. Constructed by both southerners and northerners, she argues, the disembodied Klan quickly became a part of national culture, influencing the way white Americans viewed race relations, southern manhood, violence, and the federal government during Reconstruction.

Engaging diversity in academia: manifold voices of faculty

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the perspectives of academic staff on issues of diversity and social schisms: capturing their perceptions of the complex relations at an academic campus positioned in an intricate sociopolitical context. It also explored how the faculty’s construal of diversity and social divisions inform their educational practices.Design/methodology/approachThe study employed a qualitative approach using grounded theory methodology. Data collection was based on semi-structured in-depth interviews with 20 diverse faculty members from different departments in a Northern Israeli college. The interviews were transcribed and processed into main themes and categories.FindingsThe findings revealed two main themes: “Diversity awareness” depicting recognition and sensitivity to the complex social context in the college, strategies of directly engaging with it, downplaying or overlooking the intricacies, and “Practices” describing the practical translations of the educational credos into teaching practice. Both themes reflected a myriad of faculty voices.Social implicationsThe study illuminated the challenges posed by social schisms, inequalities, and diversity for the faculty who need to grapple with the intricacies on a daily basis. More open dialogue and debates by the protagonists are needed to increase awareness of diversity and experimenting with different ways of addressing the intricacies.Originality/valueEmpirical evidence of the organizational actors’ predicaments, their diverse patterns of coping with intricacies, and the factors underlying their choices contribute to the body of knowledge on managing diversity in vivo by real women and men with different backgrounds and experiences.

Gentlemen, Heroes, Real Men, Disabled Men: Explorations at the Intersections of Disability and Masculinity in Contemporary China

This article advances new perspectives on disability culture in contemporary China. Using gender – specifically masculinity – as an “intersection,” it addresses key questions that both help to explain, but also further trouble, the way in which the “impaired” male body is both represented and lived in China today. Although recent research across the disciplines is revealing more and more about pre-modern and contemporary understandings of, and responses to, disability in China, little is known about the way in which gendered identities intersect and interact with disabled identities. From “gentlemen” and “heroes” to “real men” and “disabled men,” this article examines dominant historical and contemporary images of masculinity and disability, and illustrates how they have come to frame the way in which disabled men have been viewed and view themselves. And, through the close reading of the memoirs of one young man, Zhang Yuncheng, it reveals the possibilities and limitations through which gendered behaviours are formed and enacted on an individual level when set against Chinese discourses of disability, normalcy, and gender.

Preface

preface this vibrantly eclectic issue of Feminist Studies can perhaps best be framed as a series of interventions into current literatures on masculinities and feminisms. Angela Willey and Banu Subramaniam explore the implications of the racialized “white nerd masculinity” that is at the heart of the popular television series The Big Bang Theory, while Jessica Johnson draws our attention to the significance of the virulently muscular brand of Christian masculinity preached by Mark Driscoll in his multi-state Mars Hill Church, which drew thousands of followers during the early 2000s. Both articles reveal the toxicity of these contemporary masculine formations, from their mundane and pervasive exposition in popular culture to more strident articulations in megachurches . Gergely Kunt offers a rare first-person glimpse into the complexities of a World War II sexual economy, examining via the diary of a Hungarian refugee the relationship between militarized masculinity and sexual assault and the exploitation of women in wartime. Other essays in this volume intervene in current debates about the form, histories , and implications of Western feminisms. Jennifer McLerran’s art essay on Mohawk artist Carla Hemlock expands on the “Native feminist ethics” invoked by Yaqui legal scholar Rebecca Tsosie, suggesting that for Native feminists, improving women’s lives cannot be separated from decolonization. Magdalena Grabowska demands Western feminists rethink their commonplace dismissal of women who lived under  Preface state socialism as non-agentive, while Jo Reger calls our attention to the frequently problematized “wave” metaphor as she locates the roots of disidentification with previous generations of feminists. And Eileen Boris’s review essay highlights the racialized, gendered, classed, and transnational intertwining of fashion and feminism. The poet featured in this issue is Rachel Marie-Crane Williams. The issue closes with two reflections on the January 21st Women’s March on Washington: Mrinalini Chakraborty, one of its national organizers, describes in an interview the inception and logistical challenges of the march, while Tracey Jean Boisseau describes uplifting interactions with strangers that many march-goers experienced that day. In “Inside the Social World of Asocials: White Nerd Masculinity, Science, and the Politics of Reverent Disdain,” Angela Willey and Banu Subramaniam analyze what they call the “reverent disdain” for science that continues to pervade feminist scholarship as well as public/popular culture. This reverent disdain leads to resistance to incorporating methodologies from the natural sciences into feminist studies, even while authority is ceded to knowledges produced within those disciplines . Willey and Subramaniam demonstrate the pervasiveness of this reverent disdain through a close reading of the immensely popular television show The Big Bang Theory. While the show portrays science as pure play and curiosity, with an innocent distance from the social, Willey and Subramaniam argue that, through its depiction of nerds, the show constructs brilliance in racialized and gendered ways that police and naturalize the boundaries of knowledge production in science, rendering it inaccessible to practice and to critique. In particular, the show creates an innocent white masculinity that effaces the hierarchies of race and gender that actually exist within science as well as in society at large. Willey and Subramaniam’s goal is to encourage feminist scholarship to reject the binaries of nature and culture and move toward more “naturecultural ” engagements in which critiques of science and engagement with scientific practice coexist as intellectual and political projects. If Willey and Subramaniam highlight how nerd masculinity is made to appear outside of the social even as it reinforces social hierarchies , in “Under Conviction: ‘Real Men’ Reborn on Spiritual and Cinematic Battlefields,” Jessica Johnson excavates a muscular, evangelical Christian project to transform the sociopolitical by intertwining virulent masculinity, Hollywood movies, and the global war on terror. Preface  Johnson troubles the distinction between the evangelical and the (secular ) popular in her ethnography of Seattle’s Mars Hill Church, which at its height spread to five states and had approximately 13,000 attendees. The church had a charismatic and social-media savvy preacher named Mark Driscoll who urged men to stop being “pussies” and instructed married women to become sexually alluring beings for their husbands, even as he lay the blame for men’s problems on single women who were too sexually...

The effects of implicit gender role theories on gender system justification: Fixed beliefs strengthen masculinity to preserve the status quo.

Four studies (n = 1199) tested support for the idea that implicit theories about the fixedness versus malleability of gender roles (entity vs. incremental theories) predict differences in the degree of gender system justification, that is, support for the status quo in relations between women and men in society. Relative to an incremental theory, the holding of an entity theory correlated with more system-justifying attitudes and self-perceptions (Study 1) for men and women alike. We also found that strength of identification with one's gender in-group was a stronger predictor of system justification for men than it was for women, suggesting men's defense of the status quo may be motivated by their membership in a high status group in the social hierarchy. In 3 experiments, we then tested whether exposure to a fixed gender role theory would lead men to identify more with masculine characteristics and their male gender group, thus increasing their defense of the gender system as fair and just. We did not expect a fixed gender role theory to trigger these identity-motivated responses in women. Overall, we found that, by increasing the degree of psychological investment in their masculine identity, adopting a fixed gender role theory increased men's rationalization of the gender status quo compared with when gender roles were perceived to be changeable. This suggests that, when men are motivated to align with their masculine identity, they are more likely to endorse the persistence of gender inequality as a way of affirming their status as "real men." (PsycINFO Database Record

Under Conviction: “Real Men” Reborn on Spiritual and Cinematic Battlefields

While situating my ethnographic fieldwork at Mars Hill Church of Seattle from 2006–2008, this paper examines how processes of corporatization and militarization were structurally embedded through the circulation of fear, shame, and paranoia in the virtual, visual, and visceral networking of Pastor Mark Driscoll's posture in voice. Specifically, this paper examines teaching on biblical masculinity in tandem with Mars Hill's promotion of a militarized and sexualized visual culture as a methodology of cultural politics that conflated freedom and control while bodily recruiting evangelical ‘citizen-soldiers’ into everyday spiritual warfare on mission to expand the church's empire. I argue this ethos of battle readiness manifested through the felt reality of emergent threat signals an affective political economy conscripting U.S. citizen-soldiers through cultural politics writ large to participate in the ongoing ‘global’ war on terror ‘at home.’ By reassessing the political valences of ‘conviction’ in terms of ‘gut feeling’ which signals desires simultaneously biological and social that can be suggested and manipulated through the affective priming of mood and atmosphere, this paper examines the bodily affects and political effects of conviction as resonant across spaces deemed religious and secular to index and critique intersecting aims of Evangelical and U.S. Empire amplifying biopolitical control in the name of freedom.

Under Conviction: “Real Men” Reborn on Spiritual and Cinematic Battlefields

Under Conviction: “Real Men” Reborn on Spiritual and Cinematic Battlefields

Boys Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan ed. by Mark McLelland et al.

Reviewed by: Boys Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan ed. by Mark McLelland et al. Deborah Shamoon (bio) Boys Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan. Edited by Mark McLelland, Kazumi Nagaike, Katsuhiko Suganuma, and James Welker. University of Mississippi Press, Jackson, 2015. x, 303 pages. $65.00, cloth; $30.00, paper. In the title of a 2001 online article, Mark McLelland asked, "Why Are Japanese Girls' Comics Full of Boys Bonking?"1 Notwithstanding the playful title, McLelland was one of the first scholars writing in English to take the genre of boys' love (BL) seriously. Fifteen years later, this question is [End Page 462] less surprising as boys' love manga has proliferated in Japan and abroad, and slash (gay-themed fan fiction) has gained prominence in the West. The idea that women might enjoy fantasies of gay male romance and sex has achieved a degree of mainstream recognition, even in the United States. As McLelland argues in that early essay, the more interesting question is not "Why?" but "Why not?" or more specifically, why do we assume that gay images should be the domain of gay men alone? McLelland, joined by Kazumi Nagaike, Katsuhiko Suganuma, and James Welker as editors of a new collected volume, offers various and nuanced answers to this question and others: not only "why?" but who is reading, what is at stake for readers, and writers, and how the greater prominence of boys' love has both granted legitimacy and threatened free expression. The volume is arranged more or less chronologically, beginning with a chapter by Barbara Hartley on Takabatake Kashō's illustrations of bishōnen(beautiful boys) in the 1920s and ending with a chapter by Mark McLelland on the future of boys' love in light of government censorship such as the "Non-Existent Youth Bill" and grassroots attempts to remove BL from public libraries. Overall, chapters focus on fans (fujoshi or rotten girls, that is, female fans of boys' love), on professional and amateur writers and artists, and on discourses around fans. While there is some close reading of prominent texts, the emphasis is more on reading practices. The two standout chapters in this volume are translations of essays by Fujimoto Yukari and Ishida Hitoshi, which originally appeared in a special issue of the Japanese literary magazine Yuriika (Eureka) in 2007 on boys' love studies. Fujimoto's essay is an update and reconsideration of an essay she first published in 1991, which is also available in English translation.2 In revisiting her earlier argument that the male characters stand in for female readers, Fujimoto finds that as the genre has matured and diversified, the scope of playing with gender has widened to "experiments in transgressing every possible border of sexual difference" (p. 85). While boys' love manga, with its generic code of masculine seme (top) and feminine uke (bottom) pairings, is superficially heteronormative, Fujimoto argues that couplings contain more nuanced character traits that are not limited to a strict male-female binary, and playing with various pairings allows readers to experience sexual fantasies freed from gender oppression. Ishida likewise takes on the issue of heteronormativity in boys' love, along with the yaoi ronsō (boys' love debate) begun in 1992, which argues that the genre is homophobic and appropriates and/or misrepresents gay culture. The fact that characters often claim they are not gay and disavow gay sex as disgusting (kimochi warui) adds fuel to the debate. Ishida summarizes the response of BL readers and [End Page 463] writers, who tend to assert that the male characters are fantasies, not meant to be understood as real gay men but as points of identification for female readers. However, Ishida argues they are both: "Understanding the intersection of representational appropriation and self-projection will help us see why yaoi/BL endlessly demands the reinsertion of gender power dynamics via the roles of uke and seme to a world where the gender binary is deconstructed through featuring two characters of the same sex" (p. 229). These two chapters help to bring the Japanese language scholarship on boys' love and the debates surrounding it to a wider readership. Chapters by James Welker...

Gays, Cross-Dressers, and Emos

Gays, Cross-Dressers, and Emos

Real men: Representations of masculinity in Iranian cinema

Abstract The article examines different representations of masculinity in Iranian cinema, using Shahin Gerami’s essay ‘Mullahs, martyrs, and men: Conceptualizing masculinity in the Islamic Republic of Iran’ as the basis for its analysis. The article looks at examples of post-revolutionary Iranian cinema – in particular Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s Nargess (1992) and Kamal Tabrizi’s The Lizard (2002) – featuring male characters that can be considered in light of the masculine archetypes that Gerami identifies. This analysis is prefaced by a brief consideration of representations of masculinity in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema, in particular Masud Kimiai’s Dash Akol (1971) as an example of the luti or ‘tough guy’ genre. By considering these different representations of masculinity, the article aims to address the gender imbalance in recent studies of Iranian cinema, most of which focus predominantly or indeed exclusively on the representation of women, as well as challenge stereotypes of Iranian and/or Middle Eastern masculinity more generally.

“They are less worthy than us, but they are better than women….” Attitudes towards Homosexuality & Men Who Have Sex with Men (MSM) In Botswana

This paper presents the results of a study on Men, Masculinities and HIV/AIDS in Botswana [i] . The legal status of same sex relationships, especially homosexuality, is quite a controversial issue in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, where same sex relationships are not recognised by law or even criminalised. This makes it difficult or even impossible for sexual and reproductive health programs, including HIV prevention and treatment programs, to address the sexual and reproductive health needs of sexual minorities. At the same time, evidence from research shows that because they are neglected by intervention programs, sexual minorities become at higher risk of HIV infection and other negative SRH outcomes. Because of lack of legal recognition, sexual minorities also tend to maintain heterosexual relationships as a cover and thus form a bridge across which their elevated risk of HIV infection is transmitted to the rest of the population. It is for this reason that sexual minorities are important component to HIV prevention efforts; and also why attitudes towards sexual minorities are important.This paper uses qualitative data derived from 12 focus group discussions and 6 in-depth interviews to explore men and women’s attitudes towards homosexuality and men who have sex with men (MSM). The focus groups consisted of different groups of men and women, based on age; place of residence and occupation. Women‘s attitudes were more positive, with some indicating that some men or women may opt to have same sex relationship as a strategy to deal with issues of violence and vulnerability to HIV infection that currently characterises heterosexual sexual relationships. Men’s attitudes on the other hand tended to be overly negative, preferring to view MSM as un-natural, shameful and an abomination. However, even among men, there were those who held less conservative view. However, even among these men, they felt that MSM were not real men like themselves, and that they can only earn the trust; respect and ultimately acceptance of heterosexual men by distinguishing themselves and demonstrating that they have the same character as other men, such as bravery and dependability