Western Masculinity Research Articles

Developmental antecedents of adherence to masculinity norms: A 9-year longitudinal study of urban Chinese families.

A growing body of literature shows that adherence to some aspects of Western masculinity norms, including the suppression of emotional vulnerability, avoidance of seeking support from others, and exaggerated physical toughness, is associated with poorer psychological and social outcomes. While existing research suggests that parental gender beliefs and caregiving behaviors might influence the development of children's gendered behaviors, little is known about the developmental origins of individual differences in adherence to masculinity norms. The current study aims to address this gap and presents a longitudinal investigation of how parental gender beliefs and maternal sensitivity during infancy contribute to children's adherence to masculinity norms during middle childhood. Data were drawn from a mixed-method 9-year longitudinal study of 374 urban Chinese families (48.40% with daughters). Parental gender beliefs were assessed at 24 months, maternal sensitivity was assessed with mother-child interaction observations at 14 and 24 months, and children's self-reported adherence to masculinity norms were assessed at age 10 years. Results indicate that while parental gender beliefs had no associations with children's adherence to masculinity norms, maternal sensitivity predicted children's adherence to masculinity norms (β = -.18, p = .008) above and beyond parental gender beliefs and parental education level; moreover, there was a significant interaction of sex on the effect of maternal sensitivity on children's adherence to masculinity (β = -.23, p = .025), and the association was significant only for boys. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Gender in Cross-Cultural Encounters: Orientalism and Self-Orientalisation in Chinese-Language Young Adult Fiction

AbstractIn this article, we read and analyse selected young adult novels by Chinese-German author Wei Cheng that address the dilemmas faced by young female Chinese immigrants in Western countries. The aim is to explore the ways in which the construction of femininity and gender are inextricably bound up with categories of race and ethnicity in China-West encounters, and to probe the dynamics of such encounters embedded in the larger socio-political power structures. Through a critical analysis of the representation of Chinese femininity vis-à-vis Western masculinity, the essay interrogates the workings of the “Orientalist gaze” in relation to patriarchy and gender politics. The portrayals of the cross-racial encounter in Shaonv de Hong Chenyi (The Girl’s Red T-Shirt), which reiterate received ideas about the Orient, may be read as a product of self-Orientalisation, where the intriguing position of the adolescent Chinese girl prompts a rethinking of postcolonial gendered subjectivities. While self-Orientalisation may work to legitimate the discourse of Orientalism, the reading of Shaonv de Hong Faqia (The Girl’s Red Hairpin) reveals the ways in which self-Orientalisation could function as strategic essentialism that allows the female “Oriental” Other to gaze back and stand Orientalism on its head. The marriage between gendered and postcolonial approaches to children’s and young adult texts promises to act as a crucial intervention in the global struggle against hegemony.

Does Trauma Have a Race?

Abstract The task of theorizing and “curing” psychological trauma posed an unprecedented challenge to Western medicine during World War I. In this article, I analyze linguistic and thematic patterns across influential French medical journal publications (1914–1919) to elucidate the dominant medical model of psychological trauma in white men. My approach highlights the centrality of la volonté (“willpower”), historically a critical aspect of Western masculinity, to experts’ conceptualization of trauma itself. I expand this analysis to consider key differences between the model of trauma in white men and the so-called “facsimiles of pathology” in North African soldiers. This comparative analysis illuminates a larger cultural schema of the healthy (white, masculine) self as discrete, sovereign, impermeable, and “justified” in its occupation of colonial spaces.

“Shackle-Breakers” and “Adventure-Makers”: Fantasies of the US West at Oregon Health and Science University

“Shackle-Breakers” and “Adventure-Makers”Fantasies of the US West at Oregon Health and Science University Pamela Pierce (bio) In the 1970s the Department of Radiology at Oregon Health and Science University produced a training video for transluminal angioplasty (Dotter). In addition to showing how to open up a blocked blood vessel with a small, flexible plastic tube, the training video also displayed lofty shots of Mount Hood paired with the rousing sounds of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The “Battle Hymn of the Republic” gives the wilderness shown in the training video an almost religious significance, “at a time when the force of religion seemed vitiated by the new scientism on the one hand and social conflict on the other, wilderness acquired special significance as a resuscitator of faith” (Nash 157). For the University of Oregon Medical School (later known as Oregon Health and Science University [OHSU]) the West was a frontier and a wilderness.1 The video starts with a wide panning shot over Mount Hood. The camera shows the viewer the famous mountain and the endless vista of lofty peaks beyond. Next, the camera travels down the Columbia River, getting closer to Portland, panning down to a street view of what looks like Burnside Street, the main road in Portland. The camera gets closer to one particular man and a voice-over shares, “This man is in pain” (Dotter). It’s time for an angioplasty. Once the angioplasty wraps up, the chords of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” strike up again, and it’s time to go back to Mount Hood. This time two elderly white men, one of whom might be Charles Dotter, head of the Department of Radiology at the University of Oregon Medical School, hike the mountain. One of them lifts the sunglass covering of his glasses up and stares pensively off [End Page 29] into the distance. The scene cuts to a nurse watching a patient literally skipping down a hallway. Finally, the camera returns to the mountain, where it all began. The words “filmed in Oregon” appear over a final shot of Mount Hood. This training video and other archival items held at Oregon Health and Science University demonstrate how OHSU’s western representation intersected with classic ideas of the West as a proving ground for educated white men seeking to define themselves, a mythology that left many people out. In Wilderness and the American Mind, Roderick Nash discusses this wilderness cult with Theodore Roosevelt as a major proponent. A widespread discontentment with civilization resulted in the view of wilderness “as a source of virility, toughness, and savagery . . . [and] an increasing number of Americans invested wild places with aesthetic and ethical values, emphasizing the opportunity they afforded for contemplation and worship” (Nash 145). The frontier myth provided opportunities for masculine self-definitions. Peter Bayers explains that, influenced by the mythology of white western masculinity, “farmers and ranchers have sought to embody a masculine independence propagated by the frontier myth, with the rancher exemplifying a particularly rugged version of masculinity, given the lineage that links him to the cowboy and his predecessor, the hunter. . . . the farmer and hunter immerse themselves in nature, ‘regressing’ to a state of innocence through which they regenerate their masculine self-definition” (375). When the mythology of white western masculinity is mentioned, scholars often highlight Roosevelt’s essential role in propagating these myths with his buckskin costumes and references to the time he spent ranching in North Dakota (“Theodore Roosevelt in North Dakota”; “Theodore Roosevelt in the West”). As a sickly New York City child and an adult fan of Owen Wister’s The Virginian, Roosevelt firmly believed in the West as a proving ground and a place where things he had only read about could come to life. Literature shaped Roosevelt’s worldview throughout his life. Slotkin explains, “Roosevelt’s prior and primary engagement was with mythology; that is, with the narrative literature in which the frontier and its people existed as fantasy-projections. His reading led him from Cooper’s [End Page 30] Leatherstocking and the Norse/German sagas to Francis Parkman” (Slotkin 611). Roosevelt’s masculine western imaginary did not leave space for women...

Deterritorializing Hegemonic Globalization Progressively in Xiaolu Guo’s Experimental Writing: A Comparative Reading of A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers and A Lover’s Discourse

ABSTRACT The narrative patterns of family saga, international romance, and hyphenated identity are popular with overseas Chinese authors who wish to enter the Anglophone market. In fact, they are implicated in the homogenization and marginalization of the ethnic minorities’ cultural discourse under asymmetrical globalization. This article argues that Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers and its sequel, A Lover’s Discourse, are a continuous literary experiment in writing about the Chinese diaspora and pushing against those stereotypes. By shaping her protagonists not as recollectors but as observers via a documentary approach, Guo includes their international love within criticism of Western masculinity and links their diasporic experience to a cosmopolitan journey. The analysis of her experimental style of challenging Anglophone cultural imperialism and seeking global justice reveals the innovation and diversity of the Chinese diaspora’s translingual writing. Thus, Guo’s counter-hegemonic literary practice not only distinguishes itself from literature categorized as “ethnic” but also contributes to the discursive equality of international English-language literature by minority writers.

Re-Thinking the Hollywood Western of the Fifties: Delmer Daves’ Masculinities Trilogy Jubal (1956), 3:10 to Yuma (1957), and Cowboy (1958)

ABSTRACT The essay examines three films that Hollywood director Delmer Daves made in the mid-1950s—Jubal, 3:10 to Yuma and Cowboy—all of which starred Glenn Ford. The pairing of Ford and Daves, the essay argues, allowed Daves to re-think the Hollywood Westerns of the 1930s and 1940s, especially regarding questions around gender identity and representation of genders, that of the Western man. In doing so, these three films present an anti-nostalgic view of the traditional mode of American Western masculinity as violent, non-verbal and threatening and instead embrace a version of American masculinity that is verbal, compassionate and considerate. Through a close analysis of the films, reviews of them and marketing, the essay demonstrates how Daves used his own family background to construct Westerns that featured more adult themes and addressing the larger societal concerns about the notion of American masculinity and manhood in the 1950s.

Mormonicity

Mormonicity

Christopher Reed, Bachelor Japanists, Japanese Aesthetics and Western Masculinities

Christopher Reed, Bachelor Japanists, Japanese Aesthetics and Western Masculinities

The things we do for love: Male Gypsification and heterosexual desire in Una cubana en España/A Cuban Woman in Spain (Bayón Herrera 1951)

This article explores the intersection among masculinity, racialization and nationhood in Una cubana en España/A Cuban Woman in Spain (). I examine the figure of Miguel, a White Spaniard who disguises himself as an Andalusian Gypsy to win the love of the Cuban celebrity Blanquita. Miguel seeks to accentuate ‘Gypsy’ stereotypes to hypermasculinize himself, also contributing to dissolving the very rigid limits of White, western masculinity. Andalusian folkloric behaviour provides Miguel with a hint of Blackness, and his ability to pass as White and non-White functions as a legitimation of ‘the other Spain’. This portrays Spain as a culturally conflicted nation, suggesting an inclination to reconcile not only with the formerly colonized but also with ‘the other’ inside each Spaniard. ‘Gypsification’, in conjunction with the characters’ heterosexual union, prompts manners of cultural coexistence with Cuba, as it reconfigures Spanish national identity within a broader transatlantic context.

Capitalizing Mail-Order Brides: American Hegemony and a Return to Pre-Feminism

Contrary to popular belief, mail-order marriage is not left behind in history. With technological advancement, globalism, and capitalism, mail-order relationships in the modern world have become a capitalist venture through the form of a global marriage market with Internet websites (Starr & Adams, 2016, pp. 968-969). Currently, the common practice operates internationally in between different nations and ethnicities (Merriman, 2012, p. 87). However, the mail-order bride market is distinct from the regular intercultural dating business: a clear power structure exists between the grooms (capitalist along with mail-order marriage companies) and the brides (commodities). This paper examines how this dating market serves Western men (I will be using this term interchangeably with American men) to reinforce traditional Western masculine hegemony and ethnic dominance in a global setting (Starr & Adams, 2016, p. 972).

Fathering and masculine norms: Implications for the socialization of children's emotion regulation

AbstractEmotion regulation skills are important across the lifespan for psychological and interpersonal functioning. Research on children's emotion regulation skill development often examines parent socialization of emotion. However, this research has focused on mothers, neglecting fathers' roles in emotionally socializing children. This is concerning because traditional Western masculine norms include restricted emotionality, and conformity to these norms relates to emotion dysregulation. Fathers' views on masculinity are likely to impact their parenting attitudes and behavior and therefore relate to their socialization of children's emotion regulation. Research and theory need to include fathers from a variety of cultural backgrounds and family constellations in order to better understand the relation between masculinity and fathering behavior, particularly fathers' beliefs and behaviors toward socializing their children's emotion regulation. This review also discusses implications for prevention and intervention work with fathers and children, as well as key methodological issues and future directions for research and policy.

Ameen F. Rihani's 'Biophilic Masculinity' in The Heart of Lebanon and The Rihani Essays

Now that we have reached the third millennium, an era associated with the onslaught of modernity, technology, industrialization and urbanization, it is time for our relationship with nature to undergo an ecological evolution through which a conservationist masculinity can develop. In this respect, it is particularly essential that literature provide a genuine modernized perspective, a biocentric understanding oriented towards a biophilic attachment to nature that centers on the affirmation of universal kinship based on the connection to all organic life. The cornerstone of the biophilia notion is a balanced
 man-nature relationship which is still undervalued in the realm of green literature. In this perspective, it is worth highlighting Ameen Fares Rihani’s edifying contribution to the realm of deep ecology. The works of this Lebanese-American writer and thinker have not been given sufficient attention when his prosaic oeuvre effectively reflects man’s regrettable alienation from the natural environment. In a sense, Rihani’s prose with its biophilic inclination is a crucial addition to the body of works concerned with restoring the gap between nature and mankind. This paper, therefore, attempts to study Rihani's approach to living nature from the perspective of evolutionary biology by shedding light on an unexplored aspect, namely his essentially biophilic conviction evident in his landmark book Qualb Lubnan (The Heart of Lebanon) and in Ar-Rihaniyyaat (The Rihani Essays). These works will be analyzed from a literary ecocritical perspective and against ecological masculinity which is the most recent interpretive paradigm of ecocriticism. This reading will also profess that Rihani's intention is to ecologize modern masculinity, Eastern and/or Western masculine thought, through re-designing an alternative future, a deep green future founded upon the biophilia hypothesis.

‘She – nature, woman, Goddess’: mythic, ethical and poetic feminist discourse in Margaret Atwood’s ‘Marsh Languages’ and Luce Irigaray’s In the Beginning She Was

This manuscript pairs Margaret Atwood’s poem ‘Marsh Languages’ with Luce Irigaray’s recent philosophical text In the Beginning She Was. By doing so, an important conceptual resonance emerges between the two texts on the status of the loss of a maternal language and more broadly of the founding Mother at the origins of Western thought. Advancing a feminist poetics and ethics of the maternal, with its roots in nature, Atwood and Irigaray’s works are at odds with the enlightened language of our western masculine time, which seeks to disinherit its roots or to uproot itself. Atwood’s appeal in her poem ‘Marsh Languages’ reverberates with Luce Irigaray’s argument in In the Beginning She Was, which is that it is necessary for western philosophy to return to the marshes, so to speak, to return to the Presocratic philosopher-poets in order to discern how the logic of Western truth (via the male master-disciple) formed, and consequently discredited and covered over, a ‘she – nature, woman, Goddess’. Engaging with Greek myth (Hesiod’s Muses, Plato’s cave and mother-daughter duo Persephone-Demeter), Atwood as poet and Irigaray as philosopher interrogate and contest our western patriarchal tradition, for its erasure of ‘she – nature, woman, Goddess’, and suggest that the ethical implications of this silencing and forgetting have led to corrupt, destructive crisis-level relations, e.g. between humans, between humans and gods and between humans and nature.

Globalizing male attractiveness: Advertising in men’s lifestyle magazines in India

This study examines the construction of new models of masculinity in men’s lifestyle magazine advertising in India. Using textual analysis of advertisements, the study shows how certain kinds of western masculine ideals and body aesthetics are being adopted and reworked into advertising to appeal and facilitate consumption among middle and upper-class Indian men living in the urban centers of India. The contemporary construction of upper and aspirational middle-class masculinity includes size and hypermuscularity, fair skin/whiteness, and a view of self as global ethnic. These types of constructions help to globalize the male body and masculine ideal while also privileging whiteness and class in the local and global arena.

Bachelor Japanists: Japanese Aesthetics and Western Masculinities – Christopher REED

Bachelor Japanists offers readers an engaging and richly narrated look at Western “Japanism” of the 19th and 20th century—scholarly, collectionist, and creative engagements with Japanese culture, religion, art, and aesthetics—which, Christopher Reed argues, Western individuals and coteries used to construct queer “bachelor” identities, both male and female, eschewing marriage and evading the domestic norms of their day. The term bachelor, Reed underscores, is not [...]

Rebranding James Baldwin and His Queer Others

“Rebranding James Baldwin and His Queer Others” was a session held at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association in November 2019 in Honolulu, Hawaii. The papers gathered here show how Baldwin’s writings and life story participate in dialogues with other authors and artists who probe issues of identity and identification, as well as with other types of texts and non-American stories, boldly addressing theoretical and political perspectives different from his own. Nick Radel’s temporal challenge to reading novels on homoerotic male desire asks of us a leap of faith, one that makes it possible to read race as not necessarily a synonym for “Black,” but as a powerful historical and sexual trope that resists “over-easy” binaries of Western masculinity. Ernest L. Gibson’s engagement with Beauford Delaney’s brilliant art and the ways in which it enabled the teenage Baldwin’s “dark rapture” of self-discovery as a writer reminds us that “something [has been missing] in our discussions of male relationships.” Finally, Nigel Hatton suggests “a relationship among Baldwin, Denmark, and Giovanni’s Room that adds another thread to the important scholarship on his groundbreaking work of fiction that has impacted African-American literature, Cold War studies, transnational American studies, feminist thought, and queer theory.” All three essays enlarge our assessment of Baldwin’s contribution to understanding the ways gender and sexuality always inflect racialized Western masculinities. Thus, they help us work to better gauge the extent of Baldwin’s influence right here and right now.

White masculinity in the death zone: transformations of colonial identities in the Himalayas

ABSTRACT The following article examines relations between masculinity and whiteness in the context of the Swiss Everest expeditions of 1952. It shows how in the mountaineering literature of the time, the so-called ‘death zone’ (beyond 8000 metres of altitude) turns into an arena for a hegemonic masculinity in crisis. This crisis encompasses ‘traditional’ elements of hegemonic Western masculinity, which is based on the abjection of the body, the emotional and the irrational. In times of decolonisation, it further comprises the collapse of imperial power and the invention of postcolonial relations between white and non-white men. As this article shows, this novel iconography of male relationality evokes images of partnership while it is still based on racial inequality.

Sublime Sahib: white masculine identity formation in big mountain climbing

ABSTRACT This article explores western big mountain climbing practices in the Himalaya as ‘secular’ processes of identity formation with historical roots in Victorian efforts at sublimation. Such practices necessitate a series of social, embodied, and psychical distinctions structuring (and structured by) a white, western masculine identity. Looking to news and video documentary narratives by and about the late Swiss mountaineer Ueli Steck, this article works to situate big mountain climbing discourses as relevant to the academic study of religion through the notion of the sublime and its relationship to secularisation (broadly construed). It also situates big mountain climbing discourses in terms of contemporary postcolonial and critical whiteness scholarship on social identity. The notion of the subliminal is both the descriptive goal of many climbing pursuits, and also the means of denying the white masculine identity forged through such processes. Making use of critical social theoretic lenses as offered by both Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-François Bayart, big mountain climbing is shown as a space of white masculine identity formation supported by various appeals to ‘sacred/profane’ distinctions – both embodied and discursive. Through these distinctions, in big mountain climbing, colonial contact’s impact on structural realities makes possible a salient white masculine identity that is forged and disavowed through twin confrontations with the land and the indigenous peoples inhabiting it.

Taming the Volcano: Hegemonic and Counter-Hegemonic Masculinities in the Middle Ages

Relying to Norbert Elias' process sociology and the Bourdieusian theory of practice, this article intends to outline the beginnings of the long-term transformation of Western masculine habituses. First, it concentrates on hegemonic knightly masculine dispositions, pointing out how these patterns are structured by the uncivilized libido dominandi, i.e. by the more or less free indulgence in physical violence. Next, it scrutinises the counter-hegemonic dispositions of clerics, based on internalised violence control. Finally, it argues that there are several transitory figurations between the two ideal types, i.e. the borders between the knightly and clerical masculinities are blurred. Consequently, as a result of changing structural constraints, by the end of the Middle Ages hybrid masculine habituses are being formed.

Does masculinity moderate the relationship of height with height dissatisfaction? Findings from an Internet forum for short statured men

Research suggests that height is fundamental to Western conceptualisations of masculinity. However, researchers are yet to examine whether individual differences in conformity to Western masculine norms can help to explain why men experience height dissatisfaction. Thus, we investigated conformity to Western masculine norms as a moderator of the relationship between men’s height and height dissatisfaction. Men experiencing height dissatisfaction (N = 249) were recruited from an Internet forum that functions as a discussion space for short-statured individuals. Results indicated that shorter men and more masculine men reported greater height dissatisfaction. As hypothesised, we observed a significant interaction between height and masculinity, such that the strength of the relationship of short stature with height dissatisfaction was stronger for more masculine men. Crucially, results from a Johnson-Neyman analysis indicated that it was only for men extremely low in their endorsement of masculine norms (i.e., the 2nd percentile or lower) that the relationship of height with height dissatisfaction was nonsignificant, suggesting that, in the near-absence of masculine norm conformity, height no longer contributes to male body dissatisfaction. Whilst acknowledging that our findings require further exploration, we propose that conformity to masculine norms may be an influential factor in males’ experience of height dissatisfaction.