Men and Masculinities

Holmqvist, Sam

doi: 10.1177/1097184X19857179pmid: N/A

The pastrycook Aron Forss was a well-known person in his hometown Uppsala in the 1840’s and 1850’s, famous both for his popular café and for his femininity. This article analyses the rumors that surrounded his person, using paintings, newspaper clippings, and memoirs written by his former customers. Through his business, Forss could lay claim on normative masculinity through the rousing bourgeois ideals of financial success and craftsmanship. Being a successful businessman was a way of securing social acceptance and respectability. However, it was apparently not enough. In order to sustain his business, Forss was forced to put up with harassments. Some of his costumers treated him much like other women in public places were treated—as objects of sexual advance. Several of Forss’s contemporaries describe him with particular fascination. By describing Forss as a spectacle, he is made an exception to the rules of social appropriateness.

Kong, Travis S. K.

doi: 10.1177/1097184X19859390pmid: N/A

This article seeks a dialogue between masculinity studies and generational sexuality studies by comparing two generations of gay men in Hong Kong through in-depth interviews with 15 older gay men born before the 1950s and 25 young gay men born after 1990 using a life course approach. The article highlights the sociohistorical and political changes shaping male identity, practice, and culture in colonial and postcolonial Hong Kong, and identifies responsibility and respectability as two key dimensions in the construction of Chinese masculinity. It argues that the two generations under study accomplish gay masculinities against changing Chinese masculine ideals and hetero/homonormativities sensitive to different social relations and institutions, as well as engage in constant negotiation with the dominant heteronormative life course and need to manage stigma. Drawing on the narratives of the participants from the two generations, the article examines continuity and change in the idealized and practiced forms of masculinity embedded in different institutions, thereby providing a nuanced understanding of the transformations of Chinese generational masculinities under broad social–historical changes.

Hurd, Laura; Mahal, Raveena

doi: 10.1177/1097184X19879188pmid: N/A

To date, the body image literature has largely ignored older men, as the bulk of the research has focused on young and middle-aged women. Where studies have been conducted with older men, they have tended to only consider the perspectives of men in their 50s and 60s or to include older men as part of mixed gender or diverse age samples. Thus, little is known about how older men perceive, experience, and feel about their aging and changing bodies, even as the body is central to older men’s understanding and practice of masculinity as well as their position in age- and gender-based systems of inequality. Addressing this gap in the research, we conducted in-depth interviews with 22 community-dwelling men aged 67–90 years (average age of 77 years). Drawing upon age relations and masculinities theorizing, we asked the men about how they evaluated and felt about their appearances, health, physical abilities, and sexual functioning. Our thematic analysis revealed that the men were largely satisfied with their appearances and physical functioning, particularly their approximation to masculine ideals of youthfulness, healthiness, and independence. Whereas half of the men identified their weight as a source of body satisfaction, all of the men disparaged obesity and stereotypical older men’s enlarged stomachs in particular. That said, the men discounted appearance as an unimportant and feminized concern. In contrast, they emphasized the salience of health and body functionality, expressing concern about how changes to their physical abilities and sexual functioning had already affected, and might in the future increasingly delimit, their daily lives, and hence they preferred social and physical pursuits. We consider our findings in light of age and masculinity ideals, which collectively privilege youthful bodies and subordinate older men.

Gueta, Keren; Gamliel, Sharon; Ronel, Natti

doi: 10.1177/1097184X19849449pmid: N/A

Much of what has been written about prison masculinity has focused on the hypermasculine climate of prisons that rewards aggression and the concealment of vulnerability. However, the findings of more recent studies have indicated a more varied ideal of masculinity in this environment. The present research examined how inmates construct and understand masculinity within the domain of reformatory intervention. Interpretative phenomenological analysis was performed on fourteen transcribed interviews with inmates who participated in Narcotics Anonymous (NA). The results indicated that hypermasculinity ideals hindered the participants’ ability to apply the tenets of NA that threatened their masculine identity, such as admitting powerlessness. However, they sought to negotiate these threats by employing three main discursive strategies. First, they affirmed hegemonic masculinity notions by presenting themselves as pragmatic agents, offsetting criticism of their submission to higher authorities, constructing recovery as a masculine act, and othering drug-using men. Second, they reformulated ideas of masculinity by adapting the concept to include feminine notions of caring and admitting vulnerability, in line with their NA experience. Third, they rejected their former ideologies and their current dominant localized sociocultural constructions of hypermasculinity that stigmatized them by noting the superiority of NA as a space of support, egalitarian relationships between inmates, and trust relationships with prison staff. By focusing on the dynamic of stigma, marginalization, and masculinity, the research informs both the theoretical understanding of masculinity and the development of reformatory interventions in prison.

Dignam, Pierce; Schrock, Douglas; Erichsen, Kristen; Dowd-Arrow, Benjamin

doi: 10.1177/1097184X19873692pmid: N/A

Presidential candidates’ gendered self-presentations may help secure political support, but a ‘gendered self’ is a construct grounded in an audience’s interpretation as much as it is in a politician’s performance. The 2016 U.S. presidential election provides a unique opportunity to investigate how voters construct politicians as gendered. Based on pre-election interviews, we analyze how Trump supporters accounted for their allegiance by constructing and valorizing Trump’s masculine self—a cultural construct centered on exerting or resisting control. Interviewees (A) praised his politically incorrect spirit, (B) glorified his entrepreneurial spirit, and (C) celebrated his fighting spirit. We argue that understanding how people construct others’ gendered selves is important for scholars of both politics and manhood.

Nagy, Beáta; Rigó, Adrien

doi: 10.1177/1097184X19856399pmid: N/A

Although a man is as well concerned in each case of induced abortion as a woman is, the amount of existing studies that attempt to describe and gain insight into the psychological effects of induced abortion on men is extremely small, either when considering this number in itself or when comparing it to the number of related studies focusing on women. The present article gives an overview of the existing psychological knowledge of men’s perspective on induced abortion including their typical reactions; roles; participation in, and responsibility for, decision-making; and their impact on the female partner. Furthermore, a number of related but understudied issues are addressed.

Cogan, Alison M.; Haines, Christine E.; Devore, Maria D.

doi: 10.1177/1097184X19872793pmid: N/A

In this paper, we explore how socially constructed hegemonic masculinity permeates military culture, and how this cultural context intersects with the seeking and receiving of health care by active duty US military service members with chronic mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) (n = 18). Data were collected through individual interviews and focus groups. Using Bourdieu’s theory of practice as an analytical framework, we identified four themes: maintenance of social capital, remaining in the field, reframing health care use to bolster social capital, and risk of health care use as not being rewarded. Each emerged from statements about why participants had avoided seeking health care for physical and psychological needs during their military service. We consider our findings in the context of maintaining status within an institutional steeped in hegemonic masculinity and describe implications for reframing caring for the body and dealing with problems as masculine acts.

Lim, Adelyn

doi: 10.1177/1097184X19867389pmid: N/A

This article examines representations of fathers and fatherhood in the advertising campaigns of Singaporean government agencies. The introduction of paternity leave and encouragement for fathers to play a bigger role in childcare and child-raising suggest that the government is sympathetic to the pursuit of gender equality, but I argue that state advocacy of active fatherhood serves to reinforce patriarchal tendencies in Singapore. Current scholarship on the problematization of women in state discourses has highlighted the power and privilege of a particular social group in Singapore: heterosexual men. However, there has been a developing body of theoretical and empirical research that looks more critically at the discursive constructions of masculinities, particularly along the dimensions of class, race, and sexuality. This article takes up this issue of different masculinities and the implications this diversity has for understanding patriarchal culture and its intersecting hierarchies. I propose the concept of Confucian masculinity to explain how the depiction of active fatherhood reinforces the ubiquitous “normal family” that upholds patriarchal ideology and perpetuates patriarchal power, thereby obscuring the contradictions of class, race, and sexuality that exist in Singapore.

Lachenal, Perrine

doi: 10.1177/1097184X19874093pmid: N/A

Treating the category “martyr” as socially constructed and contested along gendered and political lines, this paper examines how heroes and martyrs have been produced and deployed in post-revolutionary Tunisia. It begins by examining governmental attempts, launched soon after the revolution, to monopolize and institutionally define who could benefit from official recognition as a martyr. The differences in the definition of “martyrdom” between official institutions and families of the deceased are unpacked, arguing that “martyr” is a moral category, the boundaries of which are often drawn in terms of differing masculinities. The paper goes on to demonstrate how the category of “martyrs of the nation” has progressively overshadowed the category of “martyrs of the revolution” in official memorial practices, as the commemoration of the revolution has progressively focused on its uniformed victims, leaving out the civilian ones. One of the interesting features of this shift is that it demonstrates the malleability of the way the category “violence” is understood and deployed. The paper thus shows how neither state officials nor the families of deceased officers, activists, or bystanders accepted that it was sufficient simply to have died during the upheaval in order to be recognized as a martyr. All applied additional moral and political criteria in order to determine who deserved to be labelled as a martyr. At stake in these debates were contrasting representations of masculinity, in particular between triumphant, militaristic masculinities and fragile and damaged masculinities. As the figure of the uniformed “hero” has become increasingly consolidated and hegemonic in post-revolutionary Tunisia, the term “martyr” itself has been increasingly appropriated by state institutions and official memorial practices that serve to reaffirm order and governmental power.

Beglaubter, Judith

doi: 10.1177/1097184X19874869pmid: N/A

Despite the consensus that fatherhood is undergoing significant change, there is little known about how men who are deeply engaged in caregiving experience the shift away from conventional models. Examining the use of parental leave by Canadian fathers offers the opportunity to study the day-to-day reality of men’s caregiving and how time with baby may be transformative. In-depth interviews with 33 men reveal that all participants developed parenting skills and emotional bonds, yet only fathers who parented without a mother’s oversight articulated a sense of ownership and accountability over their child’s care. Those personally moved by the leave experience were most likely to integrate caregiving into their identities, provided they felt ‘accomplished’ in their employment. Leave-taking thus represented an important liminal period in which fathers could ‘test the waters’ of hands-on childcare without threatening their sense of self, ultimately increasing the visibility of men as caregivers and reshaping cultural configurations of acceptable masculinity.