Beyond Combat investigates how the Vietnam War both reinforced and challenged the gender roles that were key components of American Cold War ideology. Refocusing attention onto women and gender ...paints a more complex and accurate picture of the war's far-reaching impact beyond the battlefields. Encounters between Americans and Vietnamese were shaped by a cluster of intertwined images used to make sense of and justify American intervention and use of force in Vietnam. These images included the girl next door, a wholesome reminder of why the United States was committed to defeating Communism, and the treacherous and mysterious 'dragon lady', who served as a metaphor for Vietnamese women and South Vietnam. Heather Stur also examines the ways in which ideas about masculinity shaped the American GI experience in Vietnam and, ultimately, how some American men and women returned from Vietnam to challenge homefront gender norms.
This study examines how Israeli men who are army veterans with combat-related post-traumatic stress and consequently participated in therapy engage “new masculinities” ideologies. Drawing from ...interview data with these veterans, we find changes in the men’s perceptions of masculinity and sense of themselves as men. They expressed this shift through criticisms of military masculinity and disassociating from the idea of man-as-fighter, disputing the sociocultural category of hegemonic masculinity, and performing practices identified as feminine. The men portrayed this movement, away from endorsing hegemonic military masculinity toward affirming “new masculinity” ideology rooted in therapeutic discourse, which emphasizes sensitivity, emotional disclosure, self-care, and seeking help, as intertwined with their mental recovery—and they attributed both to therapy. These findings suggest that new masculinity ideology embedded in therapeutic discourse, can offer men suffering from post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) a template to reaffirm their status as men—although men of a different kind—and indicate the possibilities for therapy in this endeavor. However, while the men adopted new masculinity ideologies, they also conformed to hegemonic masculinity, constructing hybrid masculinities. The study joins growing evidence that hybrid masculinities may have positive effects in enabling men to overcome the limitations of hegemonic masculinity, while also conforming to its expectations more broadly and maintaining men’s power.
The problems of masculinity in the philosophy of Elizabeth Badinter are analyzed in the paper. The necessity of the transition in understanding the nature of the various practices of masculinity in ...essentialist constructivist approach is proved. Constructivist approach examines masculinity not as a biological reality, but as a cultural imperative due to assessing male social roles and ways of self-presentation in terms of the ideal of “true masculinity”. The author makes conclusion that the ideal of the “true masculinity” seems to be of “anti-femininity” nature and requires the critical rethinking in contemporary culture.
Domesticity is generally treated as an aspect of women's history. In this fascinating study of the nineteenth-century middle class, John Tosh shows how profoundly men's lives were conditioned by the ...Victorian ideal and how they negotiated its many contradictions.Tosh begins by looking at the experience of boyhood, married life, sex, and fatherhood in the early decades of the nineteenth century-illustrated by case studies representing a variety of backgrounds-and then contrasts this with the lives of the late Victorian generation. He finds that the first group of men placed a new value on the home as a reaction to the disorienting experience of urbanization and as a response to the teachings of Evangelical Christianity. Domesticity still proved problematic in practice, however, because most men were likely to be absent from home for most of the day, and the role of father began to acquire its modern indeterminacy. By the 1870s, men were becoming less enchanted with the pleasures of home. Once the rights of wives were extended by law and society, marriage seemed less attractive, and the bachelor world of clubland flourished as never before.The Victorians declared that to be fully human and fully masculine, men must be active participants in domestic life. In exposing the contradictions in this ideal, they defined the climate for gender politics in the next century.
This article focuses on queer men's relationship with hegemonic masculinity and femmephobia. The study was conducted with the aim of investigating how different understandings of masculinity and ...femininity can fuel femmephobia. Ten posts within the Reddit forum “r/gaybros” were analyzed, along with their 1356 collective comments. Within the analysis, the users of r/gaybros were found to define their expression of masculinity as independent and free from any societal constraints or expectations. To be masculine meant resisting the stereotype that associates queerness with femininity. Femininity was then understood as failing to reach this construction of masculinity and as vacuously conforming to the stereotype that queer men are feminine. Consequently, the users constructed masculinity and femininity in a complementary and hierarchical way. Not only do they devalue and regulate femininity, but the femmephobia that they reproduce is a necessary part of their understanding of masculinity. This article consequently argues that the users of r/gaybros constructed a local form of hegemonic masculinity which contrasts with previous research that understands gay men as capable of imitating hegemonic masculinity but ultimately excluded from its construction.
Recent research in the social sciences suggests a methodological paradox as scholars work to make sense of the contemporary relationship between masculinity and homophobia. Representative surveys ...consistently find dramatically decreasing levels of sexual prejudice among all groups, among men and young men in particular. Qualitative scholarship, however, continues to find that enactments of homophobia remain integral components of contemporary masculine identities. In this article, we make sense of this shift and apparent methodological inconsistency. We do not question which measure is best. Instead, we argue for a need to understand the ways that gendered sexual prejudice transforms in ways that allow the relationship between masculinity and homophobia to endure—sometimes even when it appears to be in decline.
High school and the difficult terrain of sexuality and gender identity are brilliantly explored in this smart, incisive ethnography. Based on eighteen months of fieldwork in a racially diverse ...working-class high school, Dude, You're a Fag sheds new light on masculinity both as a field of meaning and as a set of social practices. C. J. Pascoe's unorthodox approach analyzes masculinity as not only a gendered process but also a sexual one. She demonstrates how the "specter of the fag" becomes a disciplinary mechanism for regulating heterosexual as well as homosexual boys and how the "fag discourse" is as much tied to gender as it is to sexuality.
South Korean masculinities have enjoyed dramatically greater influence in recent years in many realms of pan-Asian popular culture, which travels freely in part because of its hybrid ...trans-nationalistic appeal. This book investigates transcultural consumption of three iconic figures — the middle-aged Japanese female fandom of actor Bae Yong-Joon, the Western online cult fandom of the thriller film Oldboy, and the Singaporean fandom of the pop-star Rain. Through these three specific but hybrid contexts, the author develops the concepts of soft masculinity, as well as global and postmodern variants of masculine cultural impacts. In the concluding chapter, the author also discusses recently emerging versatile masculinity within the transcultural pop production paradigm represented by K-pop idol boy bands.
Research on hybrid masculinity shows that privileged men incorporate aspects of subordinated and/or marginalized masculinities into their gender performances, contributing to the persistence of ...hegemonic masculinity. This scholarship has centered on white, straight, cisgender, class‐privileged men. Yet, it is reasonable to imagine that not all privileged men enact hybrid masculinities and that at least some less‐privileged men engage in hybrid identity work. Here, we draw on 24 interviews with a diverse group of men attending an elite university, examining their beliefs about contemporary masculinity in relation to academic pursuits. Generally, race‐ and class‐privileged respondents rejected academic effort as unmanly while less‐privileged men unapologetically committed themselves to their academic endeavors. Exceptions to these patterns—privileged men who embraced academic effort and less‐privileged men who rejected it—revealed hybrid identity work attempted by both groups. However, only privileged men were able to successfully hybridize their masculine identities, while less‐privileged men were left straddling competing cultural imperatives without clearly accomplishing either. We discuss the implications of these findings for both individual men and for larger patterns of inequality and offer new theoretical insights regarding how race‐ and class privilege shape men's performances of hegemonic, complicit subordinated, marginalized, and hybrid masculinities.
Men and development Cornwall, Andrea; Edstrom, Jerker; Greig, Alan
2011., 2011, 2011-07-07, 2012-09-13, 20110101
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Brings together some of the best-known academics, activists and practitioners in the field to present a comprehensive overview with original case studies from Brazil, India, China , South Africa, ...Malawi, Uganda and Nicaragua.
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