Introduction: The Study of Masculinity

Why Masculinities?

It might seem odd to some to devote an entire book to the study of masculinity. After all, masculinity seems like an obvious thing, something we can and do take for granted. We know what it is when we see it: it is commonsensical, produced by testosterone or by nature. We can easily ascribe a series of characteristics to masculinity: “muscular,” “strong,” “hard,” “brave,” and “in control” are words that come to mind. We know that it is the opposite of femininity. We can also make a list of adjectives that do not describe masculinity, such as “weak,” “soft,” and “emotional.”

Even if many of us would agree what masculinity is when asked, we may not necessarily think about it consciously as it passes by us invisibly and we take it for granted in our everyday lives. It may be only when something goes wrong or when it goes into excessive overdrive that we really notice it. A crying man might seem like such an oddity that we cannot help but think about his masculinity (or lack thereof). We all know certain men whom we would not label as “masculine” or whom we might call “effeminate” or something else denoting an absence of masculinity. When we see such men, masculinity becomes visible because of its perceived absence. On the other hand, we might become aware of masculinity when we see a very muscular bodybuilder or a man eager for a fight. The excess of masculinity in these kinds of cases makes us aware of it. Yet, even when we notice these types of masculinity, we may still perceive them as natural: the bodybuilder is taking the male body to its natural extreme and the effeminate man is naturally unmasculine.

Our assumptions of a natural masculinity are greatly complicated, however, when we begin to think more deeply and more broadly about the topic. By going back in time and by looking at definitions of what a man used to be, it becomes clear very quickly that masculinity has a history that does not always affirm our own modern ideas about what a man is. Students of the European Renaissance, for instance, are often struck when they read heterosexual men’s writings about their intimate love for other men. They are even more struck when they learn that this writing does not make male writers seem effeminate or homosexual in their socio-historical context, but that, quite the contrary, expressions of male–male intimacy are more likely to reaffirm their masculinity. The nineteenth-century dandy is an important figure of masculinity which, to modern eyes, might seem odd: a man who makes the male body into a work of art might appear to many in the twenty-first century as an incarnation of the made-up, anti-masculine man. Yet, for people of the time, this would not necessarily have been the case, and the dandy was one figure of what a man could or should possibly be.

The concept of masculinity as natural is problematized by moving across cultures and looking at examples different from our own. There is such wide cultural variation in masculinity that considering various cases leads to the inevitable conclusion that it is something that is very difficult to ascertain. While some French men might appear effeminate by other cultures’ standards, in context this is usually not the case. American students who travel to India are often surprised to see men walking arm in arm together. While this might not be a standard masculine behavior in most segments of modern American culture, it may not make sense to people used to a certain way of thinking about masculinity.

With innumerable variations in time and in space, masculinity is more complicated than we might first believe and, consequently, masculinity can be studied not as a single definition, but as variety and complexity. The range of masculinities comes into particular relief when someone used to one definition goes somewhere else, whether on an actual trip or whether they travel by reading texts, surfing the web, watching films, or viewing paintings from another time period or cultural context. Such cross-cultural or cross-temporal differences make us aware of masculinity as particularly relative, since we come to see that what is taken for granted is not at all a given, but a fabrication or a construct of a given historical and cultural context.

Yet even within a single cultural and temporal context, ideas of masculinity are far from stable and fixed. While there may be some agreement among some people about a given definition, such a definition is never entirely agreed upon, and it is always contested in some way. A construct of masculinity might be challenged through explicit external critique of the model or through another construct presented as more valid. A male college professor may be viewed as unmasculine by a factory worker, for whom the idea of masculinity is closely linked to physical labor. But equally importantly for this book, any construct of masculinity is already challenged on its own, before any external critique. Because masculinity requires constant work to be maintained and because it can never fully remain at rest, it cannot be maintained in the way that men way want it to appear. The confident, successful Wall Street businessman suffers from anxiety on some level and, if one looks closely, he can be read as faltering and not always confident and successful. Even the most courageous soldier falters in some way in his masculinity, whether on the battlefield itself or in his psyche.

Masculinity appears even less stable once what is perhaps the most basic assumption about masculinity is stripped away, namely that masculinity belongs to men. What does masculinity look like when we do not assume that masculinity and men are directly related? What happens when masculinity is disassociated from the male body altogether and the possibility of female masculinity is considered? Masculinity might suddenly become very visible because it is seen to reside somewhere it is not normally or naturally housed or somewhere it should not be. In this case, it may be the threat of women appropriating masculinity that makes it seem so visible, as a cultural anxiety about men losing masculinity to women is expressed. Another way to strip away natural assumptions about masculinity is to consider what happens to masculinity in an age in which a person assigned female at birth can transition and be read as a man? How can masculinity be natural when trans men are read as masculine cisgender men?

We might also notice masculinity when it starts to take unexpected shapes, when it morphs into something unfamiliar or ambiguous. What does it mean about masculinity when a heterosexual late-night talk-show host makes homoerotic jokes about himself and his male guests night after night? We might wonder what masculinity means while watching football players in their tight pants slapping each other on the butt. What happens to masculinity when a heterosexual man puts on female clothing or dresses as a woman for Halloween? The cross-dressed man might call attention to himself because men do not appear in this state very often, but the situation also calls attention to masculinity itself. These kinds of ambiguous gender manifestations might make us laugh, but their unexpectedness calls attention to masculinity as more unstable and more complex than we may have originally thought.

Why Masculinities in Theory?

Masculinities in Theory is intended to help readers make masculinity an explicit and visible object of analysis, when situations call for explanation as well as when they do not seem to need analysis at all. It will not, however, focus on describing actual or ideal definitions or constructs of masculinity, nor will it do a history of masculinity. Rather, the central goal of this book is to discuss how masculinity can be conceived, how it can be theorized, and how it can be studied. Certain texts (whether literary, cinematic, digital, or artistic) take as their principal subject matter the phenomenon of masculinity, but at other moments, when masculinity passes as more invisible or unnoticed, we have to work a little harder and read between the lines, interpreting what we see, hear, or read. For, as we go about our daily lives, we come into repeated and frequent contact with less obvious forms of masculinity: in meetings, in class, on the television, on the web, on the street, at the movies, and in advertisements. Whether visible or invisible to the observer, masculinity is so varied and complex that this book will not discuss so much what it is or how it is something stable that can be easily understood.

Consequently, this book reveals how complicated masculinity is as a cultural and theoretical phenomenon. I am particularly interested in how masculinity functions in ways that might not be obvious to the naked eye, how various thinkers have thought about this functioning, and how various literary and cultural theories can be employed to think about the traditional invisibility of masculinity. I am also interested in how masculinity is a changing phenomenon, how it is fluid, how it morphs, and how we can think about and study it as something ever changing and in movement. What does it mean to think about masculinity as something that cannot easily be located or pinned down, or ever really defined in any simple or coherent way? We may think of masculinity as hard, solid, stable, or reliable, but that illusion may simply be part of the way in which it functions. The goal of this book, then, is to present key models of masculinity in order to avoid a simplistic or purely descriptive approach to masculinity, even...