Typologies of Men’s Friendships: Constructing Masculinity through Them

Abstract

Male friendships are often identified as being instrumental, avoiding expressive intimacy within their friendships. Past research has focused too much on friendship being an outcome of being male or having masculine attitudes, limiting analysis of the social construction of friendships in relation to masculine performances. Focusing on the individual production of friendship limits consideration of the construction of different dyads within one social network. Open-ended interviews with twelve men about each of their close friendships focused analysis on the dyad and not the individual. From the study, it was found that men established four different typologies of friendships (non-active, closed active, open active, expressive). While each friendship dyad differed in form and intimacy, all were influenced by the social construction of masculinity in these men’s lives.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.