Concepts of Masculinity and Masculinity Studies

Abstract

This essay provides a conceptual history of the study of masculinity in the English-speaking academy from the birth of “men’s studies” in the 1980s to current work on global masculinities. With a move away from masculinity as singular toward a focus on multiple masculinities, the influential system of theoretical types of masculinities largely attributed to the work of sociologist R.W. Connell – including especially the concept of “hegemonic masculinity” – set the stage for later work that extended or critiqued the relation between power and categories of masculinities. During this period, sociologists and historians such as Michael Kimmel demonstrated that there was a history of men and masculinity, and that historical crises of masculinity were possible and worthy objects of study. The importance accorded to questions of identities led to a large book-body of work on the relations between masculinity and homosexuality, women, transgender, race, colonialism, and ethnicity. In what might be considered a branch of masculinity studies that came of age under the influence of Eve Sedgwick, scholars invested in post-structuralist thought or in questions of literary/cultural representation, increasingly considered how masculinity is a complex phenomenon often or always defined by movement and change.

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