Elderly British men: homohysteria and orthodox masculinities

Abstract

There is limited research about homosociality and physical tactility between men in the early to middle decades of the twentieth century. This research utilizes 27 in-depth interviews with heterosexual British men aged between 65 and 91 in order to explore their masculinity and homosociality, then and today. Participants were interviewed about (1) their recollections of masculinity and same-sex friendships aged 18; (2) their awareness of, and attitudes towards, homosexuality at this age; and (3) their current views regarding today’s heterosexual male’s gendered behaviours, inclusive of their kissing, cuddling and loving other men. Results show that men born between 1924 and 1951 lived in absence of, or desire for, homosocial affection. Even today they look upon the display of inclusive masculinities by today’s male youth with disdain. We suggest that their antipathy towards homosociality is reflective of elevated cultural homophobia and homohysteria of their youths.     

When two become one: sexuality studies and critical studies of men and masculinities

Men think about sex … a lot. Is this a problem or is this a site for reformation? In this paper, we set out to think actively, deeply, about the question of sexuality, to penetrate the limits of men and masculinity studies, and to tease at a range of questions that it seems the field is not attending to for any number of reasons. When men’s studies scholars speak of sex, we often speak of rape culture, violent sex, ideas of entitlement to sex, sex workers and pornography. Many of these approaches would be framed and understood by many as ‘sex negative.’ This paper sets out to think about what a ‘sex positive’ vision of men’s studies might look like – and also to ask if a sex positive vision of the field is even possible, desirable or necessary. In this paper, we braid together sex positive feminist theory, queer theory and men’s studies to complicate the matter of sexuality, both as an actual site of the kinds of things we do, and as a site of psychic and affective possibility.     

Cultural sexism and the UK Higher Education sector

Despite the advances of the feminist movement, and wider structural legislative interventions, women remain under-represented at senior levels within academia and (some) women still experience both direct and indirect forms of discrimination throughout their careers. This article seeks to understand why this might be the case, and what, if anything we can do about it.

Using qualitative interview data which gives voice to women’s experiences, this article explores the cultural dimensions which serve to reinforce women’s structural disadvantage within the academy. Drawing upon these empirical data and informed by reflections on the notion of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ in a neo-liberal environment, this article contends that ‘cultural sexism’ provides a vocabulary through which to make sense of this structural disadvantaging. It is argued here that an understanding of the ‘ordinariness’ of cultural sexism means we can both ‘raise consciousness’, and, explore emancipatory opportunities where cultural resistance and change might be possible.     

Male workers in the female-dominated long-term care sector: evidence from England

Labor market changes, including growing opportunities to work in the long-term care (LTC) sector, may attract more men to this traditionally female-dominated occupation. Analyzing an English national workforce data-set we investigate whether men are remaining within traditional masculine jobs or crossing traditional boundaries into more emotional, and personal care work. We examine organization, local area effect, and service provision on the probability of attracting more men to the workforce. The analysis utilizes multivariate statistics and mixed-effect models. The findings highlight both horizontal and vertical segregation in the types of jobs undertaken by men in the LTC sector. A research agenda is identified.     

‘You can tell which ones are the laddy lads’: young women’s accounts of the engineering classroom at a high-performing English university

This paper explores how four young women narrated accounts of their interactions with their male peers in the engineering classroom. Drawing on data collected in a qualitative case study conducted at one high-performing English university, this paper details how the four women described two different versions of laddish masculinity evident within their engineering classroom; a hostile laddish masculinity, and a ‘friendly’ or ‘genial’ upper/middle-class laddish masculinity. Whilst the hostile lads were seemingly frowned upon and socially excluded, the ‘friendly’ or ‘genial’ upper/middle-class lads appeared largely liked and tolerated by the women. This paper thus adds to our understanding of women’s current experiences in engineering education, and works to extend research in the area of laddism in formalized learning contexts in higher education (HE). In particular, this paper draws attention to the existence of subtle or nuanced degrees of laddism in engineering at the university under study, and highlights a possible relationship between ‘lad’ discourses and gendered disciplinary discourses.     

Anorexia nervosa and the problem of “men”

The essay explores anorexia nervosa as clinical historiographical performance, focusing in particular on the role of masculinity and male subjectivity in the development of diagnostic standards for the “disorder” and in contemporary non-traditional patients diagnosed with the condition.     

Social change and social conflict in nineteenth century England: A comment

This article addresses the potential for food movements to bring about substantive changes to the current global food system. After describing the current corporate food regime, we apply Karl Polanyi's ‘double-movement’ thesis on capitalism to explain the regime's trends of neoliberalism and reform. Using the global food crisis as a point of departure, we introduce a comparative analytical framework for different political and social trends within the corporate food regime and global food movements, characterizing them as ‘Neoliberal’, ‘Reformist’, ‘Progressive’, and ‘Radical’, respectively, and describe each trend based on its discourse, model, and key actors, approach to the food crisis, and key documents. After a discussion of class, political permeability, and tensions within the food movements, we suggest that the current food crisis offers opportunities for strategic alliances between Progressive and Radical trends within the food movement. We conclude that while the food crisis has brought a retrenchment of neoliberalization and weak calls for reform, the worldwide growth of food movements directly and indirectly challenge the legitimacy and hegemony of the corporate food regime. Regime change will require sustained pressure from a strong global food movement, built on durable alliances between Progressive and Radical trends.     

Rebel masculinities of star/director/text: James Dean,Nicholas Ray,and Rebel Without a Cause

Director Nicholas Ray is arguably most familiar to cinema culture as the American test case for la politique des auteurs, the influential mode of film criticism formulated at the French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma after World War II. Ray was elevated to the status of film ‘author’ for a consistency of vision and style associated with rebellion. Yet, he was known in the film industry as an ‘actor's director,’ both for his background in theater and for bringing Lee Strasberg's ‘The Method’ to Hollywood after it had gained considerable cachet at the Actors Studio in New York since the 1930s. Although Ray was relatively unknown among the movie-going public, his films were (and still remain) recognizable for their male stars, including James Dean, Robert Mitchum, and Humphrey Bogart. In this essay, I look at his most famous film, Rebel Without a Cause (1955 Rebel Without a Cause, 1955. Film. Directed by Nicholas Ray. USA: Warner Bros. [Google Scholar]), to argue that Ray's reputation as a rebel auteur was as much the product of highbrow auteurist film criticism as the mass cultural persona of ‘rebel male hero’ that the film's star James Dean cultivated. As an actor, Dean was promoted at the vanguard of an innovative and experimental new performance style. Further, his star-performance text reveals a construction of masculinity that the film asks us to view as socially rebellious, which is retroactively linked to Ray. Both the film and the popular press form Dean's image constituted by his self-fashioned sense of authenticity, his non-normative sexuality, his highly publicized death, and the identification with an alternative family structure his role invites.     

The impact of gay friendly cultures on religious expression: a study of inclusive attitudes and behaviours among religious adolescent American male athletes

Abstract

This article investigates the way attitudes inclusive of homosexuality have proliferated among 11 high school athletes on 1 sporting team, despite those athletes representing various beliefs. Utilizing an in-depth, six-question interview schedule, as well as Huber’s centrality of religion scale (CRS-10), the respondents’ varied religious backgrounds, attitudes towards homosexuality and religiosity are discerned via semi-structured interviews. Results show that these young men reconcile their church’s stances with their own inclusive beliefs, reported ostensibly inclusive environments within their church communities, and articulated their belief in equality through secular discourse. As church communities in inclusive locales deemphasize anti-gay principles and posture inclusivity, young people may maintain religious identities as a function of secularization as declining religious authority. Finally, I discuss the relationship between inclusive masculinities, religiosity and secularization; in doing so, I explore mechanisms by which dominant cultural narratives (in this case, the acceptance of homosexuality) might transform religious expression and religious institutions.     

Pushing gender to its limits: Iranian women bodybuilders on instagram

Bodybuilding is a hyper-masculinized sport and widely perceived unfit for women. In Iran where women face struggles and spatial limitations to participate in sports, women bodybuilders are breaking the boundaries and becoming increasingly visible using digital media. This research studies two Instagram pages dedicated to Iranian women’s bodybuilding. Content analysis is carried out on the posts and the users’ comments to investigate the visual and textual content of the posts, as well as Iranian Instagram users’ perceptions of the imagery, and the discourses of bodybuilding and gender relations. The findings are analyzed using feminist literature on body, physicality and bodybuilding, and perceptions of femininity and masculinity are explored. In conclusion, the findings are contextualized within the broader socio-cultural, political and religious discourses of women’s body, sports and physicality, as well as moral and political forms of feminine embodiment in Iran.     

Abnormal fears: the queer Arctic in Michelle Paver’s Dark Matter

With focus on queer resistance emanating from place, this article examines Michelle Paver’s 2010 novel Dark Matter: A Ghost Story, set in the 1930s and focused on an all-male expedition to Svalbard. As representatives of the norm, the fictional expedition members attempt to enforce heteronormative models of interpretation characterizing depictions of the Arctic, but several aspects blur the boundaries between previously discreet categories. Starting from Sara Ahmed’s discussions about spatial and existential orientation in Queer Phenomenology (2006), the article maps how the Arctic is imagined and perceived by Jack Miller, the novel’s protagonist. Although hoping that Svalbard will constitute a productive testing ground for a particular kind of inter-war, British masculinity, specificities of place represent a progressively more threatening transgression of what Jack perceives of as normal. The Arctic is thus initially constructed as a stable place; geographical particularities then overturn possibilities for Jack’s orientation, and supernatural occurrences finally violate boundaries between past and present, sane and mad. What Ahmed refers to as ‘queer moments’ that slant that subject’s perception of the world are in the novel produced by the actual as well as the supernatural Arctic: they highlight a continuous, geographically specific resistance to categorization.     

Is Everything Compatible? A Feminist Critique of Hearn’s Composite Approach to Men and Masculinity

ABSTRACT

Since its emergence in the late 1980s, research on men and masculinity has expanded considerably into an established area at the intersection of sociology, gender studies and related disciplines. There is now a wealth of empirical research but the theoretical debates have largely centred on Connell’s notion of hegemonic masculinity. This article focuses instead on the theoretical contribution of Jeff Hearn, arguably one of the central figures within critical studies on men and masculinities over the last few decades. The article identifies the main tenets of Hearn’s theoretical writing and tracks its development over time, and offers a critical discussion of Hearn’s theoretical position. The critique focuses on ambiguous treatments of central concepts and argues that tensions between perspectives such as materialist analysis, queer theory and intersectionality are not fully acknowledged in Hearn’s work.     

Little Swans with Luxette and Loved Boy Pudding: Changing Fashions in Cookery Books

Cookery books are far from simple things: alongside the recipes we may find narrative, memoir, science, history, politics, travelogue and anthropology. The cookery book also reveals in a profoundly naked form the anxieties and paranoias of its precise historical moment. So the glamorous cookery books of the years between the wars try to persuade the newly servantless middle-class woman that the cooking she must now do herself is a creative and fashionable activity. And the postwar British, sick of the limited stodge of their still-rationed diet, clutched Elizabeth David to their collective bosom, unable to taste her pungent dishes, but in thrall to the sun-strewn fantasy of the good life her books offered. From Mrs Beeton, offering the mid-Victorian mistress of the house the instructions and routines she needed to hide the mechanisms of the domestic machine, to the potent contemporary fantasy of the Mediterranean peasant and his fabulously healthy lifestyle, Humble interrogates the cookery books of the last 150 years, asking what they can tell us about how changing attitudes to class, gender and domesticity intersect with the culture of food.     

Moving beyond ideas of laddism: conceptualising ‘mischievous masculinities’ as a new way of understanding everyday sexism and gender relations

Abstract

This article engages with current debates on ‘lad cultures’ by questioning how we understand the term in the specific context of everyday sexism and within groups of men varying in age. Further to this, using a feminist and critical masculinity studies perspective, the article will explore how men do not necessarily comprehend their behaviour within the framework of lad culture or within the continuum of sexual violence. Through discussion of ethnographic and interview data collected over a year at a site historically associated with lad cultures, that of a Rugby Union club in Northern England, an alternative way of conceptualising masculinity and everyday sexism, ‘mischievous masculinities’, is proposed. Men in the research practiced what I term mischievous masculinities, whereby they implemented ‘banter’ to aid in both the construction and de-construction of sexist ideas within the rugby space. Performing mischievous masculinity enabled men of all ages to both engage in and simultaneously challenge everyday sexism in ways they understood to be ‘innocent’. However, the continual framing of banter as ‘just a laugh’ demonstrated that this form of sexism can be construed as problematic, due, in part, to its subtlety, in relation to more overt and violent sexist practices. A key difference between the men in my research and previous theorising of ‘lad culture’ is the recurring theme amongst older participants that ‘I should know better’, demonstrating consciousness of the sexist and problematic connotations which could be drawn from this interaction. This notion of mischievous masculinities then, in the context of a life course perspective, can be seen to challenge more established notions of an unreflexive lad culture, thus affording a more nuanced understanding of everyday sexism amongst more diverse groups of men than currently exists, as well as allowing for men’s agency in a specific site.     

Sacrifice for the family: representation and practice of stay-at-home fathers in the intersection of masculinity and class in Hong Kong

With changing socio-economic conditions, some men choose to become stay-at-home fathers in Hong Kong. Although they constitute only about .5% of the total male population, they have captured widespread media attention in recent years. This paper is an exploratory study on the gender representation of stay-at-home fathers in newspapers, and their identity and practice in real life in relation to the construction of masculinity in the Asian context, with particular focus on the intersection of masculinity and social class. Although stay-at-home fathers have given up their traditional breadwinner role, the media continue to portray them in terms of conventional masculinity. Contrary to the findings in Western society, this paper, which is based on Bourdieu’s practice theory, reports that middle-class men in Hong Kong with social and cultural capital are less reflexive in their gender habitus to accept their carer identity, whereas working-class fathers, who lack the appropriate capital to resume their provider status, define themselves as carers who are responsible to the family. As the identity of provider is still central to men, the emergence of this new fatherhood is only a refashioning of the traditional role of fathers and thus does not challenge the existing gender structure.     

Food sovereignty and new peasantries: on re-peasantization and counter-hegemonic contestations in the Basque territory

This paper contributes to debates about the potential of re-peasantization and its contribution to food sovereignty with a case study from the global North, where such questions are relatively under-studied. I examine how Euskal Herriko Nekazarien Elkartasuna (EHNE)-Bizkaia, a Vía Campesina member organization from the Basque Country (Spain), advances food sovereignty through re-peasantization. I also analyze the motivations of new peasants engaged in agroecology, their understandings of food sovereignty, and the challenges that they face. Using a Gramscian political ecology framework, I argue that whereas re-peasantization contributes to a shift from corporatist to counter-hegemonic struggles, the political-economic and biophysical contexts structure agroecological production in ways that limit the extent to which new peasantries can become ‘agents of their own history’. I conclude that closer attention to peasants’ messy practices of making a living is needed to address questions of political agency.     

Masculinity,homosexuality and sport in an Islamic state of increasing homohysteria

Although a considerable degree of research has examined the intersection of masculinities, sexualities and sport in the West, this is the first article to address male homosexuality in sport within a Muslim context. To analyze the intersection of sport, masculinities and homosexuality we interview Ghazi, 20, a competitive male bodybuilder in Tunisia. We utilize his narrative to illustrate the similarities and differences between the construction of stigma in both the West and that of Muslim culture in Tunisia. Primarily, we highlight the profoundly negative representation of homosexuality in Tunisia, and the broader Islamic social world, and how it affects the construction and development of masculinity for this Muslim, gay athlete. We utilize Anderson’s notion of homohysteria to help situate the relationship between the expression of femininity and social perceptions of homosexuality in Tunisian culture, comparing it to the Western zeitgeist three decades earlier.