Masculinities in theory an introduction
"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 ca...
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| Format: | UnknownFormat |
| Sprache: | eng |
| Veröffentlicht: |
Hoboken, NJ
John Wiley & Sons
2023
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| Ausgabe: | 2nd edition |
| Schlagworte: | |
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Tag hinzufügen | Zusammenfassung: | "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"-- |
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| Beschreibung: | Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Beschreibung: | VI, 258 Seiten |
| ISBN: | 9781119884088 978-1-119-88408-8 |