Men and Masculinity - Stories Of Men, Questioning Masculinity, Vaerting, Freud, Adler, Other Psychoanalysts, Sex Differences And Ethnography
accounts
Most human cultures, perhaps all, have accounts of gender relations, explaining and illustrating what it is to be a woman or a man, and how women and men are interrelated. The forms taken by these accounts vary greatly—ancestor myths, moral exhortation, exemplary narratives, drama, social science, philosophical speculation, and visual imagery. In many, there is a specific account of the domain of men, the characteristic activities of men, and the psychological traits of manhood.
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The earliest surviving text of classical Greek civilization centers on the deeds of ruling-class men, informed by a conflict over men's rights to women. Homer's Iliad presents a vivid picture of a military encampment and a besieged city, with warrior-heroes roaming the countryside, carrying off women and occasionally massacring the population of a captured town. War is undoubtedly me…
The word masculine (as a synonym for male) is a very old word in English. It was used by Chaucer in the fourteenth century. However, the terms masculinity, masculinize, and masculinism came into common use in English only in the late nineteenth century. This change in language signaled a rather different way of looking at men and their position in the world. This change was part of the cultural re…
In the next generation, the pioneering German educator Mathilde Vaerting (1884–1977) produced in The Dominant Sex (1923) perhaps the most revolutionary theory of gender ever written. She argued that masculinity and femininity were not fixed characteristics but reflected the fact that we lived in a male-dominated society—a Männerstaat (men's state). In societies where wome…
It was the work of the Austrian physician Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), more than anything else, that disrupted the apparently natural object "masculinity" and made an enquiry into the process of its construction possible. Freud's ideas about masculinity developed in three steps. The first came in his initial statements of psychoanalytic principles: the idea of continuity …
The potential in Freud's work for a radical critique of masculinity was apparent very early. It was taken up by Alfred Adler (1870–1937), a socialist psychiatrist convinced of the importance of social factors in disease. He was one of Freud's first and most important professional supporters but broke with him in 1911, partly over the analysis of masculinity. Adler's arg…
Other psychoanalysts contributed to the argument about femininity and masculinity, though none gave the issue so central a place. Karen Horney (1885–1952) pointed to the importance of "the dread of woman," originating in fear of the mother, in the depth psychology of men. Carl Jung (1875–1961) speculated in The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious that masculin…
The first important attempt to create a social science of masculinity centered on the idea of a male sex role. Its origins go back to late-nineteenth-century debates about sex difference, when resistance to women's emancipation was bolstered by a scientific doctrine of innate sex difference. The first generation of women who entered U.S. research universities not only violated the doctrine …
The usual conception of "sex role" is that a man or a woman enacts a general set of expectations attached to their sex. There are always two sex roles in any cultural context, one male and the other female. Masculinity and femininity are quite easily interpreted as internalized sex roles, the products of socialization. The reason why this socialization occurs, according to structural…
The new feminism in the 1970s did not abandon the concept of sex roles, but it reevaluated their meaning. It was argued that the female sex role was inherently oppressive and that role internalization was a means of fixing girls and women in a subordinate position. Almost immediately, a parallel analysis of the male sex role appeared. By the mid-1970s there was a small but much-discussed men…
The most effective political mobilization among men around gender and sexual politics was the gay liberation movement that took shape around 1968–1970 in the United States and eventually became worldwide. Gay men mobilizing for civil rights, personal safety, and cultural space have acted on the basis of a long experience of oppression by heterosexual men. The term homophobia was coined arou…
The contemporary field of masculinity research, alternatively known as men's studies or critical studies of men, was created when several impulses in the 1980s moved discussions decisively beyond the sex role framework. One was the continuing development of theories of gender, both structuralist and poststructuralist, which provided more sophisticated models of the gender relations in which…
But different masculinities do not sit side by side as alternative lifestyles that men can freely choose. There are definite relationships between different masculinities. Most importantly, there are relationships of hierarchy and exclusion. In most communities there is a specific pattern of masculinity that is more respected than others. The hegemonic pattern of masculinity is often associated wi…
Until recently, most of the research on, and debate about, masculinity has been about men in First World countries. We need to think beyond this context; and even within it, we need to consider the situation of local masculinities in a global context. Global history and contemporary globalization must be part of our understanding of masculinities. Individual lives are powerfully influenced by geop…
Adler, Alfred. Understanding Human Nature. 1927. Translated by C. Brett. Oxford: Oneworld, 1992. Altman, Dennis. Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation. London: Lane, 1974. Buchbinder, David. Performance Anxieties: Re-producing Masculinity. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1998. Connell, R. W. Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Freud, Sigmund. The Case of the Wolf-Man: From the …
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