Beyond Mental and Manual: Investigating the Historical and Contemporary Borderlands Between Working-Class and Middle-Class Masculinities (original) (raw)
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Sociology, 2013
This article contributes to the literature concerning the construction of working-class masculine identity in a context of unprecedented social transformation. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 24 young men currently employed in the retail sector, this study finds that contrary to much research on masculinities young working-class men are able to resist dominant and hegemonic cultural ideals. The respondents demonstrate a very different attitude towards the 'emotional labour' required in the service sector than is often documented, while also rejecting notions of traditional gendered domestic responsibilities in respect of their futures as potential partners and parents. Congruent with other emerging research in this area, the reference point for an 'acceptable' masculine identity appears to have shifted, with some young working-class men's lives, at least, illustrating an attenuated or softened version of masculinity. Downloaded from Sociology 47(4) masculinity, even its possible redundancy . However, the story has remained the same: working-class boys and young men, it appears, behave badly at school, retain their distance from, and are dismissive of, potential service sector employment , and preserve the domestic gendered division of labour . This is well captured by McDowell who, even after revealing multiple ways of 'doing' masculinity, still identified a 'dominance of a version of traditional, sexist masculinity, in both laddish behaviours exhibited in leisure arenas and in the domestic attitudes that affect workplace attitudes ' (2003: 226). It is, perhaps, no wonder that many people often find themselves saying, hearing, reading or imagining that, as the saying goes, 'boys will be boys', even when describing the behaviour of adult men.
Mobile masculinities: Men, migration and low paid work in London
2008
The impact of migration on gender identities, norms and conventions has been predominantly understood from the perspective of female migrants. Far less attention has been paid to the potential that migration entails for the negotiation and reconstruction of male identities. Drawing on 68 in-depth interviews with male migrants employed in low-paid work in London (including care work, cleaning, construction and hospitality), this paper explores the reworking of masculinities at different stages of 'the migration project', and the embodied and emotional nature of migration. It begins by exploring the decision to migrate, which is often linked to men's responsibility to provide for the family and a perceived need to better the self. It then goes on to examine the loss and loneliness which can accompany the early stages of migration as migrant men attempt to re-negotiate their position in new gender regimes in the host country, and on the accommodation that occurs as male migrants are subsequently incorporated into both masculine but also feminized sectors of London's low-pay economy. The paper draws attention to ways in which these re-negotiations are themselves cross-cut by ethnic, racial and class differences so constructing a more nuanced picture of mobile masculinities.
Masculinity, Labour, and Neoliberalism
2018
The dramatic success of Gender Studies has rested on three developments: (1) making women's lives visible, which has also come to mean making all genders more visible; (2) insisting on intersectionality and so complicating the category of gender; (3) analyzing the tensions among global and local iterations of gender. Through textual analyses and humanities-based studies of cultural representations, as well as cultural studies of attitudes and behaviors, we have come to see the centrality of gender in the structure of modern life. This series embraces these advances in scholarship, and applies them to men's lives: gendering men's lives, exploring the rich diversity of men's lives-globally and locally, textually and practically-as well as the differences among men by class, race, sexuality, and age.
Class, Capitalism, and Masculinity: Celebrating Working-Class Culture In New Definitions of Manhood
Gender is an ideological process, constantly changing depending on space and time. While this conception of gender is modern, it, nevertheless, has applications when examining history, particularly manhood in nineteenth and early twentieth-century America. Specifically, from the 1820s to 1860s, America's small-scale, competitive capitalist system created an environment where white middle-class men could earn a comfortable living independently. Principles of high-mindedness and self-mastery were crucial for these men in maintaining a sense of stability amidst the unpredictability of the market. Interested in differentiating themselves from the stigmatized lower class, white middle-class men also adopted Victorian ideals of respectability, restraint, and intellectuality. 1 However, economic, social, and political changes by the 1880s challenged this traditional notion of manhood, highlighting how gender is a changing ideological concept. The emerging large-scale capitalist system and consumer economy of the late nineteenth century encouraged interdependence and incentivized pleasure over moral restraint, eroding conventional middle-class manhood. 2 Additionally, political and social challenges from women's movements, immigrants, and the working class contested white middle-class male power. 3 To reestablish this authority, middle-class men redefined manhood by glorifying physical prowess over intellectual capacity, appropriating working-class culture, and
Debating Modern Masculinities, 2014
This chapter reflects on the current perceived 'crisis of masculinity' and what might be seen as its opposing stance, that society now facilitates more inclusive forms of masculinity. We explore this debate using research with young undergraduate men from working-class and middle-class backgrounds, and argue that the crisis of masculinity is somewhat overstated. Middle-class men in particular can present a veneer of inclusivity attuned to being a modern liberal man but this masks a refashioning not the reforming of traditional male power relations. Meanwhile our study's working-class men demonstrate elements of tension with constructions of masculinity seemingly resolved in the emergence of more positive identifications. We therefore conclude that masculinity is neither in crisis nor radically reformed.
Bringing critical masculinity studies into a gender-inspired paradigm
Journal of Sociology, 2017
Recent disciplinary debates around the future of work and employment sociology have been based on the supposition that the sub-field has been in decline, coopted by business schools with their less 'critical' focus on the world of work and hence undermining the sociological base of such study. In parallel, the controversial 'end-of-work' thesis has signalled, potentially, a declining relevance of work as a source of identification, differentiation and cohesion. Taken together, these suggestions and debates spell out a challenge to work and employment sociology both in terms of an established disciplinary location within business/management schools and in terms of suggestions of a more peripheral positioning of work in everyday lives. Kate Huppatz and Anne Ross-Smith's article is a welcome addition to the controversies surrounding the so-called 'crisis' in the field through a possible fragmentation along theoretical and methodological lines-a fragmentation that could potentially undermine a cohesive, critical focus on the politics of working life. They offer an optimistic 'way forward' through the deployment of the gender and work sub-field. As they argue convincingly, this sub-field is capable of integrating, through its interdisciplinary orientation as well as its focus on mainstream sociological issues, the different strands of analysis from both sociology and business/ management schools, offering new frameworks for inquiry. Through the incorporation of four key themes within gender and work sociology that relate to institutional, contextually driven practice; to wider social concerns including culture, class, violence and asymmetries of power; to lived, bodily experiences and to normative questions of equality, the authors argue innovatively for a 'gender-inspired' paradigm that has been overlooked within the end-of-work thesis as well as, arguably, within the debates about the future of work and employment sociology more widely. This not only enables critical examination of the 'crisis' debate as being potentially