Adam Mansplains Everything: White-Hipster Masculinity as Covert Hegemony (original) (raw)

What Threatens, Defines: Tracing the Symbolic Boundaries of Contemporary Masculinity

Sex Roles, 2018

A robust literature ties emasculation to a range of compensatory behaviors. The present study shifts focus away from the effects of masculinity threat toward an understanding of young adult men's experiences of emasculation in their own words. Drawing on 42 in-depth interviews with undergraduate men attending a selective U.S. university, we examine the behaviors, situations, and narratives-both experienced and hypothetical-that privileged young men perceive as threatening. We use these data not only to contribute to the empirical literature on masculinity threat, but also as a novel approach for theorizing about the meaning and structure of masculinity more broadly. This is an important task given recent social and economic changes that may have altered contemporary definitions of masculinity. Emasculation accounts provide unique analytical leverage for revealing men's often unspoken understandings of acceptable masculine behavior. We find that, while many interviewees superficially espoused egalitarian and anti-homophobic beliefs, their emasculation narratives implicitly call for the subordination of women and other men. These performances consequently obscure and maintain traditional, hegemonic power relations. We discuss the implications of our finding for scholars, practitioners, and individual men who desire a more equitable gender structure.

Feminist Reclamations of Normative Masculinity (2015)

Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 2015

Feminist masculinity' might seem like a contradiction in terms: we might have assumed that one can embrace feminism or masculinity, but not both. Indeed, masculinity traditionally conceived is contrary to feminist goals, so a pressing question for many women and men is whether rejecting traditional masculinity given feminist values should move us to reject masculinity entirely or to reframe and reclaim some other sort of masculinity. bell hooks and Michael Kimmel each warn against discarding manhood or masculinity too quickly. Kimmel advocates moving from immature masculinity to a masculinity of just guys, a new model of masculinity that conceives manhood as a matter of achieving adulthood and doing the right thing; hooks envisions feminist masculinity as a constructive alternative to dominant patriarchal masculinity and urges us to reclaim masculinity reconstituted in terms of love, integrity, and mutuality. There is much to admire in both attempts to reclaim masculinity; my concern is that neither proposal offers a workable stance for feminist men without collapsing into androgyny or risking erasure of some men's and women's identities and experiences. Yet I do think feminist masculinity is available, such that men have distinctive, constructive contributions to make to feminist work, and I suggest feminist allyship as one such model, gratefully indebted to Alcoff's work on white anti-racist identity. We might understand allyship as an open-ended feminist approach to manhood: masculinity predicated on recognizing and responding to rather than accepting or ignoring distinctive privileges and expectations of men in patriarchy.

REMAPPING FEMINISM: Interpreting the Media Discourse on the End of Masculinity (2014)

2014

With every step American women have taken on the road to equality, critics had different approaches on what these advancements mean for men. A recurring claim is the crisis of masculinity. This paper examines the various media responses to this prominent thesis and how it reflects the idea of feminism over time. Part One explores masculine insecurity documented in American gender history since the nineteenth century. Part Two illustrates and examines media publications on the “demise of men”. Part Three analyzes how they reflect the understanding of feminism. Part Four picks up thoughts on feminism that presumably got lost in the making.

Hidden in Plain Sight: On the Omnipresence of Hegemonic Masculinities

Masculinities: A Journal of Identity and Culture, 2019

he concept of hegemonic masculinity, formulated more than three decades ago, has now established a long history of considerable influence on the social science understanding of gender, but in particular, masculinity. The concept emerged in the mid-1980s and was coined by Raewyn Connell, who conceptualized hegemonic masculinity as a pattern of practice that reproduced unequal relations between men and women, masculinity and femininity, and among masculinities. In this talk, I consider some of my recent work on the concept of hegemonic masculinity, with particular attention to the omnipresence of hegemonic masculinities throughout society and how they are hidden in plain sight. Following this, and in line with "authoritarianism" and "troubling times" as the themes of the symposium, I briefly discuss what I label Trump's "presidential dominating masculinity" and how it occasionally is associated with hegemonic masculinity. I then close with a few examples of counter-hegemonic practices, concentrating on non-hegemonic masculinities, in particular, what I label positive masculinities.