By R. W. Connell
Landmark sociology of gender and men
Subject
Themes
Masculinity is not a fixed character type or biological destiny but a configuration of social practice, always constructed within specific historical circumstances and always open to change. This central insight emerges through a systematic examination of how multiple intellectual traditions have attempted to explain masculinity, from psychoanalysis (Freud, Jung, Adler) through sex role theory (Parsons, Pleck) to historical, anthropological, and sociological field research. Each tradition captures partial truths while suffering from characteristic blind spots: essentialist definitions arbitrarily select one trait as the core; positivist definitions equate masculinity with what men statistically do; normative definitions set standards few men meet.
Masculinity is not a fixed character type or biological destiny but a configuration of social practice, always constructed within specific historical circumstances and always open to change. This central insight emerges through a systematic examination of how multiple intellectual traditions have…
Published in 1995, Masculinities arrived at a pivotal moment in gender studies. The Women's Liberation movement had fundamentally reshaped academic and public discourse about gender, but the focus remained overwhelmingly on women's experiences. Men's relationship to gender was either taken for…
The concept of hegemonic masculinity stands as the most influential theoretical contribution to emerge from the study of gender among men. Drawing on Antonio Gramsci's analysis of class relations, hegemony refers to the cultural dynamic by which a group claims and sustains a leading position in…
A persistent tension runs through attempts to understand masculinity: the relationship between bodies and social life. On one side stand biological determinists who insist that male bodies produce masculine behaviour through hormones, genes, or reproductive imperatives. On the other stand social…
Violence is deeply embedded in the structure of the gender order, but understanding how it functions requires moving beyond the common assumption that violence is simply an expression of individual aggression or pathology. Two distinct patterns of violence follow from the structure of gender…
Masculinity cannot be understood through gender alone. Class and race constantly interact with gender to produce distinct configurations of masculine practice, and these interactions are not merely additive but transformative. The interplay of gender with other structures of inequality creates…
Masculinities cannot be understood solely through local or national analysis. The historical processes that produced global society were gendered from the start, and understanding masculinities on a world scale requires grasping the global relationships involved. Imperial conquest, neo-colonialism,…
Multiple intellectual traditions have competed for the authority to define and explain masculinity, each offering partial insights while suffering from significant limitations. Psychoanalysis provided the earliest sustained engagement with the question. Sigmund Freud traced masculinity through the…
A widespread belief holds that "true masculinity" proceeds naturally from men's bodies. Mass culture assumes a fixed, essential masculinity beneath the surface of daily life, an assumption shared across an unlikely spectrum: sociobiologists, Christian fundamentalists, Jungian analysts, and…
Four conventional strategies for defining masculinity all prove inadequate. Essentialist definitions pick a single feature as the core of the masculine (risk-taking, aggression, "Zeus energy") but the choice is arbitrary and different essentialists never agree. Positivist definitions equate…
Young working-class men in Australia, caught in structural unemployment and poverty, construct masculinities that are far more complex and contradictory than common assumptions about conservative blue-collar manhood suggest. Contrary to the view that working-class men are uniformly reactionary in…
A group of men in the radical environmental movement have actively attempted to reform their masculinity in response to feminism. These are precisely the "soft" men scorned by the mythopoetic movement and masculine revivalists, but their project proves more difficult and contradictory than such…
Eight gay and bisexual men in Sydney reveal how homosexual masculinity is constructed within, not against, the framework of hegemonic masculinity. All grew up in conventionally gendered households with traditional divisions of labour. Their childhoods involved the same masculinising practices as…
Nine men in knowledge-based, middle-class occupations reveal deep tensions between rationality and authority within hegemonic masculinity. These men, working as an accountant, architect, computer technician, journalist, librarian, pilot, psychologist, teacher, and welfare administrator, all…
The modern gender order emerged over roughly four centuries, shaped by four developments in the "long" sixteenth century. Cultural change in metropolitan Europe displaced medieval Catholic ideals as the Protestant Reformation elevated marital heterosexuality, individualism, and the conjugal…
Public politics is overwhelmingly men's politics. In the early 1990s, 98 per cent of the Japanese Diet, 93 per cent of the United States Congress, and similar proportions worldwide are men. In Japan, a study of 502 senior bureaucrats found only three women. Yet most political activity by men is not…
Social justice in gender relations demands both practical reform and utopian imagination. Massive changes have occurred in women's employment and heterosexual practice over recent decades, yet the material structures of patriarchy persist with remarkable tenacity. Men's median income in the United…
Masculinity is not a fixed character type or biological destiny but a configuration of social practice, always constructed within specific historical circumstances and always open to change. This central insight emerges through a systematic examination of how multiple intellectual traditions have attempted to explain masculinity, from psychoanalysis (Freud, Jung, Adler) through sex role theory (Parsons, Pleck) to historical, anthropological, and sociological field research. Each tradition captures partial truths while suffering from characteristic blind spots: essentialist definitions arbitrarily select one trait as the core; positivist definitions equate masculinity with what men statistically do; normative definitions set standards few men meet.