Masculinities and Place

Andrew Gorman-Murray,Peter Hopkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317099994
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Masculinities and Place bring together an impressive range of high-profile and emerging researchers to consolidate and expand new domains of interest in the geographies of men and masculinities. It is structured around key and emerging themes within recently completed and on-going research about the intersections between men, masculinities and place. Building upon broader themes in social and cultural geographies, cultural economy and urban/rural studies, the collection is organised around the key themes of: theorising masculinities and place; intersectionality; home; family; domestic labour; work; and health and well-being.

Chapter 1
Introduction: Masculinities and Place

Andrew Gorman-Murray and Peter Hopkins

Tracing masculinities and place

The emergence of research about masculinities and place can be traced through two sets of interconnected literatures that we explore briefly in this introduction. The first of these is research that can be loosely defined as being about the geographies of masculinities (e.g. Berg and Longhurst 2003, Hopkins and Noble 2009, McDowell 2003, van Hoven and Hörschelmann 2005). This has emerged largely from feminist social and cultural geographical work that draws attention to structures, processes and places of inequality and injustice that sustain unequal gender relations. The second area of scholarship, which is ‘increasingly interdisciplinary’ (Kimmel 1987: 11) in nature, is variously referred to as ‘men’s studies’ (Kimmel 1987), the sociology of masculinities (Whitehead 2002), ‘studies of men and masculinities’, or ‘critical studies on men’ (Connell, Hearn and Kimmel 2005: 3). This work started to develop before research about the geographies of masculinities although both areas of scholarship have close connections not only in their focus upon advancing understandings of masculinities and men’s lives but also in their close relationship to, and interconnections with, feminism. In setting up this collection then – and before we say more about social and geographical research about men and masculinities – we first discuss some of the significant contributions of feminist geographies in order to contextualise the focus of this book upon masculinities and place.

Particularly from the 1980s onwards, feminist geographers have developed an increasingly sophisticated set of critiques about the discipline of geography, the nature of geographical knowledge and the gendering of social relations (including in university departments, in publishing, at conferences, and in other activities related to academic geography) (e.g. Bondi et al. 2002, Jones, Nast and Roberts 1997, Laurie et al. 1999, Moss 2002, Moss and Falconer Al-Hindi 2008, WGSG 1997). Rose (1993:1) observes that ‘the academic discipline of geography has historically been dominated by men’ and van Hoven and Hörschelmann (2005:1) note that ‘geography has long been a discipline dominated by men and one about men’. A crucial point made by feminist geographers is that geographers exclude women from their work because of the ways in which they produce knowledge:

Masculinist work claims to be exhaustive and it therefore assumes that no-one else can add to its knowledge; it is therefore reluctant to listen to anyone else. Masculinist work, then, excludes women because it alienates us in its choice of research themes, because it feels that women should not really be interested in producing geography, and also because it assumes that it is itself comprehensive. (Rose 1993: 4)

As Bonnett (1999) notes, this definition sees masculinism working within and across geography – including in learning and teaching settings and in terms of opportunities for career progression – as well as with regards to the production of geographical knowledge. Although there has arguably been much progress with regards to challenging sexism and patriarchy in geography, concerns about masculinism and male-domination persist within the discipline (e.g. Crang 2003, Maddrell et al. 2011, Seager 2000).

Second, and in addition to demonstrating the masculinism of geography, feminist geographers have made major contributions to exploring the complex ways in which everyday socio-spatial relations are gendered in ways that marginalise and stigmatise women while empowering and emboldening men. Moss and Falconer Al-Hindi (2008: 1), for example, note that ‘feminist geographers have focused their research on, for, and about women, their work, their homes, and the organization of their everyday lives’. Too numerous to mention here, there now exists a vibrant, exciting and sophisticated body of scholarship about the complexities, and ambiguities of the relationships between gender, space and power (e.g. McDowell 1999). Arguably, research about geographies of gender – although most evident in social and cultural geographies – is now an important theme in many sub-fields of geography, including economic, development and rural geographies and migration studies (e.g. Cornwall, Edstrom and Greig 2011, Laurie 2011, Little 2002, Walsh 2011, Yeoh and Willis 2004). A significant emergence from this work has also been research about the intersections between gender, sexuality and place (e.g. see Brown 2012 for an overview of work in this area) and indeed, work about geographies of masculinity, which we say more about below.

Third, feminist geographers have contributed a range of methodological approaches and insights to geography that have significantly enriched the discipline through the critical use of important methodological tools and by encouraging researchers to reflect critically about their research practices, politics and ethics when undertaking research (e.g. Bondi et al. 2002, England 1994, Katz 1994, Kobayashi 1994, Moss 2002). One of the important methodological considerations emphasised by many feminist geographers is about engaging reflexively with the research process and considering the role of positionality in research (Kobayashi 2003, Mohammad 2001). As Kobayashi (2003: 346) notes, ‘self reflexive scholars are above all concerned about the potential for recreating or reinforcing the forms of social exclusion that are at the very heart of both our research and our social acts’. In addition to this, feminist geographers have also played a significant role in advancing understandings about the centrality and importance of emotions in social life (Davidson, Bondi and Smith 2005) and this has arguably contributed to the destabilising of masculinism in the discipline (as discussed above). Overall, this body of scholarship has provided the foundation for researchers to be able to conduct emotionally sensitive and politically engaged research about gender issues while also being reflexive about their engagements with others, their role in the research process and the complex ways in which the multiple positionalities of researcher and researched interconnect in the field.

Geographies of masculinities and critical men’s studies

The reason we have explored some of the key contributions of feminist geography here is because without this, geographers would probably not be researching masculinities and we would not have produced this edited collection. Feminist geographies have provided the space, context, approaches and tools for geographers to critically research and explore the relationships between masculinities and place. Moreover, feminist geographers have also re-shaped the discipline of geography and challenged how geographical knowledge is produced; this in turn has opened up spaces for geographies of masculinities to develop. van Hoven and Hörschelmann (2005: 7) note: ‘feminist work has been crucial for the development of critical “men’s studies” in as far as the latter seek to deconstruct homogenous understandings of gender and sexuality and aim to challenge gendered power relations.’ Feminist geographies and geographies of masculinities are relational; the growth and establishment of the former has enabled the latter to develop. Indeed, many (if not most) geographers who write about masculinities – and many of the contributors to this collection – associate with feminist geographies or have, at least, strong feminist leanings.

In an overview of the field that sought to ‘place’ masculinities and geographies, Berg and Longhurst (2003: 353) note:

While Anglo-American geography has a long history of androcentrism and masculinism (Rose 1993) and therefore geographers have long been preoccupied with the activities of men, it took somewhat longer for a critique of hegemonic masculinities to develop in the discipline. It was not until 1989, then, that we began to see the beginnings of an outline for the study of masculinities.

It was Peter Jackson (1989, 1991, 1994) who was one of the first geographers to offer an explicit focus on masculinity through his work about cultural politics, plural masculinities (Jackson 1991), and black masculinity and advertising (Jackson 1994, see also Jackson, Stevenson and Brooks 1999, Stevenson, Jackson and Brooks 2000). Jackson (1991: 199) sees the interest in masculinity ‘as a response to the challenge of feminism and, to a lesser extent, the rise of increasingly politicized gay consciousness’ although this is somewhat contested as Longhurst (2000) regards the study of masculinities as being about the shifting focus of feminism rather than a response to it. In the late 1990s, following on from Jackson’s earlier work, social and cultural geographers started to focus more attention on masculinities, particularly in feminist cultural and social geographies and in work about sexuality (Longhurst 2000). Berg and Longhurst (2003) observed that by the early 2000s, other geographers were also exploring issues of relevance to masculinities, including those working in urban geographies, employment, disability and post-colonialism.

Building upon this earlier work, there was a steady increase in research about geographies of masculinities during the late 1990s and early 2000s with two important monographs about economic change and working-class young men in the UK (McDowell 2003, Nayak 2003), reviews of the field (Berg and Longhurst 2003, Little 2002, Longhurst 2000), and the publication of the edited collection Spaces of Masculinities in 2005 (van Hoven and Hörschelmann 2005). Although the field has arguably developed since the early 1990s to the mid-2000s, van Hoven and Hörschelmann (2005: 5) felt that ‘there been a notable lack of attention to the formation of masculine identities and spaces’. They continued that ‘a focus on the relational formation of male identities and masculine spaces seems long overdue in both feminist and gender-oriented geographical work’ (van Hoven and Hörschelmann 2005: 5). A key focus for geographers interested in masculinity has been about exploring the contested constructions of gender identities and how these are constructed, negotiated and contested in different localities or places (van Hoven and Hörschelmann 2005) and how this changes over time; indeed, a key challenge for geographers interested in masculinities has been to respond to the ways in which gender relations change over time and how younger men may no longer be able to fit quite so comfortably into categories of understanding that are now somewhat dated given their contemporary experiences of gender relations. Understandably then, a key focus of work here has been on how young men construct and contest their masculine identities and how these are informed by their own identities, such as their class, sexuality, race and ethnicity. Examples of work in this area include Nayak’s (2006) and McDowell’s research about working-class masculinities and Hopkins’ (2006) study of youthful Muslim masculinities.

Around ten years before geographers started to develop an interest in masculinities, social scientists researching gender relations began to develop a strong interest in studying men and masculinities. Whitehead (2002: 1–2) refers to the ‘rapidly growing international study of men and masculinities, now recognised as the sociology of masculinities’ and notes that ‘the depth and breadth of this sociology is staggering’. Similarly, Hopkins and Noble (2009: 811) discuss the ‘rapid growth within the social sciences and humanities of the new field of “masculinity studies”’. It is clear that many geographers interested in masculinity have drawn upon work in this field: ‘present-day critical analyses of masculinities owe much to the early work of Bob Connell’ (Berg and Longhurst 2003: 352).

Michael Kimmel (1987: 10–11), a leading contributor to this field, noted the following about ‘men’s studies’:

Men’s studies responds to the shifting social and intellectual contexts in the study of gender and attempts to treat masculinity not as the normative referent against which standards are assessed but as a problematic gender construct. Inspired by the academic breakthroughs of women’s studies, men’s studies addresses similar questions to the study of men and masculinity. As women’s studies has radically revised the traditional academic canon, men’s studies seeks to use that revision as the basis for this exploration of men and masculinity. Men’s studies seeks neither to replace nor to supplant women’s studies; quite the contrary. Men’s studies seeks to buttress, to augment women’s studies, to complete the radically redrawn portrait of gender that women’s studies began.

Aligning itself closely with women’s studies, men’s studies – or what we refer to here as ‘critical men’s studies’ – is therefore about studying masculinities in a critically engaging way such that the power, authority and control often associated with masculinities is questioned and challenged. Regarding men’s studies, Whitehead (2002: 2) clarifies that it ‘does not concern itself with, other than critically, “men’s studies”. By that I mean those more populist writings that either portray men as needing to reject feminism … or ignore feminist theories altogether in their research about men’. As with geographies of masculinities, the emergence of critical men’s studies has close connections with the emergence of feminist research: ‘The new feminism of the 1970s not only gave voice to women’s concerns, it challenged all assumptions about the gender system and raised a series of problems about men’ (Connell 2000: 3).

Having now traced the development of research about masculinities and place, we ask an important question for this collection: what is masculinity? This is a notoriously difficult question to answer. Berg and Longhurst (2003: 352) note that ‘we should not speak of a singular masculinity, but rather, of multiple masculinities’ while also clarifying that masculinities are ‘temporally and geographically contingent’. One of the most frequently used definitions of masculinity is offered by Connell (1995: 71); masculinity is ‘simultaneously a place in gender relations, the practices through which men and women engage that place in gender, and the effects of these practices in bodily experience, personality and culture’. Connell (2000: 29) also clarifies how masculinities ‘are configurations of practice within gender relations, a structure that includes large-scale institutions and economic relations as well as face-to-face relationships and sexuality. Masculinity is institutionalised in this structure, as well as being an aspect of individual character or personality’.

Adding to this complexity, van Hoven and Hörschelmann (2005: 10–11) note that rather than only being attached to men’s bodies, ‘masculinity can attach to bodies, objects, places and spaces well beyond the confines of biology and sex. Masculinity evokes images of maleness, yet they are by no means necessarily shared by men and can, on the other hand, be adopted by or attributed to women’. Masculinity can therefore be associated with a variety of types of bodies, places and contexts. Nayak and Kehily (2013: 197) discuss female masculinity noting that ‘an interesting approach to gender relations considers what happens when women engage with masculinity as part of themselves rather than a male Other’. Partly as a result of these challenges around defining masculinities, researchers have often focused on how masculinities are conceptualised (e.g. Connell 1995, Connell and Messerschmidt 2005) and there now exists a range of language, terminology and typologies of different types of masculinities and the particular qualities or attributes associated with these. We now turn to consider how masculinities have been conceptualised.

Conceptualising masculinities

Growing cross-disciplinary interest in men and masculinities has impelled breadth and depth in the way masculinities are conceptualised. In the early post-WWII era, sex-role theory prevailed as a key schema for understanding and explaining (and policing) gender (Carrigan, Connell and Lee 1987, Berg and Longhurst 2003). This reinforced a binary model of masculine/feminine gender identification and behaviour based on a taken-for-granted biological distinction between male and female bodies. Gender identity and social role was calibrated to biological sex characteristics. With the spread of feminist philosophies in the 1960s and 1970s, sex-role theory gave way to social constructionist understandings of gender, in which masculinity and femininity were no longer seen as innate characteristics of sex differences but as behaviours that were taught and learnt (Mac an G...