International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities
The term ‘crisis tendencies’, coined by Jürgen Habermas (1975), describes inherent, structural tensions and inequalities in social systems that lead to social crisis. Habermas’ focus was late capitalism. Connell (1995), though, applies the concept of crisis tendencies to masculinity studies to describe the tendency of a gender order towards crisis. He also makes an important distinction between crisis tendencies in gender orders and the common use of ‘crisis in masculinity’. That is, whereas a gender order is a coherent social system, masculinity is merely a configuration within that system, so masculinity only shows the symptoms of the gender order’s crisis tendencies.
For Connell, three structures inherent in a gender order make it tend towards crisis: power relations, production relations and relations of cathexis (or sexual desire). The first, power relations, demonstrates the most visible evidence of crisis tendencies, notably women’s struggles for economic, political and public policy equality—along with men’s reactions to these.
Crises stemming from production relations, second, are evidenced by still other institutional changes as women struggle for labour rights and more women join the workforce. The final structure, relations of cathexis, shows signs of crisis resulting from the increasing social acceptance of women’s desire and non-heterosexual sexuality.
The impact on men and masculinity from these crisis tendencies is highly variable. One result can be the production of crisis discourses, like moral panics over boys’ education seen in works like Sommers’ The War Against Boys (2000). Crises of masculinity can also produce violence, like domestic violence (e.g. Faludi 1999) or terrorism (e.g. Weaver-Hightower 2002), in contexts where men’s economic or civil prospects appear diminished or challenged. Not all responses to crisis, however, are retrogressive. Crisis tendencies can also push some men towards profeminist and progressive positions, like, for example, the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage at the turn of the twentieth century in the United States (see Kimmel 1996).
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