International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities
The history of ‘the West’ provides a fertile arena for exploring the various ways in which what we might now call masculinity (Connell 1987) has been constructed in diverse social, historical and cultural contexts.
It is important to realise that, even for ‘the West’, which prides itself on a certain continuity of ‘civilised’ culture, there is no essential or transcendental masculinity that stands above or outside the historical process. Rather, it is necessary to appreciate the extent to which in ‘the West’ the construction of masculinity has varied in accordance with shifts in the way in which power is organised and distributed in society. The result is that the many different social formations that make up the history of ‘the West’ each furnish their own idea of masculinity—or set of masculinities—aspects of which might survive into later formations, while other attributes will be discarded.........
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