Men’s relations with men structure the practices, processes and cultures of a wide variety of social contexts. Homosocial bonds have a profound influence on men’s friendships with other men and their social and sexual relations with women. Various institutional contexts, from schools and workplaces to militaries and governments, are dominated by males and shaped by the relations between them. Male—male relations define important kinship and familial connections. Finally, sexual relations between men have been documented across the world and throughout history, although their meanings and their associations with sexual identities and communities are diverse.
Scholarship on men and gender has emphasised that masculinity is highly homosocial—that men’s lives are highly organised by relations between men. Homosociality refers to social bonds between persons of the same sex, and more broadly to same-sex-focused social relations. Men’s performances of gender often represent homosocial enactments, undertaken in front of and in search of approval from other men (Kimmel 1994). Dynamics of bonding and solidarity, as well as hierarchies of power and status, characterise male—male relations in many social contexts. Men’s homosocial bonds are central to the organisation and maintenance of women’s subordination. However, male homosociality does not necessarily involve the subordination of women or of particular groups of men.
Homosociality plays a central role in boys’ and men’s performances of gender. Proper masculine status often is granted by other males. In front of male audiences, men demonstrate their gendered status by accumulating key markers of manhood: interpersonal power, dominance, physical and sexual prowess (Kimmel 1994). While other males can grant masculine status, they can also take it away. Male collectivities, especially informal male peer groups among boys and young men, police and reward or punish males’ performances of gender.
Gender inequalities disadvantaging women are sustained in part by male homosocial relations. Early feminist work emphasised that patriarchy, the social system of male domination, was built on relations between men ‘which, though hierarchical, establish or create interdependence and solidarity among men that enable them to dominate women’ (Hartmann 1981:14). Men’s dominance of political and economic hierarchies is sustained in part through informal male bonds or ‘boys’ clubs’. Men may maintain women’s exclusion from or subordination in workplaces and institutions through male-focused work networks, bonding, and investment in and pursuit of other men’s attention, company and approval (Flood and Pease 2006). Processes of male bonding in workplaces also construct men’s privilege by emphasising men’s difference from and superiority to women.
Male homosociality is implicated too in some of the bluntest expressions of sexism and gender inequality, in men’s violence against women. Participation in homosocial male peer groups can intensify men’s tolerance for violence against women, and male peer support is a critical factor in men’s perpetration of physical and sexual violence (Reitzel-Jaffe and Wolfe 2001). The cultures and collective rituals of male bonding among closely knit male fraternities and male athletes on college campuses foster leniency towards or even perpetration of sexual assault against women. Rape is more likely in fraternities showing greater gender segregation, less non-sexual male—female interaction, and local cultures of sexism, sexual boasting and sexual harassment. Rape may be both a means to and an expression of male bonding.
Similar dynamics are evident in violence against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender persons in public spaces, typically carried out by groups of young men and expressing homosocial and heterosexist bonds (Herek 1992). Male bonding is also associated with the solidarity between men expressed in and maintained through military combat. Mateship fosters the dehumanising of the enemy as Other and enables individuals to endure war and maintain the killing process. The sense of loyalty and commitment to one’s fellow soldiers sustains military conflict (Page 2002).
Male homosocial bonds and desire have been widely documented in literary and cultural contexts. Sedgwick (1985) argues that an erotic triangle between two men and one woman, based on homosocial relays of desire between rival heterosexual males, is found throughout British literature. Other scholarship has examined bonds between men in such diverse texts as ancient Greek poetry, Western films and science fiction. Homosocial relations were central to the fraternal organisations that proliferated in nineteenth-century Europe and the sworn brotherhoods of imperial China, based on secrecy, authority and male—male or brotherly solidarity (Nye 2000).
Homosocial bonding can support or oppose homosexual sex. Anthropological research notes examples where homosociality and homosexuality overlap, in which sexual practices between older and younger men or boys establish masculinity. Homoerotic homosociality has characterised some cultural and institutional contexts, for example in Nazi Germany, in which intense and eroticised male bonding was intertwined with misogyny (Nye 2000).
Male—male sexual relations have been documented in a wide variety of historical and cultural contexts. Such sexual involvements do not necessarily involve discrete homosexual or gay identities. The relationships between sexual identity and sexual practice are complex and contradictory, as the category ‘men who have sex with men’ (MSM) in AIDS education recognises. The term ‘MSM’ itself risks masking diversities and fluidities. As Dowsett et al. (2003) note in a review of male—male sexual relations in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia and Thailand, men who have sex with men may not fit into any socially or self-defined group of MSM. While some male—male sexual practices express ‘traditional’ sexual relations and categories, others result from modernisation and urbanisation, and while some male—male sexual networks are dense and stable, others are scattered and intermittent.
In male-dominated and highly homosocial contexts such as military institutions, male—male relations may also structure men’s sexual and social relations with women. Flood (2006) reports that some young heterosexual Australian men give top priority to their male—male friendships and find platonic friendships with women dangerously feminising. For them heterosexual activity confers masculine status and is an important medium for male bonding.
There have been historical shifts in the dominant bonds of male—male friendships. Nye (2000) describes a democratisation of friendship, from an orientation towards vertical ties and the advancement of personal or family interest to an orientation towards horizontal ties. In some historical moments male friendship has been contained through associations with homosexuality and effeminacy, while in others it has been affirmed through associations with virility and manhood. Intimate male friendships, secret male societies and brotherly bonds have posed various challenges to established social orders, by undermining the patriarchal authority of fathers or rulers or destabilising the traditional solidarities and processes of kinship. Nevertheless, most male bonds have been premised on men’s domination and the rejection of femininity (Nye 2000).
Male—male relations define the kinship and familial connections between fathers and sons, brothers, uncles, nephews, grandfathers and others. Other than scholarship on fathers and sons, there has been relatively little research on the gendered character of kin and family relations among men. Nye (2000) describes historical examinations of fraternal bonds in Europe and late imperial China and the ways in which brothers’ competition or closeness was shaped by wider social and political forces. Contemporary qualitative research in New Zealand and the USA documents diverse relationships among uncles and nephews and fmds evidence that (some) uncles act as mentors, family historians and intergenerational buffers in conflicts between parents and children, while nephews provide uncles with companionship and support (Milardo 2005).
While male homosociability is implicated in various patriarchal practices, it may also be neutral or desirable. Men may bond as friends, comrades, family members or lovers in ways that do not subordinate women or other men. Indeed, intimate friendships between men are valuable correctives to men’s emotional stoicism and reliance on women’s emotional labour.
It is a robust finding in Western scholarship that men’s same-sex friendships are less intimate than women’s (Bank and Hansford 2000). Bank and Hansford reject the idea that intimacy and support have different meanings for men and women, noting that these do not vary by gender. They also reject the idea that intimacy is less crucial to men’s enjoyment of their friendships than to women’s. For both men and women, greater enjoyment is associated with greater self-disclosure and expressive behaviours. Instead, intimacy in male—male friendships is constrained by masculine emotional restraint (emotional repression, stoicism and insensitivity) and homophobia. While overt expressions of affection were common in young men’s close friendships in nineteenth-century America, they are largely prohibited by contemporary American social norms (Morman and Floyd 1998). There are strong cultural proscriptions against the expression of verbal and non-verbal male—male affection, although these are relaxed when men are related (as there is less danger of being seen as homosexual), the situation is emotionally charged, or it is in public.
Men’s groups and men’s movements have attempted to break down men’s emotional isolation, foster male intimacies and support, and build communities of men. Such efforts may involve personal sharing, critical consciousness-raising or rituals of male bonding and initiation.
Male—male relations in many cultures have been seen as central in inducting or initiating boys into manhood. The most visible contemporary incarnation of this in Western countries is the emphasis on the importance of ‘male role models’, and especially fathers, in aiding boys’ transition into proper adult male status. Children in general, and boys in particular, are seen to require the presence of a biological father to ensure their healthy development. However, empirical examinations of parental influence fmd that fathers’ masculinity and other individual characteristics are far less important formatively than the warmth and closeness of fathers’ relationships with their sons. In other words, it is the characteristics of fathers as parents rather than their characteristics as men that influence child development. Nor is there evidence that boys raised only by women (including by lesbian mothers) are any more likely than other boys to become homosexual, adopt an unconventional gender identity or orientation, or experience other kinds of behavioural and social maladjustment and dysfunction (Flood 2003). Indeed, why do unconventional gender or sexual orientations necessarily count as adverse outcomes? At the same time, men’s involvement with children is desirable because it expands the practical, emotional and social resources available for parenting and because of the distinctive, but not unique, contribution to parenting made by male parents.
This is the complete article, containing 1,669 words
(approx. 6 pages at 300 words per page).
