International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities
Sociology was involved in debates about gender relations from the time it was conceived as a branch of human knowledge, in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century. The position of women was often considered a touchstone of social ‘progress’—itself the main theoretical concern of the first two generations of sociologists. Many of the early sociologists believed in gender reform, for instance in ending the barriers to women’s education. But the perspective was limited. Evolutionary sociologists, themselves almost exclusively men, had little to say about men as a topic in sociology—except to arrange men in racial or cultural hierarchies. Men were the point of reference, the taken-forgranted norm of humanity, so masculinity in itself was not subject to close examination.
This situation began to change with the breakdown of evolutionary sociology in the early twentieth century, the creation of depth psychology, the trauma of the Great War, the rise of first wave feminism and the broad impact of cultural modernism. The first genuinely social theory of gender, which deduced masculinity and femininity not from biological imperatives but from institutionalised power structures, was proposed by the German educationist Mathilde Vaerting. Masculine character, in her view, developed in whatever group was socially dominant.
In the following generation a more conservative, but equally social, view of gender developed in the United States in the form of ‘role theory’. This was the view of social process that saw the key determinant of behaviour in social expectations, or ‘norms’. Conformity to norms was thought to be enforced by social sanctions or punishments—more often informal than formal—applied to anyone who deviated from the norm.
Role theory was initially formulated by anthropologists, seeking to explain nonWestern social systems, but it was soon adopted by sociologists discussing industrialised societies. The most important theorist of the period was the US academic Talcott Parsons, who combined role theory with a functionalist view of society, analysing every institution in terms of the ‘function’ it performed for society as a whole. In the early 1950s Parsons applied this theoretical framework to the family and to the ‘sex roles’ that he detected within it. Masculine and feminine roles were seen as reciprocal—one was instrumental, the other was expressive—and allowed the family to function as an institution and to perform its social function of reproducing social relations and raising the young.
The idea of two linked ‘sex roles’ became very widespread, eventually spreading beyond academia and entering mass media and everyday language. Sociologists from the 1940s to the 1960s used this idea uncritically, conducting research on what the role norms were, how the roles were learnt, how some people deviated from them, etc. The usual idea was that deviance from the conventional sex roles was dangerous to society, and might lead to psychological disturbance, criminality or other dysfunctions. This was, for instance, a common view of male homosexuality at the time.
It was in this context that the first empirical investigations of the ‘male role’ were conducted by sociologists. This soon led to a modification of the conservative functionalist view, as it became clear that role norms were subject to change. The US sociologist Helen Hacker was one of the first to emphasise what she called ‘the new burdens of masculinity’, produced by the changing demands on men in the context of North American consumer capitalism and suburban life. It remained the conventional view that sex roles were necessary to society and that successfully acquiring them was, therefore, in the interest of the individual too.
The new feminism, picking up momentum at the end of the 1960s, turned sex role theory upside down. Far from being the proper destiny of women, the ‘female role’ was now regarded as the source of oppression. Sex role expectations were seen as a disabling miasma that prevented women being full citizens.
Almost as soon as this criticism of the female role was articulated, a parallel critique of the ‘male role’ began to circulate. In the early 1970s a small ‘men’s liberation’ movement formed, mainly in the USA, and began to criticise sex role expectations as putting oppressive demands on men, too. The conventional male role was pictured as narrow, constraining, anti-humane and also dangerous in terms of its impact on men’s health and psychological well-being. Conformity to the male sex role, rather than deviance from it, was now seen as the source of trouble.
Role theory as a framework for social analysis has significant weaknesses, and was falling out of favour in sociology just as it was being applied to gender politics. One of the key problems is that role theory has no very convincing way of understanding power relations in society; it tends to assume all roles are equal. Critiques of the ‘male role’ therefore tended to assume that men were oppressed in the same way, and to the same extent, as women were via the ‘female role’. This was inconsistent with the mounting evidence of large-scale social inequalities as a continuing feature of gender systems.
In place of role theory, therefore, the radical wing of the women’s liberation movement developed a view of gender which made inequalities of power the centre. Men and women were seen as two discrete categories, linked by a relation of domination. This pattern was often called ‘patriarchy’, and debates arose about the origins of patriarchy, the universality of patriarchy, and the possibilities of overthrowing it as a social system. By 1980 socialist feminists often saw patriarchy and capitalism as ‘dual systems’ of oppression and exploitation, which intersected to produce the gender inequalities of everyday life.
The view of gender or class as a system of social relations posed the question of how this system was reproduced over time. The question of ‘social reproduction’ became important in social theory about the same time as feminist theories of gender were being formulated, and for some thinkers these issues merged. The British feminist and psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell analysed patriarchy as the means by which the economic class structure was reproduced. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu developed a cyclical theory of social reproduction which emphasised the habitus (system of dispositions for action) of the individual. Much later, Bourdieu applied this to gender in the form of a theory of the reproduction of patriarchy, which has led other sociologists to fresh investigations of masculine habitus and particularly embodiment.
Apart from this, theories of patriarchy had no very clear account of masculinity. They generally saw men simply as the group who occupied the position of power in a patriarchal system, though there was also some attention to the ways men defended their privilege. The more sophisticated theorists of patriarchy, especially those with a Marxist background, also emphasised how institutions such as the capitalist state worked impersonally to reproduce men’s privileges.
The debates about theories of patriarchy were, however, crucial in pushing understandings of men in new directions. Socialist feminists drew a clear distinction between the economic roles of working-class men and bourgeois men, and this led to pioneering work on different cultural patterns of men’s lives by investigators such as the British activist Andrew Tolson. Critiques of theories of universal patriarchy, by black feminists in the metropole and feminists from the third world, called attention to the diverse situations of women in different parts of the world. In due course this led to recognition of the diverse situations of men, as well. Attempts to improve on over-simple theories of patriarchy led to more sophisticated uses of the concept of ‘social structure’ in theorising gender, and this also led to better theorisation of gender patterns such as masculinities.
When a new generation of research on masculinity picked up steam in the mid and late 1980s, it mostly relied on a broad ‘social constructionist’ perspective. In some ways this still resembled the ‘sex role’ perspective. It denied biological determination of gender, it was interested in norms and stereotypes of masculinity, and it was interested in how patterns of masculinity were learned, as boys grew into men. But the social constructionist approach was more directly concerned with power—both power that men exercised over women and power some men exercised over other men. It paid attention to the institutional contexts of masculinity and the embedding of gender patterns in workplaces and organisations. It was also much more attuned to historical change and cultural specificity in conceptions of the masculine.
Above all, the social constructionist approach took a different view of normative definitions of masculinity. Where the sex role approach had usually seen just one ‘male role’ in a given society, social constructionism identified multiple masculinities within the same culture or the same institution. Here it was strongly influenced by gay liberation theory, which since the 1970s had identified power differences and patterns of oppression among men, and had often seen gay identity as offering an alternative way of being a man. The concept of ‘hegemony’ was adapted from Gramsci’s version of Marxist theory and applied to gender. The result was a picture of multiple masculinities ordered in relation to a dominant or hegemonic pattern of masculinity at any particular moment of history.
One group of theorists developed these insights into theories of masculinity in the context of a structural theory of gender. The idea of gender as itself a social structure (and not just a side-effect of other structures such as capitalism) had been implicit in women’s liberation thought in the 1970s. From the 1980s on this idea was reformulated by gender theorists using the more flexible conceptions of structure and agency that had been emerging in general sociology. The Australian sociologist R. Connell formulated a model of gender as a multi-dimensional social structure. This yielded a model of masculinity (and femininity) as a ‘configuration of practice’ that was related simultaneously to all the dimensions of gender.
The Norwegian sociologist 0ystein Holter took a somewhat different approach, distinguishing gender, as a distinctively modern system of social exchange and identity, from the underlying (and much older) structure of patriarchy. To Holter, the decisive fact was the historically developed division between the capitalist economy, as a sphere of paid work and economic rationality identified with the masculine, and the household, as a sphere of unpaid work and gift exchange identified with the feminine. The structural subordination of the household to the economy provided the basis for modern gender hierarchy and for the social definitions of masculinity and femininity.
In strong contrast with these structural analyses are approaches to masculinity based on discourse analysis and poststructuralist theory, influenced by Foucault. Post-structuralism is a complex intellectual movement, and there has been no unanimity in the way it has been applied to gender questions. Broadly, however, poststructuralists have questioned ideas of liberation and traditional models of the subject; have emphasised the fluidity of gender identities, and have concerned themselves with how discourses (including frames of thought and patterns of language) construct identities.
The most effective applications of poststructuralist ideas to issues about masculinity have been in psychology rather than in sociology. Discursive psychologists have investigated in fme detail how conceptions of masculinity are brought into play in conversations, and how individuals can move strategically between different positions in discourse or even between different discourses. In the social sciences, poststructuralist principles have been used to question social-constructionist ideas about the relationship between crime and masculinity. Poststructuralist critics have charged masculinity research with suffering from essentialist ideas of the masculine—a criticism that misses both the anti-essentialist bases of social constructionism and its empirical documentation of diverse masculinities.
Sociological theory is now generally agreed to be in a ‘multi-paradigm’ state. There is no common framework to which all, or most, sociologists subscribe. Rather, there are multiple points of view in theory, and many attempts at reformulation or synthesis. It is not surprising that this plurality is also found in sociological work on men and masculinities. This should be a source of invention and energy—provided that the pursuit of different theories does not lead researchers away from a concern with the social realities of gender.
References and further reading
Barrett, M. (1980) Women’s Oppression Today, London: Verso.
Bourdieu, P. (2001) Masculine Domination, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Carrigan, T., Connell, R. and Lee, J. (1985) ‘Toward a new sociology of masculinity’, Theory and Society, 14:551–604.
Collier, R. (1998) Masculinities, Crime and Criminology, London: Sage.
ConneU, R. (1987) Gender and Power, Sydney: Allen and Unwin.
David, D.S. and Brannon, R. (ed.) (1976) The Fortynine Percent Majority: The Male Sex Role, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Hacker, H. (1957) ‘The new burdens of masculinity’, Marriage and Family Living, 19:227–33.
Holter, O. G. (1997) Gender, Patriarchy and Capitalism: A Sodal Forms Analysis, Oslo: University ofOslo Press.
Mitchell, J. (1974) Psychoanalysis and Feminism, New York: Pantheon.
Parsons, T. and Bales, R.F. (1956) Family Sodalization and Interaction Process, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Tolson, A. (1977) The Limits of Masculinity, London: Tavistock.
Vaerting, M. [1921] (1981) The Dominant Sex, Westport, CN: Hyperion.
RAEWYN CONNELL
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