Changing men, changing masculinities

Abstract

When it comes to academic literature, a cursory survey of titles reveals that one constant in discussions of men and masculinities is change. Segal’s (1993) Slow Motion: Changing Men, Changing Masculinities was already raising the issue of change in relation to men and masculinities over thirty years ago. Interest in the subject, however has intensified since the early 2000s, with hooks’ (2004) The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Love, Hidaka’s (2010) Salaryman Masculinity: Continuity and Change in Hegemonic Masculinity in Japan, Seidler’s (2006) Transforming Masculinities, Roberts’ (2013) Young Working-Class Men in Transition as well as his (2015) edited Debating Modern Masculinities: Change, Continuity, Crisis?, Anderson’s (2009) Inclusive Masculinity: The Changing Nature of Masculinities, and, recently, Luyt and Starck’s (2022) Masculine Power and Gender Equality: Masculinities as Change Agents to name just a few. Even before this organisations such as Achilles Heel in the UK (see Seidler, 1991) and the women’s liberation movement (see, for instance, Hanisch, 1969) were foregrounding the issue as important. Articles in recent issues of NORMA, too, have focused on the question of ‘newer’ forms of masculinity as well as central questions around what change is desirable and possible (Christofidou, 2021; Roberts, Elliott, & Ralph, 2021; Wolfman, Hearn, & Yeadon-Lee, 2021). The number of articles which deal with the issue of changes in the performance and charactertisation of masculinity and the position and performances of men, are innumerably larger (see, for example, Duncanson, 2015; Ratele, 2014; Ratele, 2015; Segal, 1993) and expanding this out to even those which do not include change in the title, the corpus of literature becomes unmanageable. There are essentially three aspects to this debate, revolving around theoretical, ethical and empirical considerations. The first concerns theories around if and why men change. CSMM, via Connell, has been indebted to a specific idea of hegemony, rooted in Gramscian notions of culture as something which is flexible and related to, but to a certain extent independent of, economic forces. Whilst Marx was notoriously economist in his approach to culture, Gramsci’s (1971) revisions emphasised the independence of the so-called superstructure from the base, observing that culture could shape political influence and subsequently economic power rather than simply the reverse. For Connell, the promise of hegemony for theorising change was one of the key dynamics which hegemony offered over sex role theory which failed to grapple with the question (Demetriou, 2001, p. 339). Connell notes specifically that “I stress that hegemonic masculinity embodies ‘a currently accepted strategy’. When conditions for the defence of patriarchy change, the bases of dominance of a particular masculinity are eroded...Hegemony then, is a historically mobile relation” (Connell, 1995, 77 emphasis added). Alongside these more structural approaches were, of course, poststructuralist critiques of gender and identity, more broadly, as malleable and fluid, which emphasised notions of gender as in flux, contextually variable and as changing over time (e.g. Beasley, 2008; Butler, 1997, 2008; Halberstam, 1998; West & Zimmerman, 1987). This suggested that change itself, is the de facto state of gender and societies more generally. There is also the question of where change emanates from and which men are perceived to have changed. Elliott (2020) and Roberts (2015) argue that change is almost always presumed to