Masculinity as buzzword?

Within Critical studies of men and masculinities (henceforth: CSMM), the concepts masculinity and masculinities have been tenacious to the point of ubiquity. The last decades have seen a tendency to identify an ever-growing number of different masculinities: flexible, inclusive, caring, toxic, etc (e.g. Anderson, 2005; Elliott, 2016; Gee, 2014). Andrea Waling (2019, p. 94) comments that this constitutes ‘a peculiar trend where theorists continue to effectively “name” masculinity’, and Jonathan Allan (2022, p. 45) asks:

why [must] something like “caring” […] become ‘masculine’ and not simply just be ‘caring’? Why must his ability to ‘care’ become a type of masculinity? Such a question is seemingly unimaginable because everything comes back to masculinities. The study of masculinities becomes ‘circular’.

Allan questions ‘caring masculinity’ here, but his enquiry has a wider relevance. The wish to name yet further masculinities is an endeavour perhaps best described as taxonomical, resulting in a ‘dizzying array’ of masculinities multiplying ‘seemingly by the hour’ (Messner, 2004, p. 75, 76). Jeff Hearn (2020, p. 25) argues that the concept ‘hegemonic masculinity’ has become hegemonic in itself, but arguably, ‘masculinity’ and ‘masculinities’ are even more pervasive.

In the deep cold of December 2023, NORMA. International Journal of Masculinity Studies organised a symposium in Karlstad, Sweden. Guests included scholars from several continents, such as representatives of the Nordic association for men and masculinity studies and of the editorial teams of Men & Masculinities and NORMA. One of the topics of the symposium was typologies of masculinities; we encouraged participants to reflect upon the ‘uses and possible abuses of typologies within the field as well as the potential of and reasons for the growing list of concepts’. In this editorial, the first one I write as a NORMA editor in-chief (together with my excellent colleagues Sam de Boise and Katarzyna Wojnicka, as well as Ulf Mellström, now senior editor), I address a related but even more fundamental issue: The focus on ‘masculinity’ and ‘masculinities’ in itself.

To do this, I give a brief overview of how masculinity/masculinities have been debated, and suggest that they are best understood as ‘buzzwords’ (Davis, 2008). In her 2008 article, Kathy Davis uses a sociology of science perspective to discuss what has made ‘intersectionality’ a successful academic concept. An immensely influential idea within feminist studies, intersectionality, Davis demonstrates, fulfils all criteria of an ‘interesting’ and ‘successful’ theoretical concept as stipulated by Murray S. Davis (1971, 1986). According to him, successful sociological concepts and theories are seldom ‘good’ or ‘true’ theories in the sense that they are consistent, valid, or detailed. Instead, they are deemed ‘interesting’ by the scholarly community by fulfilling four criteria: They (1) address a fundamental concern within the field, (2) offer a novel twist on an old problem, (3) appeal to generalists and specialists alike, and (4) are ambiguous and ill-defined and therefore open to varying interpretations (see also Davis, 2008).

More specifically, theories and concepts become ‘interesting’ or ‘successful’ by being connected to existing interpretations and understandings of a phenomenon while also offering a new explanation for it: ‘a new theory will be noticed only when it denies an old truth’ (Davis, 1971, p. 311). Importantly, ‘interesting’ concepts are neither too similar nor disconnected from existing truths, but connect to and critique them. Furthermore, ‘interesting’ theories hold enough complexity for theory specialists to spend years, sometimes entire careers, studying their subtleties. However, they also offer catchphrases and are clear enough to be used by non-specialists. Additionally, they are ambiguous; they ‘can appeal to different – even hostile – divisions of its audience, allowing each subgroup to interpret the theory in congenial, if mutually incompatible, ways’ (Davis, 1986, p. 296). As Kathy Davis puts it: ‘successful theories are successful precisely because they do not settle matters once and for all; they open them up for further discussion and inquiry’ (2008, p. 77).

Masculinity is an old concept while the use of masculinities is somewhat more recent. Due to space constraints, I discuss them together here, although they almost certainly have separate journeys of becoming ‘interesting’ to academic and feminist communities. Like intersectionality, they are theoretical concepts, not theories in themselves, and like intersectionality, they are used within shifting theoretical approaches.

Masculinity/masculinities connect to fundamental concerns within gender and feminist studies while also offering a novel twist, in line with Davis’s (1971, 1986) argument. While not coined by Raewyn Connell and colleagues (Carrigan, Connell, & Lee, 1985; Connell, 2000, 2005), their texts popularised and theorised masculinity/masculinities in ways that would impact the CSMM subfield for decades to come, rendering these concepts successful and ‘interesting’. In their discussions of masculinity/masculinities, Connell and colleagues drew upon sex-role and patriarchy theories as well as gay studies and psychological, especially psychoanalytical texts about men, while also challenging fundamental concerns within all these fields. Firstly, they incorporated a focus on power, important in patriarchy theories but lacking in sex-role and psychological theories. Secondly, they addressed the fundamental importance of men in feminist theories, while also providing nuance to the, often, generalising accounts of men, sexuality, and gender relations within patriarchy theories. Differences between men had been a fundamental concern within gay studies but not in patriarchy or psychological theories. As Davis (1971, p. 315) comments, ‘interesting’ theories may offer new views on composition: ‘What seems to be a single phenomenon is in reality composed of assorted heterogeneous elements’. Masculinity, and primarily the plural, masculinities, provided just such an opportunity to break up the seemingly single and unitary phenomenon men, and enabled in-depth studies of men’s shifting experiences, positions, and relationships to gendered power.

As several scholars have noted, intersectionality addresses the untenability of seeing ‘women’ as a unitary subject of feminism, as a ‘coherent identity project’ (Wiegman, 2002, p. 34; see also Butler, 1990; Crenshaw, 1991; Davis, 2008). As addressed not least within Black feminist thought, such analyses of men are equally untenable:

Although we are feminists and Lesbians, we feel solidarity with progressive Black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists demand. Our situation as Black people necessitates that we have solidarity around the fact of race, which white women of course do not need to have with white men, unless it is their negative solidarity as racial oppressors. We struggle together with Black men against racism, while we also struggle with Black men about sexism. (Combahee river collective, 1977, section 2, para. 4)

As the Combahee river collective point to in this passage, men’s experiences and positions are fundamentally structured by race and racism; White and Black women’s relationships and solidarities with men from their racial groups must be understood in this light. Interestingly, differences between women have not been conceptualised in terms of different femininities but have instead been understood as intersectional or through the lens of interlocking oppressions (Combahee river collective, 1977; Crenshaw, 1991). Contrastingly, CSMM scholars have addressed the need for differentiated discussions about men using the ever-growing catalogue of different ‘masculinities’ mentioned above (Messner, 2004, p. 75). Nowadays, intersectional theories and viewpoints are increasingly applied to men and masculinities (e.g. Hammarén & Johansson, 2014), but texts which connect masculine positions and men’s privileges to intersectionality on a conceptual and theoretical level are few (although see Christensen & Qvotrup Jensen, 2014; Staunæs & Søndergaard, 2011).

Research on, for instance, Black, nondominant, ecological, and gay masculinities may offer invaluable critical perspectives on how men’s lives are interconnected with race, coloniality, sexuality, the Anthropocene, and men’s politics. However, the theoretical choice of designating certain masculinities as, for instance, Black or gay does not necessarily entail discussing the inter- and intrarelationality of colonial and gendered power relations, nor the simultaneous, overdetermined, perhaps contradictory processes of racialisation, sexualisation, and gendering. The complex, sometimes diffuse (Davis, 2008), discussions about intersectionality are then not applied to men or to various ways of practicing, embodying, or producing masculine positions; in those cases, analyses based on ‘masculinities’ risk becoming reductive and descriptive, about plurality rather than power (Petersen, 2003, p. 57; Schrock & Schwalbe, 2009, p. 286).

Davis (1971, 1986) furthermore argues that ‘interesting’ concepts appeal to both specialists and generalists, and are sufficiently unclear and ambiguous to enable several different interpretations. Masculinity/masculinities are subject to very specialised theoretical discussions (e.g. Berggren, 2014; Demetriou, 2001; Donaldson, 1993; Howson, 2006; Waling, 2019), often in the context of the derivative concept ‘hegemonic masculinity’. However, they are also used by NGOs, on social media, in gender equality projects, and in public and official documents. For instance, a recent UN Security council report about violent extremism connects such extremism to ‘masculinities’, which are defined as ‘the norms, practices, social expectations, and power dynamics associated with being a man, though people of any gender can perform masculinities’ (Dier & Baldwin, 2022, p. 2). Additionally, yours truly participated in no less than two educational events about masculinity and risk organised by different Swedish county administrations only during the last year. In many Western contexts, masculinity/masculinities have entered mainstream political vocabularies, although it is arguably often unclear what these concepts are taken to refer to.

That masculinity and masculinities are unclear concepts has been endlessly debated. Hegemonic masculinity in particular has repeatedly been shown to be ambiguous (e.g. Donaldson, 1993; Hearn, 2004), often due to the unclear use of the notion of ‘hegemony’. However, the concept masculinity is in itself unclear (Hearn, 2004; 2012; Petersen, 2003; Schrock & Schwalbe, 2009), and although the invention of endless varieties or typologies seemingly specifies it, its fundamental ambiguities are not dealt with. For instance, does masculinity refer to ideals, a personality type, practices, or a historic bloc (Demetriou, 2001)? What is its relationship to men, male bodies, and ‘manhood acts’ (Halberstam, 1998; Schrock & Schwalbe, 2009)?

Of course, this last aspect renders the concept extremely versatile. Originating in what Stephen Whitehead (2002) calls a ‘juridico-discursive’ framework and what Chris Beasley (2012) calls a ‘modernist’ paradigm, ‘masculinities’ is also used within poststructuralist, posthumanist, and affective research (Allan, 2022; Hultman & Pulé, 2021; Reeser, 2017). It is adaptable enough to be found productive among scholars of different nationalities, epistemologies, and disciplinary identities.

So, the notion of masculinity, especially Connell and colleagues’ theory on the organisation of several distinguishable masculinities, connected to fundamental, pre-existing concerns within feminism and other fields (power, men, sexuality) while also offering a sufficiently altered theoretical lens (Davis, 1971, 1986). Judging by a plethora of articles, books, reports, conferences, and projects, it appeals to specialists and generalists, and the frequent use of masculinity/masculinities within different epistemologies and areas of research demonstrates that its ambivalence and unclearness provokes scholarly debate, further adding to the process by which the term circulates and accrues citations. Differently put, masculinity/masculinities have become a nodal point, constantly challenged but still organising the discursive field of CSMM (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001). The success of masculinity/masculinities is visible in the ubiquity of these concepts within feminism and CSMM, and they evidently remain ‘interesting’ concepts to the academic and feminist community.

To suggest that masculinity/masculinities themselves are buzzwords may seem harsh; surely, they are also to be seen as exceptionally productive scholarly concepts as well as common sense concepts by which people make sense of the world. My short reflection can be viewed in a positive and a negative light. The often implicit and contradictory understandings of what masculinity/masculinities actually refer to are serious problems within CSMM; theoretical development and increased conceptual clarity are essential to the continued relevance of the subfield. Simultaneously, to paraphrase Davis (2008, p. 77):

by virtue of its vagueness and inherent open-endedness [masculinity/masculinities] initiates a process of discovery which not only is potentially interminable, but promises to yield new and more comprehensive and reflexively critical insights. What more could one desire from feminist inquiry?

This issue

This issue, volume 19, issue 1, raises issues around men’s lives and how they deal with gendered patterns and expectations. As demonstrated in the articles, expectations on men vary greatly between contexts, and men may reject, embrace, or challenge such expectations.

In the first article, Thomas P. Le, M. Pease, and Sandra Chijioke contribute to the discussion around men’s embodiment, eating, and drinking. Using theories of precarious manhood, Le et al. hypothesise that men with a high drive for muscularity and men experiencing ‘masculinity threats’ would be prone to choose a masculine beverage, i.e. a protein shake. The study demonstrates that the former group did choose the high protein beverage while the latter did not. Thus, they did not engage in ‘restoration of masculinity’. The study shows that the wish to be muscular, not a wish to be masculine, may be what motivates men to consume more masculine food items.

The following two articles discuss negotiations of gendered patterns when men migrate between different national, religious, and racial contexts. Migrant men from the global south and eastern Europe face different challenges but both groups need to negotiate their masculine positions in relation to gendered expectations in their home contexts and destination countries, and in relation to intersecting ideas regarding race, religion, class, and gender.

Kelly Fischer discusses Polish migrants in Norway and their navigation of different, contextual, gendered ideals. Fischer’s interviewees discuss fatherhood and dating in the Norwegian context. Migrating entails a loss of status, and several of the men discuss encountering negative stereotypes around, primarily, Polish construction workers. While some of Fischer’s interviewees embrace Norwegian gendered ideals, others reject them; this is demonstrated in discussions about Norwegian men as childish and irresponsible.

Marzana Kamal studies negotiations of gendered positions among Bangladeshi migrant men. Migrant men from the global south are part of global, capitalist economies, structured by race, gender, and religion. Like in Fischer’s article, migrating entails a loss of status and difficulties of attaining ‘hegemonic masculinity’. While gender flexibility may be necessary in the new context, the home context contrastingly becomes a site where gendered power relations and patriarchal interpretations of Islam are reinforced, which impacts women and gendered patterns there. Kamal demonstrates that differences in destination countries do not impact men migrants’ attitudes in this regard.