Young Men Navigating Contemporary Masculinities

This book explores navigations of contemporary masculinities amongst young, advantaged men living in Australia and Germany. Taking an intersectional approach, the book argues that more open, egalitarian forms of masculinity, such as caring masculinities, are fostered by marginalised groups. Elliott investigates ways in which privileged men can move towards this openness alongside ongoing expressions of more traditional or regressive masculinity. Drawing on interviews, the book explores these navigations and the ways in which they are bound up with themes such as work, mobility, relationships, the privileges and pressures of masculinities, and the contradictions and difficulties of masculinities under neoliberalism. What is revealed is the need for change at individual, collective and structural levels, with care and openness amongst men as a means of achieving this change. Young Men Navigating Contemporary Masculinities will be of interest to students and scholars in fields such as sociology, gender studies, critical studies on men and masculinities, and cultural studies.

Masculinity, it seems, is in crisis, again. This edited volume critically interrogates the current situation facing contemporary young men. The contributors deconstruct and reject such crisis talk, with its chapters drawing on original research to present a more nuanced reality, whilst also developing a critical dialogue with one another.

How do boys see themselves? Their peers? The adult world? What are their aspirations, their fears? How do they feel about their own masculinity? About style, 'race', homophobia? About football? This book examines aspects of 'young masculinities' that have become central to contemporary social thought, paying attention to psychological issues as well as to social policy concerns. Centring on a study involving in-depth exploration, through individual and group intererviews, the authors bring to light the way boys in the early years of secondary schooling conceptualise and articulate their experiences of themselves, their peers and the adult world. The book includes discussion of boys' aspirations and anxieties, their feelings of pride and loss. As such, it offers an unusually detailed set of insights into the experiential world inhabited by these boys - how they see themselves, how girls see them, what they wish for and fear, where they feel their 'masculinity' to be advantageous and where it inhibits other potential experiences. In describing this material, the authors explore questions such as the place of violence in young people's lives, the functions of 'hardness', of homophobia and football, boys' underachievement in school, and the pervasive racialisation of masculine identity construction. Young Masculinities will be invaluable to researchers in psychology, sociology, gender and youth studies, as well as to those devising social policy on boys and young men. STEPHEN FROSH is Professor of Psychology at Birkbeck College, University of London, and previously Consultant Clinical Psychologist and Vice Dean in the Child and Family Department at the Tavistock Clinic, London. He is the author of numerous academic papers and several books, including For and Against Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference: Masculinity and Psychoanalysis, Identity Crisis: Modernity, Psychoanalysis and the Self and The Politics of Psychoanalysis. He is joint author, with Danya Glaser, of Child Sexual Abuse and co-editor with Anthony Elliott of Psychoanalysis in Context. ANN PHOENIX is Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Open University. Her books include Standpoints and Differences (with Karen Henwood and Chris Griffin), Crossfires: Nationalism, Racism and Gender in Europe (with Helma Lutz and Nira Yuval-Davies), and Black, White or Mixed Race? (with Barbara Tizard). ROB PATTMAN is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Botswana. He has taught sociology in sixth form colleges and institutions of higher education in Britain and southern Africa, and published articles on whiteness, gender identities, sex and AIDS education and social theory.

In this book Victor J Seidler, one of the leading contributors to the growing debate about masculinities, turns his attention to the lives of young men and their understandings of themselves as gendered beings. By contextualizing their experiences and subjectivities within a rapidly globalizing world, Seidler pays particular attention to the impact of the global media. How does the mass circulation of images of men's bodies, desires and sexualities affect their self-perception and behaviours, and how are these images framed within particular histories, cultures and traditions? Questioning universalist theories of 'hegemonic masculinities', the book argues that young men often feel caught between prevailing masculinities and their own struggle for self-definition. It explores both how the idea of men as 'the First Sex' has been established within the West and the ways in which men in other cultures and societies affirm their gendered identities. Seidler pioneers new methodologies that involve listening to the silences surrounding male experience as well as to oral testimonies. This enables innovative analysis of the contradictions young men are faced with in both creating their own gendered identities and establishing more equal relationships within a world of intense inequalities.

This past decade has witnessed an extraordinary transformation in men's lives. For years, wave after wave of the women's movement, a movement that reshaped every aspect of American life, produced nary a ripple among men. But suddenly men are in the spotlight. Yet, the public discussions often seem strained, silly, and sometimes flat-out wrong. The spotlight itself seems to obscure as much as it illuminates. Old tired clichTs about men's resistance to romantic commitment or reluctance to be led to the marriage altar seem perennially recyclable in advice books and on TV talk shows, but these days the laughter feels more forced, the defensiveness more pronounced. Pop biologists avoid careful confrontation with serious scientific research in their quest to find anatomical or evolutionary bases for promiscuity or porn addiction, hoping that by fiat, one can pronounce that "boys will be boys" and render it more than a flaccid tautology. And political pundits wring their hands about the feminization of American manhood, as if gender equality has neutered these formerly proud studs. Misframing Men, a collection of Michael Kimmel's commentaries on contemporary debates about masculinity, argues that the media have largely misframed this debate. Kimmel, among the world's best-known scholars in gender studies, discusses political moments such as the Virginia Military Institute and Citadel cases that reached the Supreme Court (he participated as expert witness for the Justice Department) along with Promise Keepers rallies, mythopoetic gatherings, and white supremacists. He takes on antifeminists as the real male bashers, questions the unsubstantiated assertions that men suffer from domestic violence to the same degree as women, and examines the claims made by those who want to rescue boys from the "misandrous" reforms initiated by feminism. In writings both solidly grounded and forcefully argued, Kimmel pushes the boundaries of today's modern conversation about men and masculinity.

Young Working Class Men in Transition uses a unique blend of concepts from the sociologies of youth and masculinity combined with Bourdieusian social theory to investigate British young working-class men’s transition to adulthood. Indeed, utilising data from biographical interviews as well as an ethnographic observation of social media activity, this volume provides novel insights by following young men across a seven-year time period. Against the grain of prominent popular discourses that position young working-class men as in ‘crisis’ or as adhering to negative forms of traditional masculinity, this book consequently documents subtle yet positive shifts in the performance of masculinity among this generation. Underpinned by a commitment to a much more expansive array of emotionality than has previously been revealed in such studies, young men are shown to be engaged in school, open to so called ‘women’s work’ in the service sector, and committed to relatively egalitarian divisions of labour in the family home. Despite this, class inequalities inflect their transition to adulthood with the ‘toxicity’ of neoliberalism - rather than toxic masculinity - being core to this reality. Problematising how working-class masculinity is often represented, Young Working Class Men in Transition both demonstrates and challenges the portrayal of working class masculinity as a repository of homophobia, sexism and anti-feminine acting. It will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as youth studies, masculinity studies, gender studies, sociology of education and sociology of work.

Masculinities in Contemporary American Culture offers readers a multidisciplinary, intersectional overview of masculinity studies that includes both theoretical and applied lenses. Keith combines current research with historical perspectives to demonstrate the contexts in which masculine identities have come evolved. With an emphasis on popular culture -- particularly film, TV, video games, and music -- this text invites students to examine their gendered sensibilities and discuss the ways in which different forms of media appeal to toxic masculinity.

This Handbook provides new theoretical and empirical insights into men, men’s practices and masculinities across many kinds of organizations and forms of organizing. Most mainstream studies of organizations, leadership and management do not seem to notice they are often talking a lot about men and masculinities. The Handbook challenges this general tendency to avoid gendering men by bringing together a range of theoretical and methodological approaches that: engage with not only formal organizations, such as businesses and state organizations, but also processes of organizing within and beyond organizations; address emergent and future issues on men, masculinities and organizations, such as tech masculinities, men’s emotions, sexualities and violences, animal advocacy and environmental issues, and men and masculinities in pandemics. Targeted at scholars, policymakers, practitioners and students interested in links between men, masculinities, organizations and organizing, this landmark Handbook is an invaluable resource for those working in and beyond such fi elds as gender studies, organization, leadership and management studies, political science, sociology, social and public policy, and social movement studies.