International encyclopedia of the social - William A. Darity(3).pdf - enc of social - pillowbookworm

International Encyclopedia of the

Social Sciences, 2nd edition

International Encyclopedia of the

Social Sciences, 2nd edition

VOLUME 5

MASCULINITY–NYERERE, JULIUS

William A. Darity Jr.

EDITOR IN CHIEF

MASCULINITY

Masculinity refers to the social roles, behaviors, and mean-

ings prescribed for men in any given society at any one

time. As such, it emphasizes gender, not biological sex,

and the diversity of identities among different groups of

men. Although we experience gender to be an internal

facet of identity, the concept of masculinity is produced

within the institutions of society and through our daily

interactions (Kimmel 2000).

individual differences. Although social forces operate to

create systematic differences between men and women, on

average, these differences between women and men are not

as great as the differences among men or among women.

The meanings of masculinity vary over four different

dimensions; thus four different disciplines are involved in

understanding gender—anthropology, history, psychol-

ogy, and sociology.

First, masculinities vary across cultures. Anthropolo-

gists have documented the ways that gender varies cross-

culturally. Some cultures encourage men to be stoic and to

prove masculinity, especially by sexual conquest. Other

cultures prescribe a more relaxed definition of masculinity

based on civic participation, emotional responsiveness,

and collective provision for the community’s needs. What

it means to be a man in France or among Aboriginal peo-

ples in the Australian outback are so far apart that it belies

any notion that gender identity is determined mostly by

biological sex differences. The differences between two

cultures’ version of masculinity is often greater than the

differences between the two genders.

Second, definitions of masculinity vary considerably

in any one country over time. Historians have explored

how these definitions have shifted in response to changes

in levels of industrialization and urbanization, in a

nation’s position in the larger world’s geopolitical and

economic context, and with the development of new tech-

nologies. What it meant to be a man in seventeenth-

century France or in Hellenic Greece is certainly different

from what it might mean to be a French or Greek man

today.

SEX VS. GENDER

Much popular discourse assumes that biological sex deter-

mines one’s gender identity, the experience and expression

of masculinity and femininity. Instead of focusing on bio-

logical universals, social and behavioral scientists are con-

cerned with the different ways in which biological sex

comes to mean different things in different contexts. Sex

refers to the biological apparatus, the male and the

female—our chromosomal, chemical, anatomical, organi-

zation. Gender refers to the meanings that are attached to

those differences within a culture. Sex is male and female;

gender is masculinity and femininity—what it means to be

a man or a woman. Whereas biological sex varies very lit-

tle, gender varies enormously. Sex is biological; gender is

socially constructed. Gender takes shape only within spe-

cific social and cultural contexts.

PLURAL MASCULINITIES

The use of the plural— masculinities —recognizes the dra-

matic variation in how different groups define masculin-

ity, even in the same society at the same time, as well as

INTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, 2ND EDITION

Masculinity

Third, definitions of masculinity change over the

course of a person’s life. Developmental psychologists have

examined how a set of developmental milestones leads to

differences in our experiences and our expressions of gen-

der identity. Both chronological age and life stage require

different enactments of gender. In the West, the issues

confronting a man about proving himself and feeling suc-

cessful change as he ages, as do the social institutions in

which he attempts to enact those experiences. A young

single man defines masculinity differently than do a mid-

dle-aged father and an elderly grandfather.

Finally, the meanings of masculinity vary consider-

ably within any given society at any one time. At any

given moment, several meanings of masculinity coexist.

Simply put, not all American or Brazilian or Senegalese

men are the same. Sociologists have explored the ways in

which class, race, ethnicity, age, sexuality, and region all

shape gender identity. Each of these axes modifies the oth-

ers. For example, an older, black, gay man in Chicago and

a young, white, heterosexual farm boy in Iowa would

likely have different definitions of masculinity and differ-

ent ideas about what it means to be a woman. Yet each of

these people is deeply affected by the gender norms and

power arrangements of their society.

Because gender varies so significantly—across cul-

tures, over historical time, among men and women within

any one culture, and over the life course—we cannot

speak of masculinity as though it is a constant, universal

essence, common to all men. Gender must be seen as an

ever-changing, fluid assemblage of meanings and behav-

iors; we must speak of masculinities . By pluralizing the

term we acknowledge that masculinity means different

things to different groups of people at different times.

qualify in any one of these ways is likely to view

himself—during moments at least—as unworthy,

incomplete, and inferior. (1967, p. 128)

Definitions of masculinity are not simply con-

structed in relation to the hegemonic ideals of that

gender, but also in constant reference to each other.

Gender is not only plural, it is also relational. Surveys in

Western countries indicate that men construct their

ideas of what it means to be men in constant reference

to definitions of femininity. What it means to be a man

is to be unlike a woman; indeed, social psychologists

have emphasized that although different groups of men

may disagree about other traits and their significance in

gender definitions, the “antifemininity” component of

masculinity is perhaps the single dominant and universal

characteristic.

Gender difference and gender inequality are both

produced through our relationships. Nancy Chodorow

argued that the structural arrangements by which women

are primarily responsible for raising children creates

unconscious, internalized desires in both boys and girls

that reproduce male dominance and female mothering

(1978). For boys, gender identity requires emotional

detachment from mother, a process of individuation

through separation. The boy comes to define himself as a

boy by rejecting whatever he sees as female, by devaluing

the feminine in himself (separation) and in others (male

superiority). This cycle of men defining themselves

through their distance from and devaluation of femininity

can end, Chodorow argues, only when parents participate

equally in child rearing.

GENDER AS AN INSTITUTION

Although we recognize gender diversity, we still may con-

ceive masculinities as attributes of identity only. We think

of gendered individuals who bring with them all the

attributes and behavioral characteristics of their gendered

identity into gender-neutral institutional arenas. But

because gender is plural and relational, it is also situa-

tional: What it means to be a man varies in different insti-

tutional contexts, and those different institutional

contexts demand and produce different forms of mas-

culinity. “Boys may be boys,” writes feminist legal theorist

Deborah Rhode, “but they express that identity differ-

ently in fraternity parties than in job interviews with a

female manager” (Rhode 1997, p. 142). Gender is thus

not only a property of individuals, some “thing” one has,

but a specific set of behaviors that are produced in specific

social situations. Thus gender changes as the situation

changes.

Institutions are themselves gendered. Institutions cre-

ate gendered normative standards and express a gendered

GENDER IDENTITY

Recognizing diversity ought not to obscure the ways in

which gender definitions are constructed in a field of

power. Simply put, all masculinities are not created equal.

In every culture, men contend with a definition that is

held up as the model against which all are expected to

measure themselves. This “hegemonic” definition of mas-

culinity is “constructed in relation to various subordinated

masculinities as well as in relation to women,” writes soci-

ologist R. W. Connell (1987, p. 183). As Erving Goffman

once described it,

In an important sense there is only one complete

unblushing male in America: a young, married,

white, urban, northern, heterosexual, Protestant,

father, of college education, fully employed, of

good complexion, weight, and height, and a

recent record in sports.… Any male who fails to

INTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, 2ND EDITION

Masculinity

institutional logic, and are major factors in the reproduc-

tion of gender inequality. The gendered identity of indi-

viduals shapes those gendered institutions, and the

gendered institutions express and reproduce the inequali-

ties that compose gender identity. Institutions themselves

express a logic—a dynamic—that reproduces gender rela-

tions between women and men and the gender order of

hierarchy and power.

Not only do gendered individuals negotiate their

identities within gendered institutions, but also those

institutions produce the very differences we assume are

the properties of individuals. Thus, “the extent to which

women and men do different tasks, play widely disparate

concrete social roles, strongly influences the extent to

which the two sexes develop and/or are expected to man-

ifest widely disparate personal behaviors and characteris-

tics” (Chafetz 1980, p. 112). Different structured

experiences produce the gender differences that we often

attribute to people (Chafetz 1980).

For example, take the workplace. In her now classic

work Men and Women of the Corporation (1977), Rosebeth

Moss Kanter argued that the differences in men’s and

women’s behaviors in organizations had far less to do with

their characteristics as individuals than with the structure

of the organization itself and the different jobs men and

women held. Organizational positions “carry characteris-

tic images of the kinds of people that should occupy

them,” she argued, and those who do occupy them,

whether women or men, exhibited those necessary behav-

iors (Kanter 1977, p. 21). Though the criteria for evalua-

tion of job performance, promotion, and effectiveness

seem to be gender neutral, they are, in fact, deeply gen-

dered. “While organizations were being defined as sex-

neutral machines,” she writes, “masculine principles were

dominating their authority structures” (p. 241). Once

again, masculinity—the norm—was invisible (Kanter

1975, 1977). For example, secretaries seemed to stress

personal loyalty to their bosses more than did other work-

ers, which led some observers to attribute this to women’s

greater level of personalism. But Kanter pointed out that

the best way for a secretary—of either gender—to get pro-

moted was for the boss to decide to take the secretary with

him to the higher job. Thus the structure of the women’s

jobs, not the gender of the job holder, dictated their

responses.

Sociologist Joan Acker has expanded on Kanter’s early

insights and has specified the interplay of structure and

gender. It is through our experiences in the workplace,

Acker maintains, that the differences between women and

men are reproduced, and in this way the inequality

between women and men is legitimated. Institutions are

like factories, and one of the things that they produce is

gender difference. The overall effect of this is the repro-

duction of the gender order as a whole (see Acker 1987,

1988, 1989, 1990).

Institutions accomplish the creation of gender differ-

ence and the reproduction of the gender order through

several gendered processes. Thus, “advantage and disad-

vantage, exploitation and control, action and emotion,

meaning and identity, are patterned through and in terms

of a distinction between male and female, masculine and

feminine” (Acker 1990, p. 146). We would err to assume

that gendered individuals enter gender-neutral sites, thus

maintaining the invisibility of gender-as-hierarchy, and

specifically the invisible masculine organizational logic. At

the same time, we would be just as incorrect to assume

that genderless “people” occupy those gender-neutral sites.

The problem is that such genderless people are assumed to

be able to devote themselves single-mindedly to their jobs,

to have no children or family responsibilities, and perhaps

even to have familial supports for such single-minded

workplace devotion. Thus, the “genderless” job holder

turns out to be gendered as a man.

Take, for example, the field of medicine. Many doc-

tors complete college by age twenty-one or twenty-two,

and medical school by age twenty-five to twenty-seven,

and then face three more years of internship and resi-

dency, during which time they are occasionally on call for

long stretches of time, sometimes for even two or three

days straight. They thus complete their residencies by

their late twenties or early thirties. Such a program is

designed for a male doctor—one who is not pressured by

the ticking of a biological clock, for whom the birth of

children will not disrupt these time demands, and who

may even have someone at home taking care of his chil-

dren while he sleeps at the hospital. No wonder women in

medical school—who number nearly one half of all med-

ical students today—began to complain that they were

not able to balance pregnancy and motherhood with their

medical training.

In another example, in a typical academic career a

scholar completes a PhD about six to seven years after the

BA, roughly by age thirty, and then begins a career as an

assistant professor with six more years to earn tenure and

promotion. This is usually the most intense academic

work period of a scholar’s life and also the most likely

childbearing years for professional women. The tenure

clock is thus set to a man’s rhythms—not just any man,

but one with a wife to relieve him of family obligations as

he establishes his credentials. To academics struggling to

make tenure, it often feels that publishing requires that

family life perish.

Embedded in organizational structures that are gen-

dered, subject to gendered organizational processes, and

evaluated by gendered criteria, then, the differences

INTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, 2ND EDITION

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