Masculinities and Men's Studies

Sociology of gender began, for good historical reasons, as a critique of women's subordination. For the first two decades of feminist sociology (roughly the late 1960s through the 1980s), most empirical work asked how the category 'woman' had been produced as subordinate through labor markets, family law, sexuality, and culture. Men, in such work, appeared mostly as the unmarked category whose privileges were to be documented and contested. By the mid-1980s, however, a number of sociologists began to argue that men and masculinity themselves needed to become explicit objects of study. If gender was a system — an arrangement of power, practice, and identity — then the dominant side of that system could not be left theoretically invisible.

This shift produced the field variously called men's studies, critical studies on men, or sociology of masculinities. Early landmarks included Joseph Pleck's The Myth of Masculinity (1981), which attacked the then-dominant 'sex role' paradigm; the Australian Räwyn (R.W.) Connell's essay 'Towards a New Sociology of Masculinity' (with Tim Carrigan and John Lee, 1985); and Michael Kimmel's edited volume Changing Men (1987). These scholars argued that a purely psychological 'male sex role' — a fixed bundle of expectations imposed on all men — could not account for the enormous historical and cross-cultural variation in what counted as manly, nor for the differences among men that structured male-on-male hierarchies.

The field developed a distinct agenda. It asked: how are masculinities produced in specific institutional settings (the military, sports, schools, corporations, fraternities)? How do different masculinities rank against each other, and what are the material consequences of that ranking? How do class, race, sexuality, disability, and nationality intersect with masculinity to generate radically different male lives? And how, empirically, can one study something as apparently ordinary and taken-for-granted as manhood without reproducing the very naturalization one is trying to explain?

By the 2000s men's studies had become an established subfield with its own journals (Men and Masculinities, founded 1998), professional associations (the American Men's Studies Association, 1991; the International Association for Studies of Men, 1997, superseded by later networks), and a body of cumulative empirical findings. The field remains contested — some feminists worry that focusing on men diverts attention from women's subordination — but most contemporary gender sociology treats masculinity as a legitimate and necessary object of analysis, precisely because gender is a relational system and cannot be understood by looking at only one half of it.