Even to talk about masculinity is a fairly recent phenomenon, a notable outgrowth of feminism and feminist studies. Feminist interrogations of the subordination of women in the 1960s and 1970s (what is commonly called ‘‘second-wave feminism’’) questioned the political and social possibilities of women’s lives under patriarchal culture. The concerns that feminist women expressed led to a revision of what many perceived to be a ‘‘natural’’ social order and exposed women’s concerns about the myriad ways that society discouraged autonomous behavior and the adoption of what were commonly held to be male-gendered traits. In addition, feminism rightly encouraged a more inclusive examination of women as a part of culture - as active agents in the production of culture, whether in history, society, politics, or art.
The influence of feminist theory has extended, however, beyond the mere recovery of historical women or the articulation of women’s subordination and has given birth to more sophisticated analyses of gender and sexual identity. Indeed queer theory, postcolonial theory and the field of cultural studies (among others) are indebted to the ways in which second-wave theorists and activists questioned the way that women were made Other.1 One of the most influential changes in feminist work lies in a shift from an emphasis on ‘‘woman’’ to one on ‘‘gender’’ (R. Adams and Savran 2002: 4). In addition, theories that postulated sexuality as a historical construct (e. g., Foucault 1978) and gender not as an essence but a compulsory performance in which individuals enact socially accepted and mandated gender roles (e. g., Butler 1990, 1993) have effectively moved feminism beyond the feminine and have allowed scholars and researchers to reconsider gender subject positions for men, women, transvestites, transsexuals, and the intersexed.
Though some semblance of a men’s movement appeared as early as the 1970s, masculinity studies perhaps can be said to have emerged as a distinct discipline or subfield of gender studies in the 1980s. Early works focused on masculinity studies as complementary to feminist work, in an attempt to articulate the sympathy many men felt with the women’s movement while simultaneously feeling excluded from it (Fasteau 1975; Pleck and Pleck 1980). Other work explicitly focused on homosexuality and homosocial bonds between men.2 Since the 1980s, the study of masculinity and male subjectivity has grown to be a large and healthy topic ofscholarly interest: if male and female are genders that are performed, they must both be interrogated in order to come to a sophisticated and complex understanding of gender relations and the place of gender within culture, both being ‘‘historically constructed, mutable, and contingent’’ (Adams and Savran 2002: 2). As with feminism, there is no single definable approach or topic for the study of masculinity; the lack of an orthodoxy may be in part attributable to the fact that masculinity studies came into its own when postmodernism was at its apex, but the favorable result is the abundance of approaches to male identity and culture as they reveal themselves in the social sciences, hard sciences, arts, and humanities. While the study of masculinity does not replace the need for feminism or queer theory, it frequently offers a compelling or illuminating counterpoint.
World History
