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Challenging Dominant Representations of Marginalized Boys and Men in Critical Studies on Men and Masculinities

Steven Roberts and Karla Elliott

Abstract

Raewyn Connell famously theorized hegemonic masculinity, explaining its dominance over femininity and “subordinated” and “marginalized” masculinities. Attending to representations of the latter, we argue that “men in the margin” are commonly wrongly and/or simplistically depicted as regressive and violent in response to their marginalization. Focusing on representations of working-class boys and men, we illustrate the stereotypical treatment of “men in the margin” more broadly, making clear that this goes against Connell's treatment of such men. Conversely, privileged boys and men are commonly held up by critical studies on men and masculinities scholars as paragons of progressive change. The characterization of boys and men in the margin as regressive and patriarchal impedes the ability to address problems like violence, misogyny, and homophobia and overlooks the possibilities for transformation that emerge among marginalized communities.

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Leisuring Masculinities in British Indian Childhoods

Explorations at the Intersection of Gender Order and Generational Order

Utsa Mukherjee

Abstract

In this article, I draw upon a qualitative study with 11- to 12-year-old middle-class British Indian boys and their parents to unpack the ways notions of young masculinities are negotiated within the context of children's leisure. Taking a relational approach, I argue that leisure-based masculinities of children are simultaneously generationed and gendered. By interrogating the intersection of what Raewyn Connell theorizes as “gender order” and what childhood sociologists call the “generational order,” I demonstrate that leisure-based young masculinities are forged within children's inter- (parent-child) and intra- (child-child) generational relationships around leisure. I conclude with a call for greater engagement with intersectional frameworks in the study of boys’ masculinity that simultaneously recognizes the gender and the generational structures of children's everyday lives.

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Making The Men and the Boys

Raewyn Connell

Abstract

This essay discusses the intellectual and political context in which The Men and the Boys was written, the author's research trajectory leading to the book, its concern with practical issues of change in masculinities and gender relations, the new directions in its intellectual offerings, and the way it dealt with boyhood as a field of studies.

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Men and Masculinities the Journal

Raewyn Connell's Influence on its New Vision

Joseph D. Nelson, Tristan Bridges, and Kristen Barber

Abstract

In this reflective piece, the new editors of the historic journal Men and Masculinities explicate how key tenets of Raewyn Connell's scholarship informed their expanded vision of the journal. It begins with a meta-analysis of empirical research published in the journal for the last 20 years, and highlights its emphasis on contemporary scholarship from various disciplines and fields. Each facet of the journal's new vision is relayed thereafter, including its feminist perspective, international focus, and interdisciplinarity. It concludes with efforts by the editors to actualize their vision in the service of broadening the field of gender, boyhood, and masculinity studies.

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The Men and the Boys, Twenty Years On

Revisiting Raewyn Connell's Pivotal Text

Victoria Cann, Sebastián Madrid, Kopano Ratele, Anna Tarrant, Michael R.M. Ward, and Raewyn Connell

It is twenty years since the publication of Raewyn Connell's highly influential text The Men and the Boys. This book, building on feminist and pro-feminist perspectives of gender formation, was written over a ten-year period from the late 1980s to the late 1990s. It was published five years after the release of the groundbreaking text Masculinities (1995) and tackled multiple issues concerning boys and men. While providing an important platform and summary of where the research from the social science and humanities on men and masculinities stood in the year 2000, the book also contained a theoretical framework for understanding men and masculinities as part of gender relations. Importantly, the future direction of the field was outlined, and suggestions were made as to likely future agendas. These subjects included investigating the implications of globalization and its different characteristics on gender formation, the role of men's bodies, the impact of the media and culture in men's lives, sexuality, education, health, politics, change, violence, and peace. In recent years, questions about the lives and experiences of men and boys continue to raise remarkable media interest, public concern, and controversy on a global scale. Global changes in practices of knowledge have ensured that across the humanities and social sciences, research in the field of masculinities (of all ages) has continued to flourish and expand.

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The Peer Group's Agency in a Brazilian School

Cinthia Torres Toledo and Marília Pinto de Carvalho

Abstract

Black working-class boys are the group with the most significant difficulties in their schooling process. In dialogue with Raewyn Connell, we seek to analyze how the collective conceptions of peer groups have influenced the school engagement of Brazilian boys. We conducted an ethnographic research with students around the age of 14 at an urban state school in the periphery of the city of São Paulo. We analyzed the hierarchization process between two groups of boys, demonstrating the existence of a collective notion of masculinity that works against engagement with the school. Well-known to the Anglophone academic literature, this association is rather uncommon in the Brazilian literature. We have therefore attempted to describe and analyze here the challenges faced by Black working-class Brazilian boys to establish more positive educational trajectories.

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Raewyn Connell and the Making of Masculinity Studies in South Africa

Robert Morrell

Abstract

The study of masculinity in South Africa scarcely existed in 1990. A minor interest in gender was focused on women and inequality. South Africa was emerging from four decades of apartheid. It was into this environment that Raewyn Connell's ideas were introduced, adopted and adapted. Raewyn herself made a number of trips to South Africa in the 1990s and 2000s and found a ready reception for her theories about masculinity. South Africa was in transition feeling its way from white minority rule and authoritarianism toward democracy and a commitment to ending poverty, inequality, racism, and the oppression of women. In this article, I describe how Raewyn's idea energized scholarship, created a new research interest in men and masculinity, and contributed to gender activism.

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Situating Right-Wing Populisms and Revisiting The Men and the Boys under the Neoliberal Turn

Amrita De

Abstract

This exploratory article draws critical insights from Raewyn Connell's The Men and the Boys (2000) to unpack the gendered nature of neoliberal right-wing populist governance in India and America. Connell's prescient work targeted towards forging new theoretical inroads in masculinity studies research, on its conception, continues to provide a vital heuristic model to make better sense of the present condition. This article first situates right-wing populist governance in India and America within the rubric of global neoliberal capitalism. It then unpacks Narendra Modi and Donald Trump's carefully calibrated populist imaging, drawing attention to the surrounding gendered discourses rooted in local and culturally idealized perceptions of hegemonic masculinity. Narendra Modi and Donald Trump's public figuration falls in the “cult of strongman leader stereotype”, characterized by risk-taking translated into perceived virility. Social media and its affordances further prop up their perceived masculine public personas, while affectively inscribing traditional inscriptions of heteronormative masculinity, such as ideas of dominance, as aspirational. Through preliminary research, this article then considers the effects of political masculinities on adolescent masculinities. In conclusion, this article stresses the theoretical relevance of Connell's important work twenty years later.

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Book Review

Liam Wrigley

Roberts, Steven. 2018. Young Working-Class Men in Transition. London: Routledge. 240 pp. e-ISBN: 9781315441283. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315441283.

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Conditional Freedom

A Portrait of Young Men's Sense of Belonging to the Street in Maputo, Mozambique

Andrea Moreira

Abstract

Drawing on extensive fieldwork, this article explores how a group of young men construct their sense of belonging to a public space, namely, a market in the capital city of Mozambique, Maputo. The young men's occupancy of the market was a clever opportunistic move. While life in and around the market provided opportunities and resources that allowed them to “get by,” the way space was lived and experienced in everyday life by these young men made them particularly exposed to punitive systems of social control. Their experience of belonging to the street was ambiguous, as the freedom they searched for became conditional and they recurrently put themselves in a situation in which they became easy targets for police harassment and incarceration in state prisons. The article shows how these young men position themselves and negotiate their masculinities in an urban environment where they are identified as a threat to the social order.