Everyday masculinities.
Date
1990
Authors
Frank, Blye.
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Dalhousie University
Abstract
Description
The everyday masculinities of fourteen male high school students between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, each interviewed twice during 1987 and 1988, are explored in this thesis as diverse and complex practices in which the students negotiate relationships and experience struggles full of tension and contradictions.
The initial interviews revealed five themes: (1) authority and domination and the continuous struggle around power; (2) responsibility, control and freedom, and the social privilege of being male; (3) competition; (4) violence of varying degrees against other men, women, and themselves; and, (5) sexuality. Each theme was investigated during the second interviews through eight concrete situations: (1) sports, (2) relationships with other men, (3) relationships with women, (4) body image, (5) familial relations, (6) time alone, (7) work, and (8) the future.
From the interview data, three sites of pratice--the body, sports, and sexuality--were established in order to develop a sociology of masculinity that attempts an understanding of how gender and sexual struggles, within hierarchies of intermale dominance, serve to construct the domination of some men over other men and the global subordination of women by men.
The thesis recommends that men who challenge the present form of hegemonic heterosexual masculinity and patriarchal power must continue to do so by translating the contention that the "personal is political" from slogan to strategy, from private to public, and from theory to practice. Individual men need to be recognized as historical products who help to construct the overall gender order, while simultaneously recognizing the active quality of their being in the construction of their individual masculinity and the collective masculinity of all men.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Dalhousie University (Canada), 1990.
The initial interviews revealed five themes: (1) authority and domination and the continuous struggle around power; (2) responsibility, control and freedom, and the social privilege of being male; (3) competition; (4) violence of varying degrees against other men, women, and themselves; and, (5) sexuality. Each theme was investigated during the second interviews through eight concrete situations: (1) sports, (2) relationships with other men, (3) relationships with women, (4) body image, (5) familial relations, (6) time alone, (7) work, and (8) the future.
From the interview data, three sites of pratice--the body, sports, and sexuality--were established in order to develop a sociology of masculinity that attempts an understanding of how gender and sexual struggles, within hierarchies of intermale dominance, serve to construct the domination of some men over other men and the global subordination of women by men.
The thesis recommends that men who challenge the present form of hegemonic heterosexual masculinity and patriarchal power must continue to do so by translating the contention that the "personal is political" from slogan to strategy, from private to public, and from theory to practice. Individual men need to be recognized as historical products who help to construct the overall gender order, while simultaneously recognizing the active quality of their being in the construction of their individual masculinity and the collective masculinity of all men.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Dalhousie University (Canada), 1990.
Keywords
Psychology, Social., Psychology, Personality.