By Jeff Hearn
These debates are now more explicit, more gendered, more varied and sometimes, but certainly not always, more critical. At
their base is the assumption that men, like women, are not ‘just bound to be that way’, but the result of historical, political,
economic, social and cultural forces. While there are certain dangers in developing focused academic work on men, it is, with
some qualifications, very important to study men, critically. Yet, contrary to what has sometimes been suggested, I do not
approve of the idea of ’men’s studies’.
The form that political, academic and policy debates around men have taken varies across the world. I would like to comment
here on some of these differences of emphasis in studies on men in four parts of the world. Inevitably what can be said here
will have to be broad brush, and I apologise in advance for offending and doing injustice to anybody. The differences I am
thinking of can be seen in several ways:
- the impacts of the form of feminism and ‘men’s politics’ (pro-feminist or otherwise), and the more general features of the society, mainstream social science and humanities upon the choice of subjects to be studied, the approach to those studies, and indeed the very theorisation of ‘men’.
- the location and organisation of these studies, including their relationship with feminism, women’s studies and gender research; and
- the naming of these studies.
There is a complex relationship between the politics of men and research on men worldwide. Among the many social influences that have brought the focus on men, foremost is the impact of feminism. The form feminism has taken varies greatly in different countries, and different feminist initiatives have focused on different aspects of men and suggested different analyses of men. Other forces for change include gay and queer politics. These have had an uneven impact in different parts of the world, including some diffuse effects through media and changing forms of representation.
The US: the largest and most diverse
The largest national concentration of studies on men has come, as with many academic fields, from the US. There is indeed
now a very large US literature on men, as can be seen from several US bibliographies on men. This literature has developed
there from a wide variety of influences. Some studies by men there have arisen in association with anti-sexist, pro-feminist
politics, most obviously through NOMAS (the National Organization of Men Against Sexism). But there have also been other influential
forces, including the mythopoetic men’s movement, men’s therapy, male liberation, and anti-feminist men’s rightists like the
Coalition of Free Men. Some of these demand men’s ‘voices’ are heard more fully!
The roots of this work on men lie partly in responses to feminism, but other important historical connections are with the
civil rights, gay and black movements.
Feminism in the US is an immensely large and complex movement. It takes many forms, and some have at times been antagonistic to each other. There are also relatively large developments of radical feminism, academic feminist research and publishing, and links of feminism with the politics and research of women of colour. Prominent contributions on men from gay studies and to a growing extent from black studies have also figured strongly in US studies on men. Questions around heterosexuality, whiteness and men are increasingly addressed as scholarly issues.
But US work of this kind also has to be understood in relation to the more general features of academia and of the society. In one sense, much US research on men is working against the mainstream of US social science. On the other, some of the features of that context are reproduced. For example, even at the critical edge in the work of some US scholars on men, there has been the dominance of studies based in positivist research, psychological and social psychological understandings of masculinity, psychoanalysis, (sex/gender) role theory and various forms of culturalist theory. Studies are often good on empirical description, less good on theoretical analysis. There has been some very good historical work, and social constructionism has generally been a growing intellectual approach.
General US ideologies place great faith in the individual and the market, and these features are also to be found within much of the writing on men. There is by contrast less attention to structural analysis, whether economic or political, and less faith in the power and possibility of change through the state and socialist or social democratic programmes more generally. With some notable exceptions, US work on men is not generally framed in relation to marxism or Critical Theory. Despite the emphasis on diversity, there is an ethnocentrism in that the US like most ‘central’ powers is not contextualised or problematised, as is necessary in most smaller, ‘more marginal’ countries. The analysis of men and US imperialism is rarely a subject of critical study.
US studies on men are very diverse, theoretically and politically. There have been major developments in sociology, cultural studies, literature and other disciplines. Their relation to women’s studies is also diverse. In some cases there is a close and supportive association; in others there is antagonism. It is also in the US that the term ‘men’s studies’ has been most used, often by those men who are not pro-feminist and are even anti-feminist; sometimes within a pro-feminist frame of reference. Other terms have included ‘masculinity studies’ and ‘male dominance studies’.
The UK: power and structural analysis
British research and publications on men have developed since the 1970s in a rather different context. The political and academic context there includes: its early development in the context of left class politics, and a broadly positive but by no means unproblematic relation to feminism. British feminism, though in some respects closely allied to left politics, has also developed in tension with the state, as embodied in the autonomous women’s shelter movement. Meanwhile the oppression of gays has intertwined with gay politics and gay studies. Other trends that have affected general social science debates, for example, the place of critical European social science and the critique of positivism, have also been immensely important. The established ethnocentrism of British academia is also found in studies on men, though less than formerly, with the rethinking of the UK in a post-imperial age, and the growing diversity of British society and cultures. Power and structural analysis have been central features of analysis of men and masculinities. And within that framework of structural power, in recent years there has been a strong turn to detailed ethnographic and discourse research on particular groups of men.
Australia: theoretical and empirical contributions
Australian work has made particularly important theoretical and empirical contributions. There are some similari-ties with British context, such as, its early relations to left class politics. However, the qualified freedom from a colonial centre may have brought further advantages in developing a critical edge. The particular mix of the aboriginal struggles, white British and other European ‘heritage’, and growing multiculturalism has proved to be a very potent brew for questioning the relationship of gender and ethnicity. There has been here a relatively greater visibility of gay studies, itself closely related to the buoyant gay scenes of Sydney and some other cities, and very important recent work on men’s health and men in representation.
In both UK and Australia, there is little demand to create a ‘new discipline’ of ‘men’s studies’; most of the women and men involved in developing these studies have done so in a critical relation to existing disciplines, such as sociology or women’s studies. There have also been strong arguments that studies on men are and always have been part of women’s studies. The term ‘men’s studies’ is rarely used, apart from as a term of abuse or by international publishers. It is usually taken to mean US-based studies that are not pro-feminist or are worse. This also illustrates the more general point that it is inaccurate to refer to Anglophone or Anglo-American literature, as if it is one unified thing. Instead it often encompasses quite different and opposing traditions.
Nordic research: positive aspects of men
Nordic research on men is set within different contexts again: relative societal ethnic homogeneity (though less so in Sweden), faith in welfare reform, relatively positive relations of citizens and state, small nation nationalism. There is also the different character of feminism and the women’s movement in different Nordic countries, including an often close, though uneven, relation of feminism and the state, the development of state feminism, and less emphasis on an autonomous movement. All these are relevant when considering relative Nordic gender equality (or relatively less gender inequality) when seen on a global scale. Such progressive features can feed into the myth of gender equality and the genderless citizen in some Nordic debates.
This can create a complex setting for studies on men. There has been some active Nordic research and networking on men amongst women and men. While it is clearly difficult to summarise this work, especially strong features include detailed empirical work and some broad surveys, attention to the positive aspects of men and changing men, and the diversity of men’s positions and practices such as on fatherhood. Less prominent have been gay studies, structural analyses of men’s power, and (outside Sweden) studies of men and ethnicity. There is also a different relation of studies on men to equality politics rather than more directly to feminism (as compared to US, UK or Australia). This can lead to an overstatement of the extent of equality between women and men, and even a demand for more equality of women’s studies and ’men’s studies’. It can also have contradictory effects in highlighting the specificity, diversity, even unpredictability, of men’s experiences, as well as playing down men’s structural power, say, in violence or in the corporate sector.
Three suggestions
In conclusion, I would like to make the following direct suggestions:
- First, that national studies take a less ethnocentric, less national(istic) and less regional view, and look at men in a more informed global context that also takes seriously the implications of global political economy, structural inequalities, radical multiculturalism and postcolonial debates.
- Second, that these (Critical) Studies on Men are located within the contex of Women’s Studies and Gender Research, changing existing disciplines, and not as some putative ‘new discipline’, which they are not (any more than ‘White Studies’ would be a discipline equivalent to Black Studies).
- Third, there is the question of naming. Some of these differences noted are summed up in the naming of the studies. The term ‘Men’s Studies’ is the one that ‘rolls off the tongue’ most easily. But it is also inaccurate and politically dangerous. It feeds the idea that ‘Men’s Studies’ is equivalent or parallel to Women’s Studies. It is also ambiguous – is it studies on men or by men? And it is also not necessarily critical at all. Studying men or studies by men are in themselves of no special interest; these have been done very badly for thousands of years. The term ‘men’s studies’ is used most often in the US, in the Nordic region, and by international publishers. It is also often favoured by those first-language English users who are not interested in developing critical, pro-feminist studies. To refer to ‘Men’s Studies’ can for them be a safe haven, where men can find their ‘voice’ and that of other men again. The use of ‘Men’s Studies’ can mask misogyny. It has not in my experience been used by most first English-language women and men researchers and academics most involved in developing Critical Studies on Men over the last 20 years. This issue has also been debated in the context of the International Association for Studies on Men (established in the early 1990s and co-ordinated from Norway). This is deliberately named as such, and not as the International Association of Men’s Studies. So, third, I suggest that however studies on men are to be named in Nordic languages, this is not translated as ‘Men’s Studies’ in English. ‘Studies on Men’ is better; and if they are critical, then ‘Critical Studies on Men’ is better still.
Implications
Critical Studies on Men can be characterised as: critical; on men; explicitly gendered; and by men and women, separately or collaboratively. Their development has many implications. It implies drastic rewritings of academic disciplines, and their frequent ignoring that their ’science’ has been dominantly done by men, for men, and even primarily about men. It remains truly amazing how many men social scientists seem to able to ’forget’ that the objects of their study – economy, state, international relations, national politics, crime, violence, etc. – are very difficult to understand without explicit analysis of men and gender relations generally. In Finland, like many other countries, it is quite possible to be a respected male academic without paying any attention to feminist and critical gender scholarship, including that on men. It is time that most men social scientists stopped producing their pre-scientific imaginings, and moved onto some more accurate analysis of how societies work.
