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1 – 10 of 263Johanna Kingsman and Ian Davis
This paper examines the impact of lived experiences and attitudinal blueprints on researchers within the context of masculinities research. It explores the negotiation of gendered…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper examines the impact of lived experiences and attitudinal blueprints on researchers within the context of masculinities research. It explores the negotiation of gendered roles, exploring how personal narratives shape our engagement in gender research and the collaborative process of meaning-making. It discusses the methodological tensions surrounding narrative research and naturalistic inquiry when investigating masculinities.
Design/methodology/approach
Adopting a feminist post-structuralist lens, this paper analyses the discursive nature of masculinities and its theoretical and historical construction, alongside the use of narrative research methodologies in research practices.
Findings
The paper reinforces the importance of feminist frameworks in deconstructing gender norms and challenging implicit assumptions. The role of reflexivity in the research process and the potential for researcher subjectivity as a resource is emphasised. Drawing on existing scholarship and the authors' empirical research experiences, the importance of researcher reflexivity in recognising the potential for gender performativity in the research setting is emphasised, especially in gendered research spaces and when engaging with methodologies tacitly understood through gendered ideological lenses.
Research limitations/implications
The paper contributes to ongoing scholarly discussions exploring the intersection of gender, theory and practice.
Originality/value
The paper's theoretical exploration contributes to understandings of gender dynamics in research and offers insights into the complexities of conducting masculinities research from a critical perspective. The paper contributes to ongoing scholarly discussions exploring the intersection of gender, theory and practice.
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Ian Davis and Mark Vicars
The purpose of this paper is to present two examples how stories and storying can be utilised to excavate forgotten points and junctures that result as fundamental episodes in the…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to present two examples how stories and storying can be utilised to excavate forgotten points and junctures that result as fundamental episodes in the forming of the subjective selves. Writing in-between masculinity and queerness both stories trace the experience of two boys through accounts of initiation and subjection.
Design/methodology/approach
Using autobiography as a method, in concert with Deleuzian-Guattarian notions of becoming and becoming other the paper explores how the discovery of subjective difference informs how the work of identity making and survival take place.
Findings
What is uncovered in the process of the paper is how we learn the disguises needed for survival through an early encounter away from the dominating and into the dominated. In this process of becoming other strategies are designed to disguise difference and avoid detection.
Social implications
The gaps and fissures that exist between intergenerational positions in conjunction with the straight/gay sexuality binary provide the environment within which the paper operates. Through personal biography the paper investigates how this structure informs the subjective positionality and the identity construction.
Originality/value
The openness of the writing found in both of these accounts, although clearly a narrative construction, are also akin to a stream of remembering or spontaneous prose writing. The accounts themselves are not heavily edited; they have not been figured and refigured to produce pleasing literary effects. Instead they remain raw utilising narrative tropes such as flash-back and dramaturgy simply as conduits to memory. The tropes that are employed could be read as defensive or distancing mechanism, a protection against the capacity of the unfolding lived experience to disturb and disrupt.
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The transcript talks about early days of disaster risk reduction from a community based perspective all the way from the 70s.
Abstract
Purpose
The transcript talks about early days of disaster risk reduction from a community based perspective all the way from the 70s.
Design/methodology/approach
The transcript and video was developed in the context of a UNDRR project on the History of DRR.
Findings
The transcript presents learnings from past experiences using citizenry-based development-oriented disaster management.
Originality/value
Citizenry-based development-oriented disaster management is not yet fully captured in the literature.
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The growing public anxiety towards the end of the twentieth century that men were “in crisis” was articulated in popular-cultural texts. The purpose of this paper is to examine…
Abstract
Purpose
The growing public anxiety towards the end of the twentieth century that men were “in crisis” was articulated in popular-cultural texts. The purpose of this paper is to examine the TV family sitcom Modern Family, in order to explore the ways that it constructs the masculine post-9/11.
Design/methodology/approach
The approach used is that of cultural studies, a field which draws together theorisation and analytical methods from a variety of disciplines.
Findings
Despite the variety of family structures represented in the series Modern Family, its narratives continue to foster traditional notions of patriarchal power. However, the presence of alternate versions of “family” and “masculinity” suggests an awareness of other possibilities.
Practical implications
This paper may model to its readers a way of approaching and analysing other popular-cultural texts for their representations of masculinity.
Social implications
An understanding of the dynamics of masculinity and its alternative forms of masculinity may be likely to have a material impact in the social sphere.
Originality/value
By drawing together theory and analytical approaches from a variety of relevant disciplines, the paper demonstrates that, in the wake of the events of 9/11, there are twin impulses simultaneously to adhere to a familiar, dominant notion of masculinity, yet to propose alternate forms of the masculine.
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Many scholarly disciplines are currently engaged in a turn to affect, paying close attention to emotion, feeling and sensation. The purpose of this paper is to locate affect in…
Abstract
Purpose
Many scholarly disciplines are currently engaged in a turn to affect, paying close attention to emotion, feeling and sensation. The purpose of this paper is to locate affect in relation to masculinity, time and space.
Design/methodology/approach
It suggests that historically, in a range of settings, men have been connected to one another and to women, and these affective linkages tells much about the relational quality and texture of historically experienced masculinities.
Findings
Spatial settings, in turn, facilitate, hinder and modify expressions and experiences of affect and social connectedness. This paper will bring space and time into conversation with affect, using two examples from late nineteenth-century New Zealand.
Originality/value
If masculinities scholars often focus on what divides men from women and men from each other, the paper might think about how affect connects people.
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This is a cautionary tale. In previous research on male-to-female transsexuals, the author's analysis was too knowing, detached, and full of authorial superiority. In other words…
Abstract
Purpose
This is a cautionary tale. In previous research on male-to-female transsexuals, the author's analysis was too knowing, detached, and full of authorial superiority. In other words, it was too masculine. The paper aims to discuss theses issues.
Design/methodology/approach
In this paper, the author brings to the fore the deleterious effects of the masculinist method. The author then writes a palinode in order to allow masculinity and male to be performed and un/tethered differently by and on different bodies and different subjects.
Findings
The paper concludes with a discussion of how a masculinist method emerged and its consequences.
Originality/value
This is a revised look at the author's previous work on the subject.
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This paper aims to bring together feminist philosophy, phenomenology, and masculinity studies to consider the gendered formation of ethical practices, focusing on the construction…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to bring together feminist philosophy, phenomenology, and masculinity studies to consider the gendered formation of ethical practices, focusing on the construction of “male” and “female” identities in quotidian social encounters. While scholarship on masculinity has frequently focused on hegemonic modes of behaviour or normative gender relations, less attention has been paid to the “ethics of people I know” as informal political resources, ones that shapes not only conversations about how one should act (“people I know don’t do that”), but also about the diversity of situations that friends, acquaintances or strangers could plausibly have encountered (“that hasn’t happened to anyone I know”).
Design/methodology/approach
The paper rethinks mundane social securities drawing on Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, and Sara Ahmed to consider anecdotal case studies around gender recognition and political practice, and in doing so also develops the notion of interpellation in relation to everyday ethical problems.
Findings
The paper suggests that inquiry into diverse modes of quotidian complicities – or what de Beauvoir calls the “snares” of a deeply human liberty – can be useful for describing the mixtures of sympathy, empathy, and disavowal in the performance of pro-feminist and queer-friendly masculinities or masculinist identities. It also suggests that the adoption of an “anti-normative” politics is insufficient for negotiating the problems of description and recognition involved in the articulation of gendered social experiences.
Originality/value
This paper approaches questions around political identification commonly considered in queer theory from the viewpoint of descriptive practices themselves, and thus reorients problems of recognition and interpellation towards the expression of ethical statements, rather than focusing solely on the objects of such statements.
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The purpose of this paper is to engage with a foundational gendered imaginary in Western medical and popular discourse regarding fetal sexual development. It is an imaginary that…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to engage with a foundational gendered imaginary in Western medical and popular discourse regarding fetal sexual development. It is an imaginary that consists of dual narratives that bolster an oppositional complementary model of sex-gender. By these accounts male sexual development results from complex and multi-faceted processes generated by the Y chromosome while female sexual development is straightforward, articulated through a discourse of “default sex” (Jost, 1953). Such apparent truths fit seamlessly with the timeworn notion of maleness and masculinity as always already active, and femaleness and femininity always and inevitably passive. In other words, he does and she is.
Design/methodology/approach
Despite embryogenetic findings thoroughly debunking these ideas, contemporary medical and biological textbooks remain haunted by outdated androcentric models of sex development. This paper attends to biomedical and everyday understandings of sex and gender to demonstrate how fresh lines of inquiry produce conditions that enable new ways of understanding bodies and embodied experiences.
Findings
This paper demonstrates how new ways of thinking can lead to a new understanding with regards to sex, gender, bodies, and experiences.
Originality/value
This paper attends to biomedical and everyday understandings of sex and gender to demonstrate how fresh lines of inquiry produce conditions that enable new ways of understanding bodies and embodied experiences.
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– The purpose of this paper is to review the development of the field of knowledge about masculinities, and particularly to show the need for post-colonial perspectives.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to review the development of the field of knowledge about masculinities, and particularly to show the need for post-colonial perspectives.
Design/methodology/approach
Reading major texts in the field and analysing their conclusions, inclusions, and exclusions.
Findings
Study of masculinities is necessary to gain an adequate understanding of the whole field of gender relations. This field is now global, but the consequences of a global field of knowledge are not sufficiently recognized because of the continuing hegemony of the global north in theory, methodology, and academic networks. The coloniality of gender is outlined. Significant contributions from the global south are identified and the issues involved in decolonizing the field of masculinity studies are analysed.
Research limitations/implications
Mainly Anglophone texts discussed.
Practical implications
Redesign of curricula for teaching in this area; redeployment of resources in academic publishing and other knowledge production projects.
Social implications
Knowledge in this area is relevant to HIV prevention, poverty reduction, economic development, prevention of violence, international conflict, and educational attainment.
Originality/value
To stimulate rethinking among scholars in the field of masculinity and gender studies, and through them among those dealing with the practical issues mentioned.
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