| In effect, masculinity becomes a rhetorical currency by which opposition to global integration, state centralization and increasing ethnic heterogeneity can be mobilized.
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| In effect, masculinity becomes a rhetorical currency by which opposition to global integration, state centralization and increasing ethnic heterogeneity can be mobilized.
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lol
You may very well be right, but there's a lot of noise being made by men in the psychology and education fields about redefining masculinity to suit feminist doctrine (Remember our friend, Prof. Jay Wade?). They make a very big deal about this new word they've coined - "masculinities" - note the plural usage.
Discourse(s) of PowerOne doesn't need to disect and analyze that crap to get its meaning: "Men have to go, one way or another."'Masculinity', to the extent that the term can be briefly defined at all, is simultaneously a place in gender relations, the practices through which men and women engage that place in gender, and the effects of these practices in bodily experience, personality and culture. The definition offered by Connell (1995: 71), though complex, is suggestive. It warns us that masculinity is not the property of men, and reminds us to be wary of using the terms 'men', 'male' and 'masculinity' interchangeably. Discourses of masculinity are available to, used by and imposed upon both men and women.
"As a woman, I am a consumer of masculinities, but I am not more so than men are; and, like men, I as a woman am also a producer of masculinities and a performer of them. (Sedgwick 1995: 13)Understanding masculinity as discourse broadens the focus beyond men and the biological or cultural bases of their masculine nature or identity. The challenge confronting development practitioners concerned with men's relationship to gender equality is to place this relationship in the context of relations of power not only between but also within the genders. Addressing masculinity as discourse (by whom? for what purposes?) helps this placement by clarifying the values and practices that create such hierarchies of power. Misogyny, homophobia, racism and class/status-based discrimination are all implicated in a 'politics of masculinity' that is developed and deployed by men to claim power over women, and by some men to claim power over other men.Discursive perspectives on masculinity are interested in the ways that it becomes a site for these claims and contests of power. Such perspectives pluralize masculinity into masculinities and note the way that subordinate masculinities emerge in resistance to the power claims of hegemonic masculinities.
Pluralizing masculinity into masculinities is more than a way to explain there are many ways to be a man. It is useful for understanding the connections between masculinities and the distribution and effects of power and resistance among the different forms of masculinity. This has significant implications for development work on men and gender equality. It suggests that such work should not be confined by a concern to work on masculinity in order to reform the male identity and offer men better ways of being a man, however useful such work may be to specific individuals. An understanding of the 'politics of masculinity' indicates that the values and practices (individual and institutional) that create gender inequality are also intimately involved in the creation of other hierarchies of oppression. Challenging these values and practices implies working with both women and men, at the policy and programme level, to mobilize constituencies for change in which gender equality goals are integral to movements and coalitions for social justice.
It's been clear for some time now that the global socialist matriarchy, envisioned by those seriously radical feminists who swarm around the UN, doesn't have any men in it. The precise method by which men are eliminated is never discussed, but "masculinity" always seems to have disappeared. Those women are really creepy.