petersen research on men

This article offers some reflections on the challenges posed by recent trends in social the-
ory to the field of masculinity studies. The postmodern/poststructural turn in theory has
led to a reappraisal of basic concepts in many fields of research and opened up new areas
for investigation. The article outlines the relevance of this work for masculinity studies
and draws some implications for the future development of the field. If scholars are to
effectively challenge the power relations of gender, race, and sexuality, it is important
that they critically examine the discursive frameworks that shape the fabrication of con-
cepts, the definition of problems, and the formulation of research questions. The article
concludes by proposing a revised and broadened agenda for research on men and mas-
culinities, which pays greater attention to the politics of knowledge and makes greater
use of historical methods to analyze power relations and the social constructions of mas-
culine identity and the male body.

Key words: men and masculinities; masculinity research; postmodernism;
poststructuralism; epistemology; politics of knowledge; identity; male body

This article offers some reflections on the challenges posed by recent

trends in social theory to the field of masculinity studies. The emergence of
postmodernism and poststructuralism in the social sciences and humanities
during the 1980s and 1990s has been a significant theoretical development
that has offered new tools of analysis and opened up new lines for exploration
and critique. The poststructural ideas of Michel Foucault in particular have
influenced many areas of critical enquiry, including feminism, queer theory,
and antiracist and postcolonial studies, prompting scholars to reappraise core
concepts and research foci. Feminists have interrogated such fundamental
concepts as woman, gender, patriarchy, femininity, and women’s experience
and have begun to place greater emphasis on diversity and plurality (Barrett
and Phillips 1992; Grant 1993). Along with other scholars, they have drawn
attention to the dangers of essentializing identity and universalizing experi-
ence and to the exclusions involved in deploying particular categories. The

Author’s Note: I wish to thank the three referees for their useful comments on an earlier version
of this article, and Murdoch University which granted a period of study leave that enabled me to
undertake the research for this article.

Men and Masculinities, Vol. 6 No. 1, July 2003 54-69
DOI: 10.1177/1097184X02250843
© 2003 Sage Publications

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sex/gender division, which has been foundational to second-wave feminism
and which posits a separation between a natural or biological sex and a
socially constructed gender, has also been challenged on the grounds of its
biological determinism, essentialism, and implicit heterosexism.

In this article, I describe a number of aspects of these developments and

draw some implications for future work in the field of masculinity studies.
The critique of the concepts of gender and identity and of the sex/gender
binary raises important questions about the directions of research and the pol-
itics of knowledge. It points to the need for a more reflexive use of categories
and concepts and some reorientation of research focus, with more attention to
issues of epistemology and history. If scholars are to effectively challenge the
power relations of gender, race, and sexuality, it is important that they criti-
cally examine the discursive frameworks that shape the fabrication of con-
cepts, the definition of problems, and the formulation of research questions.
The article concludes by proposing a revised and broadened agenda for
research on men and masculinities, which pays greater attention to the poli-
tics of knowledge and makes greater use of historical methods to analyze
power relations and the constructions of masculine identity and the male
body.

THE POSTSTRUCTURAL CHALLENGE

The recent poststructural turn in social theory challenges conventional

ways of thinking about the relationship between knowledge, power, truth,
and subjectivity. Eschewing structuralists’ search for the underlying rules,
codes, and systems that govern social phenomena, and the urge to develop
grand synthesizing theories, poststructuralists have focused on the inextrica-
ble links between power and knowledge and on how individuals are consti-
tuted as subjects and given unified identities. Poststructuralists have drawn
attention to micropolitics and emphasize subjectivity, difference, and every-
day life (Best and Kellner 1991, 19, 24). Universalist and scientistic claims to
be able to know, objectively, all there is to know (i.e., “the truth”) have been
rejected in favor of the view that knowledge is socially and historically spe-
cific and always grounded in a particular experience. In recent years,
poststructural ideas have found wide application in research in the social sci-
ences and humanities, including a number of areas of critical scholarship
such as feminism, queer theory, and antiracist and postcolonial studies. This
has led to the reinvigoration of many fields of academic enquiry, involving
the critique of basic concepts and strategies and the development of novel
topics of investigation.

In particular, the dualistic distinctions that underlie our descriptions of the

world (e.g., subject/object, self/other, nature/culture, mind/body, private/
public, sex/gender, and heterosexual/homosexual) have been vigorously

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interrogated, showing how they may serve to exclude and limit understand-
ing. There have been many innovative studies focusing on taken-for-granted
categories, for example, the cultural representation of whiteness rather than
blackness or color, which has been the usual focus in studies of race (e.g., see
Dyer 1997). New kinds of historical study have been undertaken, drawing
particularly on Foucault’s genealogical method, elaborated in his writings
such as The History of Sexuality (1980). Foucault’s concept of discourse,
which links power and knowledge, has found applications in the study of
diverse topics, offering new insights and new ways of understanding familiar
topics (e.g., sexuality and deviance). Historical studies of sexuality and sex
have helped recast thinking about these phenomena, which are no longer seen
as intrinsic and fixed aspects of the person, but rather understood as discur-
sive constructions or inventions (e.g., Katz 1995; Laqueur 1990; Weeks
1985, 1990).

The questioning of identity has occurred across the social sciences and

humanities, leading scholars and activists in the fields of feminism, gay and
lesbian studies, and antiracist and postcolonial studies to rethink the strategic
role of identity politics in contemporary radical practice. Queer theorists, for
instance, have explored the implications and consequences of the identity
politics of the gay and lesbian movements, that is, the strategy of “coming out
of the closet” (e.g., Sedgwick 1994). In the above areas, fundamental issues
of epistemology have been highlighted, leading scholars to reflect on the pol-
itics of their adherence to particular ways of seeing. Within feminism, there
has been increasing acknowledgement of the politics of location (Rich 1986),
which implies attention to where one is speaking from and a consciousness of
the exclusions that one’s politics perpetuate. It is recognized that the politics
of white feminists—who produce most of the published feminist theory—
have often excluded the interests of black and Third World women (Jordan
and Weedon 1995, 215).

The insights generated by scholars working in the above areas have direct

implications for the field of masculinity studies. In particular, they should
prompt scholars to consider the extent to which essentialism and dualistic
distinctions are embedded in the categories and concepts that they employ.
Evidence of essentialism, that is, “a belief in true essence . . . that which is
most irreducible, unchanging, and therefore constitutive of a given person or
thing” (Fuss 1989, 2), is widespread in writings on gender, perhaps most evi-
dently in popular (e.g., mythopoetic) literature on men. The tendency to
essentialize gender differences is not limited to the political or religious right,
or even to popular men’s movements. It is also a feature of some feminist
writings where gender differences are characterized as fundamental and
timeless (Coltrane 1994, 45). As Grosz (1995, 47-48) argued, essentialism is
seen to entail the belief that those characteristics defined as women’s/men’s
essences are shared in common by all women/men at all times and underlie
all apparent variations differentiating women/men from each other. It implies

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a limit on the variations and possibilities for change and thus of social reorga-
nization, and for this reason has been of central concern to contemporary
feminists and other critical theorists. Most contemporary theorists reject
essentialism, although some recognize the necessity of occasionally employ-
ing essentialist descriptions for strategic purposes, that is, “strategic
essentialism” (Sayer 1997, 454-55). Essentialism is likely to be sustained by
the governing frameworks of knowledge that influence the choice of research
topics and the selection of categories, concepts, and methodologies. The
recent emergence of antiessentialism in the social sciences represents a sig-
nificant challenge to all studies of gender since it involves a fundamental
questioning of established categories and concepts, especially those that
assume the existence of fixed, homogenous, and mutually exclusive identi-
ties, including man and woman. The antiessentialist critique should cause
scholars to reflect on the use of categories and, where necessary, rethink their
strategic value.

It is important that writers be aware of the implications of adhering to the

dualistic distinctions (i.e., in/out, either/or) that underlie discussions about
differences. Second-wave feminists have critiqued the notion that observed
differences between the situation and experiences of men and women are
fundamentally a product of nature—the biology-as-destiny argument—on
the grounds that this has been frequently used to explain and legitimize
inequalities. When masculinity scholars and feminists rally against
essentialism, in most cases they are targeting the assumption that there is an
underlying essential, usually biologically based, dichotomy between men
and women. Thus, much cross-cultural comparative work has been under-
taken with the aim of debunking this claim by showing that there is consider-
able cross-cultural variation in the organization and expression of gender
(e.g., see Coltrane 1994, 45-48; Cornwall and Lindisfarne 1994). In differ-
ence feminism, essentialism has less to do with biological facts than with the
ways in which “culture marks bodies and creates specific conditions in which
they live and recreate” (Gatens 1992, 133). As Gatens (1992, 135) explained,
difference feminism is “concerned with the mechanisms by which bodies are
recognized as different only insofar as they are constructed as possessing or
lacking some socially privileged quality or qualities,” which are then taken as
fundamental ontological differences.

Much recent research on men and masculinities has focused on socially

constructed differences between men and on how some masculinities come
to be constructed as hegemonic (e.g., Connell 1995; Kaufman 1994; Kimmel
1994). The replacement of the unitary concept of masculinity with the plural-
ized concept of masculinities occurred because it was recognized that there
are hierarchies among men, as well as between women and men, and that the
power relations of gender are complex and multifaceted (Kimmel 1994, 124-
26). However, as it became popularized, masculinities has sometimes lost its
dimension of power and simply come to signify diversity or plurality (Brod

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1994, 86; Hearn and Collinson 1994, 112-14). Definitions of masculinity
often entail little more than the compilation of lists of what are seen to be
characteristic masculine qualities or attributes such as aggressivity, competi-
tiveness, and emotional detachment, which, it is implied, distinguish it from
its counterpart, femininity (passivity, cooperativeness, emotionality, etc.).
That is, despite scholars’ rejection of essentialism, masculinity is often
referred to as though it had a definable, distinctive essence. Scholars often
seem not to recognize that masculinity escapes precise empirical definition
and that such identified traits at best represent “tendencies and possibilities
that individuals have more or less access to at different points in time, and
coexist in an uneasy and messy alliance” (MacInnes 1998, 15). The notion of
masculinity may contain many images and behaviors that may be competing,
contradictory, and mutually undermining, and that “completely variant
notions of masculinity can refer simultaneously or sequentially to the same
individual” (Cornwall and Lindisfarne 1994, 12). As Cornwall and Lindis-
farne (1994, 12) noted,

Meaning depends on who is speaking and who is being described in what set-
ting. Masculinity has multiple and ambiguous meanings which alter according
to context and over time. Meanings of masculinity also vary across cultures and
admit to cultural borrowing; masculinities imported from elsewhere are con-
flated with local ideas to produce new configurations.

The notion of masculinity as a composite of distinct qualities or attributes

or a single definable essence is a myth that is perpetuated by scholars through
their research and writing, particularly in their failure to acknowledge the his-
tory of, and particular significations attached to, the term masculinity. The
specific historical and social constructions of masculinity cannot be dissoci-
ated from constructions of femininity and, like other terms such as male, men,
female, and women, it is difficult to speak of masculinity without implying a
binary notion of gender (Cornwall and Lindisfarne 1994, 11, cited in
Threadgold 1990).

An enduring problem in research on gender, from any perspective, has

been the tendency to focus on differences between women and men and to
overlook extensive similarities between the sexes and even the extensive vari-
ation within each sex (Howard and Hollander 1997, 12). The reasons for this
focus on difference are manifold, and include the enduring historical influ-
ence of post-Enlightenment theories of sexual complementarity, which pos-
tulate that the minds and bodies of men and women are quite different in ways
that make them complementary; the pervasiveness of psychological theories
of identity formation that tie the quest for self-identity to distinctions of gen-
der (knowing who we are implies knowing who we are not); and the inclina-
tion of academic journals and mainstream publishers to focus on research
findings of difference, which is seen as more newsworthy than research on

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similarities (Lloyd 1984; Howard and Hollander 1997, 12-13). Both
research and writing reinforces “the essentialist belief that there are large,
stable, innate differences between the sexes and encourages biological expla-
nations for those few differences that are resiliant” (Howard and Hollander
1997, 12).

Feminist historians and philosophers of science have drawn attention to

the implicit dualistic thinking and biological determinism underlying the
concept of gender. As Haraway (1991, 134) argued, the concept of gender
was formulated within the so-called gender identity paradigm in the decades
after World War II as part of broad liberal reformulation of the life and social
sciences. However, this reformulation “failed to interrogate the political-
social history of binary categories like nature/culture, and so sex/gender, in
colonialist western discourse.” While early second-wave feminists criticized
the nature/culture dualism, argued Haraway, they hesitated to extend their
criticism fully to the derivative sex/gender distinction. Biological determin-
ism and dualistic thinking was carried over into feminist theorizing in the cor-
respondence of sex with nature and gender with culture. The development of
a second-wave feminist politics based on biological determinism versus
social constructionism and the sex/gender distinction was prestructured by a
discourse that was functionalist and essentialist in its orientation and took the
field of biology as a given rather than as a discourse open to intervention.
Within this discourse, the world is posited as an object of knowledge in which
the resources of nature are to be appropriated by culture. In their arguments
against biological determinism and in favor of social constructionism,
Haraway (1991, 134) maintained, feminists have failed to enquire into how
bodies, including sexualized and racialized bodies, appear as objects of
knowledge and sites of intervention in biology.

As queer theorists and many feminist scholars have argued, theories of

gender rely on an implicit heterosexual dualism whereby males and females
learn to become men and women through attaining opposite and distinct
traits based on sex (e.g., see Ingraham 1996). It is taken as an unproblematic
given that opposite sexes are naturally attracted to each other, much like other
aspects of the physical world, for example, magnetic fields. A heterosexual
bias can be seen most clearly in theories of socialization, whereby males and
females are seen to become men and women attaining opposite and distinct
traits based on sex. Many sociological discussions rely on an unstated hetero-
sexual dualism which implies a static and normative understanding of gen-
der. Moreover, few theorists explain the necessity of gender. The theory of
gender as an achieved status never addresses the question of “to what ends
gender is acquired” (Ingraham 1996, 185-86). As Ingraham (1996, 184)
commented,

Contemporary sex-gender ideology provides limited options for how we
organise sexuality, but expanding these options is not simply a matter of

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attending to marginalized sexualities. Instead, it seems to me that we need to
question our assumptions about sex and gender as to how they organize differ-
ence, regulate investigation, and preserve particular power relations, especially
those linked to institutionalized heterosexuality.

The assumed sex/gender binary of second-wave feminist theory has been

undermined by recent historical and theoretical enquiries into the changing
constructions or materializations of sexed bodies (e.g., Butler 1993; Laqueur
1990; Schiebinger 1986, 1993; Hood-Williams 1996, 1997). Thomas
Laqueur’s Making Sex (1990) was an especially influential source in debates
in the 1990s. In this book, Laqueur describes a shift, around the time of the
Enlightenment, from a one-sex model in which women were seen to have the
same sex organs as men but on the inside of their bodies rather than the out-
side, to a two-sex model, in which there are seen to be fundamental differ-
ences between the male and female sexes, and thus between man and woman,
in discoverable biological distinctions. Laqueur’s fundamental point is that
claims about sex always involve claims about gender and power (p. 11).
While in both the one-sex model and the two-sex model there is a hierarchy
obtaining between men and women, in the one-sex model the differences
between the sexes are of degree rather than of nature. Man is the yardstick of
perfection, against which the female sex is measured. Before the emergence
of the two-sex model, to be a man or a woman was above all a rank or cultural
role, and not one form of being biologically different from the other (Badinter
1995, 6). However, during the Enlightenment, the body began to appear as
real and cultural significations as epiphenomena, that is, “biology became the
epistemological foundation for social prescriptions” (Badinter 1995, 7).

This interrogation of gender and sex/gender has far-reaching implications

for how masculinity scholars think about the subject of their investigations.
In many studies, sex has been taken as a pregiven, natural domain, unmedi-
ated by culture and history, while gender is seen as the concomitant cultural
construction, practice, or enactment. Thus, the primary concern has been
with such questions as What is definitive of manhood (as a gendered state of
being or practice)? How one becomes a man (as an acquisition of gender role
and/or gender identity)? What are the personal implications of the crisis in
male identity (loss of gender role and/or gender identity)? An assumed sex/
gender or nature/culture dualism underpins much work in this area. It is taken
as given that sex is the stable bedrock for the social constructions of gender
and that there is a necessary correspondence between biological sex and
social gender. An analysis of how differences in sex become seen as natural,
and how these differences then become the foundation for definitions of gen-
der, would seem to be critical to the task of denaturalizing the sex/gender
dualism and its supportive relations of power. Denaturalizing sex/gender
undermines the heterosexist idea that there are two and only two complemen-
tary sexes/genders. It allows us to imagine other ways of having sex,

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organizing domestic life, and so forth, which construct gender differently,
and potentially to put them into practice (VanEvery 1996, 52). Such critical
deconstructive work is especially important with the recent rise of genetic
reductionist explanations of difference in science and popular culture.
Appeals to explanations of natural sex difference can be used to explain and
legitimize social inequalities in work, domestic arrangements, health status,
and so forth. For example, inequalities between men and women in types of
occupational representation are sometimes explained in terms of natural sex
differences in biological makeup or cognitive functioning (e.g., see Moir and
Jessel 1991).

THE REASSESSMENT OF IDENTITY

The antiessentialist movement in the social sciences has also led to a reas-

sessment of identity as an analytic category, which has profound implications
for identity-based politics. As Epstein (1993/1994) noted, social science con-
ceptions of identity—originally developed in the 1950s—lean toward either
one of two oppositional views, one a psychological reductionism, the other a
sociological reductionism. The first view treats identity as a relatively fixed
and stable characteristic of the person. It reflects the notion that we can know
who someone really is. The second conception treats identity as acquired,
involving “the internalisation or conscious adoption of socially imposed or
socially constructed labels or roles.” According to the acquired definition,
identity is not so deeply inscribed in the psyche of the individual, and so there
is scope for transforming identity. It reflects the belief that the individual can
voluntarily choose to identify as such-and-such (Epstein 1993/1994, 28-29).

Of course, these are ideal-type conceptions, and in the social sciences

attempts have been made to mediate between these contending positions. For
example, psychoanalytic explanations of identity posit a complex interaction
between intrapsychic processes and social expectations. However, the above
two basic conceptions have dominated thinking about identity up to the pres-
ent and have influenced the development of so-called identity politics,
whereby one bases one’s politics on a sense of personal identity—as gay,
Jewish, Black, a male, a female, and so forth (Fuss 1989, 97). As Fuss argued,
the tendency has been to assume that there is a causal relationship between
identity and politics, with the former determining the latter. Thus, there is the
expectation that individuals will claim or discover their true identity before
they elaborate a personal politics. This is especially evident in the gay and
lesbian literature, where there is a familiar tension between a view that iden-
tity is something that is always present (but has been repressed) and that
which has never been socially permitted (but remains to be created or
achieved). This has often led to the reduction of the political to the personal,
and the limitation of political activity to self-discovery and personal

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transformation (Fuss 1989, 99-101). In feminist psychology, in particular,
the dictum “the personal is political” has usually meant that the political is
personalized, as can be seen in the use of the notions of empowerment, revo-
lution from within, and the focus on validating women’s reality (Kitzinger
1996).

Increasingly, identity is seen in the social sciences and humanities as a dis-

cursive construction—one that is arbitrary and exclusionary and acts as a nor-
mative ideal for regulating subjects. This is not to deny human agency and the
possibility for the self to fashion itself. However, to view identity as fabri-
cated disturbs the widely held assumption that identity is relatively stable and
is made up of various fixed components, particularly gender, sexuality, race,
and ethnicity, conceived as relatively independent aspects of one’s being. As
Edwards (1990) pointed out, there has been a tendency to treat sex and gen-
der, and sexuality and gendered identity, as separate entities or aspects of
identity. Moreover, race has been either totally neglected or viewed, like sex,
as a natural category. The separation of these categories in research and writ-
ings reflects the dualism between nature and culture, referred to above, that
has been part of Western thinking since the nineteenth century (Edwards
1990, 111). One of the legacies of this dualistic thinking is that, in writings
about men and masculinities, masculine identity is often conceived as being
simply a composite of various natural and socially constructed attributes.
Thus, one is a homosexual man, a black man, a white heterosexual man, an
able-bodied young man, and so forth. The problem with the use of this addi-
tive model of identity is that no matter how exhaustive the description, there
will always be exclusions and disjunctions between imposed identity labels
and personal experiences. There is literally an infinite number of ways in
which the components of identity can intersect or combine to make up mas-
culine identity. There is an arbitrariness about any identity construction,
which will inevitably entail the silencing or exclusion of some experiences.
The critique of identity does not necessarily mean that one should disavow
identity, but rather that one needs to be constantly aware of the fictitious char-
acter of identity and of the dangers of imposing an identity. On some occa-
sions, there may be some strategic benefit in mobilizing around an identity,
conceived as a fixed and unitary category, as when appeals to women are used
to redress gender inequalities in health care (e.g., Broom 1991) and advance
affirmative action goals (e.g., see Bacchi 1996, 163). However, recent theo-
retical work questions the notion that identities must always be secure so that
one can do political work (Fuss 1989, 105).

Queer scholars, in particular, have raised questions about the dangers of

essentializing sexual identity and the deployment of simple additive (and, by
implication, exclusionary) models of identity. Writers such as Eve Sedgwick
(1994), Diana Fuss (1989), and Judith Butler (1990) have drawn attention to
the profound impact of the heterosexual/homosexual distinction on our
thinking about categories and distinctions such as masculine/feminine,

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secrecy/disclosure, majority/minority, natural/artificial, domestic/foreign,
health/illness, same/different, active passive, and in/out. As Sedgwick (1994,
41) explained, “There currently exists no framework in which to ask about
the origins or development of individual gay identity that is not already struc-
tured by an implicit, trans-individual Western project or fantasy of eradicat-
ing that identity.” The recent queer critique of sexual epistemology and of
identity politics involves a reexamination of assumptions about the relation-
ship between sexuality and identity, particularly the idea that people have a
natural sexual orientation that is normally heterosexual. This work draws
attention to the political and practical implications of the loosening of the
connection between sexuality and identity. It leads one to question the mean-
ings of gay-affirmative work as promoted by many scholars and activists.
Discussions about masculine identity are generally prefigured by a discourse
that takes as given the heterosexual/homosexual division and all that that
implies; for example, the assumption that subjects have relatively fixed and
mutually exclusive identities, the denial of the construction and fluidity of
desire, and the marginalization of those who identify as neither gay nor het-
erosexual. As queer theorists have pointed out, political projects designed to
liberate subjects, whether they be small-scale confessional or therapeutic
practices or large-scale social movements, often amount to ways of fixing
identities and shaping subjectivities through the knowledges that they gener-
ate. Recent work underlines the arbitrariness of the sexual classificatory sys-
tem and the ways in which an appeal to nature may be used to regulate sexual
identities by allowing corporeal distinctions to be drawn between the pure
and the impure, the hygienic and the unhygienic, the healthy and the
unhealthy, and so forth. As a consequence of this work, the notion of a natural
sexual orientation is increasingly difficult to sustain.

SHIFTING THE RESEARCH FOCUS

Recent theoretical work emphasizes the importance of scrutinizing basic

categories, concepts, and assumptions that guide research on men and mas-
culinity. As Frank (1993) noted, insofar as masculinity studies fails to criti-
cally examine man-made explanations of the world, it offers no profound
oppositional discourse. Although gender has become an object of enquiry,
this tends to be conceived as yet another variable to be added to “the already
long list of variables to be measured” while business continues as usual
(Frank 1993, 336).

Even with the awareness of the social construction of gender within patriarchal
relations, there is still either the lack of recognition—or the purposeful avoid-
ance—of any analysis of the historicity and the social construction of the actual
theories and the methods themselves that produce knowledge. The power of
these historical and social products (the theoretical stance and methodological

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procedures) produced within the patriarchal gaze used to gain an understand-
ing of people’s lives and the resulting consequences, are taken for granted, and
thus temporalized and depoliticized. In-so-far as these disciplinary practices
produce women, and some men, as subordinate, their methods of observation
and inquiry and the resulting production of theory do little to reorganize the
objectified “ways of knowing” (Frank 1993, 336-37).

One of the important contributions of recent theoretical and historical

work has been to highlight the role of the social and natural sciences in the
construction of knowledge of human subjects and in shaping people’s aware-
ness of themselves as subjects. Although in the broader culture there is a ten-
dency to view natural and social knowledge as mutually exclusive, increas-
ingly it has become clear that all knowledge, including biological
knowledge, is socially produced and reflects prevailing assumptions about
normal embodiment and subjectivity. Historical deconstruction has proved
invaluable in demonstrating the historical variability of our ways of knowing
and thus underlining the fact that things could be otherwise. It has been suc-
cessfully employed by sexuality scholars and feminists in the past (e.g.,
Laqueur 1990; Lloyd 1984; Ehrenreich and English 1973, 1979; Oudshoorn
1994; Schiebinger 1989; Weeks 1985, 1990) and could be useful employed
by masculinity scholars to investigate questions pertaining to the epistemol-
ogy of masculinity. Some interesting work on the history of the constructions
of masculinity and the male body has already been undertaken—for example,
George Mosse’s The Image of Man (1996), Joanna Bourke’s Dismembering
the Male (1996), Anthony Rotundo’s American Manhood (1993), and Gra-
ham Dawson’s Soldier Heroes (1994). Through such investigations, writers
have demonstrated that what are taken to be the norms of masculinity and
male embodiment are historically contingent, constantly in flux, and open to
contestation. By disrupting our taken-for-granted assumptions about men
and masculinity, historical deconstruction serves an important strategic func-
tion in allowing us to imagine alternative futures. For example, much of the
above work emphasizes that aggressive or militaristic behavior need not be
an integral and inevitable aspect of masculine identity. Further research is
required to elaborate on the complex linkages between the power relations of
gender, sexuality, race, and various constructions of masculine identity and
the male body, and show how these constructions serve to exclude and
oppress.

Recent work in the social sciences has drawn attention to the importance

of the body as a site for investigations into gender, sexuality, and power.
Under the influence of the ideas of Michel Foucault in particular, many writ-
ers have challenged the naturalistic view of the body, which has a fixed struc-
ture and immutable desires and behaviors. For example, the idea of a normal
masculine heterosexual desire is questioned by recent Foucauldian-inspired
social constructionism (see Katz 1995). Rather than seeing bodies as biologi-
cally given, or prediscursive, bodies have come to be seen as fabricated

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through discourse as an effect of power/knowledge (e.g., see Butler 1993).
Masculinity scholars could take their cue from this work to reveal the ways in
which the male body has been posited as both object and site for the exercise
of power and to explore the implications of this for the subjectivities of men.
It needs to be asked why some male bodies are invested with more visibility
and power than others and how natural knowledge is deployed in the con-
struction of differences between the sexes. As yet, there has been relatively
little analysis of how different male bodies have been constructed in dis-
course and how differences between men and women, and between men,
have come to be seen as natural differences. Feminist historians and philoso-
phers of science and supportive male scholars have shown how the produc-
tion of natural knowledge, for example, in the discipline of anatomy, has been
shaped by social assumptions about male/female difference (e.g., Giacomini,
Rozée-Koker, and Pepitone-Arreola-Rockwell 1986; Lawrence and
Bendixen 1992; Moore and Clarke 1995; Petersen 1998; Schiebinger 1986,
1989, 1993). This work underscores the necessity to challenge the represen-
tations of science and its constructions of masculinity and femininity. This
analysis needs to be extended to the social sciences as well, including psy-
chology and sociology, which are often underpinned by theories of natural
difference (e.g., see Domenici and Lesser 1995; Petersen and Davies 1997;
Seidman 1996). Scholars can usefully contribute to the task of exposing the
diverse ways in which the sciences normalize differences by making those
differences appear as inevitable by-products of nature, for example, by
undertaking discourse analyses of scientific texts that focus on sex
differences.

The recent resurgence of interest in biological, particularly genetic, expla-

nations of human differences in science and the broader culture (e.g., see
Nelkin and Lindee 1995; Petersen 1999) should prompt scholars to reflect on
the context within which knowledge is produced and disseminated. Such the-
ories have appeared with renewed vigor during a period in which there has
been a conservative backlash against virtually all minority groups and against
the gains made by feminists, gay and lesbian people, and peoples of non-
European descent. They have been strategically employed by dominant
groups to draw boundaries between Self and Other, justify rights, and deny
rights. As Nelkin and Lindee argued (1995, 399), the findings of genetic
research can be used by those who believe that education will make no differ-
ence in the social status of indigenous peoples, by those who would seek to
change homosexual behavior through medical intervention, and by those
who are opposed to equality in general. It needs to be asked why there has
been a renewed interest in genetic explanations of human differences in pop-
ular culture and science, and how such work is used to argue for discrimina-
tory policies and practices. Work such as that of Simon LeVay (1994) and
Dean Hamer (Hamer & Copeland 1994) in the United States, which focus on
the biological bases of male homosexuality, and of Moir and Jessel (1991) in

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the United Kingdom, which focuses on biological differences between men
and women, has struck a resonant chord among a broad section of the popula-
tion. There have been numerous efforts in the past to intervene into the bodies
and lives of women on the assumption that their bodies are naturally inferior,
and various forms of treatment have been meted out to homosexuals on the
assumption of that their condition is a result of a failure of some biological
function (e.g., see Birke 1982; Ehrenreich & English 1979; Minton 1996;
Terry 1995). It is likely that studies of biological difference will continue to
be used in these ways so long as science, and biological science in particular,
remains unchallenged as the privileged arbiter of the truth on questions of dif-
ference. There needs to be greater sensitivity to the history of the deploy-
ments of natural knowledge for the control and/or annihilation of that which
is deemed to be different and to the potential for such knowledge to be used to
delineate boundaries between the normal (i.e., included) and the abnormal
(i.e., excluded). If scholars are to usefully contribute to our understanding of
the social structuring of gender-based power and inequality and of the mech-
anisms for social change, it is important that they remain reflexive in their
social theorizing and aware of the implications of their adherence to particu-
lar ways of knowing.

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