Masculinism
AL Bain and C Arun-Pina, Department of Geography, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada
© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary
Duppy feminism A version of male feminism as practiced by male academic geographers who are theoretically,
philosophically, and practically committed to feminism, but who may fail to fulfill these tenets in all of their work and actions.
Female masculinity A term used to refer a range of subject positions (e.g., drag king; butch; tomboy; female-to-male) that
perform masculinity in different ways and, in so doing, challenge the notion that masculinity can only be attributed to
a supposedly self-evident male body.
Hegemonic masculinity The version of masculinity that is most highly valued, legitimated, and respected in society; it works to
disempower women and to subordinate other men.
Masculinism Pervasive patriarchal ideologies of masculine cultural dominance.
Masculinist rationality A form of knowledge that emerged during the scientific revolution that assumes a knower who is white,
bourgeois, heterosexual, and male and a knower who can separate mind from body to produce supposedly unbiased and
objective knowledge.
Men’s studies An interdisciplinary academic field of study that focuses on men’s experiences, interests, and issues.
Patriarchal dividend The general advantage that men gain from the overall subordination of women.
Reflexivity A self-critical, introspective consideration of how the positionality of the researcher and his/her subject(s) and the
relations of power between them may influence the research process.
The gaze A form of knowledge identified by feminists as masculinist for the unidirectional way in which people and things are
transformed into objects of consumption by the vision of a viewer in a privileged position of power.
Transgender An umbrella term used to describe people who have a gender identity or gender expression that is different from
their medically assigned sex at birth, that includes a range of gender identifications (e.g., transsexuals, genderqueer, nonbinary,
third gender, bigender, agender, male-to-female, and female-to-male).
Research in geography on gender was initiated by feminist geographers in the mid-1970s. Much of this early work drew on feminist
politics and theories to examine how gender relations are structured and transformed across space. Particular attention was directed
toward developing a critical discourse about women’s oppression in society and an understanding of the ways in which women’s
oppression has been perpetuated in the development of geographical theory and knowledge. In subsequent decades, feminist geographers challenged the notion of universal womanhood and sought to theorize the ways in which multiple and intersectional axes
of differencedclass, racialization, citizenship, sexuality, age, religion, and abilitydfractured identities and produced complex geographies. Out of the ensuing celebration of diversity and difference within feminist social theory came a recognition that gender is not
merely an attribute of femininity and therefore only of interest to women academics and women students; men and masculinities
are just as gendered as women and femininities. Consequently, the feminist debate was broadened to not just indirectly imply, but
rather to directly engage ideologies of masculinity. Some feminist geographers in conjunction with feminist male scholars within
other disciplines began to explicitly focus their research attention on men, masculinity, and men’s powers, practices, and identities.
This effort to open up lines of scholarly debate to include analyses of the meanings and enactments of dominant identities that have
typically been taken for granted (e.g., whiteness and heterosexuality) could also be seen in other academic fields. Through the
1990s, a geographical, empirically based literature emerged and coalesced around theorizations of the constructions, performances,
and practices of men and masculinities. Over the last decade, scholarly debates have begun to explore masculinities as they intersect
with other marginalized as well as privileged identity categories that are constructed in specific geographical contexts; shaped by
particular intersections of religion, race, and class; and informed by social and affective relationship roles (e.g., partner, wife/
husband, son/brother, friend(s), and housemate).
Theorizations of Men and Masculinities
Outside of the discipline of geography, theorizations of masculinity have been associated with the establishment in the late 1970s of
men’s studies as an interdisciplinary academic field of study variously regarded as a complement or a challenge to women’s studies.
Men’s studies were established in conjunction with the men’s movement to respond to the perceived advantages that women had
received in their struggle for equality through feminist political action and the accompanying loss of male privilege and clear gender
International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2nd edition, Volume 8
https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-102295-5.10280-X
425
426
Masculinism
roles. The men’s movement (variously composed of the anti-sexist men’s movement; the men’s rights movement; and the mythopoetic men’s movement) is a consciousness-raising effort to encourage men to name their experience as “masculine” and to affirm
their male gender and sexual identities. A network of men’s groups and related journals and magazines has developed around this
movement.
Critical research in men’s studies has grown dramatically in the last two decades, dominated, in particular, by research produced
in the disciplines of sociology and psychology. It has focused on men’s experiences, interests, and issues and has opened a range of
topics to political, media, academic, and policy debate that include men’s relation to economic restructuring; new nationalisms;
health, life course, and household changes; fatherhood; consumption patterns; educational underachievement; sexualities; and
violence. These debates have been studied in different disciplinary contexts (e.g., anthropology, sociology, psychology, geography,
social policy, political science, cultural studies, literature) and have raised fundamental questions about men and masculinities.
Certain sorts of fundamental questions have helped to render men more gendered in theoretical terms, which in turn has created
opportunities to challenge previously taken-for-granted assumptions about men’s power, authority, and social practices: What is
a man? How do men obtain and maintain power? How do men embody and perform masculinity? Is there a crisis of masculinity?
Men’s studies has made an important contribution to gender research in geography in that it has helped to foster the interrogation of
masculinity from different perspectives.
A touchstone for much of the work on masculinities, both within the discipline of geography and without, is research by the
Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell who has written widely on the multiple ways of being masculine. Connell has played a significant role in advancing understandings of the ways in which masculinity is (re)constructed within the context of historically and
geographically differentiated social and gender relations. Connell helped to develop the now widely used term “hegemonic masculinity”da term which itself has become hegemonic. Drawing on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of “hegemony,” which refers to the
cultural dynamics whereby a group claims and maintains a dominant social position, Connell defines hegemonic masculinity as the
version of masculinity that is most highly valued, legitimated, and respected in society. Connell argues that in contemporary
Western societies, it is rational, middle-class, and heterosexual masculinity that is the normative standard or the dominant form
of masculinity against which other forms of masculinity are subordinated. Hegemonic cultural norms of what it is to be a man
tell men what is appropriate clothing, conduct, body shape, values, and aspirations if they wish to be recognized in society as suitably masculine. Culturally sanctioned ways of being male are generally associated with evidence of power, physical strength, authoritativeness, confidence, and (hetero)sexual prowess. While few men may actually meet the normative standard, Connell suggests
that the majority of men actually benefit from its hegemony because they profit from the “patriarchal dividend,” the general advantage that men gain from the overall subordination of women. More recently, the sociologist Murray Knuttila has argued that while
men directly benefit from their dominance in society, that benefit exacts a price, first and foremost for women and girls, but also for
men and boys who are under pressure to “man up.” The price that men and boys pay is that they die younger, go to prison, restrict
their emotions, and blunt their humanity.
Connell explains that hegemonic masculinity is a constructed cultural and economic force that is both a personal lived experience and a collective project supported by different institutions (e.g., the state, the workplace, and the school); however, hegemonic
versions of appropriate ways of being masculine can be destabilized, Connell suggests, by changes in social norms and mores.
Dissenting masculinities, such as those performed by men who incarnate traits such as compassion, affection, kindness, cooperation, and homoeroticism in their everyday lives, can challenge hegemonic masculinity. The idea of hegemonic masculinity is important, particularly when coupled with the notion of the pluralization of masculinities, because it emphasizes that despite the variety
of different ways of doing masculinity, essentialized ideas about what it means to be a man remain deeply embedded and
profoundly influential in society.
Geography of Masculinities
Although the discipline of geography has historically been dominated by men, critical analysis of masculinity, particularly that
which is produced by men, has been slow to develop within the scholarly geographical literature. It was not until the early
1990s, two decades after the rise of feminist geographies and its accompanying interest in gender and sexualities, that a geography
of masculinities began to emerge. Influenced by the work of Connell, numerous geographers, particularly those working in the feminist cultural geographical tradition, began to explore variations in masculinity across time and space. After nearly three decades of
research, it could be argued that work on the geography of masculinities has reached a critical mass.
Peter Jackson played a central role in laying a solid foundation for a geography of masculinities. He was the first geographer to
explicitly advocate and detail the intellectual necessity and political utility of men undertaking a sustained critique of men. He
encouraged geographers to explore the contradictions inherent in masculinity in order to reveal the spatial structures that support
dominant forms of masculinity. To this end, he outlined an agenda for “mapping masculinities” that would aim to document and
to challenge the social construction, and the temporal and geographical contingency of masculinity through an examination of the
relationship between masculinity, economic activity, and identity formation; the role of the public and private sphere in varying
expressions of masculinities; gender construction at different spatial scales; homophobia; child abuse; and male organizational fraternization. The relationship between masculinity and economic activity has become a significant area of empirical investigation
within the discipline of geography. Inspired by the work of Jackson and Connell, Linda McDowell led geographical research examining the intersections of masculinity, work, and class. Additional geographic research by Doreen Massey as well as Glendon Smith
Masculinism
427
and Hilary Winchester has further confirmed the significance of work as a key place for the reproduction of men’s power and
masculinities.
More recent geographical research has focused on men at home in their social roles and domestic relationships. Alison Bain’s
work on male-identified artists in families and, in particular, on fathers and fatherhood draws on a broader interdisciplinary
body of literature from legal and family studies, and the health sciences. It approaches fatherhood as a social construction and
explores the ways in which men’s roles and authority within the family have shifted through Western history. Over the last decade,
Andrew Gorman-Murray’s research has been crucial in shaping scholarly geographic discussions of masculinity as relational wherein
gender is understood not as an isolated or absolute category but rather in changing relation to sexuality and particular geographical
contexts and spatial scales. He explores masculinity and domesticity as interrelated and coconstituted conceptual terms within the
Australian (sub)urban home and adds to the wider literature on care ethics, emotional work, and the politics of intimate spaces.
Through case studies of heteromasculine, bachelor, and gay domesticities that provide in-depth understandings of the uneven
gender dynamics of the home, he attends to the ways in which the domestic trajectories and friendships of young men in Australia
from parental home to shared home to on-their-own private home demonstrate practices of the “New Man” that can reconfigure
heteromasculinity. The term “New Man” refers to men who are intimately involved in domestic labor but are not contained or
defined by it; in turn, they construct feminized domestic activities, such as cooking, as recognizably manly. There remains scope
to further explore the geographies of men at homedthe gender division of domestic labor, parenting, and emotional
workdparticularly through a more diverse lens that examines differences across cultures, classes, and sexualities. Within the geographies of sexualities literature, the significant emergent topics of transgender and female masculinity have much to contribute to
any discussion of masculinities, a discussion that also needs to address the Anglo-American bias in much of the work on the geography of masculinities.
(Trans)nationalism and religion are fundamental concepts of belonging and being, that primarily shape gendered understandings and experiences of masculinities. For Yi’En Cheng, Singaporean husbands in international marriages construct masculine identities beyond space and time that are simultaneously situated, rooted, and mobile. For rural-to-urban Nepalese male
migrants to India, Matthew Maycock documents a shifting terrain of masculinities whereby the men are subordinated in the
public spaces of this foreign country, while gaining newer hegemonic privileges in their homeland. Clearly, national context
matters to the production, expression, and validation of masculinities, but so too does religion and history. Banu Gökariksel
and Anna Secor have extended Gorman-Murray’s work on relational masculinity by treating masculinities and Islam as historically coconstitutive and multiple. In their study of Muslim men in Turkey, they examine the intersection of religion and collective gender construction in public and private spaces by tracing the historical spatiality of piety, morality, dress codes, and
masculinity. Chris Gibson, in his study of Australian cowboy masculinities, has also revealed how masculinities are deeply
embedded in racist colonial histories and geographies. Racism, as it manifests through the surveillance, policing, and containment of kitchenettes, housing projects, and prison cells, is central to the argument that Rashad Shabazz makes about the production of Black masculinity in Chicago. He asserts that against a backdrop of poverty and containment, Black men’s “patriarchal
socialization” into culturally dominant narratives of masculinitydof providing for and protecting familydcan become inaccessible for some Black men who then develop ways of performing gender as toughness in the public arena as a means to protect
themselves. Studies of national and transnational masculinities are valuable for their challenges to constructions and narratives
of white masculine subjecthood in the Global North.
The names of female geographers mentioned in previous paragraphs suggest that a noteworthy amount of geographical research
on masculinities has been undertaken by women; however, Peter Jackson’s original request was for men to take advantage of their
insider perspective to undertake work on men. Male geographers, as Jeff Hopkins has documented, have been slow to respond to
Jackson’s request. Nevertheless, important exceptions include the work of Lawrence Berg, Alastair Bonnett, Peter Hopkins, and
Richard Phillips, as well as significant work on homosexual masculinities by Andrew Gorman-Murray, David Bell, Jon Binnie, Gavin
Brown, Michael Brown, and Larry Knopp. When speculating on why critical studies by men on masculinism have been rather
limited relative to the number of males in the discipline, Jeff Hopkins suggests part of the problem could be generational lag
(i.e., older, established male geographers pursuing research interests that they may have established when sexism went unchallenged); credibility concerns for heterosexual males; disinterest; and reluctance to challenge a privileged position in society in
a way that would erode access to power. Clearly, there is scope within geography for men and women of different identities, philosophical perspectives, and geographical contexts outside of the Global North to produce work that is critical of masculinism.
Masculinism in Geography
Masculinism has been conceptualized by feminist geographers as pervasive patriarchal ideologies of masculine cultural dominance.
The university itself has been characterized by feminist geographers like Moss et al. and the Fem-Mentee Collective as an exclusionary and masculinist institution shaped by a masculine homosocial system that disempowers people who identify as feminine
or women. When women as students, faculty, and staff are repeatedly confronted with a mismatch between their lives and the
masculine life of the academe a negative spiral of devaluation is established, which becomes most apparent in the absence of
women and people of color from the upper tiers of university research and administration. In an effort to challenge the toxic
competitiveness and white supremacy of neoliberalizing Anglo-American academia with its exclusive rules and practices of
belonging, feminist geographers advocate practicing an “ethics of care” through feminist mentoring.
428
Masculinism
One of the first usages of the term masculinism in geography was by Gillian Rose in her book Feminism and Geography. In this
groundbreaking book about the gender of geography, Rose powerfully argues that the geographic tradition has been socially and
ideologically structured by male dominanceda set of processes that she unites under the label “masculinism.” She illustrates how
masculinism reveals itself not only in the topics that geographers choose to study, the conceptual frameworks that geographers
employ in their research, and the epistemological claims to exhaustive knowledge that geographers make, but also in the career
structures and teaching strategies of the discipline. Rose asserts that the discipline of geography is masculinist. By this she means
that geographic knowledge has been distorted by false objectivism, authoritativeness, and exhaustiveness, as well as patronizing
views of women and non-Western people. As Lawrence Berg has pointed out, the attachment of geography to objectivity can still
be seen in the blind peer-reviewed process for publication in scholarly journalsdan anonymous review process is often required, in
which author and referee remain unknown to one another. In this process, it is believed that objectivity equates with impartiality,
detachment, disembodiedness, and anonymity.
Masculinist work, feminists argue, is not pluralist, sensitive, or dynamic; instead, it excludes, marginalizes, and silences other
subjectivities and interpretations in the process of knowledge production about the world. It does so, feminists maintain, through
a reliance on “masculinist rationality” and the power of “the gaze.” Masculinist rationality is a form of knowledge that emerged
during the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment. Masculinist rationality assumes a knower who is white, bourgeois, heterosexual, and male; a knower who can separate his mind from his body; a knower who is not influenced by his experiences, values,
passions, or emotions; and a knower who considers his thoughts to be unbiased and objective. This masculinist knower never problematizes his own positionality nor considers the potential partiality of his perspective. Consequently, he can comfortably assume
a master subject position that allows him to confidently generalize about the world. Such an epistemological position is termed
masculinist, not because it is inherent or essential to men, but because of the historical link between value-neutral objectivist social
science and its embodiment in white, bourgeois, heterosexual, able-bodied, cisgender males.
The gaze has also been identified as a masculinist form of knowledge and power by feminists. The gaze refers to the unidirectional process by which people and things are transformed into objects of consumption by the vision of a viewer in a privileged
position of power. In relations of looking, the viewer has the power to control what is seen and how it is seen. Feminist geographers
have argued that landscapes, women, indigenous, and non-Western people have been represented as feminine and passive by the
desire, pleasure, and power of the active male gaze. The power of the masculine gaze to seek to render space and people transparent
is central to Rose’s exploration of the masculinism of contemporary geographical discourse.
Rose uses a critique of time geography and humanistic geography in order to demonstrate how diverse masculine subjectivities
have influenced the production of academic geographical knowledge. Time geography, as developed by the Swedish geographer
Törsten Hägerstrand, uses representational diagrams of the everyday paths taken by individuals through time and space to reveal
the temporospatial structuring of social life. Rose reveals the hegemonic masculinity inherent within time geography’s minimalist
rendering of the body as a neutral vessel without skin color, sexual desire, or emotion and its minimalist rendering of space as an
infinitely knowable, transparent, and freeing medium of social life. The research methods employed by time geographers are characterized by Rose as masculinist for the way in which researchers take spaces and bodies for granted as universal and, in so doing,
exclude different subjectivities and socialities from knowledge; however, such need not necessarily be the case. Inspired by Rose’s
critique, Mei-Po Kwan demonstrates through her “body maps” how geographic information systems (GISs) methods can be used to
visually reveal aspects of women’s everyday lives. She proposes reimagining lines representing women’s life paths in space-time not
as abstract lines in transparent Cartesian space, but as body inscriptions of oppressive power relations that express women’s corporeality and embodied subjectivities. Kwan persuasively argues that the representational possibilities of geospatial technologies (GT)
(e.g., GIS, global positioning systems, and remote sensing), when combined with geospatial practices that consider emotion, feelings, values, and ethics, can offer creative possibilities for challenging the masculinism of time geography.
Rose goes on to explain that the masculinism inherent in humanistic geography is more paradoxical. She characterizes the
research methods employed by humanistic geographers as masculinist for the way in which researchers reject scientific rationality
and dualisms and superficially embrace personal emotion and self-reflexivity as a means to bolster their own power and knowledge
claims about place. The masculinism of humanistic geography, Rose maintains, is apparent in its authoritative and exhaustive
knowledge claims and disinterest in the broader social power relations of exploitation and oppression that structure experiences
of places. The fundamental geographical concept of place, Rose argues, is theorized in humanistic geography in terms of an implicit
masculine norm that ignores the possibility of other experiences of place.
For Rose, feminist geography provides a direct challenge to masculinism and a vision of a different kind of geographyda geography that is not based on exhaustive claims to knowledge nor on the exclusion of other modalities of knowing nor dependent on
a relationship of dominance and subordination, but rather a geography based on a celebration of differences and possibilities. Rose
advocates that men listen to, read, discuss, and learn from feminism. Some male geographers have done just that. David Butz and
Lawrence Berg developed the term “duppy feminism” to describe male academic geographers who are theoretically, philosophically,
and practically committed to feminism, but who may fail to fulfill some aspect of these tenets in all of their work and actions.
Jeff Hopkins also engages with Rose’s proposition by advocating for a critical cultural geography of men and masculinities that is
informed by feminist thought and methodological practice. A critical cultural geography of masculinities, he proposes, would take
as its ideological cornerstone the notion that gender inequality exists and that gender imbalance in social relations should be eradicated. Its ultimate goal, however, would be to challenge multiple forms of masculinism. As such, it would confront patriarchal and
chauvinistic forms of masculinity that women as well as men (particularly those men who do not conform to unwritten codes of
manliness) find oppressive and exploitative. It would take an anti-homophobic, an anti-transphobic, an anti-misogynistic, and an
Masculinism
429
anti-racist stance that recognizes that multiple male sexualities and identities exist and must be respected. And, last, it would interpret knowledge as a social and embodied process that is partial, and constituted by and inscribed with power relations and
emotions.
Challenging Masculinist Research Practices With Feminist Methodologies
Feminist geographers agree that there is no singular feminist method. Instead, there are key characteristics that form the foundational building blocks of feminist methodologies. As detailed below, feminist research methodologies have been set up in direct
opposition to masculinist research practices.
First, feminist research has emancipatory goals to raise social awareness about and directly challenge intersectional oppressions
(e.g., sexism, racism, xenophobia, classism, ableism, and ageism). Where masculinist research may work “for” particular social
groups, feminist research aims to work “with” women and other marginalized groups to validate and to give voice to their experiences in ways that challenge social inequalities and promote social transformation of gendered power relations. Thus, feminist
research seeks to be relevant, accessible, and participatory.
Second, feminist research recognizes that all knowledge is socially constructed from intersecting subject positionsdit cannot be
fixed and known through detached observation and testing. Feminist researchers seek to dismantle the hierarchies of power relations between researchers and researched inherent in masculinist research; they do so by fostering open and emotional relationships
with research subjects that challenge the top-down establishment of research priorities, questions, and knowledge associated with
masculinist positivist science. Feminist researchers often employ collaborative and nonexploitive methods (e.g., intensive interviewing, participant observation, recording of personal narratives, and life histories) that provide ready access to individual’s voices and
more intimate microspatial scales. Feminist researchers also engage in processes of self-reflexivity in order to acknowledge some of
the ways in which social location influences power relations, perceptions, and interpretations. In this way, the situatedness and
partiality of knowledge is celebrated in place of objectivity.
Third, feminist research in its examination of intersections of difference is also often interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary.
Expert-driven, monodisciplinary approaches to research can reinforce disciplinary boundaries and territories, potentially sustaining
the hegemony of masculine voices within historically patriarchal disciplinary networks. Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne in
the introduction to Dislocating Masculinities remark on the importance of feminism to the study of men and masculinity for offering
“uncomfortable” theories and methods of investigation. As Katarzyna Kosmala asserts in Imagining Masculinities, feminism as it
intersects with the social sciences, humanities, and fine arts offers provocative intertextual ways to (re)imagine, (re)present, and
(re)curate masculinities.
Fourth, feminist research redefines “the field” within fieldwork to include the politics of everyday worlds and intimate, familiar
settings (e.g., body, home, workplace) that researchers regularly inhabit. Vision-driven, experiential fieldwork as a research method
and a pedagogical tool is central to the practice of academic geography. Undergraduate students are taken on field trips as a means of
introducing them to geography, a discipline once characterized by Carl Sauer as a science of observation. Experience “in the field,”
the place where geographers “go” to “do” research, constitutes an important part of the professional identities of geographersdthe
experience can confer a sense of authority, legitimacy, and belonging to the discipline. Traditional fieldwork, however, has been
characterized by feminists as a masculine enterprise within geography for several reasons. First, fieldwork is often described in heroic
terms as a character-building rite-of-passage into the academic world that involves great stamina and intellectual discipline. Second,
the field has frequently been treated as a wild place to be secured and kept separate and contained by the individual fieldworker.
Third, fieldwork is rooted in masculinist notions of objectivitydan unbiased observer ensuring analytical distance from the object
of study in order to collect, extract, and interpret reliable data that in turn produces reliable knowledge for an academic audience.
Feminist researchers maintain that they are always in the field, and by rendering the personal political they aim to participate in
a continual process of collective knowledge production and mobilization that contributes to social change.
Methods of Researching Men and Masculinities
In light of the substantial body of writing by feminist geographers on how to undertake research on gender, it is worthwhile considering how geographers have sought to understand different cultures of masculinity. It would be fair to argue that while men and
masculinities have become research objects in geography, the ways in which research on men and masculinities has been undertaken by geographers have remained largely unexamined. Questions that could use consideration include as follows: Are there
particular methodologies that are more appropriate than others for studying masculinities? Are there particular writing strategies
that are more appropriate than others for representing the voices of men so as to neither malign nor romanticize them?
A survey of the geographical literature published in the last three decades on masculinities reveals that geographers have relied
quite heavily on representations of men and masculinities in a variety of media (e.g., film, television, magazines, newspapers, song
lyrics, art, and advertising) as sources of data. In his study of Black masculinity in Chicago, for example, Rashad Shabazz used
a collage of archival sourcesdmemoirs, photographs, newspapers, magazines, maps, reports, and documentariesdin order to argue
that policing, surveillance, and architectures of confinement were used to “spatialize blackness.” A second significant source of data
is semistructured interviews. Whether studying merchant bankers, engineers, gay men, young male school leavers, college students,
430
Masculinism
househusbands, or fathers, interviews remain one of the most common research methods used by geographers to elicit the views
and opinions of men of different ages, ethnicities, sexualities, religions, and occupations. When young male academics are studying
young men, single-sex focus groups and participant observation have also been used. Within this diverse empirical literature on the
geographies of masculinities there remain only a handful of instances in which geographers have reflected in any substantial, meaningful, and critical way on the process of conducting research on and with mendparticularly noteworthy is work by Linda
McDowell and Robert Vanderbeck.
One of the important concerns to be raised by geographers of masculinities relates to interpreting men’s silences on particular
issues. Masculinity is a topic that people may know about intuitively but might be unable to comfortably articulate or define clearly.
Masculinity and manhood are multidimensional, fluctuating constructs understood in relation to femininity, womanhood, and
a system of gender practices; they are not something to be measured and/or cataloged. When asked to discuss particular personal
and emotional issues relating to understandings of masculinities, some men may not say very much or they may have learned
disdain, but that does not mean that more is not going on below the conversational surface. Within a dominant male culture, it
may be difficult for men to acknowledge and relate to questions about emotions such as sadness, fear, vulnerability, or powerlessness. It is therefore imperative that researchers develop novel approaches for exploring personal and emotional issues that men may
learn to keep private. In instances where men may not be particularly verbally adept, it is useful to reflect on what strategies
researchers can use to penetrate men’s silences and to encourage them to talk without putting words in their mouths. Repeat interviews are one strategy that some geographers have found helpful because they provide the time necessary for individuals to relax
and to build up trust and to reflect on and to revisit topics in conversation. In interviews, it is important that researchers not
succumb to the temptation to take at face value men’s accounts and testimonies as revealing particular masculinities without getting
at how and why men come to feel and think about themselves in particular ways. It is also important to provide opportunities to
explore the tensions that men may feel in living out different masculinities, tensions that might not be readily apparent in an interview setting. Interviews rely on the spoken word as the primary means of expression and communication where other more visual,
written, or ethnographic methodologies might be more effective at revealing situated gender practices, performances, and identities.
Another significant concern raised by geographers of masculinities relates to how researchers write themselves into their fieldwork narrative. In a thought-provoking article, Robert Vanderbeck reflects on how male researchers have negotiated masculinities
during fieldwork. He draws on his own experience conducting ethnographic research as a volunteer. He discusses the experience of
not fitting in, of not being able to easily establish a sense of male camaraderie, and of not conforming to hegemonic gender ideals.
His masculinity, for example, was critiqued by informants who frequently scrutinized elements of his bodily performancedthe
timber of his voice, his diction, his mannerisms, and his attiredand dismissively ascribed a homosexual label. This experience,
Vanderbeck documents, undermined his confidence and credibility as a fieldworker. Vanderbeck insightfully concludes from
a review of the social science fieldwork literature that the range of masculinities expressed therein is limited and that white male
social scientists tend to write about themselves in ways that reinforce their own hegemonic masculine position. Jamie Gillen brings
white masculinities into critical relief through his vignettes about the role of alcohol consumption in the production of knowledge
during his fieldwork in Vietnam. He entered a field site cross-cut with gendered power relations in the absence of formal academic
training from his Global North institution on how to deal with important research ethics considerations related to drinking alcohol
with respondents in the Global South. He determines that whiteness and masculinities are powerful identities that are simultaneously produced out of localized as well as globalized knowledge and contain within them the potential of local spatial
disturbances.
To conclude, the degree of self-reflexivity apparent in writing by male geographers who research masculinities is limited. It is too
easy, as Matthew Sparke explains, to assume the role of “an academic male tourist” who makes bold “as-a[n]-ism” announcements
of the “straight white man variety” rather than interrogating the complex contradictions of one’s own positionality. Admittedly,
there is the danger that too much reflexivity can be self-indulgent and little more than public privileging of the researcher’s masculine prowess. Notwithstanding, there is certainly scope for researchers of masculinities to explore in a more sustained and critical
manner the masculinism that is deeply embedded in the research process, with an eye to responsibly transforming the way in which
research on men is undertaken in the discipline of geography.
See Also: Feminist Methodologies; Masculinities.
Further Reading
Bain, A.L., 2007. Claiming and controlling space: combining heterosexual fatherhood and artistic practice. Gend. Place Cult. 14, 249–266.
Berg, L., 2001. Masculinism, emplacement, and positionality in peer review. Prof. Geogr. 53, 511–521.
Berg, L., Longhurst, R., 2003. Placing masculinities and geography. Gend. Place Cult. 10, 351–360.
Butz, D., Berg, L., 2002. Paradoxical space: geography, men and duppy feminism. In: Moss, P. (Ed.), Feminist Geography in Practice: Research and Methods. Blackwell Publishers,
Oxford, pp. 87–102.
Cheng, Y., 2012. Transnational masculinities in situ: Singaporean husbands and their international marriage experiences. Area 44, 76–82.
Connell, R.W., 1995. Masculinities. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.
Cornwall, A., Lindisfarne, N., 2017. Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies. Routledge, New York.
Masculinism
431
Fem-Mentee Collective, 2017. Emotional masking and spill-outs in the neoliberalized university: a feminist geographic perspective on mentorship. J. Geogr. High. Educ. https://
doi.org/10.1080/03098265.2017.1331424.
Gibson, C., 2016. How clothing design and cultural industries refashioned frontier masculinities: a historical geography of Western wear. Gend. Place Cult. 23, 733–752.
Gillen, J., 2016. Rethinking whiteness and masculinity in geography: drinking alcohol in the field in Vietnam. Antipode 48, 584–602.
Gökariksel, B., Secor, A., 2017. Devout Muslim masculinities: the moral geographies and everyday practices of being men in Turkey. Gend. Place Cult. 24, 381–402.
Gorman-Murray, A., 2008. Masculinity and the home: a critical review and conceptual framework. Aust. Geogr. 39, 367–379.
Gorman-Murray, A., 2013. Straight-gay friendships: relational masculinities and equalities landscapes in Sydney, Australia. Geoforum 49, 214–223.
Gorman-Murray, A., 2015. Twentysomethings and twentagers: subjectivities, spaces and young men at home. Gend. Place Cult. 22, 422–439.
Hopkins, J., 2000. Signs of masculinism in an ‘uneasy’ place: advertising for ‘big brothers’. Gend. Place Cult. 7, 31–55.
Jackson, P., 1991. The cultural politics of masculinity: towards a social geography. Trans. Inst. Br. Geogr. 16, 199–213.
Knuttila, M., 2015. Paying for Masculinity: Boys, Men and the Patriarchal Dividend. Fernwood Publishing, Toronto.
Kosmala, K., 2013. Imagining Masculinities: Spatial and Temporal Representation and Visual Culture. Routledge, New York.
Kwan, M.-P., 2002. Feminist visualization: Re-envisioning GIS as a method in feminist geographic research. Ann. Assoc. Am. Geogr. 92, 645–661.
Kwan, M.-P., 2007. Affecting geospatial technologies: toward a feminist politics of emotion. Prof. Geogr. 59, 22–34.
Maycock, M.W., 2017. Hegemonic at home and subaltern abroad: kamaiya masculinities and changing mobility in Nepal. Gend. Place Cult. 24, 812–822.
McDowell, L., 2001. Working with young men. Geogr. Rev. 91, 201–214.
Moss, P., Debres, K.J., Cravey, A., Hyndman, J., Hirschboeck, K.K., Masucci, M., 1999. Toward mentoring as feminist praxis: strategies for ourselves and others. J. Geogr. High.
Educ. 23, 413–427.
Rose, G., 1993. Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN.
Shabazz, R., 2015. Spatializing Blackness: Architectures of Confinement and Black Masculinity in Chicago. University of Illinois Press, Chicago.
Sparke, M., 1996. Displacing the field in fieldwork: masculinity, metaphor and space. In: Duncan, N. (Ed.), BodySpace: Destabilizing Geographies of Gender and Sexuality.
Routledge, London, pp. 212–233.
Sundberg, J., 2003. Masculinist epistemologies and the politics of fieldwork in Latin Americanist geography. Prof. Geogr. 55, 180–190.
Vanderbeck, R., 2005. Masculinities and fieldwork: widening the discussion. Gend. Place Cult. 12, 387–402.