Directions for the Study of Masculinity: Beyond Toxicity, Experience, and Alienation

Masculinity studies allows for a view of the law as a contributor to what masculinity itself is, rather than just a regulator of a pre-existent masculinity. I use the very passive language “allows for” (as opposed to saying that masculinity studies, in fact, is doing something) because while the discursive space is available to masculinity studies due to its theoretical foundations, the analysis of power (and specifically the way the power of the law is exercised) it employs is often lacking. While feminist theory was interested in thinking about redistributing power and, significantly, about how power operated, masculinity studies often acts as if the “how” question already has been answered, and the only remaining issue is redistribution. Like mainstream civil rights advocates, masculinity studies tends to be preoccupied with combating patriarchy through legalistic means, as opposed to thinking about power as relational, productive, and, crucially, not solely held by certain individuals like a commodity. Thus, while the ideas about power discussed above, born in feminist legal theory, have found application in masculinity studies, each has been embraced to varying degrees.

According to a conventional understanding of how power manifests, law is prohibitive and repressive; it exerts its power primarily through domination. Particularly in U.S. Constitutional law, where the charter is conceived of as containing negative liberty rights that protect citizens from the government stepping into their private lives, as opposed to a source of positive liberty rights, the law rarely conceives of its power as productive. If, in contrast, power actually manifests in the creation of norms and the productive deployment of disciplinary techniques, then the juridical power of law is easily dismissed as a residual accessory to the predominant powers of modernity. Equating the power of law exclusively with repression fails to account for all the ways that the law's power functions productively to create norms and form cultures—which are the predominant powers of modernity—and “excludes a richer consideration of the law's constitutive capacities.”

Ben Golder & Peter Fitzpatrick, Foucault’s Law 17 (2009).

To the extent that the law attempts to influence a society, it identifies qualities that can be scaled up from a model individual,

Saul Levmore & Martha C. Nussbaum, Introduction to American Guy: Masculinityin Lawand Literature 1 (Saul Levmore & Martha C. Nussbaum eds., 2014).

In the words of James Boyd White, the law is:

not merely a system of rules (or rules and principles), or reducible to policy choices or class interests, but it is rather what I call a language, by which I do not mean just a set of terms and locutions, but habits of mind and expectations—what might also be called a culture. It is an enormously rich and complex system of thought and expression, of social definitions and practices, which can be learned and mastered, modified or preserved, by the individual mind. The law makes a world.

James Boyd White, The Legal Imagination xiii (abridged version 1985).

The law is perpetually invested in re-articulating its own world view, resulting in the “creeping hegemony of the legal order.”

Carol Smart, Feminismandthe Powerof Law 5 (1989).

If, on the other hand, the power of the law was actually recognized to be productive (and if sex was considered fluid and dynamic), then it would be accepted that the law had an impact on sexual difference, and the legal order would be accountable in some sense. But, since sexual difference is predominantly thought about as binaried and natural, the legal order is rarely considered to have an impact on sexual difference and is not held responsible—how could the law (something so conceptual) actually affect something like sexual difference (something so corporeal)? The law's reasoning, though, is teleological: in order to not be held responsible for the way masculinity manifests in the world, the law needs to believe in both a particular conception of the power of law and a particular idea of sexual difference. The law claims to not have a productive power by pointing to the naturalness of sexual difference which is, from the law's perspective, clearly beyond the influence of the law. The reluctance to take accountability compels the law to maintain essentialist understandings of masculinity which reinforce its conception of sexual difference, and the cycle begins again. Therefore, the law serves as a technology of sex that perpetuates a hegemonic masculinity, yet it fails to take any culpability when that masculinity manifests in undesirable but inevitable ways. Rather than being presented as fractured and disjointed social constructs, sexual categories are presented as resilient and stable, harking back to dated notions of a stable subject and suggesting that, through much trial and error, masculinity will one day find its essence.

The 2009 Supreme Court decision in Ricci v. DeStefano,

Ricci v. DeStefano, 557 U.S. 557 (2009).

The Court concluded that race-based action like that of the City is impermissible under Title VII unless the employer can demonstrate that, had it not taken the action, it would have been liable under the disparate-impact statute. According to the Court, the City's race-based rejection of the test results could not satisfy the strong-basis-in-evidence standard. The Court found that, because the tests were job related, the City lacked sufficient evidence that it would have been liable for disparate impact had it certified the test results. While the Court's opinion explicitly focuses on race, the decision and the spectacle that ensued when two of the plaintiffs testified at the Sotomayor confirmation hearing,

Judge Sotomayor was a member of the Second Circuit panel whose affirmance of a district court's decision had been appealed. See Ricci v. DeStefano, 264 Fed. Appx. 106 (2d Cir. 2008).

Applying a masculinity studies lens to Ricci reveals the extent to which particular conceptions of masculinity are ingrained in our culture in three main ways. (Counterintuitively, the insidiousness of hegemonic masculinity is often most apparent when gender issues are not being addressed directly.) First, Ricci highlights the complexities and biases that permeate assessment mechanisms and, more specifically, how internalized, gendered ideas inform the selection of relevant performance criteria. Second, Ricci perpetuates a notion of hegemonic masculinity that ultimately results in feelings of powerlessness and inadequacy among young men, who are compelled to prove their manhood in harmful ways. Third, Ricci exemplifies how the law decides to see a case from one perspective (the aggrieved white and sometimes Latino firefighter) that both privileges and endorses a specific notion of hegemonic masculinity.

Masculinity studies encountered essentialism within the context of men as a social category existing as oppressor and as homogenous—a category, it was argued, that failed to account for the diversity and complexity of men's lives. This reductionist approach brushed over critical differences among men, like race, class and sexuality, which radically altered the experience of being a man in the world. Masculinity studies was forced to address a patriarchal system in which it was assumed that all men benefited equally from male supremacy. Indeed, the tendency to characterize men as a homogenous and oppressive group risks ignoring the dangers of hegemonic masculinity, which, as we have seen in the Labrie example, leads to feelings of powerlessness and inadequacy that affirm our patriarchy. A further risk in essentializing male identity is that the complicated process of identity creation for men is not taken seriously and relationships between males—recall Ricci's firehouse and Kavanaugh's fraternity house—are seen as less intrinsic to patriarchy than relationships between men and women.

Within feminist theory, anti-essentialists have criticized the biologistic basis of certain strands of feminism that have a one-dimensional view of women, which suggested that victimhood was an almost immutable condition, counterpoised against a similarly reductivist view of men as oppressors.

Margaret Thornton, Neoliberal Melancholia: The Case of Feminist Legal Scholarship, Australian Feminist L.J. 20, 10 (2004).

Written into arguments about essentialism are perhaps the most intuitive replies when one challenges the biological foundations of sex categories: what about chromosomes, what about testosterone, what about estrogen?

See Lynn Liben, Probability Values and Human Values in Evaluating Single Sex Education, in Sex Roles 410 (“Males and females are assumed to have different ‘essences’ that, although largely invisible, are reflected in many predispositions and behaviors. These essences are given—at the individual level—by a range of genetic and hormonal processes and—at the species level—by evolution. They are viewed as part of the natural order, likely to be presumed to operate across contexts and across the lifespan, and often presumed to be immutable (at least in the absence of herculean and unnatural efforts to change them.”).

The consensus in contemporary sex determination science now recognizes that genetic sex is not located in a stark binary but is scattered about the genome. Furthermore, the correlation between chromosomes and hormones with the brain and behavior is even more fallacious and harmful: “the effect of the genetic and hormonal facets of sex on the brain and behavior must not inflexibly inscribe or ‘hardwire’ particular behavior profiles or predispositions into the brain.”

Cordelia Fine, Testosterone Rex: Mythsof Sex, Science, and Society 87 (2017).

Essentialism also appears under the guise of values and cultural attributes that are encoded as masculine. Autonomy, reason, individualism, aggressiveness, and self-sufficiency serve as the basic tenets of liberal legalism and are generally thought of within western political culture as quintessentially masculine. Thus, while essentialism on the one hand reduces the complexity of men's experience it also genders otherwise gender-neutral cultural characteristics. It is this dynamic that leads to the internalization of a particular perspective by Justice Kennedy in Ricci, which ends up privileging white men. Both law and masculinity are constituted in discourse and the overlap intertwines the two: the law, like masculinity, is constructed as rational and natural. It is this association that renders cases like Ricci arguably just as important as cases that deal explicitly with rape/sexual assault law in the struggle against patriarchy. Dismantling patriarchy is as dependent on defying heterosexism and reshaping ideas about fatherhood, or challenging implicit connections between character, integrity, and masculinity like those seen in Ricci, as it is on the specifics of Family Law. The ostensibly gender-blind discourse of law in Ricci in fact replicates the patriarchal order in the other areas of our social lives. It is this challenge to naturalistic assumptions about masculinity which recalibrates the debate as being more about politics and less about revealing hidden gendered assumptions that permeate the social world. In other words, when the naturalistic assumptions about masculinity are exposed, the political and ideological components can be challenged. For instance, the task becomes not locating where in the social world reason is being privileged over emotion, but rather disentangling the forces that bind masculinity to reason in the first place and to exposing their political nature. Consequentially, connections that appear commonsensical when the naturalistic assumptions are applied are exposed as teleological when those assumptions are removed. For instance, Smart deconstructs the connection among rationality, men, and lawyering: “So law is not rational because men are rational, but law is constituted as rational as are men, and men as the subjects of the discourse of masculinity come to experience themselves as rational—hence suited to a career in law.”

Carol Smart, Feminismandthe Powerof Law 87 (1989).

Related to the idea of essentializing the experience of being male is the concept of how to account for differences among men like race, class, and sexuality, and how to avoid simply writing in those differences on top of the heterosexual white male experience. This problem was addressed in feminist theory under the rubric of intersectionality—a concept pioneered in the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw.

Kimberlé Crenshaw, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics, U. Chi. Legal Forum 1 (1989).

Ricci serves as a paradigmatic example of Black and Latino male firefighters not being able to access the privileges available to the white male firefighters, who nonetheless experience the whole process very differently than women firefighters did. The Ricci majority

In her dissent Justice Ginsburg mentions Johnson v. Transportation Agency, Santa Clara Cty., 480 U. S. 616, which examines the contours of disparate treatment legislation from a male/female context.

Masculinity studies has recognized that an intersectional analysis is fundamental in understanding identity creation. The intersectional analysis takes on different dynamics when applied to masculinity rather than femininity. Whereas, in feminist theory, being a woman (not an already privileged cultural category) intersected with race, class, and sexual orientation, in the case of men, an already privileged identity intersects with these same components. Thus, while Black women are in a sense doubly burdened, subject in some ways to the dominating practices of both a sexual and a racial hierarchy,

Kimberlé Crenshaw, Whose Story Is It, Anyway? Feminist and Antiracist Appropriations of Anita Hill, in Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power 404 (Toni Morrison ed.,1992).

If thinking about Black women's oppression simply as being “doubly burdened” is inadequate and inaccurate, then similarly thinking about Black men's position using the equation: sexual privilege minus racial discrimination equals Black men's experience is necessarily reductionist and fails to capture any semblance of the reality of Black men's experience. The question becomes one of understanding how an intersectional analysis applies to men who are subjugated in some other area of social relations—notably race, sexuality, or class. The denial of privileges offered to white men often results in masculinity manifesting itself in different ways (ways which often support male privilege even when the particular men in question do not benefit from it themselves). A fundamental tension lies between thinking about all men benefiting from a patriarchal dividend and simultaneously recognizing that masculinities that do not fit within the dominant paradigms cannot readily access that privilege. An intersectional analysis reveals the shortcomings of a gender analysis, a class analysis, a racial analysis, or a sexuality analysis, in and of themselves. An effective analysis must examine the workings of power more overarchingly and engage with how each of the social hierarchies work together to marginalize certain groups of people.

As in the early days of feminist theory—where gender was used to distinguish between what was seen as “natural” (sexual difference) and what was seen as a social construct (gender)—masculinity studies spends much energy struggling against naturalistic and essentialist conceptions of masculinity.

See Dowd, supranote 7, at 201–04 (“Feminist Theory has examined men, patriarchy, and masculine characteristics predominantly as a source of power, domination, inequality, and subordination…In much feminist analysis, men as a group largely have been undifferentiated.”). And masculinity studies, unlike feminist theory, has not engaged the distinction between sex and gender. Collier, supranote 1, at 466 (“This critique of the division between (biological) sex and (socially constructed) gender, present within, if still marginal to, much contemporary work on masculinities, can be located within the context of broader attempts within feminist sociological theory and socio-legal work to transcend binary oppositions that have informed understandings of gender and law.”).

Generally, within masculinity studies there ought to be a self-awareness that while essentializing and naturalizing masculinity is harmful to both men and women, we nonetheless continue to live in a patriarchal system with men holding power over women. Indeed, hegemonic masculinity need not be enacted to have consequences. The power is always available to men whether they want to use it or not: “this is the mechanism through which every male enacting an identity as a man, whether he strives to enact hegemonic masculinity or not, is granted male privilege—cultural benefits and unearned advantages conferred by virtue of membership in the social category men.”

Matthew B. Ezzell, Healthy for Whom?—Males, Men, and Masculinity: A Reflection on the Doing (and Study) of Dominance, in Exploring Masculinities: Identity, Inequality, Continuity, and Change 190 (Pascoe & Bridges eds., 2016).

The first concern centers on power. In many respects, though by no means all, the impetus behind masculinity studies is the existence of patriarchy, and, thus, an understanding of the oppressive power of male supremacy is central to masculinity studies. Patriarchy generally conceptualizes power as repressive. Masculinities scholars tend to evaluate the ways that conceptions of masculinity are used to produce power. Partly because a so-called “power analysis” remains the centerpiece of feminist advocacy—the struggle to equalize power between the sexes—masculinity studies has been focused on the issue of power within society and within masculinity.

See Chris Weedon, Feminist Practiceand Postructuralist Theory 1 (1987) (“Feminism is a politics. It is a politics directed at changing existing power relations between women and men in society. These power relations structure all areas of life, the family, education and welfare, the worlds of work and politics, culture and leisure…as feminists we take as our starting point the patriarchal structure of society.”).

Hegemonic masculinity is founded on the idea that it exerts a normative power on men to conform to its tenets—as discussed above with respect to the Labrie case. Thus, power manifests in a juridical manner in two distinct ways—both as supremacy over females and over men who do not conform to conventional gender identities.

See Cohen, supranote 78, at 168 (discussing hegemonic masculinity and the hegemony of men). See also Jeff Hearn, From Hegemonic Masculinity to the Hegemony of Men, 5 (1) Fem. Theory 49 (April 2004).

Masculinity studies scholar Jeff Hearn has posited that “while power functions, flows and re-forms in multiple ways, it is difficult to avoid the fact that in most societies, and certainly those of western, ‘advanced’ capitalism, men are structurally and interpersonally dominant in most spheres of life.”

Id. at 51.

The analysis of power within masculinity studies has employed various frameworks. Two of the most prevalent are: a capacity to dominate others, and ideological conditioning.

Id. at 52.

Masculinity studies gives lip service to the idea that power flows, but continues to paint a picture of it as something that functions juridically. There is the sense of something ideological going on; dismantling patriarchy is conceived of as a political project, yet political in the wrong sense. The fight against patriarchy has emerged as a contest to root out sinister masters of the universe who pull society's levers. The focus on hegemony is “about the winning and holding of power and the formation (and destruction) of social groups in that process . . . hegemony involves persuasion of the greater part of the population, particularly through the media, and the organization of social institutions in ways that appear ‘natural’, ‘ordinary’, ‘normal’.”

Mike Donaldson, What Is Hegemonic Masculinity?, Theory & Soc’y 22(5), 645 (Oct. 1993).

Hearn, for instance, while at numerous times suggesting that he thinks about power as something that flows and should not be conceptualized in a unitary sense, distinguishes between men who both are formed in the hegemonic gender order and form the hegemonic gender order, and women who are solely formed in it. This understanding of power is one directional, with women being the passive recipients of the force of power deployed by men. While it is easy to say that “power flows,” it is much more difficult to theorize ways of making sense of masculinity while accepting that premise. This is true both because a juridical understanding of power has been internalized by most in our society; it has become common sense. As Butler reminds us, “power is not stable or static, but is remade at various junctures within everyday life; it constitutes our tenuous sense of common sense, and is ensconced as the prevailing episteme of a culture.”

Judith Butleretal., Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialoguesonthe Left 14 (2000).

The concept of hegemonic masculinity, for instance, derived from masculinity studies, provides an analysis of power that is exceedingly helpful to understand the process of male identity creation. For instance, with respect to the Labrie case, this concept renders it easier to comprehend the powerlessness felt by many young men and that the perpetuation of patriarchy is just as much about competition among men as it is about misogyny. Masculinity studies, however, tends to pinpoint the idea, in the sense that it is very good at locating examples of where hegemonic masculinity appears, yet it is less successful at deconstructing the idea. It tends to characterize hegemonic masculinity as stable, controlled, and somewhat self-serving; it is interested in understanding how power dominates, yet understanding the complexities and relationality of power makes dealing with hegemonic masculinity more difficult than locating it.

A second problem with the current direction of masculinity studies is that, because it remains tied to an emancipatory ethos, it is focused on a misguided search for origins. The project remains guided by a search for a freedom beyond patriarchy and, in this way, is always intertwined with liberalism. Masculinity studies is tied to the project of locating masculinity, which involves asking whether masculinity existed prior to its production through social structures, and, if it did, then somehow rendering “the problem” less to do with the action of actual men. The search for origins drowns out the experiences of particular individuals, marginalizes male practices, and “involves an evacuation of questions of responsibility and agency.”

Collier, supranote 2, at 468.

In Ricci, the search for origins problem manifests quite clearly, particularly in the arguments suggested by the expert witness Janet Helms. Recall that Helms did not need to look at tests to claim that she knew how minority candidates would perform in it. As she recognized, equality is impossible in a world where patriarchal relations inform the production of the subjects. It is not possible to reach a pre-patriarchy place. Indeed, even the tools of legal method which had been presumed to be neutral have now been exposed, and ideas like equality itself, are problematic because one is always equal to something. A masculinity studies analysis of Ricci, therefore, allows one to see that a case that apparently has nothing to do with gender is actually infused with patriarchal ideas, yet it continues to wrongly suggest failed ideas for moving beyond them.

The problems tied to the “search for origins” are one of the reasons that the usefulness of masculinity as an analytical category has been questioned by theorists who argue for a shift of attention to men's actual practices. But that shift remains emancipatory and problematically suggests that the problem of patriarchy is solvable by changing the actions of men. The trend in masculinity studies has been to narrow the scope, to move away from grand theories, to focus on the local, where change can be seen and felt. While this does provide some sense of tangible change, it ultimately suggests that patriarchy is solvable by ridding the world of the “bad” acts of men and that the existence of patriarchy itself is due to these particular “bad” acts of men. This has the effect of ultimately disempowering those subjects who do not identify as men because they are characterized as not being a part of or having a role in what has created the social world.

Further, part of the reason that masculinity was initially thought of as being a ripe area of study, in contrast to simply thinking about the actions of men which perpetuate male supremacy, is that there were structural, political, and theoretical impasses identified in feminist theory that were not “solvable” simply by identifying these patriarchy perpetuating acts. Focusing on the hegemony of men, rather than on masculinity, fails to recognize that the category of men is equally problematic, and constructed, as the category of masculinity. Trying to move beyond masculinity to men suggests the knowability of some sort of original position, some sort of pre-discursive, pre-gendered position, from which actions were taken which resulted in patriarchy, and that emancipation is possible by re-tracing and reversing those actions.

The insight from feminist theory to be worked from is not identifying the actions of subjects who identify as men which contribute to the domination and subordination of others, but rather to be critical of the existence of the categories in the first place. Each of these tasks appears political, yet the more radical position and the position that offers the least feel-good results is that of critiquing sexual difference/categories as a whole. This is not to suggest, necessarily, that the project should be to dismantle sexual categories (sexual categories are perhaps re-signifiable to serve ends that do not contribute to male supremacy),

Although the idea of any hegemonic masculinity serving progressive ends seems far-fetched. As one commentator has asked: “What exactly does one do nowadays to inhabit a male-positive gendered identity that feels—and is—worthy of respect (by oneself and others)?” John Stoltenberg, Why Talking about Healthy Masculinity Is Like Talking about Healthy Cancer, Feminist Current (Aug. 9, 2013). Stoltenberg argues that attempting to attain a “healthy” masculinity just “reinvigorates the disease.” Id. Examining how social agents “do” masculinity through a normative lens perpetuates the existence of gendered hierarchies.

Again, this is not to suggest that in a practical sense these actions should be condoned or ignored, but that the job of masculinity studies should be about addressing the categories themselves, rather than just focusing on the actions, which only serve to reify those categories. When the point of masculinity studies is thought of as being emancipatory—that masculinity studies has a goal and that the goal is equality or freedom or the dismantling of patriarchy—then masculinity studies is expressing its problem with origins. The concern of disembodying masculinity from men, of divorcing an analysis of masculinity from the “real” impact of the actions of men, suggests that masculinity studies should focus on equalizing power between categories, rather than on the validity of the categories themselves. Collier has cautioned against remaining tied to masculinity and has suggested re-theorizing men identities “in ways that might produce a richer, more nuanced conceptual framework in which men's and women's practices, subjectivities, and bodies can be approached.”

Collier, supranote 2, at 473.

The emphasis on the behavior of particular men also highlights the importance of experience in the context of masculinity studies. Experience, in practice, often becomes the most authentic evidence on which to base claims to truth. Within masculinity studies, when the focus turns to ways of “doing” masculinity and to an analysis of the actions of men, “truth” is found through experiential claims. The paradigm suggested by turning toward the specific behavior of individuals is one in which the reality of patriarchy is attributable to the actions of certain bad apples. The focus on domination on a micro level renders the views of particular individuals the source of explanations.

See Tracy E. Higgins, Anti-Essentialism, Relativism, and Human Rights, 19 Harv. Women’s L.J. (1996).

There appears to be a tension between the need for a local, contextualized approach to problems of gender oppression (which avoid buying into essentialist accounts of gender) and not overly relying on the evidence of experience; anti-essentialism suggests going more micro while critiques of experience seem to suggest a more macro approach. The trend in masculinity studies has been to turn inward, to move from macro to micro, to be practical and focus on the actual behavior of men, rather than on big boring questions about discourse, theory, and language. But something gets lost in making this decision. There need not be any grand theory that suddenly makes masculinity comprehensible. In fact, focusing on individual experiences is partly done because of a desire for tangible solutions, to reduce harm and eliminate suffering, to make the world a tangibly more just place. The implication is not to throw out experience—as we are cautioned by Scott, “[e]xperience is not a word we can do without, although, given its usage to essentialize identity and reify the subject, it is tempting to abandon it altogether,”

Id. at 797.

In the context of Ricci, we see how the experiences of the firefighters are constructed as the foundation of the truth. The categories within which the firefighters built their reality—e.g., white, Black, male, female—are made to appear ahistorical, and thus devoid of interpretation. The subjects, though, have been conceived within patriarchal and white supremacist social relations; the visions of the firefighters are structured through particular discourses and histories, and the experiences are not pre-discursive, but rather formed in discourse. The question, in this case, is not one of choosing between two alternative perspectives (white vs. Black; man vs. woman), but rather about questioning the structures that formed the subjects.

One of the insights from Janet Helms, the expert witness in Ricci, was that subjects are formed within existing social (e.g., racist and patriarchal) relations. It is not only that there are two contrasting perspectives that are equally true. That paradigm is palatable to the law, it adheres to the conventional narrative of history that new evidence is discovered that changes existing interpretations; the constant being that the experiences themselves are occurring to subjects and not that the subject are constituted by the experience. The insight of Helms is not palatable to the law, and, thus, her testimony was considered beyond the scope of the case and not taken seriously by either the majority opinion or the dissent. But the insight is an important one because it reorients the focus from the question of choosing between two contrasting experiences to that of the naturalness of the categories that structure the experiences themselves.

When experience is viewed as the foundation of truth, then we risk missing the fact that experience is both always already an interpretation and something that needs interpreting. The subject is constituted through the experience, as opposed to subjects simply having experiences. In practice, however, the law does determine which experiences to privilege and which perspective to adopt. In doing so, the fact that subjects are formed within patriarchal relations continues to play a role. In the example of Judge Kavanaugh's confirmation hearing, patriarchy rendered Dr. Ford's experience an interpretation while Judge Kavanaugh's was something to be interpreted.

Experience should not serve as a stand-in for an analysis of the production of knowledge. Thinking within the terms dictated by experience simply reproduces the categories of analysis without any critical turn, which, in the context of masculinity studies, is vital considering the validity, usefulness, and effect of the category, is what is being interrogated. Thinking about structural problems, the discursive construction of subjects, and of the need to think beyond and in different terms than sexual differences allow, is a daunting task without tangible near-term goals. Indeed, making the decisions to not pursue these questions, or rather to emphasize the others, is making a political decision; a decision that claims, rightly or wrongly, that the overarching political structure within which we live is capable of accommodating the changes that are sought.

Finally, the political nature of this emancipatory project is also present when one looks at the manner in which masculinity studies tends to think about subjectivity. The existence of a pre-existing subject buys into the humanist conception of each individual containing some sort of essence, and thus, potentially, being worthy of certain rights. Masculinity studies, therefore, by foregrounding a pre-discursive subject and describing its project as emancipatory, is implicitly buying into the politics of liberal humanism. It becomes difficult to suggest a radical politics or agenda within a discipline defined by those parameters. Masculinity studies is, essentially, a humanist project, striving for freedom and equality through rights and law, but it need not be. The focus can turn back to the political implications of thinking about sexual difference as naturalistic and inevitable, it can focus on the implications of thinking about masculinity studies as an emancipatory project focused on retrieving a pre-patriarchal space, it can stop exclusively focusing on the actions of individual men and recognize how experience is not the sole key to knowledge.

When thinking about and studying masculinity there is a fear that, as a culture, we will fall into silly stereotypes, that we will accept “frat boy” behavior out of young men, that we will propagate outdated ideas about what it means to be a man and about the rituals that “make boys men,” that we will contribute to the seemingly endless perpetuation of patriarchy. But these should not be the only concerns. There are equally important questions about masculinity regarding more than just falling into stereotypical and essentialized ideas about masculinity. No longer does the major challenge—although it remains part of the challenge—only entail suggesting that masculinity comes in different shapes and sizes and that there is more than one way to be a man. It is no longer enough for critiques of masculinity to problematize sex roles and power imbalances, to highlight experiences of injustice, and to offer easy solutions that provide superficial critiques of patriarchy resorting back to an imaginary origin where equality was ubiquitous. Masculinity studies is in danger of turning clinical to avoid the uncertainty and agnosticism pivotal to an honest study of masculinity. Masculinity and the law remain pieces in a neoliberal puzzle that not only continues to re-articulate patriarchal relations in new ways, but falsely promises an illusory cohesiveness and an emancipation that is both inapt and misdirected.