Review: Stephen M. Whitehead. Men and Masculinities: Key Themes and New Directions.

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review: 

Since the project of masculinity studies began in the Anglo-American academia in the 1970s, much has been published on "man" as a gendered category. From within the context of women's studies, a critical view of men and masculinity has been demanded by feminist critics as a necessary contribution to the project of deconstructing patriarchal myths and power structures. "Man," for centuries held to be "the very centre, the core, the drive, the universal 'mankind,'" (Whitehead 5) has become the object of rigorous scholarly scrutiny which aims at making men visible as a political and a gendered category and at decentring and particularizing men's experience and social position. Over the last two decades, predominantly sociological literature on men has provided increasingly complex tools for theorizing masculinity. This sociology of masculinity focuses on contemporary masculine identities. Another strand of academic writing on men is located within the field of gender history and aims at laying open the historical change of notions of masculinity and hence deconstructing an ahistorical, universal image of Man.