Recent analyses of responses to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have posited that men’s dismissive attitudes toward the risks of the virus reflect their attempts to conform to masculine norms that valorize bravery and strength. In this article, the authors develop an alternative account of the gender differences in attitudes toward COVID-19. Drawing on three waves of in-depth interviews with college students and members of their households ( n = 45) over a period of 16 weeks (for a total of 120 interviews), the authors find that men and women in comparable circumstances perceive similar risks of COVID-19, but they diverge in their attitudes toward, and responses to, these risks. Connecting scholarship on gender and care work with research on risk, the authors argue that gender differences in attitudes toward risk are influenced by the unique and strenuous care work responsibilities generated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which are borne primarily by women—and from which men are exempt.

The “Black Lives Matter” movement, centered on fighting racial injustice and inequality (particularly in the criminal justice system), has garnered a great deal of media attention in recent years. Given the relatively recent emergence of the movement, there exists very little scholarly research on media portrayals of the movement. In this article, I report findings from a qualitative examination of major newspaper portrayals of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement between April and August 2016, before the particularly divisive 2016 presidential election. Inductive textual analyses of 131 newspaper articles indicate that, although the movement’s goals were represented positively and from the perspective of members of the movement, the newspapers politicized and sensationalized the movement, and they focused far more on supposed negative consequences of the movement. I discuss these findings by drawing on the “protest paradigm” and the “public nuisance paradigm” in media coverage of social protest movements, arguing that the latter is particularly useful for interpreting portrayals of Black Lives Matter in the prevailing US political climate.

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Penological literature has focused extensively, and often exclusively, on the “hypermasculine” nature of men’s prisons. A separate and relatively recent body of sociological research has explored “hybrid masculinities,” whereby (usually privileged) men selectively enact traits conventionally associated with subordinate masculinities and even femininities. In this article, I draw on 24 in-depth interviews with incarcerated men to argue that these men construct hybrid masculinities in response to their feelings of insecurity and to resist the hypermasculine prison environment. In so doing, I link theoretical literature on hybrid masculinities with penological research to explore how a particularly marginalized group of men construct hybrid masculinities to cope with and challenge hegemonic masculinity in prison.

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