This research explores the career development of men who cross over into the historically female occupation of physical therapy, drawing from a critical feminist perspective on sport, work, and the gender order. Data gathered from thirty-two semistructured interviews with early-and mid-career men indicate that a traditional emphasis on athleticism shaped men's career entry and early specialty choices. Men in physical therapy described a "good physical therapist" as displaying both stereotypically masculine and feminine traits. Although athleticism shaped men's abilities to comfortably accept alternative masculinities in the form of caring work, early-career specialty choices reinforced hegemonic patterns of occupational segregation. Implications for gender equality at work are discussed and limitations to feminist perspectives are noted.Sociocultural understandings of gender as analytically distinct from biological notions of sex have led contemporary theorists to grapple with transitional and multifaceted expressions of gender (Acker 1990;Lorber 1996;Fausto-Sterling 2000). Notions of gender take on meaning both within and against the larger cultural dictates of hegemonic masculinity and femininity. 1 These ideal prescriptions and normative constellations of attitudes, behaviors, and personality traits (Kimmel 1994) for boys and girls and men and women have meaning in the structural contexts of institutions such as work, family, the media, and sport, as well as in the social locations of gender, age, race/ethnicity, sexuality, and class (Cazenave 1984;Connell 1987Connell , 1990Connell , 1995. A theory of the gender order and masculine development recognizes that gender is not an essential quality or thing that a person possesses but rather is a dynamic process that changes in time and space within changing structural contexts (Messner and Sabo 1990). According to Connell the gender order "is a historically constructed pattern of power relations between men and women and definitions of femininity and masculinity" (1987, p. 98-99). Conceptualized as such, masculinity is "simultaneously a place in gender relations, the practices through which men and women engage that place in gender, and the effects of these practices in bodily experience, personality and culture" (Connell 1995, p. 71).Early critical feminist perspectives on the development of masculine identities drew heavily from objects-relations theory (Chodorow 1978). This approach addresses the importance for boys in identifying with same-sex objects or symbols (e.g., fathers and athletes), traits (e.g., independence and competitiveness), and sex roles (e.g., instrumentality and protection) and their separation from opposite-sex objects and symbols (e.g., mothers and sisters), traits (e.g., emotionality and dependency), and sex roles (e.g., caregiving and nurturing). This process of individuation is wrought, with ambiguity for boys and men as they mature due primarily to the conflicting sex-role expectations and messages received from predominantly female car...
