‘That’s what I call a man’

Abstract

According to Connell (1995), "being a man" involves actively positioning one's self in relation to culturally dominant images of masculinity. Yet, crucially, these images change depending on the social and historical context. In this paper, we examine contemporary discourses of masculinity as they are represented in the British press. In particular, we focus on the ways in which masculine representations are both racialized and classed, and how they are positioned in relation to one another within a broader ideological field of gender and power. Analyses are based on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of a large corpus (44.1 million words) of newspaper articles on masculinity that appeared in the UK between 2003 and 2011. Our findings underscore the importance of adopting an intersectional approach to the study of language and masculinity, and provide support for recent critical re-evaluations of the foundational concept of hegemonic masculinity.

Language and Masculinities: History, Development, and Future

“…Going beyond conversational data, some scholars have examined masculinity as a literal performance through the vector of traditional and 'new' media. For example, Talbot (1997), Sunderland (2000), Benwell (2003Benwell ( , 2004, Stibbe (2004), Coffey-Glover (2015), and Baker & Levon (2016) have analysed how discourses of men, maleness, and masculinity are textually constructed in books, magazines, and newspapers, while Bucholtz and Lopez (2011), examine how masculinity and ethnicity are inflected in performances of 'linguistic minstrelsy' (a form of mock language, following Hill 1998) in Hollywood movies, demonstrating the ways such minstrelsy simultaneously reproduces and undermines the dominance of hegemonic white masculinity. Alim et al (2018) also show how white hegemony is challenged through their analysis of freestyle rap battles in Los Angeles and Cape Town, although they convincingly argue that these performances also marginalize "women, femininity, and all gender nonconforming bodies that challenge the gender binary" (Alim et al 2018, p. 59), thus becoming a site for the continued legitimation of cisheteropatriarchy.…”

“It’s Not Macho, Is It?”: Contemporary British Christian Men’s Constructions of Masculinity

“…Hegemonic masculinity is constituted in material and embodied practices as well as in cultural norms and discourses (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005, p. 842), and this article examines discursive patterns of reproduction of, and resistance to, societal hegemonic masculinity norms among a group of Christian men in Britain. These men are situated within broader church and societal discourses about masculinity which include conflicting representations of men as caring, emotionally sensitive, and oriented toward gender equality or as (re)-asserting male dominance via sexism and homophobia (Baker & Levon, 2016;Brown & Woodhead, 2016).…”

Navigating normativities: Gender and sexuality in text and talk

“…As the contributions to this special issue illustrate, it is difficult—if not impossible—to analytically isolate the discursive negotiations of sexual normativities without taking into account their imbrications with, for instance, gender, race, and ethnicity (see also Baker & Levon 2016; Levon, Milani, & Kitis 2017), and their laminations with a plethora of other socially relevant dimensions, which include, but are not limited to, tradition/modernity and cosmopolitanism/orientalism (see also Milani & Levon 2016).…”