This must be one of the very best and most thorough books in the field of men's studies. It is in three parts. The first examines ways of understanding masculinity. The second is a field study, based on life-history interviews with four groups of men. The third part examines the way in which men's studies have proliferated in recent years and considers some of the political implications.
"This book has been hard to write, even for a practised writer. The issues are explosive, and the chances of getting wrong answers are excellent. I once wrote that working on such questions was like cutting your hair with a badly adjusted mechanical harvester. I failed to mention that the harvester has never been oiled." (p.x)
As one who has tried myself to write in this field, I know what he means. But this is the man who invented the phrase 'hegemonic masculinity' and wrote the immensely influential 'Gender and Power'. There is a good critique of the idea of a sex role.
"It is telling that discussions of 'the male sex role' have mostly ignored gay men and have had little to say about race and ethnicity. Sex role theory has a fundamental difficulty in grasping issues of power." (p.27)
As Connell points out, there has been an explosion of work in men's studies in the last ten years, and some new thinking has emerged. Some common themes are: the construction of masculinity in everyday life; the importance of economic and institutional structures; the significance of differences among masculinities; and the dynamic character of gender. He has a good dig at the idea that men's aggression is due to testosterone.
On the other hand. he is not fully sold on social constructionism either:
"a wholly semiotic or cultural account of gender is no more tenable than a biological reductionist one. The surface on which cultural meanings are inscribed is not featureless, and it does not stay still." (p.51)
And there is a fascinating chapter on men's bodies, with many case vignettes and personal stories.
The third chapter is called 'The social organization of masculinity', and here some very useful distinctions are drawn. Connell distinguishes between four different ways in which masculinity can be defined and thought about. The first is essentialism: here one feature is picked out to be the core of masculinity, and everything else derived from it. The second is positivism, where masculinity is defined as whatever is measured 'scientifically' by psychometric or ethnographic scales of masculinity and femininity. The third is the normative approach, where the focus is on what masculinity should be: this can be oppressive if it is adopted by a particular culture or subculture, and men then punished if they do not measure up to it. The fourth is the semiotic approach, where the phallus is defined as the master-signifier, and femininity is defined symbolically by lack.
Connell then goes on to give his own version, which is the basis of his position throughout the book. "Masculinity", he says,
"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". (p.71)
He goes on to discuss the three main areas in which these practices are worked out in practice: power relations, production relations and emotional relations. This is a beautiful and well worked out analysis, and it is clearly much more sophisticated, and yet at the same time usable, way of looking at masculinity than anything which has gone before.
In Part 2 he goes on to deal with 'Four studies of the dynamics of masculinity'. Here we come down from the abstract discussion of principles to specific applications. Connell started by identifying four groups of men for whom the construction or integration of masculinity was under pressure. Group one was five unemployed men between the ages of 17 and 29, contrasted with three white-collar workers between the ages of 23 and 26. All eight had similar class backgrounds. Group two was six men with experience of eco-feminism, all activists in various environmental issues.
Group three was eight men from the Sydney gay community. And group four was nine men of the new middle class who have adopted a standard conventional masculine lifestyle. This is a fascinating section of the book, where the bloodless ideas get up and come to life in concrete three-dimensional fashion.
Part 3 is called 'History and politics', and goes back to 1450 in its very thorough attempt to make sense of the development of ideas about masculinity. The political discussion is equally thorough: Achilles Heel is mentioned, and my own work is mentioned, and Vic Seidler is mentioned, for example. There is a good critique of Robert Bly.
The final chapter is called 'Practice and Utopia'. In it many of the themes of the book are brought together. I liked his statement:
So the 'change' of which there is so much awareness is not the crumbling of the material and institutional structures of patriarchy. What has crumbled, in the industrial countries, is the legitimation of patriarchy.
In Chapter 4 I quoted a young working-class man with a record of violence, unemployment and imprisonment, briskly endorsing equal rights for women and complaining about 'prejudiced blokes' who do not. The vast change in legitimation over the past century is, for me, summed up in that comment.(p.226)
He agrees that no crowds of men have become feminists, but says that the underlying terms of discussion have shifted. But still, the task of social change is a formidable one, and one which we should never underestimate. What we are moving towards is largely unknown, and therefore a source of fear as well as of desire.
The book does not end with a clear clarion call to action: the situation which has been revealed is much too complex for that. But anyone who is interested in social change and the part which masculinity has to play in that must read this book. Without it, any reaction to gender questions is likely to be too simplistic and too unaware of what is really involved. This is one of those books which has to be read if we are to keep up with the active thinking in this field. All readers of Achilles Heel would find it fascinating.
John Rowan
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