ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to understand the ‘making of men’ as legal ‘professionals’ - as practising lawyers and legal academics. It seeks to unpack the nature of the ‘norm’ - the ‘masculinism’ of law - via an exploration of the ways in which sexed subject positions are held at particular moments and locations to be ‘masculine’. By locating the legal field in the broader context of social, economic and cultural processes whereby men’s discrimination is both reproduced and legitimated; a different set of issues and questions have emerged from those which frame the liberal-legal equality model. Such an engagement with the sexed specificity of men’s subjectivities in the legal field is not possible without an adequate conceptualisation of the ways in which the bodies of men are ‘sexed’ as masculine in specific contexts. The gender regimes of both law school and legal practice are microcosms of broader employment structures in which a particular (hetero) familial frame ascribes social meanings.
