Thinking through the ‘Boy Crisis’: From Multiple Masculinities to Intersectionality

Contemporary gender scholars regard it as axiomatic that masculinity, both as an ideal and as a set of embodied practices, is multiple. As legal scholar Nancy Dowd observes, ‘a key piece of masculinity theory is that masculinity is not unitary; hence the name of the field is masculinities, plural’ (2010, 27). In disclosing the false universalism of a generation of sociological, anthropological and psychological studies of the male sex role, masculinity studies has encouraged gender scholars to move beyond traditional ways of conceiving patriarchal power and to address the heterogeneity and uneven distribution of male privilege.