ABSTRACT
The relationship between law and masculinity is a topic marginal to much mainstream legal scholarship. Even at international conferences and symposia concerned with law, gender and sexuality it remains rare, still, to find workshops specifically focused on this subject. Nonetheless, there are signs that things are changing. Writing in 1995, in the book Masculinity, Law and the Family, I observed how, at the time, there had been few texts that took as the specific object of study the relationship between masculinity and law (Collier 1995). This is no longer the case, andover the past fifteen years or so a rich picture has emerged within law and society scholarship of the ‘man’ or, more accurately, the ‘men’ of legal discourse. A now substantial body of research has unpacked the ways in which ideas about men and gender have been understood, constructed, or otherwise depicted in law. This work raises important questions about many aspects of social life, as well as about the variable and contested meanings that attach to gender. Events such as the ‘Masculinities and the Law’ workshop, from which this collection is drawn, held at Emory Law School in September 2009, and the symposium on ‘Feminist Perspectives in Masculinities’ held at Harvard Law School in March 2010, are indicative of a field of study that, in recent years in particular, has developed rapidly. More legal scholars are seeking, in diverse areas of law, and via a range of methods, to reconsider how ideas about masculinities inform and circulate in law and policy debates within specific jurisdictions (see, for example, Dowd 2010, McGinley 2004, Cooper 2009a, 2006a, Collier 2010b, 2009, 1998, Cooper and McGinley 2012, Thomson 2008).
