ABSTRACT
This essay interrogates male scholars’ putative loyalty to feminism by questioning the notion of loyalties being grounded in essential gender/sex-related identities. It reviews the theoretical challenges to ideas of gendered identity posed by work on fluidity of sex–gender systems, poststructuralist ideas of identity construction, intersectionality, and hegemonic and hybrid masculinities; two volumes on ‘Men in Feminism’ as well as other examples of ethnographic evidence serve as diagnostics of the change in approach to thinking about identity. The essay suggests that commitments to feminist politics may be better measured through scholarship which serves to illumine forms of gendered power, including reflexive evaluations of researchers’ identities.
