ABSTRACT
Over the last few years there has been a surge of interest in the study of men and masculinity. We are told that on both sides of the Atlantic men are starting to respond to the challenges of feminism. Women and gay men are no longer the ‘problem’ to be unravelled. Now the spotlight is on the heterosexual male. Fresh definitions of ‘masculinity’ abound, affirming old myths in attempts to create new males. From the ‘wounded male’ to the ‘new man’, images of reconstructed men appear on advertising billboards and television and in magazines and newspapers. These responses to feminism not only attempt to ‘unwrap masculinity’ (Chapman and Rutherford 1988; Polan 1988), but also to reassert male prerogatives (Faludi 1992): perhaps as Brittan suggests, ‘what has changed is not male power as such, but its form, the presentation and the packaging’ (1989: 2). Now, as in the past, the term ‘men’ is used as an unmarked universal category to
stand for humanity in general. Over the last two decades, feminists have challenged the ideological and material entailments of such implicit male bias. It is ironic that the logic of feminism as a political position has often required the notion of ‘men’ as a single, oppositional category. Founding their position on the assertion that ‘the personal is the political’, feminists have consistently raised awkward questions about the status quo in both the community and the academy (cf. Caplan 1987a). More recently, however, the feminist political project has faced a number of theoretical and methodological challenges from within. Several of these challenges have had a direct bearing on the genesis of this volume. Like feminism, anthropology can be described as an inquisitive and uncomfor-
table discipline that offers theories and methods for investigating a multiplicity of interested perspectives. Yet anthropologists have been curiously silent in the recent wide-ranging debates on masculinity. In Dislocating Masculinity, our aim is not simply to fill a descriptive void, but to demonstrate why the premises and methods of social anthropology are important to the study of men and masculinities. The
ethnographic studies we present reveal the richness of an anthropological approach to questions of gender; they raise important theoretical questions and suggest further areas for research. In our introduction, we examine the wider academic background to our study
and draw on the new ethnographies of our authors to address anthropologically some of the intellectual and political issues raised by feminist and postmodern theory. In this respect, our positions as gendered participants in current debates about masculinity are significant. We want to disrupt the premises that underlie much recent writing on and by men, whether it belongs to the canon of men’s studies (cf. Brod 1987; Kimmel 1987) or is the work of anthropologists such as Gilmore (1990). In so doing, we offer a new perspective for viewing gendered identities and subverting dominant chauvinisms on which gender, class, race and other hierarchies depend.
