ABSTRACT
Masculinities scholarship is an essential piece of feminist analysis and of critical equality analysis. It requires that we ‘ask the man question’ to further unravel inequalities (Dowd 2008, 2010). Asking the ‘man question’ means simply to ask, ‘What is the position of boys and/or men in this situation?’ Implicit in this question should be a second question, ‘Does this apply to all boys and/or men, or only to some, or does it affect different men differently?’ A decade ago Angela Harris urged legal scholars to ask the ‘man question’ by exposing the masculinities present in the brutal sodomization of Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant, by white police officers while Louima was in police custody (Harris 2000). To many, race alone explained what had occurred in the Louima case. Failure to recognize how masculinities infused that incident as well, Harris argued, would ratify and condone male-on-male violence, hypermasculinity in police culture, and the racial hierarchy of masculinities present in the incident. In the decade since Harris’s analysis, much work has been done in masculinities scholarship, but few legal scholars have brought this perspective into the mainstream of critical legal scholarship (Collier 2010a, McGinley 2010, 2007a, 2004, Cooper 2006a, Gavanas 2004a, Giller 2004, Howarth 2002, Kimmel 1997a, Levit 1996, 1999, Vojdik 2002). This book marks one of several movements towards examining and considering what masculinities scholarship can offer (Harvard Journal of Law and Gender 2010, Cooper and McGinley 2012, McGinley 2010).
