ABSTRACT
Writing about Western countries, Alan Peterson (1998: 19) raises doubts about the appropriateness of the term ‘crisis’ for the current debates around issues of masculinity. He points out that there have been such ‘crises’ before, often in response to large-scale socio-economic change that includes more assertive demands by women – such as in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France and England, and late-nineteenth/early-twentieth-century Europe and America (Petersen 1998: 19–20, citing Kimmel 1987, and Badinter 1995). This current ‘crisis’ is wider in scope, however, since it involves all sections of society and converges with a broader ‘crisis of modernity’ in which the epistemological foundations of categories that have been used to frame thinking since the nineteenth century have come under sustained attack (Petersen 1998: 20–21).
