ABSTRACT
Over the past 15 years, scholars have paid increasing attention to college students who are men and their development (Davis, 2002; Davis & Laker, 2004; Edwards & Jones, 2009; Harper & Harris, 2010b; Kimmel, 2008; Laker & Davis, 2011). This body of research has been important in examining how masculinity socialization impacts some men’s lives (Harper & Harris, 2010a); however, men are often viewed in the aggregate, which represents a dangerous and often misleading assumption. In this chapter, we used collaborative autoethnography (Chang, Ngunjiri, & Hernandez, 2012) to examine the connection between concept and methodology in higher education research on men. We noted tensions that arise when the term men is used interchangeably with males and surfaced the importance of researcher reflexivity in gender scholarship. We explored contexts wherein gender connotes subject position while operating as a system that regulates who belongs to the category of men, conferring privilege and advantage to those who conform to hegemonic norms. We concluded with themes devised from retracing and critiquing our own decisions in the research process and imagining emancipatory possibilities when starting with men in gender research.
