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Chapter
Practice and Utopia
DOI link for Practice and Utopia
Practice and Utopia book
Practice and Utopia
DOI link for Practice and Utopia
Practice and Utopia book
ABSTRACT
This chapter will consider what our current knowledge of masculinity means for the project of social justice in gender relations. The consciousness of historical change in gender, even as it opens up a politics of change, also seems to limit it. The statistics of inequality list men, not masculinities, as the advantaged group. Difference/dominance means not logical separation but intimate supremacy. The pattern of difference/dominance is so deeply embedded in culture, institutions and body-reflexive practices that it functions as a limit to the rights-based politics of reform. The degendering strategy applies not only at the level of culture and institutions, but also at the level of the body – the ground chosen by defenders of patriarchy, where the fear of men being turned into women is most poignant. The main model for political action on masculinity in rich countries is the idea of a ‘men’s movement’.