ABSTRACT
This chapter shifts away from examining media and representations, to exploring how Australian men come to understand and define their masculinity. In this chapter, I focus on what it means to effectively be a man in Australia. I explore how they define, engage with, and understand masculinity. In the first part of the chapter, I explore how masculinity has been theorised and taken up in academic scholarship, as well as provide the methodological background in conducting interviews with the participants. In the second part, I ask, what is masculinity, or masculine, for these men? In these conversations, a number of themes emerged that linked men to what I argue is a white, working-class masculine narrative as the “ideal”.
