ABSTRACT
This chapter explains that masculinities are empirically plural, although maintaining their dominant and dominating force in the social world. More importantly, the concern with men as gendered subjects and the theorization about masculinities can only be fully understood when placed in the broader history of feminism and of its relationship with essentialism, reification and categorization in gender analysis. In her feminist critique of dichotomies, Raia Prokhovnik identifies four key features of binary thinking, which apply perfectly to processes of gender dualism. The rigidity of fixed gender identities has been strongly questioned by post-structuralist feminisms, and in their critical analyses of both traditional sex-role theory and gender categoricalism. Even if paradigmatically revolutionary, the theoretical proposals of feminism did not fully bring down gender dichotomies. The chapter explains that exaggeration of difference remains strong at present and is resisting, sometimes clearly in its death throes, the critical deconstruction of the masculine status quo.
