Beyond macho: Defining a man’s world

Stereotype a disservice to men, academics say

The male stereotype of the allpowerful protector and provider is doing a disservice to men — pressuring them to conform and ultimately, leaving many powerless to face the challenges of modern society.

That’s the thesis that binds many academics in the new area of masculinity studies, who say their examination of how the culture of maleness impacts men, rather than those around them, has been a long time coming. While women’s studies have been gaining a foothold at universities across the country since the early 1970s, academic courses and research on men could barely be found, most often hidden under the umbrella of gender studies.

Now, however, researchers who focus on the study of men and masculinity are coming out of the cold. They are the vanguard, whose theories are often used in newspaper and magazine stories about how men are faring.

“Clearly it’s at a very nascent stage in its development, in the humanities and social sciences,” says Concordia University sociologist Marc Lafrance, who teaches about men and masculinity as part of several courses on gender and sexuality at the Montreal university.

But even though there are just a few courses in masculinity studies given at the university level across Canada, and no departments of men’s or masculinity studies, Lafrance, 35, says that since arriving at Concordia in 2006 after completing a PHD at Oxford, “I went from supervising nothing on masculinity over my first two years to supervising four students and then five and now, we’re waiting to hear about the status of three new applications in our graduate program in the upcoming year.”

The push to study masculinity might be viewed as a logical extension of women’s studies, which examines the problems of gender and the social construction of sexuality mostly from a female perspective. In addition, there’s the “masculinity crisis” widely discussed today — males under pressure from societal changes.

“These two things together have created a fertile context for study, and we’re starting to see concrete evidence that this is becoming a fullfledged area of inquiry,” Lafrance says.

But rather than looking only at men’s behaviour through the tired lens of their power and destructiveness, he believes we need to look at how masculinity “as a structure, as a lived experience, can also be fundamentally disempowering to men.”

The aggressive arena of men’s sports and its connection to serious emotional damage is being studied by Concordia sociology graduate student Cheryl Macdonald, 24, who interviewed a number of major junior hockey players about what masculinity means to them.