Investigating Hegemonic Masculinity: Portrayals of Masculinity in Men’s Lifestyle Magazines

A content analysis of eight different men’s lifestyle magazines sold in Canada between November 2004 and August 2006 was conducted to explore how masculinities are currently being portrayed in regards to the body, aesthetics and grooming, and fashion. Findings suggest that different men’s magazines represent different forms of masculinity but elements of hegemonic masculinity (culturally normative ideals of masculinity within a structure of social relations where some men are subordinated) are woven throughout. Although the marketed look varies by the magazine, these magazines not only convey the message that appearance can be manipulated—but it should also be enhanced, and that men should engage in bodywork in order to attain the lifestyle they desire.     

The Role of Masculinity in Children’s Bullying

The aim of the present study was to explore the association between gender role, in terms of self-attribution of masculine and feminine characteristics, and children's involvement in bullying problems during the elementary-school years. A total of 113, six- to ten-year-old children completed self-report measures of bullying and victimization and a masculinity–femininity scale. Their teachers provided ratings of pupils’ reactive and proactive aggressive behavior. Data from a hierarchical regression on bullying scores showed that, irrespective of sex, masculine traits predicted active bullying behavior. Moreover, bullying was also related to victimization and to teacher's evaluation of reactive aggression. Our findings suggest the need for longitudinal and cross-cultural studies in this line of research.     

Philosophical and Political Issues in Research on Women’s Violence and Aggression

This essay organizes the philosophical and political issues raised by researching women’s aggression and violence by posing three questions. What does a research focus on women’s violence and aggression offer feminist scholars and activists? What are the potential hazards of such a focus? What are promising directions for research? To focus on women as aggressors and perpetrators as well as victims sheds light on compelling and difficult questions of gender and violence, especially violence and aggression between intimate partners. It also presents some political pitfalls for the most vigilant researchers, including oversimplification and misinterpretation of complex empirical findings. The author concludes with a call for researchers to follow the lead of the ideas and evidence collected in this special issue.     

Liminal Masculinity in Richard Selzer’s Knife Song Korea

The doctor in a foreign country is a recurring theme in physician writer Richard Selzer’s stories. In his 2009 novel, Knife Song Korea, Selzer returns to this theme, examining it in depth through the lens of gender. Selzer features the American military surgeon Sloane’s multiple border-crossings, namely, from America to Korea, from health to patienthood, and from sex-exploitation to love. Crossing those visible or invisible borders in the gender and race conscious contexts of medical profession and military in wartime Korea, Sloane finds himself liminally located among various masculine stereotypes. The mixed-race situation in the novel further pushes Sloane to realize the unbearability of the baggage of American manhood as represented in his profession. Selzer’s punishment of Sloane’s border-crossings seems to suggest that physicians, together with patients, are equally likely to be victimized by the macho norms in medicine.     

Women’s Ideals for Masculinity Across Social Contexts: Patriarchal Agentic Masculinity is Valued in Work,Family, and Romance but Communal Masculinity in Friendship

The present study explores women’s ideals for masculinity in different social contexts (work, family/romance, and friendship) and compares how traditional (agentic) and non-patriarchal (communal) masculinity are valued in each context. Survey data were collected from one international (N = 159) and three South African samples (Ns = 86, 100, 161) of women. Results show that although women value patriarchal ideals for masculinity, agentic and communal versions of masculinity are valued differently across contexts. Specifically, traditional agentic versions of masculinity were most valued in the contexts most important to the long-term production of viable identity (family/romance and work). It was only in friendship that non-patriarchal communal masculinity was consistently idealized over traditional agentic masculinity. The results are discussed in relation to hegemonic masculinity (HM) and system justification theory (SJT). Congruent with SJT, women idealized versions of masculinity that may not be in their own or their group’s best interests, but in line with HM, the results emphasized the fluidity of masculinity and that the same individual can simultaneously idealize different versions of masculinity depending on the context. Because stereotypes are both explanations for the status quo and warrants for behaving in one way or another, these collective ideals for masculinity and contextual boundaries may be important obstacles to achieving gender equity.     

Validity Concerns in the Measurement of Women’s and Men’s Report of Intimate Partner Violence

The measurement of intimate partner violence (IPV) has proven to be more complex than originally anticipated and content and construct validity need to be greatly improved for IPV assessment. For measurement of IPV in the United States, these validity issues range from providing the most accurate wording for the content domain to controversies as to when violent actions are counted (e.g., self-defense) or whether to include mild aggression (e.g., psychological conflict tactics) that may be more normative and not harmful. The three major forms of IPV (i.e., physical, sexual, and psychological abuse) have distinct validity issues and may require different modalities for assessment. Gender needs to be considered when establishing construct validity due to differences in the meaning of aggression, impacts of abuse, and even patterns of violence for women and men. External threats to validity include potential bias of self-report and motivations when reporting on a partner, discrepancies in couples’ reports, the influence of response styles, and design issues affecting reporting. Traditional methods used to establish validity for IPV scales are reviewed and critiqued. Recommendations for enhancing validity in IPV assessment are provided.     

Vattimo’s Renunciation of Violence

For Gianni Vattimo, the renunciation of violence is the starting point for constructing a post foundational politics. So far, criticism of Vattimo’s argument has focused on his larger commitment to metaphysical nihilism and whether the renunciation of violence is a thicker principle than his post foundational philosophy can support. I argue that Vattimo’s renunciation of violence can also be criticized for two other reasons. First, Vattimo attempts to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable uses of violence through an under developed idea of self-defense. Second, despite his attention to the political and philosophical impact of mass communications technology, Vattimo ignores emerging technological challenges to our understanding of violence. Nonetheless, I argue that Vattimo’s renunciation can still serve as a useful starting point for contemporary political thinking. What Vattimo’s logic shows is that we can enhance the moral standing of democracy by decisively detaching its practices and institutions from historical artifacts of political violence.     

Internalized Homophobia and Intimate Partner Violence in Young Adult Women’s Same-Sex Relationships

This study examined the relationship between intimate partner violence (IPV), internalized homophobia, and psychological maladjustment in a convenience sample of young adult women. Rates of psychological and physical abuse in women’s same-sex relationships were shown to be commensurate to previously reported rates of violence in the IPV literature; rates of sexual coercion were also ascertained. A relationship was found between Moral and Religious Attitudes Toward Lesbianism (MRATL), a dimension of internalized homophobia, and the perpetration of sexual coercion. As expected, internalized homophobia was connected to psychological maladjustment. In addition, both the perpetration of psychological aggression and physical violence were associated with emotional instability. The study findings are discussed within the current body of literature on IPV.     

Immigration Policies and Immigrant Women’s Vulnerability to Intimate Partner Violence in Canada

This article explores Canadian immigration policies’ influence on immigrant and newcomer women’s vulnerability to intimate partner violence in Canada. Neoliberal policies’ influence on immigration policies and restructuring of the welfare state, the creation of structural conditions that increase immigrant and newcomer women’s vulnerability to intimate partner violence while restricting their access to services that can help them seek recourse from such abuse, are discussed. The underlying question raised and discussed in this article is whether cultural identity and distinctiveness could be used to rationalize exclusionary policies that are contrary to the ideals of multiculturalism in Canada.     

Australia’s State-Specific and Regional Migration Scheme: An Assessment of its Impacts in South Australia

In post-demographic transition societies, the impacts of low fertility and aging are most strongly felt in peripheral areas where they are exacerbated by youth outmigration. International migration is increasingly seen to have the potential to offset these demographic constraints on economic development. In Australia, immigration policy has been strongly focused on selecting who can be accepted as settlers. However, there are now a range of visa categories which also influence where they settle and channels a fifth of settler arrivals into lagging peripheral parts of the nation. This paper shows how these have been used by the State of South Australia to more than treble its immigrant intake as part of its economic development strategy. The impact of the State-Specific Regional Migration (SSRM) Scheme in South Australia is assessed and the initial experience of settlers examined. It is argued that international migration can play a supportive role in the development of peripheral regions in OECD countries, but there are a number of preconditions which need to be met for them to be effective.     

Monsters of Men: Masculinity and the Other in Patrick Ness’s Chaos Walking Series

ABSTRACT

To date, studies of gender issues in young adult dystopian novels have been dominated by a focus on constructions of female subjectivity, girlhood, and the potential for female empowerment. However, little critical attention has been correspondingly dedicated to examining how regimes of masculinity, traditional privileges of male power, and male adolescence are represented and mediated in dystopian fiction for teenagers. Patrick Ness’s exploration of normative and transgressive embodiments of masculinity in his dystopian Chaos Walking series for young adults powerfully addresses tensions between power and vulnerability, autonomy and conformity, and concepts of boyhood and manhood. Through their experiences with the possibilities of telepathy, biotechnology, and interspecies relationships, Ness’s protagonists must negotiate with the simultaneous attraction of the fragmented self and its threat to the regulation of conventional manhood, as male characters struggle to sustain their inherited understanding of themselves and the relation between self and other. Through his problematizing of the boundaries between traditional hegemonic and Other, human and alien codes, and his emphasis on the importance of non-hierarchical and inclusive co-existence, Ness proposes a receptive, expansive, and egalitarian paradigm of masculinity.     

Anti-Luck Epistemology and Safety’s (Recent) Discontents

Anti-luck epistemology is an approach to analyzing knowledge that takes as a starting point the widely-held assumption that knowledge must exclude luck. Call this the anti-luck platitude. As Duncan Pritchard (2005) has suggested, there are three stages constituent of anti-luck epistemology, each which specifies a different philosophical requirement: these stages call for us to first give an account of luck; second, specify the sense in which knowledge is incompatible with luck; and finally, show what conditions must be satisfied in order to block the kind of luck with which knowledge was argued to be incompatible. What I’ll show here is that the modal account of luck offers a plausible story at the first stage and leads naturally to equally plausible lines to take at the second and third stages, at which a safety condition on knowledge is squarely motivated. There are, however, recent challenges—advanced by Jonathan Kvanvig (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77: 272–281, 2008); Kelly Becker (2007); and Jennifer Lackey (Australasian Journal of Philosophy 86(2):255–267, 2008), among others—to the plausibility of the safety-based anti-luck project I’ve sketched here at each of its three stages of development. Once I’ve made precise the challenges, I’ll show why none implies that we abandon the commitments of the safety-based anti-luck project at any of its stages. What we should conclude, then, is that a safety-condition on knowledge is motivated by independently defensible accounts of (1) what luck is; and (2) just how knowledge should be thought incompatible with it.     

“A Father’s Touch:” Negotiating Masculinity and Sexual Subjectivity in Child Care

This essay explores changing attitudes towards male caregivers in postwar America to understand conceptions of prepubescent gender and sexuality. While the 1950s have been viewed as a period of rigid gender conventions, the demands of a baby boom generation allowed men unexpected roles as caregivers. In the 1960s and 1970s, challenges to the status quo along with fears of female-headed households encouraged men to move into the field of child care, but this was particularly short lived. Political backlash and a failing economy turned male daycare workers into suspects, revealing the ambiguity that so often distorts children’s interactions with men.

Profiles of Children’s Thinking About Violence in Families Exposed to Intimate Partner Violence

Intimate partner violence remains a pervasive and common social problem. Evidence indicates that children witness many instances of intimate partner violence. However, the structure of children’s thinking about family violence is still not well understood. This research employed latent profile analysis to identify underlying latent profiles of children’s thinking about violence using the Attitudes and Beliefs About Violence Scale. The analysis identified two latent profiles mostly differentiated by children’s beliefs about whether or not victims of violence deserve to have violence inflicted upon them. Several covariates differentiated members of the two profiles. Suggestions for intervention and practice are included.     

Women’s Income-generating Activity and Experiences of Economic Intimate Partner Violence in Rural Bangladesh

Sex Roles - Economic coercion is a form of intimate partner violence (IPV) that is distinct from but often co-occurs with physical, psychological, and sexual IPV. Women’s experiences of...     

Violence and existence: an examination of Carl Schmitt’s philosophy

Continental Philosophy Review - This article examines the concept of existence underlying Carl Schmitt’s political philosophy—a concept is that Heidegger largely shares. Can such a...