This paper responds to two trends in debates about Plato's view of women in the Republic. First, many scholars argue or assume that Plato seeks to minimize the influence of femininity in the ideal city, and to make guardian women themselves as “masculine” as possible. Second, scholars who address the relationship between Plato's views of women and his psychological theory tend to focus on the reasoning and appetitive parts of the tripartite soul. In response to the first point, we argue (...) that the idea that Plato seeks to masculinize/de-feminize the city oversimplifies his treatment of Greek gender norms. Although he does want to eliminate some traditionally feminine qualities from the city, he also seeks to eliminate many masculine qualities as well. Moreover, while he tries to make guardian women more like men in some respects, he simultaneously aims to make guardian men more like Greek women in important ways. Regarding the second point, we argue that this project of reimagining gender norms is illuminated by Plato's psychology, but instead of emphasizing reason and appetite, we show how his views are connected to his account of the third, “spirited” part of the soul, thumos, and its dual hard/soft or aggressive/gentle nature. (shrink)

The activational and organizational hormone effects as originally defined do not conflict with activational influences on brain structure. Ovarian hormonal influences on the rodent corpus callosum could be activational rather than organizational. The masculinization/feminization distinction in brain structure and the timing of sex differences in visuo-spatial abilities need to be clarified.

This research provides a look at men doing gender in the highly feminized context of temporary clerical employment. Male clerical temporaries, as with other men who cross over into “women's work,” face institutionalized challenges to their sense of masculinity. In particular, male clerical temporary workers face gender assessment—highlighting their failure to live up to the ideals of hegemonic masculinity. The resulting gender strategies these men adopt reveal how male clerical temporary workers “do masculinity”—often in a collaborative (...) performance shaped by the gendered expectations of their agencies, their clients, and even themselves—to reassert the feminine identification of the job while at the same time rejecting its application to them. Paradoxically, rather than disrupting the gender order, the gender strategies used by these male clerical temporaries help to reproduce and naturalize the gendered organization of work and reinvigorate hegemonic masculinity and its domination over women and subaltern men. (shrink)

This is an interesting reinterpretation of masculine and feminine that speaks to contemporary perspectives on to what extent gender is a spectrum, especially when we consider the fates of all the so‐called "masculine" men in Dune. On one level, in Denis Villeneuve's Dune women become empowered, while the men become emasculated. Examining gender in Dune would be incomplete without a look at Baron Harkonnen, who, in both Frank Herbert's book and in David Lynch's 1984 film, is clearly depicted not just (...) as gay, but as embodying a sort of deviant sexuality. So, it appears that the traditional masculine/feminine gender binary is challenged throughout Villeneuve's part one, with many of the male characters embodying a feminized masculinity and with most of the female characters existing within a feminine imaginary to the point that Dune 's society borders on the androgynous. (shrink)

Augmenting and supplementing the arguments of Crespi & Badcock (C&B), I show that digit ratio (2D:4D), a putative marker of prenatal androgen action, indeed appears differentially altered in autism-spectrum disorders (lower/masculinized) versus schizophrenic-spectrum disorders (higher/feminized). Consistent with C&B's framework, some evidence (substantial heritability, assortative mating, sex-specific familial transmission) points to possible sex chromosome and imprinted genes effects on 2D:4D expression.

Arnold Schwarzenegger's celebrity status allowed him to project a symbolic masculine persona that was effective in gaining political power as California governor. The well-known violent tough-guy persona that Schwarzenegger developed in the mid-1980s contributed to a post—Vietnam era cultural remasculinization of the American man. But this narrow hyper-masculinity was often caricatured in popular culture and delegitimized. In the 1990s and 2000s, Schwarzenegger forged a credible masculine imagery by introducing characters who were humorously self-mocking and focused on care and protection (...) of children. Schwarzenegger's resultant hybrid masculinity, the “Kindergarten Commando,” represents an ascendant hegemonic masculinity always foregrounding muscle, toughness, and the threat of violence and following with situationally appropriate symbolic displays of compassion. The equation of toughness plus compassion composing the Kindergarten Commando is asymmetrical, with toughness eclipsing compassion; this has implications for the kinds of policies that U.S. elected leaders advocate. Republicans utilize this masculine imagery in national politics to gain voters' trust in times of fear and insecurity and continue to employ a strategy that projects a devalued feminized stigma onto more liberal candidates. (shrink)

Veterinary medicine has undergone dramatic, rapid feminization while in many ways remaining gendered masculine. With women constituting approximately half of its practitioners and nearly 80 percent of students, veterinary medicine is the most feminized of the comparable health professions. Nevertheless, the culture of veterinary medicine glorifies stereotypically masculine actions and attitudes. This article examines how women veterinarians understand the gender dynamics within the profession. Our analysis reveals that the discursive strategies available to women sustain and justify the status quo, (...) and thus preserve hegemonic masculinity. Women use strategies previously used toward female tokens in nontraditional jobs, such as role encapsulation, and strategies previously used by male tokens in traditionally female jobs, such as distancing from the feminine. Through this discursive “gender work,” women help to maintain the institutionalized inequality and the masculine ethic of the profession. Veterinary medicine illustrates the importance of considering organizational context in studies of feminization. (shrink)

Dans l’Antiquité romaine, la musique participe à sa façon à la construction du genre en introduisant une division sexuée des notes et des instruments de musique dans la théorie musicale et un partage des sexes lors de la pratique musicale. La question du costume du musicien et du travestissement offre aussi une autre occasion d’explorer le thème du genre. Êtres ambivalents par excellence, le musicien et le danseur se situent parfois en marge du monde masculin à cause de leur allure, (...) de leur habit et de la nature même de leur métier. L’histoire emblématique d’Achille caché dans le gynécée à Skyros ou celle, réelle, du noble Clodius travesti en femme utilisant tous deux les apparences de la musicienne en sont les manifestations les plus abouties qui servent d’exempla pour les Anciens dans la définition des frontières entre féminité et virilité. (shrink)

This study examined the association between mental rotation ability and facial masculinity preference in gay and bisexual men in China. The participants (436 gay/bisexual men, 132 heterosexual men and 254 heterosexual women) completed an online Shepard and Metzler-type mental rotation task and a forced-choice preference task of ten pairs of masculinized/feminized male faces. The results revealed that mental rotation ability was significantly associated with preference for masculinized faces in both gay and bisexual men. There were no significant correlations (...) between mental rotation ability and facial masculinity preference in both heterosexual men and women. The findings imply homogamy in partner preference in gay and bisexual men in terms of masculinity. (shrink)

In this paper we address the objectivist logic of bipolar gender attribution, the entitlement of ideal masculine virtues, and the repression of so-called non-male characteristics in persons who live with chronic disabling conditions. More specifically, we show how the living experience of chronic disability continues to be co-opted by patriarchal strategies designed to keep particular bodies both invisible and silent.

This paper articulates a methodological strategy for creating a “conceptual home” whose aim is the enabling and promotion of Latin American feminist philosophy in the context of Latin American feminist theory's concern for the relationship between theory and practice. The author argues that philosophy as a discipline is still too compromised by masculine-dominant, Anglocentric, and Eurocentric ways of representing knowledge such that discursive and ideological impediments make it difficult to conceive and develop ways of feminist theorizing that arise from an (...) interpellation of the philosopher by the Latin American conditions affecting her social and cultural life. The author offers a fourfold approach to grounding knowledge, based on the principles of pursuing a critical approach to knowledge, a concern for the relationship of theory and practice, an orientation toward progressive political projects of freedom and liberation in the context of Latin American history and politics, and a transformative politics of culture. It is argued that through such specific methodological concerns, Latin American feminist philosophy can attain a distinct identity and stop depending for its articulation on paradigms of knowledge whose premises are not necessarily best attuned to understand the issues it must confront in its sociocultural practice. (shrink)

The state of Alaska has a complex historical relationship with its wild wolf packs. The authors expand Connell's concept of frontier masculinity to interpret articles from the Anchorage Daily News as an alternative way to understand Alaska's shifting wolf policies. Originally, state policies were shaped by frontier masculinity and characterized by claims of sportsmen's rights to kill wolves. With the reinstitution of an aggressive wolf-eradication project, Alaska policy makers retooled frontier masculinity. This altered form of masculinity, (...) retro frontier masculinity, is constructed at the state level and deploys new strategic emphases: vilifying opponents as feminized sissies, casting wolf hunters as paternalist protectors, reifying the masculine family provider role, and framing the issue as fundamentally about competition. (shrink)

Cultural critics of the “feminization of love” have argued that heterosexual love has been feminized by a stress on emotional expressivity that masks “masculine” love, with its greater emphasis on instrumental behaviors. Using survey data, this article examines the extent to which the feminization-of-love hypothesis can be extended to same-sex friendships. Data analyses revealed that women's friendships were more expressive than men's only when a narrow, positive definition of expressivity was employed; men's friendships were found to be more aggressive, (...) but no more instrumental, than those of women. These and other findings support the conclusion that women's friendships are more similar to the cultural images of heroic friendship and sisterhood than to the narrower image of feminized love. (shrink)

Facial feminization surgery (FFS) is a set of bone and soft tissue procedures intended to feminize the faces of transgender women. In the surgical evaluation, particular facial features are identified as ‘sex specific’ and targeted for intervention as such. But those features do not exhibit ‘maleness’ or ‘femaleness’ alone; they are complexly entwined with morphologies of ethnic classification. Based on clinical observation, I show how the desired feminine ideal conflicted with facial characteristics identified as ‘ethnic’. In FFS practice, ‘masculinity’ (...) and ‘ethnicity’ were entangled as the constitutive outsides by which desirable ‘femininity’ was articulated. I argue that surgery that self-consciously enacts a patient’s move away from physiognomically identifiable ethnicity in order to achieve an ostensibly unmarked and neutral femininity becomes not only a process of feminizing the face but of whitening it, regardless of whether ‘white’ features are the express desire of the patient or aim of the surgeon. (shrink)

Our paper focuses on the philosophical perspective of constructing active caring masculinities agencies in the contemporary feminist discourse. Since contemporary feminisms are not simply anti-essentialist, but more importantly, polyphonic, we believe that it is far more appropriate to talk about ‘masculinities’ as opposed to ‘masculinity’. We are proposing a revised understanding of the self in which the self is not defined primarily in the dichotomous, categorical one-other relationship. We use Paul Ricoeur’s anthropology to describe the self as relational, as (...) well as Joan Tronto’s recent perspective on care which fits well with a Ricoeurian reconstruction of the self. We also engage with Raewyn Connell’s discourse on masculinity and more specifically, hegemonic masculinity. By using ‘caring masculine agencies’ as an alternative to ‘masculinity as reactive anti-femininity’, we are proposing a paradigm shift that hopefully is flexible enough to respect the dynamism inherent to any act of gender-identification. (shrink)

Existing evidence suggests that children from around the age of 8 years strategically alter their public image in accordance with known values and preferences of peers, through the self-descriptive information they convey. However, an important but neglected aspect of this 'self-presentation' is the medium through which such information is communicated: the voice itself. The present study explored peer audience effects on children's vocal productions. Fifty-six children were presented with vignettes where a fictional child, matched to the participant's age and sex, (...) is trying to make friends with a group of same-sex peers with stereotypically masculine or feminine interests. Participants were asked to impersonate the child in that situation and, as the child, to read out loud masculine, feminine and gender-neutral self-descriptive statements to these hypothetical audiences. They also had to decide which of those self-descriptive statements would be most helpful for making friends. In line with previous research, boys and girls preferentially selected masculine or feminine self-descriptive statements depending on the audience interests. Crucially, acoustic analyses of fundamental frequency and formant frequency spacing revealed that children also spontaneously altered their vocal productions: they feminized their voices when speaking to members of the ballet club, while they masculinized their voices when speaking to members of the rugby club. Both sexes also feminized their voices when uttering feminine sentences, compared to when uttering masculine and gender-neutral sentences. Implications for the hitherto neglected role of acoustic qualities of children's vocal behaviour in peer interactions are discussed. This article is part of the theme issue 'Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact '. (shrink)

This article argues that Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex continues to teach academic feminism why difference feminism holds productive and generative potential for feminists and why equality feminism has been consistently subject to criticism since the second wave of feminism. Using Hegel's master—slave dialectic as a lens to interpret subjectivity in The Second Sex, this text reveals an aspect of equality feminism that relies upon masculine subjectivity, a subjectivity that inherently constitutes otherness. This reliance on masculine subjectivity is anathema (...) to difference feminism because the otherness inherently constituted by such subjectivity simultaneously and paradoxically constitutes women's ongoing subordination. In assuming equality with men by adopting masculine subjectivity, women are not immune to constituting women as other. Difference feminisms, on the other hand, start from where women are as they choose to see themselves socially, economically, racially, sexually. The Second Sex reveals that difference feminisms imagine freedom in order to identify the difference that would empower women, not strictly towards sex equality with a stable referent, but towards emancipatory projects that make a difference for women themselves. The Second Sex portends that such imagined freedom has not been actualized, thus the present remains circumscribed by power that subordinates the difference in question. When read alongside The Second Sex, the tension between equality and difference feminisms can still be read as feminisms that coexist with one another, each with their limitations, each with productive potential and cautionary rejoinders. (shrink)

This study explores how men make sense of their participation in the feminized practice of salon hair care. By placing white, middle-class, heterosexual men at the center of analysis, I investigate the meaning of beauty work for a population that has been overlooked in research on gender and the beauty industry. Specifically, I demonstrate that men embed their purchase of salon hair care in the need to appropriate expectations of white professional-class masculinity. Ultimately, these men reproduce raced and (...) classed gender differences in the hair salon by resisting feminization while at the same time transgressing gender boundaries. (shrink)

Masculinities vary by organizational context, demonstrating that organizational culture shapes the gendering of work even within the same occupation. The author draws on comparative and ethnographic data collected in two retail environments to understand how a common organizational culture is differently gendered by the organization of work. In these music stores, organizational culture is driven by masculinist fantasies of the rock musician lifestyle. As the products and knowledge of the rock musician lifestyle are made popularly accessible and retail work is (...) deskilled, a style of masculinity based on fraternization and competition takes the place of formal knowledge and experience—reaffirming rock musician as a populist, but exclusively male identity. The article concludes with a consideration of how the de-skilling of retail work reproduces gendered interactions that affirm men’s control over work and its products, even as retail work is presumed to be feminizing. (shrink)

While both men and women work out in contemporary gyms, popular conceptions of the gym as a masculine institution continue. The authors examine organizational processes within a chain of women-only gyms to explore whether and how these processes have feminized the historically masculine gym. They examine the physical setting and equipment, the established procedures for customers' use of machines, and the interactional styles of employees as components of the organization's structure. They argue that the organization's use of technology and (...) labor mobilizes customers' participation in a feminized organizational culture of nonjudgmental and noncompetitive sociability. Organizational processes create a context that fosters gendered interactions and identities among customers. The organizational context calls gendered behavior into play such that the performance is naturalized. The processes outlined may occur in other cases of organizational recoding and suggest ways that transposable gender practices may change the gender coding of an institution yet leave gender hierarchies intact. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Theorizing Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in ChinaKwai-Cheung LoTheorizing Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China. By Kam Louie. Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. 239. Hardcover U.S. $60.00.In Theorizing Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China Kam Louie offers us a very clear and concise analysis of the cultural models of Chinese masculinity from ancient imperial times to the present age of transnational (...) contact. Although academic works on Chinese masculinity are not totally absent, systematic and thorough historical surveys of this topic are still rare. While gender studies of China are predominantly on femininity or other women-related issues, man as a gendered category has long escaped serious academic attention. Louie's book could be considered a pioneering effort to provide a rather comprehensive study of this subject. Besides describing in detail the historical development of the male image from premodern to contemporary times, Louie also focuses on the ways in which Chinese men have been represented under the Western gaze and how these representations have negotiated with the dominant Western culture.The fundamental structure of masculinity in China, according to Louie, operates according to the two poles of wen (literary attainment, cultural knowledge, the mental) and wu (martial valor, martial arts, the physical), which are far more complementary than antagonistic, although the wen polarity has always been prioritized over wu in the conventional Chinese mindset. wen maleness is exemplified by Confucius, the sage of the gentleman-scholar type, whereas Guan Yu, the God of War, represents the wu masculine ideal. These two archetypes of Chinese masculinity [End Page 497] converge in the stern observance of moral demands, self-restraint, and a resistance or even a misogynistic attitude to the faults associated with femininity (i.e., sexual pleasure, comfort, and loss of virility) in order to pursue lofty forms of justice and homosocial binding. The recent popularity of Hong Kong martial arts films in the West may help Western readers become accustomed to the traditional Chinese idea that the ideal balance of wen and wu places emphasis on strategy and learning as a means of avoiding the use of violence. Louie repeatedly asserts that, in the Chinese cultural context, all men by definition have some wen and/or some wu, thus negating a simplified dichotomy.The highest ideal of Chinese maleness is that of a single individual who can demonstrate at the highest level the cultural credentials and physical skills of wen and wu. That is to say, the great man who can hold a brush in his right hand and a sword or some other weapon in his left, demonstrating prowess in both kinds of effort. But in terms of their sex appeal, it is always the softer, cerebral, scholarly men of wen who are more attractive to Chinese women than their macho, brawny opposite. Other than analyzing the heterosexual relationships of Chinese manhood, Louie also provocatively suggests that brotherhood and passions between men are never simply homosocial but can have sexual implications. He supports this claim by making reference to many classical texts that depict men sleeping together, leading to strong emotional attachments and jealousy, as if they were in a romantic or erotic liaison. What distinguishes Louie's wen/wu duality from the conventional yin/yang binary opposition (which is also an artificial difference that defines the Chinese male in relation to Western men and reinforces the stereotype of a feminized Chinese masculinity) is that he believes his dyad of Chinese masculinity to be more resilient, flexible, and adaptable to historical change, hybridizing with Western culture while simultaneously exerting its own global influence on non-Chinese cultures.Covering a vast range of historical and contemporary materials and a variety of genres, from classical philosophy to traditional vernacular fiction (e.g., The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and The Water Margin), through Lao She's early twentieth-century novel The Two Mas, the subversive portrayals of men by modern Chinese women writers, to contemporary Hong Kong action cinema—all in a relatively slim volume—Louie is at his best, for example, when observing and depicting character, but he is not so good at analyzing his texts on a... (shrink)

The object of this article is to return to the critique formulated by queer post feminism of the use of the paradigm of « male domination » — a use made by both Bourdieu and some renaturalising currents within feminism. Equally, we look at different queer strategies to escape from this paradigm, and see how it is possible to resist the dominant sex / gender system. A reductive vision of the power of gender often goes hand in hand with a (...) renaturalisation of « masculine » and «feminine » genders and serves as a block on the sexual politics that make up feminisms. We emphasise the limits believed to have been imposed by Bourdieu in diffusing a blocked description of « male domination ». We critique equally the limits of certain feminist currents, which, by developing a monogendered vision of gender oppositions, have made of the entrance of gender, a unique entrance point - hegemonic one might say - and have, therefore, led sexual politics to make numerous simplifications and exclusions. The strategies proposed by queer post feminism, to counter the effects of the renaturalising seizure of « male domination », as well as those of totalisation and the universalising unification of those feminists which are neither revolutionary, nor abolitionist, nor dialectical, are drawn from a modest but multiple micropolitics, and prescribe a salutary deontologisation of the « subject Woman of feminism ». (shrink)

Drawing on in-depth interviews, I analyze how teen fathers talk about the responsibility for having a baby at a young age. In addition to negotiating the stigma often associated with teen pregnancy, teen fathers also confront stereotypes that label them as selfish and uncaring. In telling their stories of “what happened,” they utilize three gendered discourses to deny responsibility for the pregnancy: the feminization of birth control, a discourse of uncontrollable male sexual desire, and love. Their narratives also reveal the (...) ways in which gendered norms can solve some problems while creating others. Aligning themselves with certain notions of masculinity can serve as a resource for denying responsibility for the pregnancy while also signifying their manhood, but these same discourses are also constraining in that they reinforce stereotypes of teen fathers as selfish, even predatory. While these approaches may allow teen fathers to claim masculine identities, they also stigmatize them as the wrong kind of men. In short, teen fathers are not only negotiating the potential stigma of teen pregnancy, they are also negotiating their identities as men. (shrink)

In September 2018, a controversial judicial sentence concerning sexual violence caused a public outcry in Portugal. The court decision invoked the alleged environment of mutual seduction, the use of much alcohol consumption, and the lack of serious injuries to justify the suspended penalty. Stemming from the idea that understandings of what journalism is and what it should be are profoundly ideological and that notions of what it means to be and to behave like a woman and as a man have (...) been developed based on shifting realities within generalised patriarchal structures, this article intends to critically analyse the news media coverage of the controversial judicial sentence on this rape case in Portugal exploring the implications objective-based journalism entails for gender equality. As such, it will identify the shortcomings of objectivity and its leeway when covering sexual violence exploring how objective-based journalism provides room to negotiate practices, norms, identities, and meanings concerning sexual violence, particularly rape and rape myths, and questioning whether a margin of maneuvre is enough to deconstruct patriarchal assumptions of feminity, masculinity and sexuality. (shrink)

Historically, studies of the role of endogenous hormones in developmental differentiation of the sexes have suggested that mammalian sexual differentiation is mediated primarily by testicular androgens, and that exposure to androgens in early life leads to a male brain as defined by neuroanatomy and behavior. The female brain has been assumed to develop via a hormonal default mechanism, in the absence of androgen or other hormones. Ovarian hormones have significant effects on the development of a sexually dimorphic cortical structure, the (...) corpus callosum, which is larger in male than in female rats. In the females, removal of the ovaries as late as Day 16 increases the cross-sectional area of the adult corpus callosum. Treatment with low-dose estradiol starting on Day 25 inhibits this effect. Female callosa are also enlarged by a combination of daily postnatal handling and exogenous testosterone administered prior to Day 8. The effects of androgen treatment are expressed early in development, with males and testosterone-treated females having larger callosa than control females as early as Day 30. The effects of ovariectomy do not appear until after Day 55. These findings are more consistent with other evidence of a later sensitive period for ovarian feminization as compared to androgenic masculinization. (shrink)

This essay explores the place in Clarice Lispector’s literature that seeks to touch a primary ground of the living with a language that exceeds the symbolic in order to read it from an anthropocenic, posthuman, and feminist present. It argues that the story “A menor mulher do mundo” (Laços de família, 1960) takes to an extreme what happens in all of Lispector’s literature at the point that we can find in Macabéa’s character from A hora da estrela (1976), a sort (...) of continuation of the smallest woman in the world. In both – the story and the novel – materiality comes to life and it is associated with a neutral background that goes beyond the difference between the human and the nonhuman, the feminine and the masculine, and that coincides with language, with the word. Both characters are residue and resistance, and operate in the stories in the same way that the word operates in Lispector’s writing. The Deleuzian concept of minor and its continuation on the concept of immanence are therefore read not only as a way to think beyond the species, but also as that which operates by destabilizing the concept of “woman” as a universal. Lispector’s writing, then, allows us to separate contemporary feminisms from an affirmation of the identity of the feminine and the masculine, to take them instead into an order that – regardless of whether embodied in woman – is outside the patriarchal. (shrink)

We argue that estrogen feminization of the brain is the result of a series of events initiated by differential androgen exposure. There is no need to postulate a feminizing process parallel to androgen-induced masculinization to explain the findings.

This paper considers recent experiments in art and artificial intelligence that crystallize around training algorithms to generate artworks based on datasets derived from the Western art historical canon. Over the last decade, a shift towards the rejection of canonicity has begun to take shape in art historical discourse. At the same time, algorithmically enabled practices in the US and Europe have emerged that entrench the Western canon as a locus and guarantor of aesthetic value. Operating within the epistemic framework of (...) a “view from nowhere,” this tendency in generative art inherits the coloniality of both art history and artificial intelligence. Producing “art histories from nowhere,” this tendency conflates the conceptual category of visual art with the histories of Western cultural production. It reproduces a set of aesthetic values that entrench the mythology of the artist-genius and his imputed whiteness and masculinity; the extolment of innovation and novelty as self-evident virtues; disembodied Cartesian models of knowing and sensing; and the erasure of contributions that have been occluded from canonical visibility. As we encounter systems trained on particular visions of art history and of the artist, how might we remain attentive to the specific lens through which they are taught to see? This essay addresses that question by bringing the coloniality of recent experiments into view, bridging data feminisms and decolonial studies to formulate alternative visions of encounters between art and AI. (shrink)

In this article we argue that the complex connections between gender and fatness have not been fully examined, particularly in so far as they relate to men. We consider the role of early feminist literature in establishing the idea that the fear of fatness is fundamentally tied up with patriarchy and the ways this also underwrites more recent examinations of fatness and gender. Moreover, we assert that popular feminist scholarship has actively produced the assumption that weight is not only a (...) women's issue, but that it is tied up with the very construction of femininity. Through an examination of the cultural history of fatness we show that men have also been caught up in the drive to reshape the body over the last century. However, their concerns have remained largely hidden, framed as they often are in the lexicon of ‘fitness’ and ‘muscularity’. An examination of the limited published material on male concerns with fat reveals that for many men fatness is feminizing – and undermines normative forms of masculinity in threatening ways. We call for further research that considers both female and male experiences of fatness, given the limitations of approaches that focus merely on one or the other. (shrink)

Women are important actors in smallholder farmer milk production. Therefore, female input in the dairy cooperatives is essential to dairy development in emerging economies. Within dairy value chains, however, their contributions are often not formally acknowledged or rewarded. This article contributes to filling this gap by adopting a multileveled institutional perspective to explore the case of dairy development in the Pangalengan mixed-sex dairy cooperative on West Java, Indonesia. The objective is to add evidence from the dairy development practice in Indonesia (...) to the current agenda for gender and development as well as identify pathways for future research on dairy development that will help it do better in practice. Central to the exploration is a discussion of formal and informal institutions as part of the dynamics of the inequality regimes in dairy cooperatives. Evidence from dairy development practices in the Pangalengan cooperative shows, among others, distinct differences between the participation of male and female target groups in dairy development extension, as well as farm size- and resource-related trends in ‘masculinization’ and ‘feminization’ of the smallholder farmer household. The conclusions contribute to debates on more resilient, thus sustainable working relations in food chains, women’s empowerment, gender equality and social justice in agriculture as well as cooperative studies. (shrink)

There has been broad interest in the so-called rise of women farmers in United States (US) agriculture. Researchers have elucidated the diverse ways farmers ‘perform’ gender, while also examining how engaging in a masculine-coded industry like agriculture shapes individuals’ gendered identities as well as their social and mental wellbeing. While illuminating, this work is mostly focused on sustainable or direct-market farmers, with surprisingly little research examining women on conventional row crops operations. This paper works to fill this empirical gap and (...) further theorize gender-agriculture intersections through analyzing interviews with Iowa women row-crop farmers to understand the ways they perceive their gendered identities, and how they see them shaping their farming experience and mental wellbeing. Deploying a conceptual understanding of gender as both discursive and embodied as well as relational and fluid, I find respondents see themselves operating in a somewhat liminal gender identity, where they feel adept at moving between masculinized spaces of agriculture and more feminized domains of homes and office jobs. Critically, while women rarely expressed stress about doing “masculine” coded agricultural labor, they had more complex feelings towards either disliking or imperfectly completing feminized care and reproductive labor. Younger women expressed particular ambivalence about assuming the identity of farmer while also fulfilling gendered norms around (heterosexual) marriage and childbearing. The liminality of women’s gender performance also cut both ways, and while they feel able to access different gendered spaces some feel they are not fully accepted in either. I conclude by reflecting on what these particular forms of gendered subjectivity might mean for women’s mental wellbeing and how agencies might better support gender equity in agriculture. (shrink)

Recent discussions have connected Nietzsche’s philosophy of masculinity to the return of authoritarian politics. Neoconservative debates about masculinity, and right-wing extremism, explicitly refer back to Nietzsche’s philosophy and often present democratization, a feminization of society, and political correctness as responsible for a weakening of masculinity. One example for this reception of Nietzsche’s writings is Jordan Peterson’s psychological diagnosis of a presumed crisis of masculinity. This article undertakes a comparison of Nietzsche’s philosophy of masculinities with Peterson’s neo-Jungian (...) psychology of masculinity in the context of recent conceptualizations of patriarchy, misogyny, and gendered forms of ressentiment. This comparison will highlight that Nietzsche’s conception of masculinity is more complex, and has philosophically more to offer, than neoconservative ideas about masculinity that onesidedly foreground male strength. Finally it will be pointed out how a Jungian analysis discloses aspects of the Dionysian that are of relevance to contemporary gender studies of Nietzsche’s philosophy. (shrink)

Little is known about how gendered understandings of patients can inform professionals’ discretionary actions and decisions to include or exclude in clinical practice. Using Connell's poststructuralist perspectives on gender as an analytic framework, this article aims to investigate how professionals’ articulations of depression are framed by signs of masculinity and femininity, and how these articulations inform service provision to patients with depression in clinical psychiatry. Building on interview data drawn from an ethnographic study, the article shows how the professionals’ (...) articulations reflected a gender binary that framed how the feminized patients were often connected to psychiatric care while masculinized patients were referred to separate alcohol or substance use treatment outside the psychiatric institution. The article discusses the societal and institutional conditionality of gendered understandings in psychiatry. In spite of several limitations, the article elucidates how professionals’ understandings might have wide‐ranging implications for the accuracy of epidemiological research and policy, and how they reflect a power struggle between patients and professionals about the legitimate right to interpret patients’ conditions and efforts to manage their illness‐related problems. (shrink)

This article analyses the British TV drama Warriors, investigating military masculinities and their cinematic attachments to specific nationhoods. The author’s main argument is that Warriors engages in a negotiation of ontological differences through production of military masculinities, situated within specific time–space coordinates. The story of the war is told using the classical war movie genre, underpinned by a tripartite gendered discourse that links feminization, victimhood and peace, on the one side, with two kinds of military masculinities, on the other side: (...) first, the heroic-moral-military masculinity of the protector and defender and second, the vicious-ethnic-military masculinity of the ‘local’ men. As the drama’s characters stand for the specific symbolic geographies and histories, we see different ontological worlds appearing. Among them Bosnia – represented through viciousness of local masculinities and victimhood of local femininities – becomes a specific, isolated place, the ‘symbolic continent’ of the Balkans, whose singular, violent geography is separated from Europe and the West, through Orientalist and Balkanist discourses. Furthermore, it is a place with a past but no future, wherein moral geographies of peacekeeping military masculinities translate into ontologies of Self and Other. (shrink)

Current research has focused on gender as a conditioning factor in students’ study choices, highlighting the existence of gender stereotypes associated with these choice. The general objective of this article is to analyse if there are differences based on sex in the choice of musical instruments in music conservatories. The methodology used is quantitative. We have analysed the data on enrolment in the different instrumental specialities of two public music conservatories in Seville (Spain) at the three levels of music education: (...) Basic, Professional and Higher Music Education. This article contrasts if there are instrumental specialities that are mostly chosen by one or the other sex, and to check if this sexual segregation has been produced by chance or can be explained by other causes. This investigation was carried out for a total of 4120 students from two different conservatories. The main conclusions of the study were the existence of feminized and masculinized instrumental families, and the relationship between the variables “students’ sex” and “instrumental families and musical specialities” was significant with a medium effect size. This research confirms that men and women choose the instruments that have traditionally been associated with their male or female roles respectively. (shrink)

An ongoing study examining the discursive negotiation of ethnic and gendered embodied identities of adolescent girls in Japan with Japanese and `white' mixed-parentage is extended to also investigate and compare boys. This study draws on Feminist Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis which views women and girls as `simultaneously positioned as relatively powerless within a range of dominant discourses on gender, but as relatively powerful within alternative and competing social discourses'. Here, this is taken further by also giving voice to boys. Furthermore, ethnic (...) discourses are examined alongside of gender discourses. Not only girls constructed the `idealized Other', within discourses of femininity, but boys similarly viewed their bodies against a model of idealized masculinity within discourses of masculinities. The boys revealed a feminized, narcissistic body consciousness where they struggled to resist a `discourse of foreign grotesqueness' and instead worked to embody themselves within a positive `discourse of foreign attractiveness', as did the girls. (shrink)

Many men who work in women's professions experience a glass escalator effect that facilitates their advancement and upward mobility within these fields. Research finds that subtle aspects of the interactions, norms, and expectations in women's professions push men upward and outward into the higher-status, higher-paying, more “masculine” positions within these fields. Although most research includes minority men, little has explicitly considered how racial dynamics color these men's encounters with the mechanisms of the glass escalator. In this article, the author examines (...) how intersections of race and gender combine to shape experiences for minority men in the culturally feminized field of nursing and finds that the upward mobility implied by the glass escalator is not uniformly available to all men who do “women's work.” The author concludes that the glass escalator is a racialized concept and a gendered one and considers the implications of this for future studies of men in feminized occupations. (shrink)

This paper explores two phases of the early modern genre wars. The first was fought by Marie de Gournay, in her “Preface” to Montaigne's Essays, on behalf of her adoptive father and in defense of his naked and masculine prose. The second was fought half a century later by Nicholas Boileau in opposition to Gournay's feminizing successor, Madeleine de Scudéry. In this debate Gournay's position is egalitarian, whereas Scudéry's approximates to a feminism of difference. It is claimed that both female (...) protagonists in this early debate occlude the female body. The far more sexually explicit prose of Mary Delarivier Manley is then used to raise the question: is it genre, or is it, rather, the very nature of erotic sexuality, that makes it so difficult for women to masterfully expose themselves as authoritative subjects? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Solving the Jigsaw PuzzlePeggy CadetIn my medical record, there is an enigmatic note. It was written as a consultation request from a pediatric endocrinologist to a plastic surgeon while I was hospitalized at age 13 (in the late 1960s) for mastectomy. The note reads:You have seen this unfortunate teenager with the feminizing testis [older name for androgen insensitivity] syndrome on several occasions in the past in reference to the (...) construction of a penis. Would appreciate your seeing him again to evaluate the problem. He is firmly fixed in the male gender role despite efforts on the part of his father to persuade him of the logic of a change.The surgeon’s response (also in my notes) was:The prospect of creating an acceptable penis in this patient seems to me very remote. There is nothing there except an enlarged clitoris. This could be mobilized and might project a few cm but cannot be made into a male organ of normal dimensions. The hair distribution and the perineum is also feminine which compounds the reconstruction problem.Since the decision has been made to go along with the male gender I suppose that mobilization of the penis–clitoris is reasonable. Urethral reconstruction will be possible only much later....I saw this note for the first time at age 21 but didn’t think it was particularly significant until many years later. At the time I had other, much more pressing concerns, as I had reached the conclusion by then that I had been mis–assigned as a boy and that the only way for me to have a reasonable and happy life would be for me to change to living as a girl. It was not a surprise that my doctors had been completely on the wrong track about my “gender”. I was also not about to bring this up with the endocrinologist, a person who had terrified me as a child and whom I still found a bit intimidating.I do remember the surgeon stopping by and examining me briefly without explaining who he was or why he was there. I had a somewhat longer, but equally uninformative (for me) visit from a child psychiatrist. The note requesting a consultation from the psychiatrist reads:Would you see while he is here recovering from his mastectomy? Since he began to show mammary growth 18 months ago his father has put him under considerable pressure to undergo another change in gender role. has resisted but he is quite depressed. We would appreciate any suggestions you may have.I actually have no recollection at all of anything like pressure from my father to change to living as a girl. What I actually experienced was more like 180 degrees away from that—the expectation that I should try to be more masculine. As I remember, my father was bothered by my having breasts and was the one who initiated the physician contacts that led to mastectomy. (My mother had died when I was five, leaving him to rear me as a single parent.)As my father recollected to me many years later, he had asked the pediatric endocrinologist to explain all of my treatment options and alternatives to me. I can only guess, but possibly the pediatric endocrinologist interpreted this as my father wanting me to change to living as a girl. As a young [End Page E1] adult, I got the impression that this particular doctor tended to mistake asking for information about possible treatments for requesting treatment. The idea of a patient gathering information and making informed decisions may not have figured prominently in his thinking. On the office visit when I was 21 and first mentioned to him that I might want to live as a girl, he told me that gender identity was “an unshakable conviction,” so perhaps his idea was that gender was just not something a person could make an ordinary decision about, weighing the pros and cons.My father knew—but at age 13 I didn’t—that the original decision for me to grow up as a boy had been made in a somewhat haphazard way. I had entered... (shrink)

Evidence accumulates that pre- and postnatally circulating estrogens play an active role in the differentiation of the female brain: the susceptible period for feminization of the brain seems to extend far beyond the period during which masculinization of the brain occurs. Thus, there is a need to reevaluate the widely accepted “concept of basic femaleness” in sexual brain differentiation.

While journalism traditionally is considered a ‘masculine’ domain, it is said that public relations are a ‘feminine’ profession. The legitimation for this gendered coding of two professions are so-called gender different characteristics. The aim of this article is to show how the differentiation of professional roles in journalism and journalism-related fields goes hand in hand with processes of gender differentiating ascriptions on the symbolic and discoursive levels. Additionally, the communication research reproduces these binary codes in context with gender codings. The (...) history of professions shows that gendered practices of ascription are arbitrary and only needed to legitimize gendered positionings in the professional field. A closer look at the gendered positioning of the two professions journalism and public relations shows that both have primary and secondary job markets, horizontal and vertical segmentation, and gender-based differences in pay. The gendered positioning – existing on two levels between journalism and public relations as well as within both professions – is not the product of gender different characteristics but of gendered ascriptions of meaning to different job positions. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze both the gendered practices of ascription on the symbolic and the discoursive levels, as well as the gendered positioning in the relationship of journalism and public relations and within both professions. Finally, the consequence for the main/malestream research in the relationship between journalism and public relations could be that the ‘feminization’ of public relations leads public relations researchers to underestimate the power of public relations. (shrink)

Analyses of gender-based violence during mass conflict have typically focused on violence committed against women. Violence perpetrated against men has only recently been examined as gender-based violence in its own right. Using narratives from 1,136 Darfuri refugees, we analyze patterns of gender-based violence perpetrated against men and boys during the genocide in Darfur. We examine how this violence emasculates men and boys through four mechanisms: homosexualization, feminization, genital harm, and sex-selective killing. In line with an interactionist approach, we demonstrate how (...) genocidal violence is gendered and argue that perpetrators committing gender-based violence perform masculinity in accordance with hegemonic gender norms in Sudan. We also show how gender-based violence enacts, reinforces, and creates meaning on multiple levels in a matrix of mutually reinforcing processes that we term the gender-genocide nexus. By extending the gender–violence link to the context of mass atrocity, this study facilitates an understanding of the mechanisms through which gender inequalities can be reproduced and maintained in diverse situations and structures. (shrink)

Who said manifestos are dead? Some thirty years after the publication of Donna Haraway's illustrious A Cyborg Manifesto, fifty years after Valerie Solanas's angry and delightful SCUM Manifesto, and 170 years after Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's influential Communist Manifesto, a new manifesto in town in fact bears traces of all these and then some: The Xenofeminist Manifesto. This manifesto, which comes in a gorgeously designed booklet version as well as in a colorful and nostalgic 80s computer-culture website with nerdy (...) hexadecimal page numbers and related Twitter account, is a work from the “xenofeminist” collective Laboria Cuboniks. The name of this collective, whose members are from various parts of the globe, is actually an anagram of “Nicolas Bourbaki,” a largely French collective of mathematicians in the early 1900s who sought to affirm abstraction, rigor, and generalization. Together with a firm foot in cyberfeminism and a strong penchant for the abstract and universal by way of the logic of computing against the arguably flawed universal of “nature,” the manifesto also clearly bears the marks of feminist ecocriticism, new materialism, queer theory, and technological accelerationism. The two books under review bring various activisms and insights together in an original way, and do so clearly with an eye toward reviving the cyberfeminist spirit through, among others, ideas from Shulamith Firestone's Dialectics of Sex. This pairing certainly had me excited, since, as I argue elsewhere, I am, together with Haraway's original cyborg manifesto, firmly of the opinion that feminisms of all kinds should intervene in and contribute even more radically to contemporary techno-culture and philosophy of technology. This is because clearly, new media and genetic technologies are at present some of the most powerful techniques by which we live and probably will live in the near future, and because these technologies are intimately interwoven with Eurocentric masculinism, heterosexism, militarism, and capitalism. (shrink)

This paper argues that the slogans “A Woman's Right to Choose” and “The Personal is the Political” typify different traditions within feminist thinking; one emphasizing rights and equality, the other the unconscious and the personal. The author responds to both traditions by bringing together mind and body, and reason and emotion, via the figure of the copula. The copula expresses an alternative model of identity which indicates that value can be produced only in relation.Let us say that the problem is (...) violence. At its most naive: how can the sexual relation, which is supposedly full of love, be violent?I mean the sexual relation in its resonances and ambiguity—to indicate the relation between the sexes, and the relation between lovers. In no way can the relation be confined to love, either heterosexual or homosexual, since it is often a contest. It cannot be reduced solely to a social relation, because in one of its aspects it addresses the most intimate subjectivity.In a certain feminist lifestyle advocacy, those women who are in same sex relations avoid sexual violence by avoiding men, and those who are in heterosexual relationships strive to find the “right kind”—that is, relationships of respectful and supportive love—rejecting all signs of aggression, from sexist disparagement and emotional cruelty to sexual humiliation and physical assault, as “abuse.”Strangely, this dichotomy does not explain the proximity of passion and aggression, whether in love between men and women or in same-sex relationships between feminist women. As rational counsel, it resists the important sense in which the erotic is, and is even valued as, the excess of the rational. And as an analysis of the oppression of women it defeats itself, for to insist on masculinity as violence itself, and/or on the sexual relation as properly governed by reason, seems to miss the point of both love and feminism.Stranger still, feminisms, which set out to address and redress the oppression of women, have become rivalrous themselves. Are these aggressions a legacy of the intellectual world they must take place in. Have we overlooked an aspect of the relation between sisters? Feminism has not addressed the question of aggression in feminism as anything more than contamination.Perhaps, after all, the thing that feminism has not yet successfully addressed is love. The “battle between the sexes” has not rendered the ambivalence of the heterosexual relation. As a species of theory, feminism has relished the rigor of distinction and has not found it easy to tolerate the proximity of opposites.And yet, in evoking the body, some feminisms approach closer to this difficulty. It remains to take up the relation between the body and the concept more thoroughly, in order to find out whether sexual difference could ever be philosophical. (shrink)

This article examines the variety of men's responses to feminism in late nineteenthand early twentieth-century United States through texts that addressed the claims raised by the turn-of-the-century women's movements. Antifeminist texts relied on traditional arguments, as well as Social Darwinist and natural law notions, to reassert the patriarchal family and to oppose women's suffrage and participation in the public sphere. Masculinist texts sought to combat the purported feminization of American manhood by proposing islands of masculinity, untainted by feminizing forces; (...) proscribed homosociality was also cast as an effective antidote to homosexuality. Profeminist texts openly embraced women's claims for changes in public participation and private and family life, both out of a sense of justice and the conviction that such changes would benefit men and challenge the emerging industrial capitalist order. Parallels to contemporary men's responses to the women's movement are suggested. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Standing at the Intersections: Navigating Life as a Black Intersex ManSean Saifa WallAs I sit down to write this narrative, my mind is reflecting on the past year. This year has seen numerous protests against state–sanctioned violence with the declaration that “Black Lives Matter”. As a Black intersex man, I have witnessed the impact of state–sanctioned violence on my family and my community, both from the police state and (...) medical community. I charge the police state and the medical community with state– sanctioned violence: Each targets non–normative bodies—the former through incarceration and execution, and the latter by means of surgical and hormonal intervention. As a Black intersex man, I stand at the intersection bearing witness to how this violence has incarcerated my friends and loved ones as well as being subjected to medically unnecessary surgical intervention. Although this is where I stand now, both socially and politically, I have not always existed here.I was born in the winter of 1978 at Columbia–Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. I was the youngest of five children and one of three children in my family who were born with an intersex trait now known as androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS). At the time, AIS was referred to as “testicular [End Page 117] feminization syndrome.” Upon receiving my medical records years later at the age of twenty–five, I noticed scribbling and a barrage of notes indicating the process by which the doctors assigned my gender as female. Although I had ambiguous genitalia, which caused some initial confusion among the doctors, XY chromosomes were not enough for me to be raised as male. My mother was told I would be raised as a girl and, according to the medical records, “function as such.”Unlike my sisters who were also born with AIS, my mom was not swayed by the surgical recommendations doctors made about my body. As a matter of protocol, my sisters’ gonads were removed in infancy, however, my mom made the decision that my testes would remain with me until they had to be removed.Because of intense pain in my groin area, my testicles were removed when I was thirteen years old. The pain that I felt following the surgery was perhaps the worst pain that I have experienced in my entire life. After surgery, my pediatrician prescribed estrogen and Provera as a hormonal replacement regimen. Fatty deposits changed the shape and contours of my face. Once robust and chiseled thighs now harbored cellulite. The beginnings of facial hair and prominent body hair became wispy and nonexistent. What was hard and defined became soft.At no point did anyone ask me what I wanted to do with my body.I actually missed the effects of my natural testosterone such as a deepening voice, increased hair and muscle mass; when I asked if I could take both testosterone and estrogen after surgery, my mother remarked, “You would look too weird.”The hormone therapy was coupled with intense social conditioning. I feel as if the social conditioning for young women raised with AIS is suffocating. When doctors prescribed hormones for me to take, my mother constantly reminded me how “beautiful” the little yellow pills would make me. As a means of reassurance, my pediatrician told my mom that “a lot of fashion models” have AIS and that I would most certainly be beautiful. In our dominant US culture, gender norms can already be oppressive, but for women with AIS, there is the impact of gender norms and the underlying fear that women with AIS are not really women since they have XY chromosomes. I did not succumb to the pressure to be more feminine, but actually gravitated toward masculinity. Before transitioning to live as a man, I considered myself a butch woman. When I came out of the closet at fourteen years old and presented as a masculine young woman, I never felt safe. Because I dated women who were more feminine than I, my relationship with these women seemed threatening to men who repeatedly reminded me through harassment and threats that “I was not a man.” Of course, I wasn’t trying to be a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Surviving American Culture:On Chuck PalahniukEduardo MendietaIn an age in which American culture has become the United States' number one export, along with its weapons, low intensity conflict, carcinogenic cigarettes, its "freedom," and pornography, it is delightful and even a sign of hope that there are writers who have taken on the delicate and perilous task of offering a prognosis of what ails this culture. In the following essay I (...) argue that Chuck Palahniuk's works ought to be read as a mortician's report on American culture. Chuck Palahniuk broke into the literary world by way of the movie version of his first novel: Fight Club (1995). He has gone on to write six other novels: Survivor (1999), Invisible Monsters (2000), Choke (2001), Lullaby (2002), and Diary (2003). He also has published an interesting travel book, Fugitives and Refugees; A Walk in Portland, Oregon (2003), but since this is not properly fiction, I will not discuss it in this essay.1Clearly, Palahniuk has already produced a corpus worthy of careful consideration and analysis. Yet, as a west coast writer, far from the literary circles and brokers of the east coast, indeed far away from the clubs of self-promotion and self-monitoring that censure and hold in tight grip the monopoly of criticism that highlights "worthy literature," Palahniuk has not attracted a lot of critical attention. It is only with his most recent work Choke that he has began to be widely reviewed and commented on. In the following I provide a thematic reconstruction of each one of the six published novels, in chronological sequence. I will argue that Palahniuk is not trying to write the "great American novel," although he is profiling himself as a quintessential "American" writer in the midst of post–Cold War megalomania and celebrated Pax Americana. He has taken on a culture that has become so gargantuan, [End Page 394] fragmented, and differentiated but at the same time so rich, so self-reflexive, so historicized and also so mimicked that one novel cannot tell its story in one narrative with one dramatic thread. Many novels, many short cuts, many vignettes, are necessary: one polyphonic, asynchronous, temporally bi-directional, hyper-textual, and cyber-encyclopedic novel made up of individual novels, where each novel is the Bildungsroman of an American hero but told in reverse. These heroes, I will argue, are testimonies to the resilient power of individuals to resist even the most invasive and persistent onslaughts by culture on the physic life of freedom and individuality. I will also argue that he is neither a commercial nor academic writer; that is, he is not the kind of writer who writes either in order to maintain a living or secure tenure. He is a writer with a mission, a vision, and a very distinctive style. The stories that Palahniuk tells are stories that begin at the end, and end at the beginning: they are turned around Bildungsromans. They are, in other words, about unmaking, uncoupling, and disentangling our selves from the normal self into which we have been socialized. These stories are, thus, about the discovery of moral resources that lay dormant in the very simplicity of human solidarity and trust in our will to survive morally untainted, or at least redeemable. I will conclude by arguing that Palahniuk's novels are about surviving American Culture, and about how deviance is the health of the individual in a sick society.One could characterize Fight Club as the intelligent man's response to Robert Bly's Iron John (1990),2 or the fictionalized version of the Michael Kimmel's Manhood in America: A Cultural History (1996).3 Alternatively, one could argue that Fight Club is the fin-de-sieclé response to Barbara Ehrenreich's prognosis in her The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (1983) of 1970s and 1980s narcissistic and hedonistic masculinity.4 Chuck Palahniuk's first novel is a biting and poignant look at men in American culture after the end of affluence and the simultaneous "feminization" of masculinity. It is at the same time about the struggle for a viable sense of masculinity in an age in... (shrink)

It is argued that it is not enough for feminist standpoint theory to argue that a feminine standpoint is better than a masculine one because of its genesis in female psycho-sexuality, it needs to show that its content is actually objectively more accurate. It then argues that historical feminists, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, have in fact tended to adopt a justice perspective, grounded in reason, which is objectively of greater value than that developed by many male authors, because these historical (...) writers have failed to think that justice is incompatible with feeling and emotion and have attempted to combine the importance of sympathy, empathy, and feeling with the need for equality, liberty, and fairness. (shrink)