Loading field map
Masculinity studies is a subfield of gender studies that examines men and masculinities as socially and historically constructed categories rather than as natural, fixed facts. Where much early gender scholarship focused on women’s experiences and feminist critique, masculinity studies turns the analytical lens onto men: how societies define what it means to be a man, how those definitions vary across time and place, how they intersect with other dimensions of identity, and how they shape men’s lives, relationships, and social power. The field does not treat “masculinity” as a single essence but as a plural, contested set of practices, ideals, and expectations—hence the common use of the plural “masculinities.”
The field’s core questions revolve around the relationship between masculinity and power. Why do most societies associate masculinity with authority, strength, and emotional restraint? How do masculine ideals reproduce gender inequality, and how do they also constrain men themselves? What happens to men who fail to meet dominant standards—because of class, race, sexuality, disability, or simply personal temperament? How do masculine norms change, and under what conditions do they become less rigid or less hierarchical?
These questions carry practical stakes. Masculinity studies has informed debates about men’s mental health, violence prevention, fatherhood, workplace culture, education, and military policy. Because masculine ideals often demand stoicism and self-reliance, they can discourage men from seeking help for depression or physical ailments. Because they often link manhood to dominance, they can normalize aggression in intimate relationships or public life. At the same time, the field resists the assumption that all men benefit equally or uniformly from gender arrangements; it asks which men benefit, at whose expense, and at what cost to themselves.
Masculinity studies emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, largely in the English-speaking world, as a response to second-wave feminism. Feminist scholars had demonstrated that gender was a social system, not a biological given, and that women’s subordination was built into institutions, language, and everyday interaction. Some men involved in feminist movements and men’s groups began asking what this analysis meant for men. Early work often took one of two forms: a critical examination of male privilege, or a therapeutic exploration of the emotional costs of traditional manhood. The latter strand, sometimes called the mythopoetic men’s movement, emphasized recovering a supposedly deeper, authentic masculinity through ritual and storytelling; it was popular in the 1990s but had little lasting influence on academic scholarship.
The academic field proper took shape through the work of scholars who insisted that masculinity, like femininity, must be studied as a structural and cultural phenomenon. A key development was the concept of hegemonic masculinity, introduced in the 1980s by the Australian sociologist R. W. Connell. Connell argued that societies do not contain a single masculinity but a hierarchy of masculinities. At the top sits the hegemonic form—the culturally exalted ideal that legitimates men’s dominance over women and over other men. Below it are complicit masculinities (men who benefit from patriarchy without embodying its ideal), subordinate masculinities (notably gay masculinities, often associated with femininity), and marginalized masculinities (those shaped by race, class, or disability). This framework moved the field away from treating “the male role” as a single script and toward analyzing power relations among men.
Connell’s work also connected masculinity studies to broader social theory. Masculinity was not a personality trait but a configuration of practice embedded in institutions—the state, the military, the workplace, the family. This institutional focus distinguished the field from earlier psychological accounts of sex roles and aligned it with feminist and Marxist analyses of social structure.
Several distinct approaches have organized research in masculinity studies. They are not a linear sequence; they overlap, borrow from one another, and sometimes conflict.
The hegemonic masculinity framework remains the field’s most influential conceptual tool, but it has also been the most debated. Critics have argued that the concept is too easily used as a static typology, labeling some men “hegemonic” and others “subordinate” without analyzing the practices that produce and contest dominance. Others have noted that the term can imply a single, coherent ideal when in fact societies sustain multiple, contradictory ideals. Connell and her collaborators responded by emphasizing that hegemony is never complete; it is always contested and must be continually re-established. Later work has also stressed that hegemonic masculinity is not a personality type but a set of cultural and institutional mechanisms—for example, the way corporate leadership is imagined as requiring aggressive competition, or the way military training equates manhood with endurance.
Despite these debates, the framework’s core insight endures: masculinities are ranked, and the ranking is tied to broader systems of gender inequality. Research influenced by this approach has examined how men in different positions—working-class men, racialized men, gay men—negotiate their distance from or proximity to the dominant ideal.
A broader theoretical current, social constructionism, underpins most contemporary work. It holds that gender is not an expression of inner nature but a performance produced through repeated actions, language, and institutional arrangements. This view draws on the work of sociologists like Erving Goffman and ethnomethodologists like Harold Garfinkel, who studied how people “do” gender in everyday interaction. In masculinity studies, this translates into attention to the micro-level: how men display masculinity through posture, speech, humor, risk-taking, or emotional restraint; how they account for their actions in ways that preserve a masculine self-image; and how institutions reward or punish these displays.
Practice theory, associated with Connell and with the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, adds a structural dimension. Masculinity is not just performed but embedded in fields of practice—sports, work, sexuality, violence—where certain ways of being a man accumulate symbolic capital. Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus—the internalized dispositions that shape perception and action—has been used to explain why masculine practices often feel natural and automatic even when they are socially produced.
Beginning in the 1990s, masculinity studies absorbed the insight of intersectionality, a term coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe how systems of oppression—race, class, gender, sexuality—interact. Earlier work had sometimes treated masculinity as a universal category, implicitly white and middle-class. Intersectional approaches showed that Black men, working-class men, disabled men, and gay men experience masculinity differently, and that their marginalization within hierarchies of men is as important as their privilege relative to women.
This approach has produced rich empirical studies: how Black men navigate stereotypes of threat and hypersexuality; how working-class men construct dignity through manual labor or military service; how disabled men are often desexualized and excluded from masculine ideals; how gay men have developed alternative masculinities that challenge heteronormativity. Intersectionality also complicates the field’s political stakes. A Black man may be privileged as a man but subordinated as a Black person; a white working-class man may be privileged by race but subordinated by class. Masculinity studies cannot simply celebrate or condemn “men” as a bloc.
By the 2000s, many scholars adopted the label critical studies on men and masculinities to signal their normative commitment. CSMM explicitly aligns with feminist and queer politics, aiming not just to describe masculinities but to transform them toward greater gender equality. This approach emphasizes the plurality of masculinities, the historical mutability of masculine ideals, and the possibility of what Connell called “positive masculinities”—forms of manhood that reject dominance and embrace care, emotional openness, and egalitarian relationships.
CSMM has also been self-critical about the field’s own exclusions. Early masculinity studies was dominated by white, Western, heterosexual men, and some critics argued that it risked re-centering men’s concerns at the expense of feminist priorities. In response, the field has become more attentive to global perspectives, including postcolonial and decolonial critiques that question whether Western concepts of masculinity apply to other cultural contexts.
Masculinity studies has expanded beyond its Anglo-American origins. Scholars in Latin America, Africa, South Asia, and East Asia have examined how colonial and postcolonial histories shape masculine ideals. Colonial administrations often imposed European gender norms, undermining indigenous masculinities that did not fit the colonial model. Postcolonial nation-building has frequently involved reclaiming a “national” masculinity—sometimes militarized, sometimes domesticated—as a symbol of sovereignty. These studies complicate the field’s assumptions by showing that masculinity is not only a local gender system but also a site of global power relations.
For example, research on South Asian masculinities has examined how colonial stereotypes of “effeminate” Bengali men versus “martial” Punjabi men shaped recruitment into colonial armies and continue to influence regional identities. Work on African masculinities has explored how economic crisis and labor migration have disrupted men’s roles as providers, leading to new forms of masculine anxiety and sometimes to increased violence against women. These studies do not simply apply Western theory to new cases; they challenge the theory itself, asking whether concepts like hegemonic masculinity capture the dynamics of societies where gender relations are organized differently.
Masculinity studies is methodologically plural. Sociologists use interviews, ethnography, and survey data to document how men talk about their lives and how masculine norms vary across groups. Cultural scholars analyze media, literature, film, and advertising to trace the circulation of masculine images. Historians reconstruct how masculine ideals changed in response to war, industrialization, or social movements. Psychologists study the effects of masculine norms on mental health and behavior, often using scales that measure conformity to traditional masculinity.
A recurring methodological issue is the gap between what men say and what they do. Interviews may elicit performances of masculinity rather than candid self-description; men may exaggerate their sexual conquests, downplay their emotional dependence, or present themselves as more stoic than they are. Ethnographic research, which involves long-term observation, can partially address this by comparing words with actions. Quantitative research faces the challenge of defining and measuring “masculinity” in ways that are not culturally biased. The field has largely moved away from treating masculinity as a fixed trait and toward treating it as a situated accomplishment, which makes measurement inherently difficult.
Contemporary masculinity studies is characterized by several ongoing debates. One concerns the relationship between masculinity and crisis. Popular discourse often speaks of a “crisis of masculinity”—men falling behind in education, struggling with unemployment, experiencing higher rates of suicide and addiction. Some scholars argue that this crisis narrative is overstated or even reactionary, serving to re-center men’s grievances at a time when women are making gains. Others argue that there is a genuine crisis, but it is not a crisis of masculinity as such; it is a crisis of the economic and social conditions that once supported a particular masculine ideal—the breadwinner, the manual laborer, the family patriarch. The field’s task is to distinguish between legitimate concern for men’s suffering and nostalgia for male dominance.
Another debate concerns the rise of online masculinities, including “incel” communities, men’s rights activism, and the so-called manosphere. These movements often appropriate the language of gender studies—claiming that men are oppressed, that feminism has gone too far, that masculine nature is being suppressed. Masculinity studies scholars have analyzed these movements as responses to economic precarity, social isolation, and the erosion of traditional male roles. The field’s challenge is to take the genuine grievances seriously while rejecting the misogynistic conclusions.
A third area of active research is the study of care and caregiving. As women’s labor force participation has risen and family structures have diversified, men are increasingly expected to participate in childcare, eldercare, and emotional labor. Research examines how men negotiate these expectations, how institutions like workplaces and schools support or hinder them, and whether new forms of “caring masculinities” are emerging. This work is often explicitly normative, asking not just what masculinities are but what they could become.
Finally, the field has begun to engage with transgender and nonbinary experiences. Trans men and nonbinary people complicate the assumption that masculinity is tied to male bodies or that it is always oppressive. Some trans men describe their masculinity as a source of authenticity and joy, not dominance. This has prompted scholars to distinguish between masculinity as a system of power and masculinity as a form of selfhood. The relationship between these two dimensions remains unresolved and is one of the field’s most generative tensions.
Masculinity studies is inseparable from feminist theory, which provided its founding questions and political commitments. It also overlaps with queer studies, which examines the regulation of sexuality and gender nonconformity; with men’s studies, an older and less critical tradition that treated men as the default human subject; and with the sociology of gender more broadly. The field’s distinctiveness lies in its refusal to treat men as unmarked or universal. By making masculinity visible as a category, it reveals the gendered character of institutions and practices that often present themselves as neutral—the corporation, the military, the university, the family.
At the same time, the field faces a persistent risk: that studying men will once again center men, diverting attention and resources from feminist work on women. This risk is not hypothetical; it has been raised by feminist scholars since the field’s inception. The field’s response has been to insist that its goal is not to celebrate men but to understand and dismantle the gender order, including its effects on men themselves. Whether it succeeds is an open question, and the field’s internal debates are partly debates about its own political direction.