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Old 05-14-2016, 11:11 AM   #623
DanaC
We have to go back, Kate!
 
Join Date: Apr 2004
Location: Yorkshire
Posts: 25,964
The other side of the gender coin...

We talk an awful lot about, and indeed society has historically been very interested in defining, femininity, both in terms of setting and policing those definitions, and breaking down and challenging them. In recent years, there has been an increase in the conversation around defiing masculinity, or more properly, masculinities. Certainly as an area for historical and sociological study, it is a rapidly growing and developing field.

I really love the study of masculinities - having first encountered it via the historical study of gender and femininity, it really struck a chord with me. When 'women's studies' first started to take hold, and then 'gender studies' grew out of that, there was a tendency to see masculinity as somehow natural and unchanging, with femininity differentiated and imposed. Likewise, in the period I study (18th and early 19th centuries) there was a huge amount of discourse about 'the Sex', i.e women. Hundreds of thousands of words were published attempting to define womanhood, often in direct counterpoint to manliness. And historians for a long time, took as read that manliness had always been more or less the same, with only minor distinctions between one period and another. Men were the constant against which the shifting face of woman was measured. In recent decades that has changed and more and more academic discourse focused on how men conceive of their own masculinity, and how masculinity is perfomed and understood. The contextual and often contested nature of gender has now been expanded to include masculinity. I find it utterly fascinating.

So, I was quite excited to see Grayson Perry's new documentary series exploring modern masculinities. I highly recommend it, if you can find it. It's called Grayson Perry: All Man.

Here's a nice interview with Perry about his new series: (am hoping this plays outside the uk)

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