Masculinidades contemporâneas: representações da masculinidade na ótica de homens e mulheres executivos

Nesta dissertação, o objetivo é identificar e analisar as representações sociais acerca das masculinidades referidas por homens executivos, gestores do mundo de negócios. Onde o foco maior é conseguir evidências para os seguintes questionamentos: o que é ser homem no mundo dos negócios? Quais as representações sociais da masculinidade? Quais as formas privilegiadas, ou hegemônicas dessa masculinidade? Este trabalho está baseado no projeto de pesquisa do Dr. Alexandre de Pádua Carrieri sobre “Masculinidades Contemporâneas: Representações da Masculinidade na Ótica de Homens e Mulheres Executivos”. Como contribuição teórica para os estudos organizacionais, esta pesquisa possibilita um olhar sobre a masculinidade contemporânea no ambiente empresarial, e não apenas a dominação do masculino sobre o feminino. Como o mundo dos negócios é um termo abrangente a pesquisa não se concentrou em setores específicos da sociedade, ou mesmo desse “mundo de negócios”, se buscou alcançar uma concepção analítica que atingisse a representação social sobre esse mundo. O objeto alvo deste estudo são os executivos, diretores, gerentes, assessores e coordenadores, pois esses sujeitos dentro da dinâmica do capitalismo contemporâneo são móveis dentro dos controles das organizações. Trata-se de uma pesquisa exploratória, onde foi realizada entrevistas a fim de se obter dados qualitativos sobre objeto de estudo e que tem como suporte metodológico a Teoria das Representações Sociais e a análise do discurso. As entrevistas foram realizadas com 10 homens de negócio, tais quais coordenadores de Instituição de Ensino Superior; coordenador de investimento e operações industriais; diretores executivos; gestor de unidades e assessor jurídico, todos da cidade do Rio de Janeiro. Dessa forma, foi possível analisar as representações sociais da masculinidade no que diz respeito ao homem de negócios. Os avanços dos estudos sobre a masculinidade tornará possível à desconstrução da masculinidade hegemônica exercida sobre todos nós, homens e mulheres. Tal análise possibilita um aumento do conhecimento sobre as organizações, assim como, ajuda entender as influências do comportamento dos funcionários na empresa. Através das entrevistas foi possível conhecer o ambiente de trabalho do executivo homem, suas responsabilidades, o contexto social em que está inserido e as representações sociais que o conduzem na sociedade. Como a sociedade brasileira, em sua maioria, diz-se capitalista e cristã a dominação e o poder exercido pelos mais fortes continuaram a existir. Porém, com a pesquisa é possível verificar quais as representações sociais da masculinidade marcantes nos homens de negócio, as quais direcionam todo o contexto organizacional, independente do sexo. Dessa forma se fez possível entender um pouco melhor esse “capitalismo selvagem” corporativo em qual a sociedade optou viver.

Afinal o que querem os homens?: um estudo da masculinidade

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Entre ditos e não ditos: a marcação social de diferenças de gênero e sexualidade por intermédio das práticas escolares da Educação Física

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

"Enemigos de la virilidad": Sex, Masturbation, and Celibacy in Nineteenth-Century Spain

The discourse on sexuality in nineteenth-century Spain presents a fundamental difference between the masculine ideal of that period and our current definition of masculinity. According to today’s popular stereotype, the typical man seeks out sexual contact and takes any opportunities that arise. By contrast, within the hygiene texts of the nineteenth century one detects a sense of unease associated with sexual activity and its corresponding role in the construction of hegemonic masculinity. In particular, sexual excess, masturbation, and celibacy were viewed as antagonistic to middle-class masculinity, which was instead associated with venereal moderation, marriage, and fatherhood. Men who transgressed this model risked their health as well as their masculinity. This formula reveals an element of fragility with regard to notions of manhood, in contrast to the traditional image of Spanish masculinity that originated during the Reconquest and is based on bellicose heroism, bravado, and sexual prowess.

What is this thing called Historical Archaeology?

Historical archaeology, in its narrow temporal sense -as an archaeology of the emergence and subsequent evolution of the Modern world- is steadily taking pace in Spanish academia. This paper aims at provoking a more robust debate through understanding how Spanish historical archaeology is placed in the international scene and some of its more relevant particularities. In so doing, the paper also stresses the strong links that have united historical and prehistorical archaeology since its inception, both in relation to the ontological, epistemological and methodological definition of the first as to the influence of socio-political issues in the latter. Such reflection is partly a situated reflection from prehistory as one of the paper’s authors has been a prehistorian for most of her professional life.

Chinese Men and "Leftover Women" : How do Chinese Men Position Themselves in Relation to the Concept of Labelling Women as "Leftover"?

In recent years there has been a resurgence of gender inequality in China. Today, women are pressured to get married by the state and their social surroundings, as they told if they remain unmarried and have the "three highs"; high age, education and salary, they will become leftovers on the marriage market. Previous research on the concept of labelling women as "leftover" has 4 shown that labelling women as "leftover" can have several different negative impacts. In this thesis, both the theory of masculine hegemony and the theory of symbolic interaction have been used. The concept creates a hegemonic masculinity as it is a normative practice that promotes the subordination of women. However, as the concept is based on the notion that all Chinese men, or at least those of relevant social standing, would find the "three highs" undesirable, it is relevant to see how Chinese men in fact do position themselves in relation to the hegemonic masculinity on an individual level. In symbolic interaction, the concept of gender is created through social construction when people attach special meanings to the sex of a person, a process which is called "doing gender". Therefore symbolic interaction is used to see what special meaning Chinese men attach to women having the "three highs" and masculine hegemony to put their answers into a larger context. If it could be shown that Chinese men do not comply with the hegemonic masculinity, Chinese women would not have to feel obliged to adjust to the hegemonic masculinity and thereby making it easier for them to pursue higher education, high paying jobs and marrying at a later age. However, as this thesis is a qualitative study, and therefore a limited number of data subjects, the generalizability of the result should not be exaggerated. The interviews that were conducted for this thesis showed that the data subjects were familiar with the concept and that they considered it to be natural for there to be women China labelled as "leftover". Nevertheless, in relation to their own marital choices, the data subjects did not attach the negative meaning as set out by the hegemonic masculinity, a result which to some extent was confirmed by the data subjects’ experiences and other control questions. The result is interesting, and enforces Connell and MesserSchmidt’s theory, that even though a hegemonic masculinity is normative, not everyone has to comply with it. As the cornerstone of the concept is that Chinese men find women with the "three highs" undesirable, the result of the study shows that there is a need for the concept to be further examined and questioned.

Theorizing masculinities for a new generation

Foregrounding research among 16-21 year-old heterosexual male youth, this article provides an overview of the changing nature of masculinities in Anglo-American cultures. I suggest that cultural homophobia is rapidly decreasing among young men in these cultures, and that this has a profound impact on their gendered performances. I suggest that hegemonic masculinity theory is incapable of explaining these changes. Thus I introduce inclusive masculinity theory—and its principal heuristic concept, homohysteria—to make sense of the changing nature of young men’s masculinities.

Negotiating a masculine bloc: Jonathan Franzen's The corrections

Contemporary research on masculinities has focused on demonstrating how these are multiple, hierarchical, collective as well as individual, complex and contingent. In this article, I read Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections in the light of such recent theorizations. I propose to focus on the negotiation of what Demetriou has termed a masculine bloc, which is a space in which hegemonic and non-hegemonic masculinities coexist and, therefore, a strict duality between both categories is transcended. Next, I suggest focusing on the construction of masculinities as subject positions that are interwoven with different geographical levels. It is my contention that St. Jude, the fictional city for the Lamberts’ home in the Midwest, conforms the symbolic arena in which hegemonic masculinity is staged.

Soldiering and the making of Finnish manhood : conscription and masculinity in interwar Finland, 1918–1939

Military conscription and peacetime military service were the subjects of heated political, social and cultural controversies during the early years of national independence in Finland. Both the critics and the supporters of the existing military system described it as strongly formative of young men’s physical and moral development into adult men and male citizens. The conflicts over conscription prompted the contemporaries to express their notions about what Finnish men were like, at their best and at their worst, and what should and could be done about it. This thesis studies military conscription as an arena for the “making of manhood” in peacetime Finnish society, 1918–1939. It examines a range of public images of conscripted soldiering, asking how soldiering was depicted and given gendered meanings in parliamentary debates, war hero myths, texts concerned with the military and civic education of conscripts, as well as in works of fiction and reminiscences about military training as a personal experience. Studying conscription with a focus on masculinity, the thesis explores the different cultural images of manliness, soldiering and male citizenship on offer in Finnish society. It investigates how political parties, officers, educators, journalists, writers and “ordinary” conscripts used and developed, embraced or rejected these notions, according to their political purposes or personal needs. The period between the two world wars can be described as a fast-forward into military modernity in Finland. In the process, European middle class gender ideologies clashed with Finnish agrarian masculinities. Nationalistic agendas for the militarisation of Finnish manhood stumbled against intense class conflicts and ideological resistance. Military propaganda used images of military heroism, civic virtue and individual success to persuade the conscripts into ways of thinking and acting that were shaped by bourgeois mentality, nationalistic ideology and religious morality. These images are further analysed as expressive of the personal experiences and emotions of their middle-aged, male authors. The efforts of these military educators were, however, actively resisted on many fronts, ranging from rural working class masculinities among the conscripted young men to ideological critiques of the standing army system in parliament. In narratives about military training, masculinity was depicted as both strengthened and contradicted by the harsh and even brutal practices of interwar Finnish military training. The study represents a combination of new military history and the historical study of men and masculinities. It approaches masculinity as a contested and highly political form of social and cultural knowledge that is actively and selectively used by historic actors. Instead of trying to identify a dominant or “hegemonic” form of masculinity within a pre-determined theoretical structure, this study examines how the meanings ascribed to manhood varied according to class, age, political ideology and social situation. The interwar period in Finland can be understood as a period of contest between different notions of militarised masculinity, yet to judge by the materials studied, there was no clear winning party in that contest. A gradual movement from an atmosphere of conflict surrounding conscription towards political and cultural compromises can be discerned, yet this convergence was incomplete and many division lines remained.

Crisis or failure of hegemonic masculinities in David Lodge’s Campus Trilogy

This bachelor’s thesis examines the crisis of hegemonic masculinities in David Lodge’s Campus Trilogy. In the course of the thesis, I demonstrate that the male characters in the novels aspire to hegemonic ideals of masculinity, but that ultimately most of them fail in their aspirations. However, I also show that this does not lead to the abandonment of this pursuit, but merely to its reformulation and a continued attempt of male characters to aspire to this reformulated ideal. In order to achieve this, I conduct a close reading of the novels and based on this, first determine the predominant types of hegemonic masculinities in each novel, and then whether certain characters aspire to these hegemonic ideals. Next I analyze whether or not they are successful. This analysis is chiefly based on the sociological concept of hegemonic masculinities developed by Connell. With the help of this concept, this thesis shows that several types of masculinities can be identified in the novels and that these exist in hierarchical relation to each other. Furthermore, it shows that these aspirations and the ideals themselves are always prone to crises that are brought on by societal changes in their environment. However, it is also demonstrated that in most cases these crises do not lead to the collapse of the ideal or the failure of its pursuit, but rather to the reformulation and continuation of both.

It's in his eyes? The negotiation and interpretation of masculinity using the Dolce et Gabbana's 2005 Print advertising campaign

The concept of 'masculinity' has over more years received increased attention within consumer research discourse suggesting the potential of a 'crisis of masculinity', symptomatic of a growing feminisation, or 'queering' of visual imagery and consumption (e.g. Patterson & Elliott, 2002). Although this corpus of research has served to enrich the broader gender identity debate, it is, arguably, still relatively underdeveloped and therefore warrants further insight and elaboration. The aim of this paper is, therefore, to explore how masculinity is represented and interpreted by men using the Dolce et Gabbana men's 2005 print advertising campaign. The rationale for using this particular campaign is that it is one of the most homoerotic, provocative, and well publicised campaigns to cross over from the 'gay' media to more mainstream UK men's magazines. Masculinity, and what it means to be 'masculine', manifests itself within particular ideological, moral, cultural and hegemonic discourses. Masculinity is not a homogenous term which can be simply reduced, and ascribed, to those born as 'male' rather than 'female'.

Vernacular perceptions of masculinity and fatherhood among Newfoundland offshore workers and their families

My thesis is an ethnographic study of how offshore workers of Newfoundland and Labrador, as well as their families, express and reflect upon traditional Newfoundland constructs of fatherhood and masculinity through narrative and ritual. With a schedule that often involves a constant shift between home and away, offshore workers in the province take part in high-risk professions in order to provide for their families back home. These professions, and their associated lifestyles, involve the incorporation of routine strategies that allows family culture to maintain itself. At the same time, these professions largely carry on a tradition of hegemonically masculine practices, albeit in a newer context. Drawing on a blend of literary and ethnographic research based on the Avalon Peninsula, I utilize examples of current Newfoundland culture to describe how nostalgic memoirs of outport Newfoundland create models of hegemonically masculine fatherhood in the province. I go on to explain how those models manifest themselves in the experiences of current offshore workers, and how they affect their spouses and children. Furthermore, through examining how young adults with offshore-working parents describe their experiences of their fathers, it is possible to see how the effects of local hegemonic masculinities are manifested through narratives about fathers who worked away from home.

"Serve Canada with Men Like These": Masculinity, "Peacekeeping," and National Identity in Cold War Canada, 1956-1959

This paper explores the ways in which the construction of militarized masculinities in Cold War Canadian media reflected the hegemonic masculinities and broader social trends of the period. This paper focuses specifically on the recruiting materials produced for and by the Canadian Army between 1956 and 1959, the time of the Suez Canal Crisis and the beginnings of “Canadian peacekeeping.” Through the mobilization of modern and anti-modern masculine identities attached to hegemonic and idealized Cold War Canadian masculinities, the Army created the image of the “Modern Warrior” to portray itself as an occupation and culture for “real Canadian men.” This identity simultaneously corresponded with Canada’s new “peacekeeping” identity. By presenting certain images of Canadian manhood as the “ideal” Canadian identity and by associating this “ideal” masculinity with military service, the Army’s recruitment advertisements conflated Cold War rhetoric of service, defence, national citizenship, cultural belonging, and “ideal” ethnicity with a Canadian identity available only to a specific (and often exclusive) segment of society. Because military service has long been considered the crux of citizenship, these advertisements (re)entrenched patterns of middle-class, heterosexual, Anglo- Saxon masculine power and dominance in a time of social uncertainty and cultural anxiety through the reaffirmation of this group’s “privilege” to serve the nation.

Performing masculinity, performing the self: Rudolfo Anaya's Bless me, Ultima and Heart of Aztlan

This article explores how Bless Me, Ultima and Heart of Aztlan, the two earliest novels by acclaimed Chicano writer Rudolfo Anaya, problematise and negotiate Chicano masculinity issues. I will focus on the main characters of the novels, who, at different vital moments of their lives, question the meaning of manhood amidst important socio-economic changes and conflicting cultural traditions. Anaya reveals the complexity of being “mestizo” in American society, and exposes how hegemonic standards of masculinity are Manichean, restrictive and reliant on gender inequality. I will finally examine whether the novels challenge hegemonic gender orders, successfully negotiate non-heterosexist ideals of manhood, and ultimately contribute to the advancement of egalitarian gender relations for the Chicana/o community