Abstract
Studying the male gender role poses some unique challenges for feminist researchers. In this chapter, I use my personal experiences as a feminist and social psychologist to frame three key questions about the merits of studying men and men’s gendered experiences. These questions concern the methods, focus, and contributions of my research on precarious manhood. Specifically, I consider whether work that compares men’s and women’s experiences reinforces the gender binary; whether research on precarious manhood downplays women’s gender-based struggles; and the potential of my research to illuminate factors that pose barriers to feminist progress. While the questions I consider do not necessarily have clear-cut, definitive answers, the exercise of unpacking and examining them is both intellectually and politically important.
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Notes
- 1.
Indeed, it is false to imply that there is one, unified set of feminist critiques of empiricism and the scientific method (Riger, 1992). Harding (1986) identifies three primary themes among feminist critiques of science, but even this analysis inevitably glosses over some of the distinctions between different feminist perspectives.
- 2.
Actually, our university—from which many of our research samples are drawn—is fairly racially and ethnically diverse compared to many North American universities, with 51 % students identifying as White, 21 % as Latino/a, 11 % as Black, 8 % as Asian, and 9 % as Biracial or “other” (University of South Florida InfoCenter, 2015).
- 3.
Many of the ideas presented here were inspired by and/or refined through discussions held at the “Work as a Masculinity Contest” work group hosted by Dr. Joan Williams and Dr. Jennifer Berdahl in December of 2015 at the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia.
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Acknowledgment
I thank Heather Sellers and Jamie Goldenberg for their helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this chapter, and David Davisson for his invaluable assistance with research.
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Bosson, J.K. (2016). Feminism and the Study of Masculinity: Unlikely Bedfellows?. In: Roberts, TA., Curtin, N., Duncan, L., Cortina, L. (eds) Feminist Perspectives on Building a Better Psychological Science of Gender. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32141-7_6
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