Belonging: Scrutiny, Irony and Performance

Abstract

The temporalities and spatialities of ‘work’ and ‘home’ have been a focus in Chapters 3, 4 and 5. Together, these have introduced the gendered dimensions of the environments within which mobile masculinities are lived out. In this chapter we sharpen our focus on the nature of identification itself, exploring data which show how men both practise but also imagine masculinity. Chapter 3 placed the occupations selected for our study into a wider context of historical shifts, not only in their status and gendering, but also in the characteristics of masculinity valued in those settings: for example, the go-getting entrepreneur of the Thatcherite era who replaced the honourable gentleman estate agent who had preceded him. While the men who staff estate agents’ reception areas, undertake valuations, and broker deals may themselves manifest these qualities in only a limited sense, if at all, masculinity, for them, is nonetheless lived out in relation to particular constellations of characteristics. It is this relationship which we now take up, seeking to understand identification as a process that unfolds in relation to distinctive models of what it means to be a (particular kind of) man. As Chapter 4 argued, aspects of masculinity are selectively required, rewarded or ‘released’ at home and at work, the extent to which those associated with home and the workplace differ from each other varying across the three occupations.