Masculinities?

First, why study masculinity? A critical analysis of masculinity is essential to understanding the construction of gender. Moreover, the study of masculinity is imperative to the struggle for gender equality. Masculinity is culturally portrayed as an inherent quality possessed by men. In American cultures, masculinity is viewed as an eternal, intangible quality that resides inherently within the male anatomy. Early feminist studies established gender as an important lens to view the oppression of women. Yet, limiting the critical study of gender to women and femininity only reinforced the conception that masculinity is genderless, primeval, and natural. Masculinity Studies emerged out of a similar feminist constructionist framework—critically analyzing men’s experiences and construction of manhood.

In order to understand how drag and masculinities are queered in Asheville, an explanation of the terms masculinity, drag, and queer is necessary. 
Why masculinities? Just as not all men are alike, constructions of masculinity vary due to location, age, body, ability, race, class, and sexuality. To elucidate, a white working-class man from rural Alabama is going to have different experience of manhood than a second-generation Latino college professor in Seattle. Many kinds of masculinity exist. Scholarship from these diverse masculinities elucidates one hegemonic masculinity: white, heterosexual, middle-class, able-bodied, urban, educated, employed, Christian, native born, etc[i]. As Masculinity Studies scholar, Michael Kimmel articulates, all men, however privileged, feel inferior when juxtaposed with this perceived ideal of masculinity[ii]. This particular version of masculinity is structurally invisible: the genderless norm, the “unisex” marker by which everything and everyone is measured. Experiences of non-normative masculinities (such as non-white, non-male, lower class and queer masculinities) have been strategically marginalized because they expose the existence, dominance, and construction of this idyllic masculinity.

Notes:


[i] Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History, (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 5-6.


[ii] Ibid.