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The Costs of Exclusionary Practices in Masculnities Studies* (Forthcoming in Men and Masculinities)

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The Costs of Exclusionary Practices in Masculnities Studies* (Forthcoming in Men and Masculinities) The Costs of Exclusionary Practices in Masculnities Studies* (forthcoming in Men and Masculinities) Tristan Bridges University of California, Santa Barbara Scholarship on “masculinities” emerged formally as a gender studies subfield in the 1970s. I reflected on this after reading and reviewing Michael Messner, Max Greenberg, and Tal Peretz’s (2015) book, Some Men: Feminist Allies and the Movement to End Violence Against Women. In it, they interviewed over 50 men and some women born over the course of half a century (1941- 1991). They asked them about their politics, how they started getting interested in doing feminist work, what brought them in, and they thought critically about the kinds of feminist work they were doing. Age intersected with their stories of engagement in important ways. Perhaps selfishly, I was most interested in the stories of the men among whom I am counted—that youngest generation of feminist activists Messner, Greenberg, and Peretz call “the professional cohort,” a group for whom a place was already set at the table. Their entry into feminist work came more easily, in large part due to the work of earlier feminists who helped to institutionalize some of the work so that colleges, universities, and professional organizations have positions for people who “do this work.” For scholars of my generation, this “field” was under way well before we arrived. And that means that we encountered the field on different terms. In graduate school, I think I tried to steer clear of being described as a “masculinities scholar” as long as I could. I thought of myself as a feminist gender scholar who just happened to study (mostly) men. And part of my hesitance was that the field appeared to me to be dominated by men—a curious pocket of gender studies. It seemed to me that it did not start out this way, but that this is what it had become. Messner, Greeberg, and Peretz (2015) stress that this shift was associated with new opportunities for new groups of men to get involved with feminist work addressing issues of violence against women such that the men doing this work today are, for instance, more racially diverse than earlier generations of men who got involved. When I reviewed the book though, I also noted that the feminism of this youngest cohort appeared to be more scripted, less fraught. Institutionalizing feminist work by and for men came at a cost—the “feminist” part of this work seemed watered * This article is based in part on a presentation at the winter meeting of Sociologists for Women in Society, Albuquerque, NM, February 2017. Thanks to Tara Leigh Tober, Michael Messner, Kristen Barber, France Winddance Twine, D’Lane Compton, Michael Kimmel, C.J. Pascoe, and Cliff Leek for discussions that led to this article and for advanced comments, edits, and suggestions on drafts. And my gratitude to the graduate students in my winter 2018 masculinities graduate seminar whose discussion and conversation informed and enriched this article a great deal: Nicholas Farley, Aracely Garcia Gonzalez, Kendall Ota, Allison Pierce, Sekani Robinson, Amanda Rodriguez, Cierra Sorrin, and Fátima Suarez. Finally, I would also like to acknowledge Maxine Baca Zinn, Lynn Weber Cannon, Elizabeth Higginbothan, and Bonnie Thornton Dill who, in 1986, published a viewpoint essay in Signs entitled “The Costs of Exclusion in Women’s Studies” proposing a series of intersectional critiques of Women’s Studies and an analysis of the gendered and racialized power structure associated with key journals in the field here proposed about masculinities studies. It was both their title and analysis I am acknkowledging here and to which this article is indebted as well. down when compared with the older cohorts they interviewed. This is, of course, my reading of their discoveries—not necessarily their argument. Even in my short time as a part of this field, it has changed enormously. In looking back over the 20 years Men and Masculinities has been a journal, I address shifts in the status of the journal, the question of who it is who publishes here, and how that has changed over two decades as a way of addressing larger transformations in the field. Here, I discuss the institutionalization of what Maxine Baca Zinn, Lynn Weber Cannon, Elizabeth Higginbotham, and Bonnie Thornton Dill (1986) call “exclusionary practices” as well as the politics of citation during both the emergence of masculinities as a subfield of gender studies as well as more recent citational practices in the field to address some of the consequences of this transformation. Finally, I address what I see as one of the central shifts in the field. Masculinities have always been objects of inquiry often “on the move.” That is, scholars have always been interested in those moments when gender structures and enactments of gender appear to rupture, shift, or transform. And questions of how we make sense of transformations in inequality and privilege continue to motivate a great deal of scholarship in the field today. And, over the last 30-50 years, we also have new methods, tools, and a larger body of research and theory to document, analyze, and explain transformations in durable systems of inequality as they are happening. And I argue that, as a field, we can and should be making better use of them as well as the diverse perspectives and standpoints that make up this field of study. Men and Masculinities Then and Now Judith Lorber came to my graduate institution to give a colloquium a little over a decade ago and sat down with me when I was initially formulating my dissertation. We went out to breakfast and I told her about the project on men’s gender politics I was devising at the time. She smiled and joked, “So, which one of the Michaels do you like?” It’s true. There is an incredible collection of “Michaels” who play a crucial role in masculinities studies: Michael Messner, Michael Kimmel, Michael Kaufman, Michael Flood, Michael Schwalbe, just to name some. It makes sense. Michael is a popular name (in the U.S. and abroad) and, in the U.S. at least, its popularity started to peek right around the time many of our field’s Michaels were born. (As a side note, there’s a similar case to be made about the quantity of “Judiths” in gender and feminist studies as well. Though I wasn’t clever enough to have thought of that in the moment, nor would I have been bold enough to share it.) The conversation helped me shape what became my dissertation, but it also made me think about how many men make up this field, make a living by doing work in this field, and more. But feminist women have always been a part of this field, too. In fact, since Men and Masculinities was first published in 1998, the journal has published more scholarship by scholars who do not identify as men over time than men (see Figure 1). In only one issue were all of the contributing authors of articles men. This is interesting and important, but it is also only one metric of change in the field. It says something about who is publishing in the field—but not about influence. Measuring the “status” of masculinities studies involves a more complicated bit of data: data on influence. Men and Masculinities is only one journal. But it has also become the flagship journal in this subfield of gender studies. So, tracking the influence of this journal is one small indication of shifts in the field as well. Gender & Society has a more prestigious ranking both within sociology as well as in gender studies. Yet, measures of influence used to assess the status of academic journals find that while Men and Masculinities was ranked beneath other important interdisciplinary journals of feminist gender studies scholarship like Signs and Sex Roles when it was first published, the influence of the journal has steadily increased such that, by 2017, Men and Masculinities had a higher influence ranking than both Signs and Sex Roles (see Figure 2). And this shift primarily occurred over the past decade alone. So, Figure 1 shows us that the journal has steadily published less work by men over time, and Figure 2 demonstrates that the influence of the journal has grown over time. This is all well and good as an indication of status and growth of the journal itself and of the journal as one representation of growth in feminist scholarship on masculinities more broadly. But the measure of impact used for Figure 2 rests on a very specific and common metric of influence within academia: citations. And as with any measure of status or influence, citations are not without a politics. The Politics of Citation and the Institutionalization of Privilege in Masculinities Studies Early scholarship on masculinities was fiercely interdisciplinary. If you look at citations in some of the early feminist scholarship that helped to produce “the field,” the citations come from all over the place. This was important for many reasons, but one was to establish research in the field as explicitly feminist—indeed, the field started to coalesce alongside a sustained critique of the inability of sex role theory to adequately make sense of power, inequality, and social change in the 1970s and 1980s. And the first feminist theories of masculinities relied on an incredible interdisciplinary array of feminist scholarship, much of it by women. Indeed, as the intersectional, feminist, queer, and critical race theorist Sara Ahmed (2017) writes, “Citations can be feminist bricks: they are the materials through which, from which, we create our dwellings” (2017: 16).
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