Table Of Contentcover
global masculinities
Michael S. Kimmel
Men face common issues – the balance between work and family,
fatherhood, defining masculinity in a globalising economy, health
and reproduction, sexuality and violence. They are confronting these
issues all over the world in very different contexts and are coming
up with different priorities and strategies to address them. This
new international series provides a vehicle for understanding this
diversity, and reflects the growing awareness that analysis of mascu-
linity will be greatly impoverished if it remains dominated by a
European/North American/Australian matrix. A number of regional
and thematic cross-cultural volumes are planned.
Michael S. Kimmel is a well-known educator on gender issues. His
work has appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers and scholarly
journals, including the New York Times Book Review, Harvard Business
Review, The Nation and Psychology Today, where he was a contribut-
ing editor and columnist on male–female relationships. His teaching
examines men’s lives from a pro-feminist perspective. He is national
spokesperson for the National Organization for Men Against Sexism
(NOMAS) in the United States.
Robert Morrell (ed.), Changing Men in Southern Africa
Bob Pease and Keith Pringle (eds.), A Man’s World? Changing Men’s
Practices in a Globalized World
Frances Cleaver (ed.), Masculinities Matter! Men, Gender and Development
Lahoucine Ouzgane (ed.), Islamic Masculinities
Adam Jones (ed.), Men of the Global South: A Reader
about the author
Victor Jeleniewski Seidler is Professor of Social Theory in the Depart-
ment of Sociology, Goldsmiths College, University of London. He has
written widely in the field of gender, particularly in relation to men
and masculinities, as well as in social theory, critical theory, phil-
osophy and ethics. His most recent book is Transforming Masculinities:
Men, Cultures, Bodies, Power, Sex and Love (Routledge, ).
young men and masculinities
global cultures and intimate lives
VICTOR J . SEIDLER
ZED BOOKS
London & New York
In memory of my brother Michael,
October – April
and remembering my older brother Johnny,
July – May
Young Men and Masculinities was published in by
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contents
preface young men, global cultures and intimate lives
one introduction: young men and masculinities
two masculinities, histories, cultures and religions
three listening, speaking and learning
four questioning adam: men, power and love
five rethinking fatherhood
six masculinities, bodies and emotional life
seven bodies, desires, pleasures and love
eight authority, identities, bodies and intimacy
nine bodies, ethics, fears and desires
ten friends, risks and transgressions
eleven risk, fears, race and belongings
twelve risk, self-harm, abuse and control
thirteen young men, bodies, sexualities and health
f ourteen young men’s sexual and reproductive health
fifteen young men, heroes, violence and conflict
notes
bibliography
index
‘Nothing is ever the same as they said it was.
It’s what I’ve never seen before that I recognize.’
Diane Arbus, Revelations
‘Focusing on the person, the self, and the emotions
– all topics difficult to probe in traditional ethnographic
frameworks – is a way of getting to the level at which cultural
differences are most deeply rooted: in feelings and in complex
indigenous reflections about the nature of persons and social
relationships.’
George E. Marcus and Michael J. Fischer,
Anthropology as Cultural Critique
preface
young men, global cultures and intimate lives
families
Intimate relations and family life have undergone enormous changes
in the West since the s, to the degree that in the new millennium
we remain unsure about how to think about them. With globalisation
and new technologies of mass communication these uncertainties have
been reflected in urban and, increasingly, in rural settings globally.
The issue is not simply to decide who is to be included within the
sphere of family and intimate relations, but to account for the in-
creased rate of separation and divorce, and to register the fact that
families across heterosexual and gay relationships have become so
much more complex.
We can no longer assume, as we still did in Europe and the United
States in the s, that there is a norm of the ‘nuclear family’
against which other family forms are to be judged and evaluated. This
assumption was part of a pervasive ethic of normalisation within the
positivist traditions that prevailed in the social sciences whereby if,
for example, you grew up in a family with a single mother or where a
father had died, you learnt to keep quiet about it at school, wanting
at some level to feel that your family could somehow be ‘normal’.
This vision of ‘normal’ heterosexual ‘socialisation’ has haunted studies
