Contemporary articles citing Connell R (1995) Masculinities

gender, concept, race, hegemonic, understanding, studies, attention, same, feminist, masculinity

Choo, Hae & Myra Ferree. 2010. "Practicing Intersectionality in Sociological Research: a Critical Analysis of Inclusions, Interactions, and Institutions in the Study of Inequalities." Sociological Theory. 28:2 129-149.

In this article we ask what it means for sociologists to practice intersectionality as a theoretical and methodological approach to inequality. What are the implications for choices of subject matter and style of work? We distinguish three styles of understanding intersectionality in practice: group-centered, process-centered, and system-centered. The first. emphasizes placing multiply-marginalized groups and their perspectives at the center of the research. The second, intersectionality as a process, highlights power as relational, seeing the interactions among variables as multiplying oppressions at various points of intersection, and drawing attention to unmarked groups. Finally, seeing intersectionality as shaping the entire social system pushes analysis away from associating specific inequalities with unique institutions, instead looking for processes that are fully interactive, historically co-determining, and complex. Using several examples of recent, highly regarded qualitative studies, we draw attention to the comparative, contextual, and complex dimensions of sociological analysis that can be missing even when race, class, and gender are explicitly brought together.

Orloff, Ann. 2009. "Gendering the Comparative Analysis of Welfare States: an Unfinished Agenda." Sociological Theory. 27:3 317-343.

Can feminists count on welfare states-or at least some aspects of these complex systems-as resources in the struggle for gender equality ? Gender analysts of ``welfare states'' investigate this question and the broader set of issues around the mutually constitutive relationship between systems of social provision and regulation and gender. Feminist scholars have moved to bring the contingent practice of politics back into grounded fields of action and social change and away from the reification and abstractions that had come to dominate models of politics focused on ``big'' structures and systems, including those focused on ``welfare states.'' Conceptual innovations and reconceptualizations of foundational terms have been especially prominent in the comparative scholarship on welfare states, starting with gender, and including care, autonomy, citizenship, (in)dependence, political agency, and equality. In contrast to other subfields of political science and sociology, gendered insights have to some extent been incorporated into mainstream comparative scholarship on welfare states. The arguments between feminists and mainstream scholars over the course of the last two decades have been productive, powering the development of key themes and concepts pioneered by gender scholars, including ``defamilialization,'' the significance of unpaid care work in families and the difficulties of work-family ``reconciliation,'' gendered welfare state institutions, the relation between fertility and women's employment, and the partisan correlates of different family and gender policy models. Yet the mainstream still resists the deeper implications of feminist work, and has difficulties assimilating concepts of care, gendered power, dependency, and interdependency. Thus, the agenda of gendering comparative welfare state studies remains unfinished. To develop an understanding of what might be needed to finish that agenda, I assess the gendered contributions to the analysis of modern systems of social provision, starting with the concept of gender itself, then moving to studies of the gendered division of labor (including care) and of gendered political power.

Lewis, AE. 2004. "``what Group?'' - Studying Whites and Whiteness in the Era of ``color-blindness''." Sociological Theory. 22:4 623-646. Link

In this article I argue that despite the claims of some, all whites in racialized societies ``have race.'' But because of the current context of race in our society, I argue that scholars of ``whiteness ``face several difficult theoretical and methodological challenges. First is the problem of how to avoid essentializing race when talking about whites as a social collective. That is, scholars must contend with the challenge of how to write about what is shared by those racialized as white without implying that their experiences of racialization all will be the same. Second, within the current context of color-blind racial discourse researchers must confront the reality that some whites claim not to experience their whiteness at all. Third, studies of whiteness must not be conducted in a vacuum: racial discourse or ``culture'' cannot be separated from material realities. Only by attending to and by recognizing these challenges will empirical research on whiteness be able to push the boundaries of our understandings about the role of whites as racial actors and thereby also contribute to our understanding of how race works more generally.

Brekhus, W. 1998. "Sociology of the Unmarked: Redirecting Our Focus." Sociological Theory. 16:1 34-51. Link

This article suggests that American sociology has developed a defacto tradition in the sociology of the marked that devotes greater epistemological attention to ``politically salient'' and ``ontologically uncommon'' features of social life, Although the ``unmarked'' comprises the vast majority of social life, the ``marked'' commands a disproportionate share of attention from sociologists. Since the marked already draws more attention within the general culture, social scientists contribute to re-marking and the reproduction of common-sense images of social reality This has important analytic consequences. This article argues for developing a stronger tradition in a sociology of the unmarked that explicitly foregrounds ``politically unnoticed'' and taken-for-granted elements of social reality. Three strategies are proposed toward this end: (1) reversing conventional patterns of markedness to foreground what typically remains unnamed and implicit, (2) marking everything by filling in all the shades of social continue so that each shares the same degree of epistemological ornamentation, and (3) developing an analytically nomadic perspective that observes social phenomena from multiple vantage points.

Alway, J. 1995. "The Trouble With Gender: Tales of the Still-missing Feminist Revolution in Sociological Theory." Sociological Theory. 13:3 209-228. Link

Why do sociological theorists remain uninterested in and resistant to feminist theory? Notwithstanding indications of increasing openness to feminist theory, journals and texts on sociological theory reflect a continuing pattern of neglect. Identify reasons for this pattern; including tensions resulting from the introduction of gender as a central analytical category: Nor only does gender challenge the dichotomous categories that define sociology's boundaries and identity, it also displaces the discipline's central problematic of modernity. The significance of this displacement is apparent when the discipline's responses to feminist and postmodernist theory are compared I discuss the relevance of feminist theoretical work to contemporary issues in sociological theory, with specific attention to the synthetic nature of feminist theorizing to work on rethinking power resistance, and oppression, and to efforts to effect a conceptual shift from `'either/or'' to `'both/and'' thinking and to establish new grounds for assessing knowledge claims.

Hearn, J. 1998. "Theorizing Men and Men's Theorizing: Varieties of Discursive Practices in Men's Theorizing of Men." Theory and Society. 27:6 781-816. Link

Donovan, B. 1998. "Political Consequences of Private Authority: Promise Keepers and the Transformation of Hegemonic Masculinity." Theory and Society. 27:6 817-843. Link

Demetriou, DZ. 2001. "Connell's Concept of Hegemonic Masculinity: a Critique." Theory and Society. 30:3 337-361. Link

Korteweg, AC. 2003. "Welfare Reform and the Subject of the Working Mother: ``get a Job, a Better Job, Then a Career''." Theory and Society. 32:4 445-480. Link

Until 1996, poor single mothers in the United States could claim welfare benefits for themselves and their children under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program if they had no other source of income. With the 1996 passage of the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), paid work and work-related activities became a mandatory condition for receiving aid. At the same time, the law promotes marriage as a route out of poverty. Using a feminist reinterpretation of Althusser's concept of interpellation, I turn to Job Clubs, mandatory week-long workshops that teach job search skills, to analyze the citizen-subject generated by front-line representatives of the state in the context of this new legislation. Based on participant-observation, I conclude that while PRWORA ostensibly promotes both marriage and paid employment, Job Club trainers enforced a masculine worker-citizen subject through the deployment of three discursive strategies. These discursive strategies 1) promoted paid work over welfare-receipt as both a pragmatic and moral choice, 2) posited an individual-psychological account of women's welfare receipt, and 3) portrayed parenting skills as marketable skills. In the conclusion, I speculate that current welfare reform efforts require the generation of a self-reproducing worker-citizen and that workshops like Job Club become a site in which the existence of this autonomous citizen is affirmed.

Schippers, Mimi. 2007. "Recovering the Feminine Other: Masculinity, Femininity, and Gender Hegemony." Theory and Society. 36:1 85-102. Link

R. W. Connell's path-breaking notion of multiple masculinities (Connell, 1995) and hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 1987, 1995) have been taken up as central constructs in the sociology of gender. Although there has been a great deal of empirical research and theory published that has built upon and utilized Connell's concepts, an adequate conceptualization of hegemonic femininity and multiple femininities has not yet been developed. To redress this, the author presents a theoretical framework that builds upon the insights of Connell and others, offers a definition of hegemonic masculinity and hegemonic femininity that allows for multiple configurations within each, and that can be used empirically across settings and groups. The author also outlines how hegemonic masculinity and hegemonic femininity are implicated in and intersect with other systems of inequality such as class, race, and ethnicity.