Abstract
In their introductory chapter, Kevin Floyd and Stefan Horlacher argue that over the last couple of decades the history of scholarship on masculinity has tended to move in a specific, definable direction—from emphasizing a singular ‘masculinity’ to emphasizing highly differentiated ‘masculinities’—and that the tension between these different understandings of masculinity can better be understood in relation to a concomitant tension or opposition: between ‘systems’ on the one hand, and ‘bodies’ on the other; between abstract systems—such as patriarchy, kinship, or even language—and the various concrete forms taken by gendered, individuated corporeality. Moreover, they argue that masculinity and patriarchy have long been examined in terms of their imbrication with other, distinct but overlapping, systems, from international capitalism and globalization to the nation-state, and that this tension—between attending to the gendered, stylized body, and attending to the broader webs of relations within which that body operates—has become apparent in numerous ways. It is this tension that the current volume addresses.
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Notes
- 1.
This volume is the result of a five-year research project on comparative masculinity studies funded by the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation, Kent State University, and Dresden University of Technology. This introduction in part builds on Horlacher and Floyd 2013, the first volume which resulted from this project. We would like to take this opportunity and thank Sebastian Jansen, Denise Günther, Ulrike Kohn, and Mirjam Frotscher for their precious help in editing the manuscript and creating the index.
- 2.
One might even add that one of the distinguishing features of a psychoanalytic approach to masculinity is that it is one of the only approaches that lends itself to both of these ways of understanding masculinity, equipped as it is to provide vocabularies with which to understand gender at somatic and social or structural levels simultaneously—though this certainly does not mean that most examples of the psychoanalytic scrutiny of masculinity have much success in achieving both.
- 3.
We chose the time span from World War II to the present because this is a period in which differentiated masculinities proliferate for specifically national and transnational reasons, including global waves of decolonization, changing patterns of migration, the emergence of ‘new’ subaltern subjects demanding social, cultural, and political recognition, as well as conservative reactions against these developments.
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Floyd, K., Horlacher, S. (2017). Contemporary Masculinities in the UK and the US: Between Bodies and Systems . In: Horlacher, S., Floyd, K. (eds) Contemporary Masculinities in the UK and the US. Global Masculinities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50820-7_1
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