What it Means to be a Man: Young People, Masculinities and Social Change

What is it about?

The paper explores how ideas of masculinity are currently configured in a former shipbuilding community. Derived from ethnographic research with 120 young people from three schools, the study makes a critical intervention into gender and work through a focus on masculinities and economies of caregiving. The paper contributes to emerging work on gender, work and care in four ways. First, highlighting a contingent relationship between local political economy, place and the production of masculinities. Second, demonstrating how the inclusion of young people’s perspectives and experiences of male caregiving extends existing feminist care geographies. Third, by exploring how care is gendered, ‘regendered’ and ‘degendered’ in young people’s accounts, prising open possibilities for ‘undoing’ patriarchal masculinities and reworking the gender order. Finally, it is argued that such practices may inspire new economic ontologies of care, pluralise masculinity and enhance the transformation of gender relations at local and global scales.

Featured Image

Photo by Adrià Crehuet Cano on Unsplash

Photo by Adrià Crehuet Cano on Unsplash

Why is it important?

In an age where industrial jobs are no longer the norm, young people need to develop masculinities befitting off the contemporary labour market. Issues of 'toxic masculinity' have been widely debated, and it is imperative that young men develop more egalitarian and pluralistic forms of masculinity.

Perspectives