Raewyn Connell
She is currently a Professor at the University of Sydney's Faculty of Education and Social Work, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences. Raewyn is a senior editor of the journal Theory and Society and is on the editorial board of eight other social-science journals. Her teaching fields have included general sociology, social theory, sociology of education, gender relations, sexuality, and research methods. She is currently supervising seven research higher degree students.
Without a doubt, Raewyn's research and theorising on the social construction of masculinities has had a major influence on the creation of this international research field. Her book Masculinities (1995, now translated into Italian, Swedish, German, Spanish and Chinese) is the most cited research publication in this field. More recently she has opened up questions about the relations between masculinities and neoliberal globalization. These studies show her characteristic concern to combine an understanding of large-scale social structures with recognition of personal experience and collective agency.
In her book, Masculinities, she said that not all societies had a concept of masculinity even though they give some cultural explanation about gender. Masculinity is a concept related very close with feminity, is created as its opposite. Connell identify four approaches to masculinity concept. First, is essentialist, which give more importance to one of the characteristics of masculinity, but authors are not agree about which of all characteristics should be the main one, it is very relative determine masculinity as only one trait. Second, is positivism, is based on what in fact men do as men, but there is no consideration to cultural context which influence in those facts make them differents and diverse. Third, is normative, there are some norms about what men could do and what couldn’t (as the sentence “men don’t cry”, and many others), built in media, movies, and all simbolic representations about ideal man, but it is also essentialist because give more importance to some characteristic over others. Fourth, is semiotic, which get away individual masculinity to talk about simbolic differences in a cultural system, in which feminity is very related with masculinity because it is all that is not masculine. Feminity is empty, have no significance, is full of what masculinity is not. It is an approach that always refer to discourse but is very useful to cultural analysis.
There are many kinds of masculinities living together but always there is one which is hegemonic to the rest and marginalize others in a gender system. Hegemonic masculinity is not a fixable personality, is that kind of masculinity which is in a superior level. No matter what, each culture will prefer one kind of masculinity over others. Most of men don’t live in the model of hegemonic masculinity, on the contrary, it is live for very few persons in a society. Masculinity (as feminity) has internal contradictions and historical ruptures, because what is hegemonic is determine in a mobile relation. Nowadays domination is stablish from heterosexual men to homosexual ones, because homosexuality is the deposit of all that hegemonic masculinity don’t consider representative, that is why homosexuality is very closed to feminization of men. Transsexuality is also another sphere that challenge hegemonic masculinity but transsexuals suffer a normalization through medical practices to order bodies follow social ideology of gender dicotomy.
We hope Connell reflectes about her change of identity, because is a paradox that the most important intellectual of masculinity is now a woman.
Some of the most important books:
Breines, I, RW Connell and I Eide, ed. 2000. Male Roles, Masculinities and Violence: A Culture of Peace Perspective. Paris, UNESCO Publishing.
Connell, RW. 2002. Gender. Cambridge, Polity Press; Malden, Blackwell Publishers.
Connell, RW. 1995. Masculinities. Cambridge, Polity Press; Sydney, Allen & Unwin; Berkeley, University of California Press.
Connell, RW. 1987. Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics. Sydney, Allen & Unwin; Cambridge, Polity Press; Stanford, Stanford University Press.
Complete book list:
http://www-personal.edfac.usyd.edu.au/staff/connellr/books.shtml
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.W._Connell
An interview:
http://www.mavaindia.org/Interview_Connell.html
