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In this paper we provide a critical analysis of the concept of hegemonic masculinity.We argue that although this concept embodies important theoretical insights, it is insufficiently developed as it stands to enable us to understand how men position themselves as gendered beings. In particular it offers a vague and imprecise account of the social psychological reproduction of male identities. We outline an alternative critical discursive psychology of masculinity. Drawing on data from interviews with a sample of men from a range of ages and from diverse occupational backgrounds, we delineate three distinctive, yet related, procedures or psycho-discursive practices, through which men construct themselves as masculine. The political implications of these discursive practices, as well as the broader implications of treating the psychological process of identification as form of discursive accomplishment, are also discussed.KEYWORDS: male identity, hegemonic masculinity, identification, gender categories, the imaginary, discourse analysis, discursive practice, discursive psychology. 3This paper focuses on the discursive strategies involved in negotiating membership of gender categories. Specifically, we are interested in how men position themselves in relation to conventional notions of the masculine. How do men take on the social identity of 'being a man' as they talk, and what are the implications of the typical discursive paths they follow? We concentrate on responses to interview questions such as "Would you describe yourself as a masculine man?" and "Are there moments in everyday life when you feel more masculine than at other times?", and on men's responses to magazine photographs of possible role models. To help make sense of these moments of self-assessment and identification, we introduce notions of 'imaginary positions' and 'psycho-discursive practices' and initiate a dialogue with the feminist sociology of masculinity developed by Robert Connell and his colleagues (Carrigan et al., 1985;Connell, 1987;.According to Connell, the task of 'being a man' involves taking on and negotiating 'hegemonic masculinity'. Men's identity strategies are constituted through their complicit or resistant stance to prescribed dominant masculine styles. Connell's (1987) analysis of this process of identification is an anti-essentialist one. He argues that masculine characters are not given. Rather, a range of possible styles and personae emerge from the gender regimes found in different cultures and historical periods. Among the possible variety of ways of being masculine, however, some become 'winning styles' and it is these with which men must engage.Connell's conception of hegemony draws on Gramsci's (1971) 4Connell's formulation of hegemonic masculinity and men's complicity or resistance has a number of advantages. First, this approach allows for diversity. Masculine identities can be studied in the plural rather than in the singular. Second, this is an analysis deeply attentive to the problematic of gender power....

We contrast two theoretical approaches to social influence, one stressing interpersonal dependence, conceptualized as normative and informational influence (Deutsch & Gerard, 1955), and the other stressing group membership, conceptualized as selfcategorization and referent informational influence (Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher & Wetherell, 1987). We argue that both social comparisons to reduce uncertainty and the existence of normative pressure to comply depend on perceiving the source of influence as belonging to one's own category. This study tested these two approaches using three influence paradigms. First we demonstrate that, in Sherifs (1936) autokinetic effect paradigm, the impact of confederates on the formation of a norm decreases as their membership of a different category is made more salient to subjects. Second, in the Asch (1956) conformity paradigm, surveillance effectively exerrs normative pressure ifdone by an in-group but not by an out-group. In-group influence decreases and out-group influence increases when subjects respond privately. Self-report data indicate that in-groupconfederates create more subjective uncertainty than out-group confederates and public responding seems to increase cohesiveness with in-group -but decrease it with out-group -sources of influence. In our third experiment we use the group polarization paradigm (e.g. Bumstein & Vinokur, 1973) to demonstrate that, when categorical differences between two subgroups within a discussion group are made salient, convergence of opinion between the subgroups is inhibited. Taken together the experiments show that self-categorization can be a crucial determining factor in social influence.

In recent years it has become increasingly difficult for men to ignore the issue of their gendered status. Gone, it seems, are the days when men sat comfortably as the unmarked sex. Instead the 'masculine condition' has been put under the spotlight in a barrage of television and radio programmes, newspaper and magazine articles. The same is also true within the social sciences with a steady stream of new titles about men and masculinity emerging from a range of theoretical perspectives, including sociology (e.g.

This study used a discursive approach to analysing doctors' and nurses' accounts of men's health in the context of general practice. The analysis worked intensively with interview material from a small sample of general practitioners and their nursing colleagues. We examine the contradictory discursive framework through which this sample made sense of their male patients. The 'interpretative repertoires' through which doctors and nurses constructed their representations of male patients and the 'subject positions' these afforded men are outlined in detail. We describe how hegemonic masculinity is both critiqued for its detrimental consequences for health and paradoxically also indulged and protected. These constructions reflect a series of ideological dilemmas for men and health professionals between the maintenance of hegemonic masculine identities and negotiating adequate health care. Men who step outside 'typical' gender constructions tended to be marked as deviant or rendered invisible as a consequence.

The recent 'turn to affect' in social and cultural research has been built on the notion of affect as a kind of excess. Affect is contrasted with the discursive and the cognitive, and distinguished from 'domesticated' emotion. The focus is on the presumed direct hit of events on bodies and on what is sensed rather than known. This formulation in combination with the need for new methods has disconnected discourse studies from research on affect. In common with other recent critics, I argue that the formulation of affect as an excess is unsustainable. I focus here, however, on the methodological consequences. The objective of affect research is to produce textured, lively analyses of multiple modes of engagement and to understand the working of power through patterns of assemblage. Intriguingly, fine-grain studies of discursive practice might realize these aims more effectively than some new, 'non-representational' methodological approaches. I contrast one example of non-representational empirical investigation with an example of discursive research on normative episodic sequences. My general aim is to build a more productive dialogue between rich traditions in discourse studies and new lines of research on affect and emotion.