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....