Through four years of ethnographic participant observation, and in-depth interviews, this article examines how militarism and masculinity are bound together in the social space of a military-style charter school in Southern California. Drawing on the concept of hegemonic masculinity by Connell, and the discussion by Higate and Hopton on the reciprocal relationship between militarism and masculinity, this article examines the construction of a military hegemonic masculinity at the school. It also examines the nuances and effects of this particular form of hegemonic masculinity for both boys and girls and argues it is exemplified at the school through the acceptance and condonement of violence and the warrior hero archetype. While not all cadets at the school have access to, or can capitalize upon the advantages of this particular hegemonic masculinity, specifically black boys and girls, it is a powerful force that shapes social interactions, social patterns, and social identities for boys and girls.

It is widely acknowledged that gender is a key category in pornography, yet the relation of the latter to contemporary masculinities remains relatively obscure. Although there is a substantial critical literature on the positioning and treatment of women in pornography, the connection between the consumption of pornographic images and the social construction of hegemonic masculinity has been more often presumed than examined. This lacuna becomes more apparent when juxtaposed with the profusion and proliferation of Internet porn in recent years. Rather than enter into existing antiporn or proporn debates, this article seeks to pose a different set of questions about the relationship between masculinity, technology, and pornography. It suggests that the Internet produces a qualitative change in the way in which viewers are affected by pornography and that this has implications for contemporary gender relations. Beyond men’s control over women’s bodies, Internet porn participates in the larger drama of a technological confrontation between men and nature—one in which control and the meaning of masculinity is perpetually at stake.

Contextualized studies of gender have been published, but these studies typically compare men and women in a single context. In this study, we examined men’s expectations for women across two interpersonal contexts, dating and the workplace, with particular attention to the gender-related traits of expressiveness and instrumentality. Data were provided by eighty-seven unmarried, heterosexual young adult males. Significant differences were found for trait preference as a function of context, with young men reporting stronger preference for expressive traits in the romantic context and stronger preference for instrumental traits in the work context. Contextual differences became nonsignificant when egalitarian beliefs were added to the model. Discussion focuses on the importance of context for understanding gender.

Japanese American veterans' narratives of World War II (WWII) constitute a dynamic discursive site where heterogeneous and contradictory understandings of masculinity, military service, and national allegiance are articulated. While loyalty and patriotism often stand out as dominant themes in their narratives, their retelling of wartime military service by no means provides a uniform picture of heroic masculinity and patriotic nationalism. Having suffered from race- and gender-based dislocation as colored immigrant men in US history, Japanese American veterans' narratives necessarily include moments of ambiguity, contradiction, and disruption and reveal the complex nature of minority men's assertion to national belonging. By examining diverse and often contestatory voices of Japanese American veterans, this essay illuminates how minority men's retelling of military service contradicts and even subverts the dominant understandings of war, masculinity, and nation.

Much has been reported in the media and depicted in the popular culture that purports to describe the so-called "Blue Wall of Silence," a phenomenon that suggests that the police engage in a pervasive pattern of deception and withholding of the truth in ritual cover-up for their brethren. This writing suggests that there exists within the subculture of policing an idiosyncratic construct of masculinity that privileges tacit conspiracies of silence. This cult of masculinity validates normative heterosexuality, hierarchical regimentation, homosocial bonding, homophobia, and paternalistic misogyny. Silences are maintained, supported, and endorsed in a reflexive and unspoken means of obstructing evaluation of officer conduct by interlopers who (the subculture suggests) have little appreciation for or understanding of the danger, adversity, and peril that consume the working lives of the police. The essay attempts to articulate the underlying aspects of this idiosyncratic subculture that countenance bonding and subsequent silences.

Social scientists implicate high-status men as sexually objectifying women. Yet, few have investigated these men’s perceptions and accounts of their own experiences. Racial variation in gender relations in college has also received little scholarly attention. Analyzing 30 in-depth, individual interviews and surveys and two focus group interviews from Black and White men at a large university, we find racial differences in approaches toward women. More specifically, Black men exhibit more romantic approaches, whereas White men exhibit more sexual approaches. However, these differences are not solely related to race. Instead, "normative institutional arrangements" (e.g., community size and living arrangements) structure these approaches. We discuss the broader theoretical mechanisms regarding masculine performances, gender attitudes and behaviors, and race. In doing so, this study highlights the importance of "normative institutional arrangements" for understanding how the performances of masculinities are legitimized across racial- and status-group categories of men.

Using an intersectional analysis of Black masculinities, we explored how 2 African American men’s personal emotions regarding violence against women and their perceptions of masculinity became politicized by experiences that led to their participation in the founding of 2 separate profeminist men’s organizations. Through the public use of their personal narratives, the men used organizational activities to foster new raced-gendered feeling rules regarding emotion that challenge hegemonic masculinity generally and Black hegemonic masculinities, in particular. Narrative themes indicating reconceptualization of Black masculinity and feeling rules for men included (a) "becoming aware" of an injustice to a woman that generated negative emotions, and (b) "becoming active" in the profeminist men’s movement that allowed the transformation of negative emotions into positive ones. We make recommendations for future research that pays particular attention to how depictions of Black masculinity stigmatize Black men’s emotionality in ways that exacerbate differences in emotion norms between men and women and among different racially constructed groups of men.

In the hierarchy of masculinities, old men and gay men are clearly subordinated. Many assume, therefore, that old gay men are doubly stigmatized; however, we argue that the picture is decidedly more complex. In this article, we explore the bodily experiences of aging through analysis of intensive interviews with 10 gay men who are in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. We focus on the interpretations and strategies these gay men use to make sense of their aging bodies. We identify several themes relating to how these men think about their own bodies, the bodies of other gay men, and their place within gay communities. Their aging corporeal experiences allow us to examine ageist notions about aging and being old and to explore how this thinking, which valorizes youthfulness, shapes their aging experiences.

Shauna Singh Baldwin's English Lessons and Other Stories (1999) focuses on the previously neglected Sikh male as the subject of its narratives. The construction of Sikh masculinity is mapped onto the wider historical contexts of immigration to North America, and globalization and consumerism in India. In Sikhism, the Khalsa male, because of his turban, is the marked body signaling difference. But in the diaspora, religious markers such as the turban shape the performance of a specific kind of gendered identity and also define the manner in which integration into a religious, cultural, and ethnic identity proceeds. The family, specifically the hetero-normative family, is at the heart of the performance, the pedagogy, and the continuity of specific notions of a religio-cultural masculinity, which speaks sometimes in concert with and sometimes against the feminist grain. Religious identifications such as the turban that bear the moral burden of older value systems and notions of masculinity and femininity collide with changing survival systems, and women and men may have to negotiate different moral compasses.