Masculinity in the Twenty-First Century: An Introduction

For the past forty years or more the psychoanalytic literature on gender and sexuality has focused almost exclusively on female psychology and female development. Male psychology has for the most part been neglected, with the exception of a few scattered contributions (e.g., Abelin 1975; Alizade 2003; Breen 1993; Diamond 2004; Fogel, Lane, and Liebert 1986; Fogel 1998; Herzog 2001; Ross 1979; Stoller 1965; Trowell and Etchegoyen 2002).

Journals devoted to the subject of gender have privileged studies of femininity and of gays and lesbians. With this special section on masculinity we hope to begin to remedy this situation by discussing and debating contemporary gender theory and by examining contemporary clinical cases of men in psychoanalysis.

What is masculinity in 2006? If notions of masculinity have changed, just how have they changed in the century since Freud (1905) wrote Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality? Is there one masculinity or many (just as there may be many femininities)? The answers to these questions are so complex that some thinkers consider the very concept of gender to be irrelevant. At one extreme is the Scottish sociologist John MacInnes (1998), who in The End of Masculinity: The Confusion of Sexual Genesis and Sexual Difference in Modern Society concluded that it is impossible to define “masculinity” because “no such thing exists.” He claims that one cannot say merely that masculinity is now in crisis, because “the briefest historical survey will show that masculinity has always been in one crisis or another” (p. 11). Adrienne Harris (2005), less strident, sees gender as “soft assembly” and views it through the lens of chaos theory. For Harris the body expresses historical and social forces that affect its “gait, mien, posture, body type, the outcome of nutritional specificity, diet, aesthetics of dress and body presentation” (p. 121). “It is increasingly difficult,” she