Connell, R. W. Masculinities. Berkeley and LA: UofCP, 2005.

“Role theory exaggerates the degree to which people’s social behavior is prescribed. But at the same time, by assuming that the prescriptions are reciprocal, it underplays social inequality and power. For all these reasons ‘role’ has proved unworkable as a general framework for social analysis” (Connell 26).

“Like sex role research, this is concerned with public conventions about masculinity. But rather than treat these as preexisting norms which are passively internalized and enacted, the new research explores the making and remaking of conventions in social practice itself” (Connell 35).

“To recognize diversity in masculinities is not enough. We must also recognize the relations between the different kinds of masculinity: relations of alliance, dominance and subordination. These relationships are constructed through practices that exclude and include, that intimidate, exploit, and so on. There is a gender politics within masculinity. School studies show patterns of hegemony vividly” (Connell 37).

“The term ‘patriarchy’ came into widespread use around 1970 to describe this system of gender domination” (Connell 41).

“To put the point in another and perhaps clearer way, it is gender relations that constitute a coherent object of knowledge for science. Knowledge of masculinity arises within the project of knowing gender relations” (Connell 44).

“The institutional organization of sport embeds definite social relations: competition and hierarchy among men, exclusion or domination of women” (Connell 54).

“The constitution of masculinity through bodily performance means that gender is vulnerable when the performance cannot be sustained—for instance, as a result of physical disability” (Connell 54).

“Another is to reformulate the definition of masculinity, bringing it closer to what is now possible, though still pursuing masculine themes such as independence and control. The third is to reject hegemonic masculinity as a package—criticizing the physical stereotypes, and moving towards a counter-sexist politics, a project of the kind explored in Chapter 5 below” (Connell 55).

“That is to say, an unmasculine person would behave differently: being peaceable rather than violent, conciliatory rather than dominating, hardly able to kick a football, uninterested in sexual conquest, and so forth” (Connell 67).

“This conception presupposes a belief in individual difference and personal agency. In that sense it is built on the conception of growth of colonial empires and capitalist economic relations . . . But the concept is also inherently relational. ‘Masculinity’ does not exist except in contrast with ‘femininity’. A culture which does not treat women and men as bearers of polarized character types, at least in principle, does not have a concept of masculinity in the sense of modern European/American culture” (Connell 68).

“The terms ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ point beyond categorical sex difference to the ways men differ among themselves, and women differ among themselves, in matters of gender” (Connell 69).

“Normative definitions recognize these differences and offer a standard: masculinity is what men ought to be” (Connell 70).

“In the semiotic opposition of masculinity and femininity, masculinity is the unmarked term, the place of symbolic authority. The phallus is master-signifier, and femininity is symbolically defined by lack” (Connell 70).

“Rather than attempted to define masculinity as an object (a natural character type, a behavioural average, a norm), we need to focus on the processes and relationships thorough which men and women conduct gendered lives. ‘Masculinity’, to the extent the term can be briefly defined at all, is simultaneously a place in gender relations, the practices thorough which men and women engage that place in gender; and the effects of these practices in bodily experiences, personality and culture” (Connell 71).

“Chapter 1 noted how social science had come to recognize a third site of gender configuration, institutions such as the state, the workplace and the school. Many find it difficult to accept that institutions are substantively, not just metaphorically, gendered. This is nevertheless, a key point. The state, for instance, is a masculine institution” (Connell 73).

“We need at least a three-fold model of the structure of gender, distinguishing relations of (a) power, (b) production and (c) cathexis (emotional attachment)” (Connell 74).

“It is now common to say that gender ‘intersects’—better interacts—with race and class. We might add that it constantly interacts with nationality or position in the world order” (Connell 75).

“Recognizing multiple masculinities, especially in an individualist culture such as the United States, risk taking them for alternative lifestyles, a matter of consumer choice” (76).

“The number of men rigorously practicing the hegemonic pattern in its entirety may be quite small. Yet the majority of men gain from its hegemony, since they benefit from the patriarchal dividend, the advantage men in general gain from the overall subordination of women” (Connell 79).

“Masculinities constructed in ways that realize the patriarchal dividend, without the tensions or risks of being the frontline troops of patriarchy, are complicit in this sense” (Connell 79).

“Marriage, fatherhood and community life often involve extensive compromises with women rather than naked domination or an uncontested display of authority. A great many men who draw the patriarchal dividend also respect their wives and mothers, are never violent towards women, do their accustomed share of the housework, bring home the family wage, and can easily convince themselves that feminists must be bra-burning extremists” (Connell 80).

“These two types of relationship—hegemony, domination/subordination and complicity on the one hand, marginalization/authorization on the other—provide a framework in which we can analyze specific masculinities” (Connell 81).

“Men gain a dividend from patriarchy in terms of honour; prestige and the right to command. They also gain a material dividend” (Connell 82).

“It follows that the politics of masculinity cannot concern only questions of personal life and identity. It must also concern question so social justice” (Connell 83).

“Terror is used as a means of drawing boundaries and making exclusions” (Connell 83).

“Violence is a part of a system of dominance, but is at the same time a measure of its imperfection. A thoroughly legitimate hierarchy would have less need to intimidate” (Connell 84).

“Patriarchal control of wealth is sustained by inheritance mechanisms” (Connell 85).

“We are all engaged in constructing a world of gender relations. How it is made, what strategies different groups pursue, and with what effects, are political questions” (Connell 86).

“A familiar theme in patriarchal ideology is that men are rational while women are emotional . . . Hegemonic masculinity establishes its hegemony partly by its claim to embody the power of reason, and thus represent the interests of the whole society” (Connell 164).

“Working-class women contested their economic dependence on men as the factory system evolved” (Connell 191).

“In gender terms, fascism was a naked reassertion of male supremacy in societies that had been moving towards equality for women. To accomplish this, fascism promoted now images of hegemonic masculinity, glorifying irrationality (the ‘triumph of the will, thinking with ‘the blood’) and the unrestrained violence of the frontline soldier” (193).

“Women’s attempts to gain a share of power have revealed a defence in depth operated by the men behind the barricades: from legal exclusion, through formal recruitment rules that require experience, qualifications or ‘merit’ that are harder for women to gain, to a rich variety of informal biases and assumptions that work in favour of men” (Connell 204-205).

“The mass media persistently satirize ‘the New Sensitive Man,’ let alone active feminist men. From the point of view of hegemonic masculinity the whole thing is a ludicrous exercise in men trying to turn themselves into women” (Connell 222).

“Masculinity is shaped in relation to an overall structure of power (the subordination of women to men), and in relation to a general symbolism of difference (the opposition of femininity and masculinity” (Connell 223).

“But in that case the current project of personal change is radically incomplete, because it ignores the masculinity in women’s personalities (though often recognizes the femininity in men’s); the process cannot be confined to therapy of politics among men” (Connell 230).

“This integration, however, is not on equal terms. It occurs in a context of patriarchal institutions where the ‘male is norm’, or the masculine is authoritative” (Connell 231).

“The defence of injustice in gender relations constantly appeals to difference, to a masculine/feminine opposition defining one place for female bodies and other place for male. But this is never ‘difference’ in a purely logical sense” (Connell 231).

“The social organization of these practices in a patriarchal gender order constitutes difference as dominance, as unavoidably hierarchical” (Connell 231).

“Difference/dominance means not logical separation but intimate supremacy. It involves immediate social relations as well as broad cultural themes” (Connell 232).

“Though schools have been a rich site for studying the reproduction of masculinities (from Learning to Labour to Gender Play), and though most of the people doing research on masculinity work in the education industry (as academics or students), there is surprisingly little discussion of the role of education in the transformation of masculinity” (Connell 238).

“I would argue that these are questions of major importance, and that education is a key site of alliance politics” (Connell 239).

“Any curriculum must address the diversity of masculinities, and the intersections of gender with race, class and nationality, if it is not to fall into a sterile choice between celebration and negation of masculinity in general” (Connell 239).

“Men’s interest in patriarchy is condensed in hegemonic masculinity and is defended by the cultural machinery that exalts hegemonic masculinity” (Connell 241).

“The disadvantages listed above are, broadly speaking the conditions of the advantages” (Connell 248).

“Gender complexities continue in the new conservatism. George W. Bush was the first US president to place a woman in the very heart of the state power structure, as National Security Advisor to the president. Condoleezza Rice has, on press accounts, been of the Bush administration’s hawks, urging violent intervention in the Middle East and an expansion of US military forces. Yet the US state, and the right wing of the Republican Party in the country, remain overwhelmingly the province of men—and men of a particular character, power-oriented, ruthless and brutal, restrained by little more than calculations of likely opposition” (Connell 251).

“Major institutions including two of the three main cultural institutions of contemporary Western society, the church and the mass media (education is a different story), continue to be not only male-dominated but active producers of a male-centered gender culture” (Connell 252).

“Regarded thirty years ago as intellectually obsolete, a celebration of the entrepreneurial individual is currently the centerpiece of Western political culture” (Connell 254).

“But if neo-liberalism is post-patriarchal, that is not to say it favours social justice in relation to gender. Neo-liberal politics has no interest in justice at all” (Connell 255).

“Indirectly, therefore, neo-liberalism has acted in ways that degrade the position of the majority of women, at the same time as it celebrates the entry of a minority of women into the officially de-gendered heaven of professional success” (Connell 255).

“Neo-liberalism similarly degrades the economic and social position of some men, but not all. Many men are relatively advantaged by the shift of social resources from the state to the market, and by de-regulation of markets. And there is a particular group who are the intended beneficiaries of the whole neo-liberal policy package—entrepreneurs” (Connell 255).

“The ‘individual’ may be formally gender-neutral, but one cannot say the same about the ‘entrepreneur’. The desired attributes of managers and capitalists as entrepreneur’. The desired attributes of managers and capitalists as entrepreneur (thrusting competitiveness, ruthlessness, focus on the bottom line, etc” (Connell 255).

“Sport has become a vital public metaphor of capitalism and market society” (Connell 256).

“It works because the champion sportsman and the successful entrepreneur are both men bearing related kinds of masculinity” (Connell 256).

“Women are becoming more marginal, more transient, in the lives of managers, unless they are there on the same terms of the men, i.e. as entrepreneurial individuals. In which case they have to ‘manage like a man’, as Wajcman (1999) aptly puts it” (Connell 257).