Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept

“Hegemonic masculinity” is often reduced to strength, violence or a desire to control. Connell and Messerschmidt’s reassessment resists that personality-based reading. The problem is to explain which practices legitimize male dominance, and how different men, women and institutions participate in that order.

The most common is not necessarily the most authoritative

Hegemony does not require most men to embody an ideal, nor direct violence in every encounter. An image achieved by relatively few may still organize authority, household arrangements or stories of success. Other men can benefit from the order while also experiencing subordination shaped by class, race, sexuality and position.

Reviewing criticisms of the concept, the authors warn against turning masculinities into sealed categories or assigning a man a type on the basis of isolated conduct. Practices and relations provide a better unit of analysis: the same person can gain, lose or negotiate power across different settings.

Revising the concept to account for change

The reformulation addresses relations among local, regional and global scales, embodiment, the complexity of gender relations, and contradictions that make transformation possible. A globally circulating ideal is not reproduced identically everywhere. Bodies are neither irrelevant symbols nor biological causes that predetermine dominance.

Women cannot simply serve as the passive background to men’s actions. Their practices, opposition and investments help shape how relationships persist. Recognizing participation does not distribute responsibility equally or erase differences in resources and capacities for violence.

This conceptual paper offers no personality test ready for routine application. Calling any forceful man hegemonic would lose the explanation of how institutions produce legitimacy. Doing Gender helps examine how an order is accomplished in everyday encounters. Jackson Katz’s talk on men and violence offers a comparison with public advocacy: can a call for men’s responsibility retain an institutional analysis rather than reduce violence to the character of a few bad individuals?