If you go to the Google Scholar database and look up ‘masculinities’, you will find about 180,000 entries. It is not a gigantic field in comparison with a topic like ‘climate change’, but it is a significant area of knowledge with a rich research base.

This became recognized as a field of research in the English-speaking world in the 1980s, though its roots are much earlier.^[2] Debates about gender, including fears about masculinity, bubbled up in Europe and in the colonized world in the 19th and early 20th centuries, especially as women’s movements took shape. The Boy Scout movement was one product of these anxieties. Arguably fascism was another.

Gender and sexuality were strongly emphasised in psychoanalysis, whose influence grew in the first half of the 20th century. By the mid-century, questions about men’s social position and the state of masculinity were being raised in many forums. There was angst in the United States about the weakening of boys’ moral fibre caused by (depending on who was speaking) over-protective mothers, comic books, homosexuality, or communism. At this time too the poet and cultural theorist Octavio Paz problematized ‘machismo’. In a famous essay on Mexican society and culture, The Labyrinth of Solitude, Paz explored the stark gender divide in urban culture and the rigidity of the accepted form of masculinity. The Labyrinth triggered a long discussion of machismo in Latin American societies.^[3]

These discussions took a new shape in the 1970s. Both Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation gave an impulse towards a social critique of masculinity. As activist movements, they centred their gaze on questions of power and oppression. In the 1980s a research field crystallized, influenced by these questions. Researchers undertook new empirical studies and offered new ideas about gender hierarchy. Crucially, the early research showed that there is not just one pattern of masculinity.

A notable example was Der Mann, the book published in 1985 by two feminist researchers, Sigrid Metz-Göckel and Ursula Müller.^[4] This was based on a comprehensive survey of the situation of men in Germany and their outlook on gender issues, one of the first such studies anywhere. The researchers found much complacency about everyday inequalities in family life, housework and child care.

But they also found a wide spectrum of attitudes on gender equality among men, from male-chauvinism to egalitarianism. The same year a team of Australian researchers, of whom I was one, published our proposal for ‘a new sociology of masculinity’, emphasizing the multiplicity of masculinities and the power differences between groups of men.

A wave of social-science research followed, using surveys, close-focus interviews, content analysis and participant observation. Its main concern was to document the patterns of masculinity found in social life in particular times and places. There were studies of schools, workplaces, communities, media, and more. I call this the ‘ethnographic moment’ in masculinity research.

This research quickly found practical applications. Work on boys’ education was given urgency by a media panic about boys’ supposed failure in schooling. Programs for violence prevention, including domestic violence, drew guidance from the new masculinity research. In men’s health work, the research corrected the simple dichotomous view of gender that had been taken for granted (and regrettably still persists) in biomedical sciences.

Psychological counselling, conflict resolution, criminology and sports were other areas where masculinities research proved useful. In 2003, United Nations agencies sponsored a discussion of policies concerning men, boys and masculinities, which drew on ‘ethnographic moment’ research around the world. This resulted in a wide-ranging document The Role of Men and Boys in Achieving Gender Equality, adopted at the 2004 meeting of the UN Commission on the Status of Women.^[5]

The new research field grew rapidly on a world scale. The most sustained research and documentation program was launched in the mid 1990s, not in the global North, but in Chile under the leadership of Teresa Valdés and José Olavarría.^[6] This program attracted researchers from across Latin America, and has produced a long series of books and reports. In 2018, a conference held in Santiago celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the first continent-wide gathering of Latin American researchers in the field.

We now have bodies of masculinity research not only from the Americas but also from Scandinavia, central Europe, Africa, the Arabic-speaking world, Australia, east Asia, Indonesia, and more. There are dedicated journals, handbooks, textbooks, university courses and conferences – all the familiar machinery of an active research field.