Explaining Men's Entry into Female‐Concentrated Occupations: Issues of Masculinity and Social Class

This article seeks to add to an understanding of why some men enter female‐concentrated occupations (and why the majority do not). Drawing on the results of in‐depth interviews with 27 men in a range of occupations, I illustrate and interpret the complex and often contradictory ways in which men approach the notion of working in female‐concentrated occupations and examine the impact that this has on their occupational outcomes. The data suggest that different attitudes to female‐concentrated work cannot in themselves explain men's presence there. Consequently I explore, with particular reference to social class, the context in which attitudes around gender, work and occupational destinations, are framed. I conclude that men's entry to female‐concentrated occupations may best be approached, not as an issue of ‘masculinity’ but as one of social mobility operating within a gendered labour market.     

Women Constructing Masculinity in Voluntary Firefighting

Within gender studies, research and theorizing have used archetypal ‘masculine’ occupations to explore how masculinity is accomplished and practised in social interaction. In contrast, little work has explored how masculinity is constructed in the voluntary sector. In this paper, we address this gap by exploring how masculinity is constructed and experienced by women volunteers who are active firefighters in rural and regional Victoria. Firefighting is widely recognized as a non‐traditional occupation for women and they are underrepresented as volunteers as well as paid employees. We explore masculinity from the perspective of women volunteers because this can enhance our understanding of masculinity as a relational achievement as well as help to identify practices that they experience as problematic. Our research shows how voluntary work can afford a distinct range of resources for the ‘doing’ of gender and how this reflects the specific organizational and geographical contexts in which such volunteering occurs.     

Negotiating the dichotomy of Boffin and Triad: British-Chinese pupils' constructions of 'laddism'

Little research has examined constructions of gender among young British‐Chinese. This paper seeks to further understanding in this area, particularly in relation to notions of ‘laddism’ currently deployed in educational policy discourse around gender and achievement. As a group British‐Chinese boys tend to very high achievement in the British Education system. The notion of ‘laddish behaviour’ as an explanation for boys’ apparent underachievement in comparison to girls at GCSE level was discussed with British‐Chinese pupils. An overwhelming majority of British‐Chinese pupils supported this explanation, and a majority of these pupils applied notions of ‘laddish behaviour’ to British‐Chinese boys, to some extent contesting stereotypes of the Chinese as uniformly ‘good pupils’. However, the discourses of ‘the good Chinese pupil’ and ‘Chinese value of education’ were frequently drawn on by pupil respondents, with the result that the pupils often presented British‐Chinese manifestations of ‘laddism’ as mild versions in comparison with pernicious ‘others’. The paper discusses different presentations of laddism among some of the male respondents. It concludes by analysing the impact of ‘raced’ and gendered discourses on British‐Chinese constructions of masculinity. British‐Chinese boys may be able to adopt versions of masculinity which do not impede their learning, but this tended to result in their masculinity being problematised in teacher discourse.     

Not only men but also migrants in non-traditional occupations

Domestic labour is considered a typical female job, and due to the arrival of large migration flows to Italy it has experienced a massive ethnicized connotation, peculiar of this sector. This paper focuses on how a double and subaltern condition of belonging to a ‘minority group’ affects gender perceptions of male migrant domestic workers and how they construct their masculinity.

This research is based on a comparison between 54 interviews with male and female migrant domestic workers, drawing on an intersectional approach based on gender and nationality. It shows how moving across borders, living in a host society, and working in a non-traditional job can reshape male immigrants' gender division perceptions, often in contradictory and unexpected ways. It also emerges how the ‘racial glass escalator’ allows reaffirmation of characteristics tied to the privileges of masculinity and furnishes an important and useful framework in which to analyse the experience of men in ‘female’ occupations.     

Redoing Gender: How Women in the Funeral Industry Use Essentialism for Equality

Although some research considers women's participation in traditionally male‐dominated jobs as an ‘undoing’ of the gender system, other scholars argue that women's participation in non‐traditional roles can actually maintain hegemonic masculinity. Because women have recently entered the funeral industry in unprecedented numbers, the profession offers a unique context to study how women negotiate a sense of belonging in male‐dominated fields. I draw on 22 interviews with women in the funeral industry to reveal how gender is done and undone in an occupational context. In what Hughey ( 2010 . Social Problems, 57, 653–679) refers to as a ‘paradox of participation’, I argue that women in the funeral industry redefine the image of the ideal funeral director by using gender essentialist logic, which originally acted as a barrier to their entry to the field, to justify their participation. By showing how gender essentialism and egalitarianism can constitute reinforcing logics instead of an opposing binary, this research contributes to the literature concerning women in non‐traditional roles.     

Learning to be Palestinian in Athens: constructing national identities in diaspora

In this article I focus on constructions of diasporic national identities and the nation as active and strategic processes using the case study of Palestinians in Athens. I seek, thereby, to contribute to debates on national identity, the nation and long‐distance nationalism, particularly in relation to those in diaspora with a collective cause to advocate. I explore how first‐ and second‐generation Palestinians in Athens construct and narrate Palestinian national identities, the homeland and political unity. I argue that the need to ‘choose’ to be Palestinian, often for political reasons, highlights that the nation is not a ‘given’ entity. This can be a difficult process for those in diaspora to deal with, as there may be tensions between constructions of political unity and attachment to the homeland and feelings of ambivalence and in‐between‐ness that may be seen as politically counterproductive. However, I stress that ‘messy’ and contradictory narratives and spatialities of diasporic national identities that come about as a result of cross‐border or transnational (dis)connections do not necessarily lead to apathy and, therefore, can be important.     

Reprogramming Femininity? The Construction of Gender Identities in the Israeli Hi‐tech Industry between Global and Local Gender Orders

Based on the study of gender identities in the Israeli hi‐tech sector, this article sets out to explore the doing of gender in a context comprised of two cultural repertoires characterized by divergent and contradictory fundamental assumptions: the new masculine transnational economy and pro‐natalist Israeli society. The article demonstrates how, by manoeuvering and moving between these global and local cultural repertoires, privileged Israeli hi‐tech women enact and construct a ‘new femininity’ that simultaneously challenges both the discourse of the ‘ideal hi‐tech worker’ and that of traditional Israeli femininity. This new femininity, I argue, is grounded in a local translation of the ‘family friendly organization’ discourse.     

‘Show us your frilly,pink underbelly’: Men administrative assistants doing masculinities and femininity

Research on men tokens (or numerical minorities) at work has focused on the processes by which men try to claim hegemonic masculine identities for themselves and how workplace interactants support or reject these attempts. In contrast to masculinity studies, token theory has paid less attention to non‐hegemonic masculinities. Using interviews with men administrative assistants, I develop a more comprehensive understanding of men tokens' gender performances and their significance for gender inequality. I present a four‐part typology: hegemonic masculinity, alternative masculinity, critical masculinity and male femininity. The categories are differentiated along two axes: support for hegemonic masculinity and support for hierarchical, binary gender.     

Studs and protest-hypermasculinity: the tomboyism within black lesbian female masculinity

In this article, I use the ethnographic work I conducted in the summer of 2009 with Black lesbian women from South Carolina to show how Black female masculinity has been influenced by historically based constructions of Black gender. I will argue that these studs strategically construct and perform their masculinity in ways that shield them from sexism, racism, and homophobia both in and out of their Black community. By adopting the particular type of masculinity common among their Black male peers, these studs can gain access to some levels of male privilege and power which, in turn, can act as useful defense mechanisms against multiple types of discrimination and oppression.     

Girls’ Jobs for the Boys? Men,Masculinity and Non‐Traditional Occupations

Occupational segregation by sex remains the most pervasive aspect of the labour market. In the past, most research on this topic has concentrated on explanations of women’s segregation into low paid and low status occupations, or investigations of women who have crossed gender boundaries into men’s jobs, and the potential impact on them and the occupations. In contrast, this article reports on a small‐scale, qualitative study of ten men who have crossed into what are generally defined as ‘women’s jobs’. In doing so, one of the impacts on them has been that they have experienced challenges to their masculine identity from various sources and in a variety of ways. The men’s reactions to these challenges, and their strategies for developing and accommodating their masculinity in light of these challenges, are illuminating. They either attempted to maintain a traditional masculinity by distancing themselves from female colleagues, and/or partially (re)constructed a different masculinity by identifying with their non‐traditional occupations. This they did as often as they deemed necessary as a response to different forms of challenge to their gender identities from both men and women. Finally, the article argues that these responses work to maintain the men as the dominant gender, even in these traditionally defined ‘women’s jobs’.     

On reflection: is reflexivity necessarily beneficial in intercultural education? 1

This article explores how the concept of reflexivity is used in intercultural education. Reflexivity is often presented as a key learning goal in acquiring intercultural competence (ICC). Yet, reflexivity can be defined in different ways, and take different forms across time and space, depending on the concepts of selfhood that prevail and how notions of difference are constructed. First, I discuss how the dominant usages of reflexivity in intercultural education reflect and reproduce a Cartesian view of the self that shapes how ICC is conceptualized and taught. I discuss three assumptions that this view produces: that the self is accessible and transcendable, that reflexivity is universal across space and time, and that the self can act as its own remedial change agent or ‘inner consultant.’ I argue that because reflexivity is understood in many different ways, attention to definition is crucial, both in designing learning objectives in intercultural education and in devising ways to attain them. Greater attention is also needed in intercultural education to the ways in which selfhood, and hence also reflexivity and constructions of difference, differ across space and time.     

Expectant Mothers and Absent Fathers: Paid Maternity Leave in Australia

In this article we explore how the reluctance to introduce a national paid maternity leave scheme in Australia reflects gendered norms and constructions of parenthood and work. We report on the findings of a study of selected media texts that show how the public discourse that surrounded proposals to introduce such a scheme exhibited deep‐seated resistance to women who combine motherhood with continued attachment to the paid workforce. Using a multi‐modal approach to discourse analysis, we show how gender and maternity are constructed using cultural and historical discursive resources that reinforce a conservative national identity. By focusing on what is both absent and present in the media texts we show how ‘actual fathers’ are rendered invisible and the space filled by the government as ‘symbolic fathers’ impregnating a production line of maternal citizens.     

Non‐understanding as a heuristic to hypothesizing cultural models: A meta‐oriented sociolinguistic strategy1

This article is concerned with the development of an analytic strategy to construct U.S. cultural models of war and terrorism, which are ‘mediatized’ or significantly shaped by the media. Central to that strategy are repair cues to non‐understanding as heuristics in intercultural encounters. These are applied to an inherently mediatized discursive ‘reality’ of war and terrorism. Theoretically, I synthesize sociolinguistic and anthropological perspectives into a ‘meta‐oriented sociolinguistics’, which analytically focuses on the meta‐dimension of discourse. The strategy is applied to a text on war and terrorism from the New York Times, to demonstrate its utility. Furthermore, I provide implications for enhancing validity in the ethnography of mediatized discourse. Specific to the findings of this article, I suggest that corpus studies of media discourse should be conducted on the metadiscursive keywords kamikaze, surprise attacks, Pearl Harbor, and 9/11 in particular temporal frames.     

‘Heroes and Matriarchs’: Working‐Class Femininities,Violence and Door Supervision Work

Door supervision work is traditionally seen as a working‐class, male‐dominated trade. In addition, it is deemed to be one that is physically risky, where violence is seen as a ‘tool of the trade’ and where ‘bodily capital’ and ‘fighting ability’ are paramount to the competent performance of the job. This paper is a timely analysis on the manner in which the increasing numbers of women who work in door supervision negotiate their occupational identity and construct their work practices. The analysis focused on the way in which discursive constructions of both violence and workplace identities are variably taken up, reworked and resisted through the intersection of gender and class. This resulted in the identification of two main discourses; ‘playing the hero’ and the ‘hard matriarch’. These findings allow us to theorize that multiple, gendered and classed occupational identities exist beyond normative expectations and can be seen to be both emancipatory for working women, while simultaneously bolstering exploitation, workplace harassment and violent practices.     

Masculinities and fathering

There is a developing body of research regarding fathering, in the UK, but the experiences of African-Caribbean and white working-class fathers, and how their experiences are mediated by gender and ethnicity have been neglected. The purpose of this paper is to address this gap in research by reporting on the similarities and differences within the stories of African-Caribbean and white working-class men about fathering, and to examine the personal and structural dimensions to these experiences using Connell's theoretical framework for understanding masculinities (1995, 2005). Qualitative, semi-structured individual interviews were undertaken with seven white and six African-Caribbean fathers. Findings indicate that African-Caribbean fathers, specifically, their associated practices, regarding children's ‘behaviour’ and learning, with experiences of racism that they anticipated their children may encounter in the future. Both groups of men's stories demonstrated limited reflexivity about the unequal distribution of domestic labour within the home. The study also found that fathers’ experiences were associated with contradictory and differing forms of masculinity. The fathers’ stories provide evidence of changing forms of masculinity, for example, in ways in which fathers conceptualised fathering as enjoyable involvement with children, and the ways fathers negotiated and resisted the constraints of paid work in order to be involved with children. Findings also reinforce the importance of health and social care services reorienting their priorities to engage with fathers, and opportunities for future research, regarding the experiences of African-Caribbean fathers in particular, are also identified.     

Knowing cows: Transformative mobilizations of human and non‐human bodies in an emotionography of the slaughterhouse

This ‘emotionography’ of the slaughterhouse elucidates how the identities of both human and non‐human individuals are constructed by line and lairage workers. Hegemonic masculine ideals that underpin slaughterhouse work mean that the emotions of workers as well as the emotional experience of cattle are either denied, diminished or repressed. Based on fieldwork in an Irish slaughterhouse, I articulate how the industrial slaughter of animals entangles human and non‐human life in metamorphic processes that seek to diminish the emotionality of individuals, maintaining the boundary between human/non‐human animals. These transformations simultaneously pacify the emotional toll of killing non‐human individuals and reinforce perceptions of cows as sellable, killable and edible in the commodification of bovine bodies. Amidst the relative absence of emotions in slaughterhouse ethnographies, this article reveals how emotions emerge, erupt and confound the act of slaughtering cattle for slaughterhouse workers unsettling categorizations of masculinity and ‘animals as food’.     

Epistemic authority and the gender lens

Researching ‘hidden’ forms of social inequality such as gender often poses particular challenges. Not least of these is how to uncover such dimensions of social life whilst preserving the perspectives of research participants, who may not consider such matters relevant to their lives, particularly if other forms of identity or oppression are more prominent for them. Here, I reflect on these issues in the context of researching user involvement in mental health services from a feminist perspective. I show how ‘uncovering’ gender and other forms of social inequality in the field was aided through adopting a wide analytical lens focusing on power, along with reflexivity and openness in discussing my own political analysis and commitments in relation to the study area with the researched. I also describe how I attempted to resolve the epistemological‐ethical issues involved through conceptualising these in terms of ‘situatedness’ and gender salience and adopting a feminist standpoint which emphasised what researchers can, and indeed should, bring to the research enterprise. Related issues of power and empowerment in the research process are discussed.     

Men Discussing Women and Women Discussing Men: Reflexivity,Transformation and Gendered Practice in the Context of Nursing Care

This article explores gender reflexivity through the accounts of men discussing women and of women discussing men as professional nurses. Drawing on data from an Australian‐based study, and with an orientation to gender as practice, it investigates the skills and aptitudes that each is seen to bring to the job, how men and women view the other's performance as caregivers and the experiences and challenges of working with the other group. Previous work has suggested there is a link between reflexivity and transformation as individuals self‐consciously shape identities and as they reflect critically on their social conditions. The results from this study question the nature and extent of these transformative powers and suggest different levels of reflexivity based on the extent to which individuals challenge gender norms. These levels are linked to experiences of dissonance as men and women work with each other in a ‘feminized’ context of nursing care.     

The ‘new industrial man’ as unhero: Doing postfeminist masculinities in an Italian pharmacological research centre

Recent work has documented the need to engage with how men construct masculinities within postfeminist discourses in the workplace. Postfeminism has sparked debates concerning the changing ideals of masculinities, highlighting the tensions between traditional forms of patriarchy and ‘new’ ways of being a man (e.g., emotional, a ‘new father’, in crisis). Men have been depicted as being in search of a new identity, opposed to the ever‐growing confidence and empowerment of women. In mobilizing postfeminism as a discourse, this article illustrates how men working in an Italian pharmacological research centre (managed by men but dominated by women) assume subject positions that contradictorily fluctuate between tradition and fluid modernity, to reveal a masculinity which we identify with the ‘new industrial man’. The postfeminist masculinities exposed in the analysis mesh pro‐ and anti‐feminist ideas by appealing to un/heroic and romanticized subjectivities. The analysis also shows how un/heroic masculinities and men's appeal to biological differences to reinforce social ones and devalue the feminine obfuscate organizational gender inequalities. The article advances masculinity theory by offering a nuanced analysis of how masculinities and men are affected by paradoxical contemporary pressures for more egalitarian gender relations and a renewed emphasis on patriarchal traditions, which continue to support the gendering of the workplace.