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The Childhood, Law & Policy Network (CLPN)

An interview with Utsa Mukherjee about his edited collection, Debating Childhood Masculinities: Rethinking the Interplay of Age, Gender and Social Change

Our member, Dr. Utsa Mukherjee (Brunel University London, UK), talks about his edited collection, Debating Childhood Masculinities: Rethinking the Interplay of Age, Gender and Social Change (Emerald, 2024).

Published:

Q: What is this edited collection about?

This edited collection brings together interdisciplinary scholarship to examine how childhood masculinities are constructed, experienced and regulated in different parts of the world. In doing so, it foregrounds children’s agency and voices which are often missing from the Critical Studies on Men and Masculinities (CSMM) literature.

Adopting a gender-inclusive approach, authors in this edited collection embrace a variety of anti-racist, feminist, neomaterialist and queer frameworks to showcase an international and interdisciplinary body of scholarship that explores the way childhood masculinities in today’s world are being negotiated and lived out in the context of wider social change across gender relations and masculine ideals. Grounded in the premise that childhood masculinities are not biologically determined, chapters outline how children’s understanding and enactment of masculinity are culturally conditioned, historically contingent, social-material constructions that are produced at the intersection of generational and gendered relations.

Providing impactful contributions to the fields of childhood and masculinity studies, this edited collection leads the academic conversation on masculinities into new and productive directions. The fresh insights offered here will be useful to childhood practitioners, educators and policy makers who are committed to gender equity and democratisation.

Q: What made you initiate this volume?

The dearth of critical, international scholarship focused on childhood masculinities led to the development of this edited volume. As debates on gender and power continue to develop around us, it is more important than ever before to centre children’s voices and experiences and think critically about the way children understand and enact masculinities and how these processes are regulated and governed.

In recent years, there has been significant growth of scholarly interest in the changing nature of masculinity with many researchers drawings attention to the coexistence of a multiplicity of masculinities and the relation between them. Notable contributors to these debates have also demonstrated the way various notions of masculinities are interlocked with class, race, sexuality and other markers of social difference. This body of scholarship, which is often grouped under the rubric of Critical Studies on Men and Masculinities (CSMM), grapples with changing ideals of masculinity as well as seeks to understand the ‘regressive change[s]’ unfolding us around, be it the emboldening of ‘political masculinism’, backlash against progressive gender politics and warfare (Mellstrom, 2023). Children and young people today are growing up in this milieu, and indeed, a number of misogynist ‘manfluencers’ promoting antifeminist and male supremacist content online are targeting their messages specifically towards teenage boys (Wescott et al., 2023). Yet, CSMM has rarely had serious critical engagement with the way masculinities are learned, negotiated and lived out by younger children in the context of wider social change in gender relations and masculine ideals. The extant literature on childhood masculinities is often siloed in either childhood studies, gender studies or masculinity studies, with little dialogue between these fields. This is where this new volume intervenes.

An excerpt from the introductory chapter:

I recognise this [volume] as an opportunity for CSMM scholars globally to think more critically about childhood masculinities that take children’s agency and voices into account. At the same time, childhood studies must reckon with the significant shifts currently underway in the sociological scholarship on men and masculinities. Against this backdrop, this edited volume embraces a critical stance informed by anti-racist, feminist and queer approaches among others to showcase an international and interdisciplinary body of scholarship that explore the way childhood masculinities in today’s world are being negotiated, represented and lived out at the intersection of generational and gendered politics and social change.

The chapters share the premise that childhood masculinities are not biologically determined but are culturally conditioned, historically contingent social-material constructions that are produced at the intersection of generational and gendered relations in a given society at any time. In other words, the volume advances a situational and processual understanding that posits that ‘masculinity is something that not only some specific bodies (those assigned male at birth) have or own, but as a position that is more situational and which can be deployed and activated by a variety of bodies’ (Gottzén & Straube, 2016, p. 221). This approach takes bodies seriously and highlights the way practices of masculinity ‘constantly refers to bodies and what bodies do’ without reducing the question of masculinity to the biological constitution of the body (Connell, 2005, p. 71). Just as masculinity studies are not the same as study of men, research on childhood masculinities does not simply pertain to the study of boys and boyhood. Of course, research with boys can offer a point of entry for studying childhood masculinities as many authors in this volume show, but there are other equally important entrées into this question that do not centre the cis-male body as Martino and colleagues’ chapter in this volume reminds us. In this way, this volume differs in its objectives from efforts to make ‘the invisible boy visible’ within scholarship by capturing ‘boys’ gender making’ (Hällgren et al., 2015, p. 7), although that is a relevant and important intellectual project in itself.

Instead, the chapters in this book foreground childhood masculinities by unpacking the interplay of age, gender and social change. In many ways, contributing authors build ‘on the idea of masculinities as something achieved...[and] contextualized as specific plural identities which intersect with class, ethnicity and sexuality’ (Pattman et al., 1998, p. 126, emphasis authors’). Further, the authors champion a gender-inclusive approach to masculinity including chapters that look into trans and non-binary masculinities.

My hope in putting this volume together was to create a space for greater critical scholarly work on childhood masculinities that offer new directions for both childhood studies and CSMM. As editor, I did not provide a top-down framework for authors to shoehorn their work into, but I encouraged them to think from the lives of children without centring adults’ perspectives and to firmly anchor their analysis in historical and geographical contexts of their work. The result is a set of eight exceptionally rich chapters that make important empirical and conceptual contributions to CSMM and childhood studies. The golden thread running through the chapters in this volume is their focus on power and gender inequalities in the analysis of childhood masculinities. Almost every author in this volume has to varying degrees built on and/or critiqued Connell’s (2000) pioneering work on masculinities. Although Connell’s (2000) writings focused primarily on youth and men in the Australian context, they have much to say about childhood masculinities, especially with reference to power that researchers continue to engage with.

Global gender politics and ‘democratic projects of change in masculinity’ (Connell, 2016, p. 313) require us to step outside dominant global north centric frameworks, challenge existing geographical inequalities in knowledge production (especially in CSMM and childhood studies) and give due importance to research from the Global South that can offer new avenues for developments in the field. Building on this insight, the chapters in the volume are drawn from an international pool of scholars committed to equity and social justice. The contributing authors are based across four continents and eight countries, offering contextually grounded analysis of childhoods and masculinities. Their work adds greatly to our current knowledge on the topic and in turn has the potential to inform progressive actions and policy changes on the ground. As Connell (2016, p. 315) puts it, ‘accurate knowledge and theoretical insight are priceless assets for action, [especially] when action is concerned with contesting power and achieving social justice’.

 

(the introduction chapter is free to download from the publisher’s website).

 

 

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