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Male Peer Support Theory (MPST) is one of the few principal theories about masculinity and men’s violence against women. The theory foregrounds the role of social networks in encouraging violence. This article offers a critical discussion of MPST, particularly the assumption that social networks primarily support violence. Drawing on a qualitative study of young men perpetrators in Sweden, we suggest that the concept of response is better suited than support in capturing the diversity of social network responses to violence. In our data, there were few stories about unmitigated pro-abuse support. Instead, we found responses that unequivocally condemned violence, as well as ambiguous and transformative responses. We suggest that such responses be understood in relation to changing attitudes concerning violence.

One of the most important questions for feminist research on men and masculinity concerns how men can change and become more affected by feminism and less engaged in sexism. Here, men who identify as feminist, pro-feminist or anti-sexist have been considered to be of particular interest. This article contributes to the emerging research on men’s engagement with feminism by analysing contemporary writing about gender relations, inequality and masculinity, more specifically books about men published in Sweden, 2004-2015. Focusing on lived-experience descriptions, the analysis shows how a range of emotions are central to the processes where men encounter and are becoming affected by feminism. The emotions identified include happy ones such as relief, but a more prominent place is given to negative emotions such as alienation, shame, frustration, as well as loss and mourning. Drawing on Ahmed’s model of emotions as bound up with encounters with others, the article highlights how of men’s engagement with feminism is embedded within interpersonal relations with others, particularly women partners, men friends, and children.

This chapter discusses different historical and contemporary approaches to men, masculinity and intimate partner violence. We present radical feminism and its analysis of men’s violence as an effect of patriarchal society, as well as a contribution to its upholding. We then discuss socialist feminist contributions to understanding masculinity and violence where the emphasis instead lies on diversity, historical change and situated action. Next, we turn to ‘accounts research’, which deconstructs how men talk about, explain and justify their violence, and to psychosocial criminology, which instead stresses the psychological history of the perpetrator, albeit within the context of structural inequality. We also consider what we call social network approaches, particularly male peer support theory, which foregrounds the role of the relational setting as a mediator between social structure and individual action. Finally, we discuss intersectional perspectives, which foreground the interconnectedness of different forms of social inequality, such as gender, sexuality, race and class. We conclude by suggesting the need for more dialogue between on the one hand research on gender and violence and on the other contemporary developments within interdisciplinary feminist theory.

Since its emergence in the late 1980s, research on men and masculinity has expanded considerably into an established area at the intersection of sociology, gender studies and related disciplines. T ...

Despite the consolidation of “critical studies on men” or “masculinity studies” in recent years, critics have pointed to a kind of feminist theory deficit due to the relative lack of engagement with contemporary developments of feminist theory. By focusing on post-structuralist feminist and feminist phenomenological accounts of subjectivity, this article seeks to contribute to the emerging body of work that brings such theories into critical studies on men. I argue that making use of these perspectives is not only a matter of replacing dominant theories, but rather offers possibilities for creative rereading of earlier work on masculinity, which may not have been sufficiently appreciated from the viewpoint of dominant structural perspectives. My argument proceeds through a reading of John Stoltenberg as a post-structuralist feminist, and a reading of Victor Seidler as a feminist phenomenologist. I suggest that the study of masculinity can benefit from both traditions, and as an example I consider Jonathan Salisbury’s and David Jackson’s work on “boys’ work.” Drawing in particular on Sara Ahmed’s innovative combination of post-structuralism and phenomenology, I suggest an understanding of masculinity as “sticky.”

Hip hop has grown into a worldwide genre in recent decades, often being associated with issues of race and class. However, as research on ‘hip hop feminism’ in the US context demonstrates, the categories of gender and sexuality are no less fundamental. In the growing body of international hip hop research, though, questions about gender have been relatively absent, and relatively little is known about how gender norms are negotiated and challenged in hip hop in Europe. This article seeks to contribute to filling this gap in the literature by exploring how women negotiate the gender norms of hip hop in the case of Sweden. To this end, rap lyrics by 12 female rap artists are analysed through poststructuralist discourse analysis. The analysis focuses on intersectionality, feminism within and beyond hip hop, as well as the possibilities and limitations of female masculinity. It is shown how the masculine norms of the genre are simultaneously resisted and resignified as many female rappers incorporate some elements commonly associated with masculinity but mobilize them in their challenging of masculine norms. In this way, complying with the genre interestingly produces a hard and explicit feminism in which ‘all sexist pigs will be slaughtered”.

Performing heterosexuality is often a central component in the making ofmasculinity. Yet queer theory with its critical focus on heterosexuality has not hadthe same impact on masculinity studies as ...