“Changing the World One Man at a Time”: Transforming Cultural Conceptions of Masculinity and the American Dream".

The mythopoetic men's movement is a popular and controversial force on the American cultural landscape today. While much has been written about this phenomenon, little sustained participant-observer research has been done to explore its complexities and nuances. Based on over six years of ethnographic research, the paper is an in-depth study of the ideological dynamics of the mythopoetic men's movement. Developed is a theoretical perspective drawing on new advances in cultural sociology, creating a synthesis between these and the theoretical achievements of recent work in the field of masculinity studies. The paper then uses this semiotic cultural approach to examine the dynamics of power, hegemony, exclusion, identity, belief, motivation, ideological contestation and social change within the realm of the mythopoetic men's movement. Uncovered is a discourse of liberational masculinity, mobilized by group members to understand and critique what they identify as hegemonic masculinity, a force they see as fundamentally damaging themselves and those around them. Struggling to understand and evaluate the events in their world, these men explore, share, argue and contest the symbolic meaning of their life experiences. Through complex processes of ideological contestation, the men battle over the moral and political soul of masculinity and their identities, creating a discourse that is feminist in central ways but confused and contradictory about its ultimate position. They are developing an emergent world view to understand and address what they see as the oppressive, unjust, emotionally and spiritually dysfunctional social world of contemporary America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]