Men Talk: Stories in the Making of Masculinity (review)

In 1996, Jennifer Coates published Women talk: Conversation between women friends (WT), a rich and illuminating discourse-analytic study of women’s friendships and the kinds of conversations that lie at their heart. Not only did WT offer considerable insight on conversational dynamics, but it also offered new ways of thinking about women’s relations to one another. I began reading WT as a professional project and ended up personally engaged by her acute analysis of the nature of women’s friendships and the place of talk in sustaining them. In many ways the book was deeply personal, in part because C herself participated in many of the conversations discussed and in part because she strongly identified with what was going on even when she was not included. I certainly did not always agree with her analyses, but I found them illuminating. The ‘women’ were English-speaking women, mostly from relatively privileged backgrounds in England, and they agreed to record themselves when they got together for companionable periods of natural unscripted talk.

Men talk: Stories in the making of masculinity (MT) is a worthy successor to WT. Not surprisingly, however, its tone and its emphases are rather different. The focus of MT is on narrative, on telling stories. Storytelling, C argues, is central to men’s construction of themselves and of the other men they encounter in their lives. Men’s stories, her corpus suggests, focus on male exploits and achievements and promote camaraderie among men but not emotional intimacy. The stories analyzed in MT offer further support for the idea that ‘hegemonic masculinity’ (Connell 1995) crucially involves distinguishing oneself from and claiming superiority to both women and gay men. Hardly surprising, but C’s analyses are far more detailed, subtle, and nuanced than such a summary can convey: MT is an important contribution to the recent literature on masculinity as performed by men and boys in contemporary Western industrial society.

Ch. 1, ‘We was playing naked football’, sets the stage, noting that, although research involving men’s speech has been going on for some time, it is only recently that scholars have examined men and their speech as gendered. (I use here the short quotes that C has selected to open her chapter titles.) The all-male data that are the main focus of the book are drawn from recordings of thirty-two different conversations of friendship groups, which include 203 stories; twelve separate groups are represented, and they include different ages and class backgrounds. Directly or through intermediaries, C got these groups to consent to recording themselves for her research project. Although occasionally participants indicated awareness of ‘this professor’ who would listen to them, on the whole their speech struck her as not particularly self-conscious. Sometimes, C reports, she felt like a voyeur as she listened to talk that was very different from what she heard in mixed-sex or all-female conversations.

Ch. 2, ‘Good story!’, offers a very nice introduction to conversational narrative as a distinctive genre. C draws from her data to show that at the heart of a story is a sequence of narrative clauses—event reports typically in the past tense but sometimes shifted to the ‘historic present’ to highlight a particular event—ordered to match the order of the events in the episode being narrated. Of course, stories typically also include nonnarrative clauses that provide background or offer evaluation. The second key feature of stories is their claim to ‘tellability’—to having a ‘point’ worthy of the audience’s attention. And, of course, a speaker needs to signal that a story is beginning (‘Did I tell you . . . ?’) in order to get the floor for a protracted turn and that it is ending (‘So, that was . . . ’) in order to return to ‘the now of the conversational present’ (30). Where men’s and women’s stories differ dramatically, says C, is not in such relatively formal features but in what counts as tellable: Men but not...