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>> 1 Introduction Masculinities, Multidimensionality, and Law: Why They Need One Another Ann C. McGinley and Frank Rudy Cooper This book engages the emergence of a new school of legal thought: multidimensional masculinities theory. As a critical theory of law, multidimensional masculinities theory assumes that law distributes power by relying upon assumptions about human behavior that reproduce preexisting social relations. Law and culture are co-constitutive (Nice 2000): cultural norms influence law and legal norms simultaneously influence culture. This book seeks to expand critical legal theory by considering a set of cultural and legal norms that have been under-explored: masculinities. Masculinities theory has already established itself in the social sciences (Connell 1995), and posits that “assumptions about the meaning of manhood influence behaviors, ideologies, and institutions” (Cooper 2009, 635). Masculinities scholars analyze “how societal norms shape behavior of individual men and women, how masculinities are imbedded in the structure of institutions , and how individuals and groups perform masculinities within those institutions” (McGinley 2010, 720). Masculinities scholars thus evaluate the ways that concepts of masculinity are used to produce power. 2 > 3 Similarly, the number of law professors of color increased significantly in the late 1980s, and some of these professors began to write about race in new ways, challenging the neutrality of the law (ibid.). These scholars focused on the invisible racial biases contained in the law. They would ultimately create the critical race theory movement. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Kimberl é Crenshaw and Angela Harris, two black female law professors, wrote influential articles criticizing white feminist legal theorists for their failure to recognize that women of color experience law and culture differently than white women do (ibid. 244–45). Simultaneously, postmodernism began to take hold in feminist thought, especially in the social sciences, emphasizing that there is no one truth and questioning the power of law to find one solution to a common problem among women (Vicente 1997). Recently, feminist legal theorists like Martha Fineman do not focus on gender. Rather, they address what they perceive to be all people’s common vulnerability (Fineman 2008). Nonetheless, it is fair to say that feminist theory originally focused on women and that many, if not most, feminist legal theorists continue to do so. As feminist legal theory took hold in the legal academy, masculinities theory was emerging in the social sciences in response to the women’s movement of the 1970s. Masculinities theorists would agree with feminists that men as a group have power over women as a group, but they tend to complicate the situation. Peter F. Murphy explains that by the late 1970s, for the first time, men began to examine the effects of the social construction of the roles of men. In essence, men started using feminist methodology to “turn the feminist lens upon themselves as men” (Murphy 2004, 9). He states, “feminism became more a critical perspective through which men could scrutinize masculinity, and less a call for men to act solely as advocates for women’s causes” (ibid.). Whereas feminist theory focuses on women as the subject, masculinities theorists focus on men. Both theories see much of gender as socially constructed , but feminist theory, in its focus on women, tends to see men in essentialist ways (Dowd 2010). Feminist theory has tended to analyze all men as fundamentally and equally oppressors of women. Thus, while feminist theory does the important work of analyzing the power that men have as a group over women as a group, it does not always consider how men achieve power and retain power, power differentials among men, and how those power differentials harm not only women as a group but also some men. In contrast, masculinities theorists see masculinity as a social construct that encourages men to compete with one another in order to prove their masculinity to each other. Those behaviors, in turn, harm women because as 4 > 5 from gender to race in order to understand the simultaneously gendered and raced issues prevalent in the juvenile justice system. This book engages in such lens-shifting in order to merge masculinities theory with feminist and critical race theories, and in some instances, queer theory, to achieve an understanding of why masculinity in general is such an enduring social value and how masculinities combine with race, sexual orientation, class, and other identities in different contexts. Furthermore, it uses multiple lenses to show both how identity concepts are embedded in the law and how the law furthers gendered, racial, classed...

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