Masculinity Lessons: Rethinking Men’s and Women’s Studies Edited by James V. Catano and Daniel A. Novak (review)

Masculinity studies is difficult to define. This is in part because the field exists in a transient space where it is carved out and delineated by related fields, and in part because masculinity studies traditionally has been pretty much every field of study. If we are to look explicitly at masculinity, we must do so carefully to avoid re-inscribing hierarchies that celebrate masculinity at the expense of femininity. We must also avoid tearing down the masculine so that it too is devalued. James V. Catano and Daniel A. Novak’s edited collection, Masculinity Lessons: Rethinking Men’s and Women’s Studies, looks at masculinity directly. In doing so, it blurs the parameters of masculinity studies even further. The collection of essays in this work all come from the National Women’s Studies Association Journal, so there is an inherent tension that arises from defining the field of masculinity studies from without; it is a field that owes its very existence to the dialectical work of women’s studies. While culling the articles about masculinity from a journal whose primary focus has been femininity presents conceptual problems, Masculinity Lessons is still an intriguing and needed collection.

In their introduction to the book, Catano and Novak address the tension of the field directly. They argue that rather than forcing feminist reading of masculinity on readers—as some scholars claim women’s studies has done when shifting attention to masculinity—their collection attempts to carry on a “useful conversation within Women’s Studies about men and masculinity” (2). The first wave of conversation “gathered itself around a reactionary attempt to raise the gates and rattle the scepters of Iron Johns everywhere” (Ibid). The second wave sought value and positivity in masculine behaviors. In the current third wave, masculinity “sheds its essen-tialist alignment with sex and becomes a true gender concept” and becomes part of the spectrum of gendered behaviors that both men and women experience (Ibid). The scholars in the collection reflect perspectives from all three waves, with works spanning from 1989 to 2008.

The book is divided into four sections—“Engaging the Issue: Masculinity and Women’s and Gender Studies,” “Embodying Masculinity: Science and Society,” “Performing Social Expectations: The Domestic Scene,” and “Performing Social Expectations: The Public Stage”—with articles that are incredibly diverse in topic and scope. The first section begins with Margaret O’Brien’s late-1980s review of three books that saw then a tension that remains today: though focusing on masculinity studies, “it is noticeable that worry about ‘the women’s question’ permeates all three books” (11). Other essays, like Sue L. Cataldi’s “Reflections on ‘Male Bashing,’” take a more defensive tone by asserting that feminism is not about bashing men but rather about ending sexism, oppression, and violence. This same focus on what feminism does and can do in local and pedagogical spaces underscores the articles in this section, from Sharon Bernstein’s article on race and gender in the classroom to Diane Suter and David Schweickart’s delineations for a gender and race-inclusive course to Judith Kegan Gardiner advocating for gender-diverse textbooks in the feminist classroom to Jayne E. Stake, Jeannue Sevelius, and Sarah Hanly’s article about how students respond to feminist attitudes in women’s and gender studies classrooms. What struck me in this section is how masculinity studies is often discussed indirectly as a secondary consideration within the context of feminism.

The second section begins to think more fully about what a full gender studies means if we are to think about gender as a spectrum rather than as a binary. Cressida J. Heye’s review of three texts about transgender issues calls for this shift by proclaiming, “It’s no longer enough, however, for feminist readers to dismiss the projects of trans theorists and activists as epiphenomenal to feminist discourses or even queer theory” (101...