Troubled Masculinities: Reimagining Urban Men ed. by Ken Moffatt (review)

Troubled Masculinities: Reimagining Urban Men is an edited collection of nine essays that considers ways in which men create and inhabit their worlds and the worlds of others and, in turn, are created by these worlds. Focusing specifically on “social expressions of masculinity,” and turning attention to how masculinities are at play and negotiated in place through social, material, and discursive practices, the editor, Ken Moffatt, argues that local cultural practices have the capacity to challenge dominant expressions of masculinities and provide alternative expressions. In this collection Moffatt brings together writers and thinkers who pursue these alternative “expressions of masculinity” by critically reflecting on the experiences of living masculinity in an urban context, while locating these experiences within broader theoretical and cultural practices. In doing so, contributors engage repeatedly in an examination of their gendering and gendered practices, implicitly and explicitly. Indeed, the manner in which dominant practices of masculinity can be challenged, reconfigured, and imagined differently by resisting certain ways of participating in the world as men concerns all eleven contributors. This politics of resistance, along with its commitment to keeping alive possibilities for living differently in the world in the company of others, is one of the most interesting and alluring aspects of this edited collection. Carl E. James’s contribution (chapter 4) stands out in this regard.

The ideas of philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler echo loudly throughout this text and greatly inform and influence many positions developed in the book. Indeed, the overall purpose of the book seems to align with that of Butler’s best-known work, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, whose aim “was to open up the field of possibility for gender without dictating which kinds of possibilities ought to be realized.” This, too, it could be said, is the purpose of Troubled Masculinities, which has at its core a political project: “to help men claim identities that have been previously hidden, oppressed, misrepresented, or unacknowledged.”

Contributors to this collection include professors, counsellors, therapists, mental health professionals, and a playwright and teaching artist. While they are described as “diverse in terms of race, cultural heritage, sexuality and age,” they seem to share similar political commitments and theoretical positions, which in itself is not objectionable, but it does seem strange when the aim of the book is, according to Moffatt, to “map the terrain of masculinity in an urban area manifestly marked by global forces.” For the most part, accounts of what it means to live as a man in and across spaces of recognizability and imperceptibility are written in opposition to hegemonic masculinities, which, for the contributors to this book, are broadly understood as “white, middle-class, and heterosexual.” In the text, at times it seems that some situations, occurrences, and concepts have been essentialized and reified in efforts to build compelling and convincing arguments. In such instances, it appears that insufficient attention has been paid to the impossibility or indeed undesirability of figuring out something for once and for all. For example, I don’t think we can ever figure out “what specifically constitutes masculinity,” but we can remain curious, interested, and committed to the pursuit of the question. As research has shown, neither do we live in a world in which a fixed notion of masculinity presides. And so it is puzzling to read Moffatt’s claim that “the philosophical practice of this book … [is] to disrupt the fixed idea of masculinity to make room for new possibilities for its political practice.” This disruption, one might say, has been happening for the past three decades in the critical writings of scholars who have taken up the topic of masculinities and masculinizing practices as an intellectual project. What has emerged from that work is an understanding of masculinity as relational, fluid, incomplete, and forever negotiable and negotiated.

For readers new to masculinities research and theory, this collection provides a good introduction to some of the key issues and concepts advanced in...