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“It’s not macho, is it?”: contemporary British Christian men’s constructions of masculinity
Religion is a key site for constructions of masculinity, and visions of a gender equal society must include religious men. This study examines how a group of British white, heterosexual, middle-class, lay Anglican men construct masculinities via discourses on church-going, worship styles, and godly submission. The interviewed men express a hybrid form of masculinity, informed by religious faith, that embraces typically “feminine” characteristics such as love, humility, and vulnerability. At the same time, they articulate ideals of heteronormativity and essentialized gender differences that support hegemonic masculinity. The participants engage simultaneously in a selective, “discursive distancing” from, and a discursive alignment with, hegemonic masculinity norms, thus revealing tensions between competing masculinity norms.
History
School
- Social Sciences and Humanities
Department
- Criminology, Sociology and Social Policy
Published in
The Journal of Men’s StudiesVolume
29Issue
3Pages
259-277Publisher
SAGE PublicationsVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Rights holder
© SAGE PublicationsPublisher statement
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Sage under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/Acceptance date
2020-10-17Publication date
2020-12-18Copyright date
2020ISSN
1060-8265eISSN
1933-0251Publisher version
Language
- en