men and masculinity identitiy
Schrock, Douglas, and Michael Schwalbe. "Men, Masculinity, And Manhood Acts." Annual Review of Sociology 35.1 (2009): 277-295. Print. The struggle to find the clear distinction between gender and sex still reigns.
Currently in our society, these two terms can be broken down to be legally and socially recognized. According to the lectures in class on October 16th and 18th, gender is described to be a social category such as a man or a woman, while sex is perceived to be the biological or anatomical difference between male and female. In the article Men, Masculinity and Manhood Acts, authors Douglas Schrock and Michael Schwalbe suggest that masculinity also has a clear distinction from gender and sex, and unlike gender and sex that can be broken down into two, sometimes three, categories, masculinity is a spectrum with a multitude of terms and examples that define it. The authors’ main goal in this article is to show how society and literature shapes a man into thinking masculinity is black and white. The authors portray this by interpreting how males learn to perform manhood acts throughout the stages of their lives, while also comparing the strengths and weaknesses of the multiple masculinities. By dialing in on manhood acts and how they extract respect from others, they are able to propose insights on the social construction of gender. Within the article a few research questions arise. For example, the authors stress that they want to consider “how males learn to signify masculine selves,”(Schrock and Schwalbe 286). Thus meaning that they want to rediscover why and how men classify themselves as masculine, or what is the common definition of masculinity according to the male species. The authors explain the singularity and plurality of it all and how they want to know how literature tells us about manhood by stating, “themes and variations in the construction of manhood acts”(Schrock and Schwalbe 281). By this the authors are foreshadowing that there are
Currently in our society, these two terms can be broken down to be legally and socially recognized. According to the lectures in class on October 16th and 18th, gender is described to be a social category such as a man or a woman, while sex is perceived to be the biological or anatomical difference between male and female. In the article Men, Masculinity and Manhood Acts, authors Douglas Schrock and Michael Schwalbe suggest that masculinity also has a clear distinction from gender and sex, and unlike gender and sex that can be broken down into two, sometimes three, categories, masculinity is a spectrum with a multitude of terms and examples that define it. The authors’ main goal in this article is to show how society and literature shapes a man into thinking masculinity is black and white. The authors portray this by interpreting how males learn to perform manhood acts throughout the stages of their lives, while also comparing the strengths and weaknesses of the multiple masculinities. By dialing in on manhood acts and how they extract respect from others, they are able to propose insights on the social construction of gender. Within the article a few research questions arise. For example, the authors stress that they want to consider “how males learn to signify masculine selves,”(Schrock and Schwalbe 286). Thus meaning that they want to rediscover why and how men classify themselves as masculine, or what is the common definition of masculinity according to the male species. The authors explain the singularity and plurality of it all and how they want to know how literature tells us about manhood by stating, “themes and variations in the construction of manhood acts”(Schrock and Schwalbe 281). By this the authors are foreshadowing that there are