The purpose of this research was to utilise a unique researcher vantage point (as embedded academy coach) to explore the experiences of male youth footballers (14-15 years old) at an English professional football academy. Participant observations and in-depth semi-structured interviews with twelve boys were used to generate data. The analysis focused upon (a) the competitive social organisation of the academy, (b) representations of masculinity (c) emotional proximity and what it means to be ‘friends’ in the academy setting, and (d) attitudes towards homosexuality. My findings highlight the limited ability of boys to develop trust and ‘deep’ friendships in this institutional context. These findings suggest that a hyper-competitive (neoliberal) market-driven rationality penetrates football academies and may play a role in altering the parameters of how ‘friendships’ can be lived and experienced for young people ‘on the inside’ of such institutions. Despite limitations on ‘friendships’ and emotional-proximity inside the academy, there was some evidence of inclusivity (c.f. Anderson, 2009), with regards to attitudes towards homosexuality. However, drawing on the concepts of complicity (Connell, 1987, 1995) and hybridity (c.f. Demetriou, 2001; Bridges, 2014), caution is maintained in describing these youth academy footballers as conclusively inclusive. Implications of these findings, limitations of this study and directions for future research are all discussed.

Magister Artium - MA / There is a theoretical gap in scholarship pertaining to masculinity and disability in dance. Existing scholarship on masculinity, disability and dance respectively, seldom bring these three themes into conversation with each other, missing opportunities to examine the nuances of masculinity. Through an ethnographic study, I endeavoured to capture the narratives of three professional disabled male dancers from different contexts and backgrounds. The phenomenological approach was selected in order to enhance understanding of my participants’ experiences in an attempt to illuminate how these dancers negotiate and embody their masculinity in dance spaces. The nuances of masculinity, disability and dance are therefore interpreted through a phenomenological framework and seek to foreground the intricacies of negotiation and subjectivity. Through face-to-face in-depth interviews, watching performances and rehearsals as well as less formal conversations, this project aims to illuminate the lives of Marc Brew (Scotland), David Toole (England) and Zama Sonjica (South Africa) as disabled male dancers. I am particularly interested in disability’s ability to challenge normative ideas around dance, identity and masculinity. I argue the need to change limiting perceptions of hegemonic masculinity and the male dancer’s body to advance the artistic medium of dance and allow for constructive dialogue around issues of access and inclusivity. Furthermore, like Roebuck (2001), I am interested in the ways in which contemporary dance works "contributes to the development of a more sensitive understanding of the ways in which dance articulates masculine identity" (Roebuck, 2001: 1).

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In western media, Asian men have traditionally represented as either effeminized or emasculated. First providing a historical and ideological account for such representations, this thesis proceeds to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of the three strategies that Asian filmmakers have adopted to counter this stereotype: the assimilationistic strategy, the segregationistic strategy and the integrationistic strategy. Eventually, this thesis proposes a new way to cope with dilemma by providing a close reading of a British independent film, Lilting. It argues that a fourth strategy, which is named the dynamic strategy, can be detected. Because in this film masculinity is presented as a fluid quality that flows through different characters and does not attach to race or any other fixed identity, there is no need to struggle against the demands imposed by the white hegemony.

How do sex practices get constructed as normal? This research evaluates discussions of pegging, a gender non-conforming sex practice within heterosexual sex whereby women anally penetrate men. Data were collected from the website Reddit and its subreddit r/sex. 3,485 comments posted to 30 discussion threads were analyzed for common themes. Findings suggest that pegging confuses gendered expectations for “having sex”. Additionally, heteronormativity and homophobia were found to structure heterosexual interactions, including the ways in which gender and sexual identities, desire, and bodies are understood. This is illuminated by findings supporting “gender accountability” or the idea that we “do gender” because people anticipate how others will perceive their actions based on gender expectations. Finally, an examination of homophobia reveals ways in which homophobia operates in a hate-free zone. Homophobia was found to encourage heterosexuals’ treatment of homosexuals as distinctly different kinds of people than heterosexuals, including frequent boundary setting between what is gay and straight. Overall this project reveals that pegging is a culturally unintelligible sex act that causes a great deal of confusion, anxiety, and sometimes pleasure for those who partake.

The gender order in urban India is changing rapidly. Several economic, political and sociocultural shifts have brought with them new opportunities and challenges for Indian men and women. This thesis attempts to understand some of these social and cultural changes from the perspective of a group of affluent young men in Delhi. By ethnographically studying young men and their masculinities in urban public spaces of leisure and consumption, this thesis explores some of their relatively new practices of consumption and embodied performances of gender, as well as its consequences on gendering a city space. Through focusing on newly commodified spaces like gyms, shopping malls, night clubs, bars, metro trains and cruising parks in Delhi, I argue that a politics of space, age, gender and class come together to mark men's identities, bodies as well as urban spaces, creating forms of belonging and exclusions in a neoliberal India. Within this context, I explore how ideas of what it means to be a young man are changing in a consumerist India and how this in turn shapes young men's relationships with other men, women, families and changing city spaces. Using ethnographic data collected over fourteen months of fieldwork in Delhi, along with visual and cultural analysis, this thesis lays bare the layers of masculine performances and reveals the everyday attempts at embedding and reproducing a heterosexist patriarchal social order under the guise of a 'new Indian man' and his 'new' India. In the process, I critically but empathetically explore the gendered hierarchies and anxieties that emerge in contemporary India and its consequences on various bodies and city spaces. The chief arguments are presented in five empirical chapters: 1) A 'New' Indian Man, 2) A Masculine Body, 3) Desexing a Masculine Body, 4) A Smart and Masculine City, and 5) A Safe/Unsafe City.

This dissertation aims to examine masculinities and transitional police reform, considering policy and processes, and investigating the policing of gender-based violence in post-war societies. Drawing upon current feminist theory in the field of transitional justice, it focuses on masculinities in formal post-conflict police reform processes, an area that has been much under-researched in the academic literature. More specifically, the dissertation examines international processes focused on police reform advocacy relating to gender-sensitive reform, and local level police reform relating to gender-based violence (GBV). To examine local level reforms, two post-conflict case sites, Bosnia Herzegovina (BiH), and Northern Ireland (NI) were selected for investigation. My research understands gender as a discursive construct and investigates the gendered conceptions built into police reform policy, process, and practice. How these conceptions come to be part of police reform texts and how they manifest in post-conflict policing responses to gender-based violence (GBV) is the focus of the dissertation. Overall, my research identifies masculinity as an unstated norm in police reform, and case study findings indicate that hegemonic masculinities shape police reform policy and practice relating to GBV in particular ways, reiterating conventional gender norms, and limiting the potential for transformative change. Findings suggest that current reforms in post-conflict transitions contribute to, and constitute a process of remasculinisation.

Higher rates of sexual harassment in the military have been well documented in the existing literature. However, not much is known about how the deployment of women effects the odds of sexual harassment of females. This study used three public use datasets collected by the Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) in 2006, 2010, and 2012 from active duty soldiers in the Air Force, Army, Marines, and Navy to evaluate the effect of deployment on five different types of sexual harassment. Organizational factors such as sex-ratio, paygrade, masculinity, and organizational climate were also evaluated in relation to sexual harassment. Lastly, the interaction effects of organizational factors and deployment were evaluated in regards to sexual harassment. Females who had been deployed were more likely to experience all types of sexual harassment compared to non-deployed females. All organizational climate variables also had significant effects on odds of sexual harassment. The interactive effects of deployment and organizational factors on sexual harassment were less clear, with the only reliable interaction being paygrade with deployment. Future research should further evaluate the relationship between deployment and sexual harassment, especially for women serving in combat zones. The organizational factors that can mitigate sexual harassment in deployment situations need further investigation so that female soldiers can become more integrated into traditionally masculine combat roles without a corresponding increase in sexual harassment.

Baseball has not always been identified as a man’s game despite the fact that its boosters began proclaiming it a “manly” pastime in antebellum America. This thesis reveals, for the first time, that baseball began as a gender-neutral sport. Countless girls and women across the country played the game in every decade of the nineteenth century that the game existed, organizing the same types of teams that boys and men did. The thesis explains how and why the gender-neutral game become so fiercely gendered as masculine and explains how this characterization persisted despite dramatic changes in gender ideals and roles over time. Close scrutiny of nineteenth-century sources indicates that baseball’s gendered character was neither inevitable nor quickly solidified. For decades journalists, scholars, and ordinary citizens unwittingly perpetuated the gendered narrative—a narrative introduced by men with a personal and financial stake in shaping the game for their own purposes and one accepted and reinforced in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth by female physical educators who organized a structure for girls’ and women’s sport that discouraged elitism and encouraged participation by individuals of all physical characteristics. This thesis traces the evolution of baseball throughout the nineteenth century, focusing on the development of the formal structure of the sport and the cultural “creed” it shaped. To the extent allowed by available primary sources, each chapter highlights the perceptions of female players, particularly as they saw themselves in the context of baseball culture and social ideals of gender.

This thesis is a historical comprehensive case study on masculinity that explores stereotypes of masculinity in professional wrestling. Working from theories about gender roles, hegemonic masculinity, misogyny (with its disdain for femininity) and heteronormativity, this study utilizes a content analysis of American professional wrestling to look at the gendered basis of how and why wrestling characters are created and how they are successful. Professional wrestlers historically have created characters based in American popular cultures and specifically American gender ideologies of masculinity that are based in hetero-patriarchal cultural ideals. By looking through the history of masculinity and gender stereotypes in professional wrestling, I uncover how contemporary wrestlers are reworking these stereotypes to create new characters with changing gender inflections based on global cultural ideals, rather than American culture, demonstrating the influence global culture and the globalized wrestling community has on contemporary American wrestling. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2019. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection