- Detailed Table of Contents
- Editorial
- Jürgen Martschukat: Men in Gray Flannel Suits. Troubling Masculinities in 1950s America
- Kristoff Kerl: The Pure and the Sodomite. Masculinity, Sexuality and Antisemitism in the Leo Frank Case.
- Norbert Finzsch: Masculinities. The Million Man March
- Isabel Karremann: "The Sea Will Make a Man of Him?" Hypervirility, Effeminacy, and the Figure of the Queer Pirate in the Popular Imagination from the Early Eighteenth-Century to Hollywood.
- Christiane König: Not Becoming-Posthuman in the Ultimate Postfilmic Posthuman Male Fantasy. Queer-Feminist Observations on James Cameron’s Avatar (2009)
Intersectional work on masculinities in general is rare, a fact that may have its cause in the history of the concept intersectionality itself. It originated in the context of discussions between white middle class liberal feminists and African American women who reproached the white liberals color blindness and their lack of concern for questions of class. Kimberlé Crenshaw, founder of Critical Race Studies (Crenshaw 1995), was interested in the relationship of race and law. She not only coined the term “intersectionality”, but wrote two ground-breaking articles that investigated the law’s inability to make visible black women’s experience of discrimination, which was a problem of intersectionality. (Crenshaw 1988, 1991) Nira Yuval-Davis and others started to investigate the interrelationship of ethnic and gender divisions in the early 1980s. (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1983). Intersectionality became a concept that allowed for the understanding of gender differences as mediated and transformed by other categories of repression such as class and race. So far, the intersectional approach has not yet been applied in historical studies on masculinities. If gender is a relational category, it is only logical to assume, that this lacuna has to be filled. Intersectionality as an approach that attempts to struggle with historically specific forms of power and domination does not lend itself easily to the analysis of masculinities, because men have been perceived as being the Other in possession of power and privilege. It may be argued however that masculinity is no fixed and uniform concept. If one applies the concept of hegemonic respective non-hegemonic masculinities in accordance with Connell (Connell 1995, 2005), it may be scholarly useful and politically functional to apply the intersectional approach to the study of masculinities as well, especially since masculinities can be found outside of traditional male roles and bodies (Stoller 1997, Halberstam 1998). If masculinity is a contested terrain that produces exclusions, hierarchies and stratifications within itself, if there is indeed something like hegemonic and non-hegemonic masculinity, if in other word one has to speak about the striations within the masculine space, it may be justified to speak of the application of intersectionality within the history of masculinities, even if this seems to contradict older feminist contentions and initial usages of the concept.
