Masculinity After Hegemony: Gender in the Interregnum

• In Event: Sociology of Sex and Gender Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 10. Masculinities: Crisis, Politics, and Transition

Abstract

Rising levels of overt misogyny have renewed scholarly attention to Raewyn Connell's concept of hegemonic masculinity, particularly its role in legitimating gender inequality. Recent scholarship rightly foregrounds legitimacy as the theoretical linchpin of this theory yet often leaves under-theorized how legitimacy is produced and stabilized, treating hegemonic masculinity as a diffuse cultural ideal rather than an institutionally grounded process. I argue that hegemonic masculinity's legitimizing force is best understood through its institutionalization in paid labour, state authority, and heterosexual intimacy. Yet the present moment is distinct: we are witnessing the simultaneous erosion of both the institutional and ideological bases of masculine power. Drawing on Antonio Gramsci's concept of the interregnum, I argue that we are living through a gender interregnum in which male dominance persists without the stable institutions that once made it durable or the broadscale consent that once made it legitimate. Under these conditions, masculinities proliferate without durable institutional anchoring, giving rise to what I term post-hegemonic masculinities. Read in this way, contemporary gender politics are best understood not as backlash or identity conflict, but as a crisis of institutional disintegration.

Author

• Jillian Sunderland, University of Toronto