26 October 2018
Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
Fabianinkatu 24, 3rd floor
17.30-19.00
key note lecture
Tristan Bridges (UC Santa Barbara)
Gender Hegemony in Transition: Shifts in Gender Inequality in 21st Century Workplaces and Society
Masculinities Studies emerged as a distinct sub-field of feminist gender studies some time during the 1970s as a part of a larger, interdisciplinary project of studying privilege and structured advantage as critical to our understandings of the reproduction of power and inequality. This presentation discusses initial feminist work that sought to identify masculinity and men’s collective gender privilege as “invisible,” and how the relative visibility of both masculinity and gender privilege has radically shifted over the past half century. This shift in the visibility of masculinity and gender privilege has had diverse consequences, some of which have been the emergence of new “hybrid” masculinities which research shows often appear to challenge systems of power and inequality, but are better seen as obscuring and reproducing inequalities in historically novel ways. This presentation outlines a theory of “hybrid masculinities,” discussing how this work builds on Raewyn Connell’s theory of gender relations and inequality and addresses how it can help us better understand new and emergent forms of inequalities in workplaces and beyond.