Review of 'Plural masculinities: the remaking of the self in private life', by Sofia Aboim: Farnham, UK, Ashgate, 2010, 196 pp., £55.00 (hardback), ISBN 9780754674672

Abstract

The title of Sofia Aboim's book 'Plural masculinities' may at first seem redundant to those familiar with the field of men and masculinity studies. Since Raewyn Connell's work in the mid-1990s it has become customary to understand and refer to masculinities as necessarily plural. Connell's work challenged the notion that masculinity could be thought of as a trait that men had more or less of and advanced an influential theory of masculinity as a form of practice in a gendered order, hierarchically arranged in relations of hegemony, subordination and marginality and in opposition to femininity. Masculinity was necessarily plural by virtue of the fact it could take different shapes in different social and cultural contexts, yet what remained central was the basic emphasis on some forms or expressions of masculinity as more culturally valid or powerful than others. This approach to gender has been extraordinarily influential, if not without challenge both for its perceived theoretical weaknesses and for the ways it has been interpreted and applied across a number of disciplines.