Masculinities in a global perspective

The series began as part of a set of lectures under the title ‘Masculinities and Class in a Global Perspective’ given by various academics in the spring of 2014 at the International Gender Studies Centre, Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford.

There were two motivations for beginning this online series. The first was to provide a platform for academic debates among scholars so as to easily engage various scholarly debates around masculinities whilst at the same time allowing those debates to move out the academy and to become more readily accessible in an online format.

A second, and more profound, motivation came as a question: why do activists and scholars talk about men as men so infrequently? This question has been crucial in trying to situate ‘men’ within the various discussions on ‘gender’ which the articles in this series engages.

The first paper in this series, Selin Akyuz’s essay Turkish Political Masculinities, examines the varying masculinities displayed by political parties in Turkey today, and provides a brilliant beginning for our understanding of how formal politics – connected, of course, to class relations – is both effected by and effects how men are men today.