Looking Back and Looking Forward: Men and Masculinity in Psychological Research on Violence Against Women

Jeffrey, N. K., Rice, C., & Smoliak, O. (2024): Looking back and looking forward: Men and masculinity in psychological research on violence against women. Psychology of Men & Masculinities. https://doi.org/10.1037/men0000483

Abstract

In this paper, we systematically and critically review the past decade of empirical psychological research (n = 132) on masculinity and violence against women (VAW) to demonstrate an overreliance on individualist and “culturalist” (or culturally essentialist) approaches to theorizing and studying masculinity. Individualist and essentialist approaches assume that masculinity is something men are or possess based on the extent to which they identify with, conform to, or approve of traits or norms (pre)deemed masculine. We argue that these approaches cannot explain why it is men who overwhelmingly practice VAW, or account for the contextual, material, and structural power asymmetries that create conditions for gendered violence. We demonstrate the potentiality of formulations of masculinity (structuralist, poststructuralist, and especially processual) for ending VAW that move beyond individualism and essentialism. Whilst they have helpfully situated masculinity within wider systemic forces, structuralist approaches often overlook how structures operate in constituting masculinities; and they impose false unity by theorizing masculinity through a homogenizing categorical lens. Poststructuralist approaches have accounted for fluidity in the complex construction of masculine subjects, but not for socio-material forces, or systemic inequities and modes of structural violence (e.g., neoliberalism, colonialism) that co-produce VAW. We argue that processual approaches, not yet mobilized in the empirical masculinity and VAW literature, offer a particularly productive new way forward in that they map how the individual and social intertwine. We outline implications for theory, research, and praxis.