Masculinity
It is easy to forget that until very recently, masculinity was understood solely in terms of the behaviors, activities, and political positions associated with the experience of being a man. So sutured to one another were men and masculinity, in ways that are not true for women and femininity, that there were very few ways of speaking or thinking about masculinity that did not affirm manhood on the one hand and define itself against womanhood on the other. Masculinity, furthermore, named a racial project of power and domination in which normative masculinity attached to whiteness while Black, Asian, or Latinx masculinities bore the weight of representing excess or insufficiency. It is not the case that these hegemonic versions of masculinity are now a thing of the past, and yet the twenty-first century has been marked by very clear shifts in the meanings, functions, and understandings of men and masculinity. Social media–based movements like #MeToo have, in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, offered platforms for deep critiques of the “boys will be boys” mentality that has granted powerful men impunity in relation to unwanted sexual advances on women. And as descriptions and accounts of widespread sexual harassment, assault,...