Configuring masculinity

Abstract

More than just an Introduction to the contributions which make up this volume, this article argues that masculinity studies is a social necessity, points to the problems the construction of male gender identities seems to pose (not only) in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and stresses the outstanding contribution that literature can make with regard to male gender identity formation. Moreover, this contribution asks whether gender identity should not be seen as a potentially unstable, contradictory, and evolving cultural product akin to literature, whose medium, language, and chief "mode of operation", that is, narration, it shares. The article also contends that in literary texts, we find both, self- as well as externally-determined or enforced configurations of masculinity as well as the very mechanisms of their production or enforcement.