FEATURED PUBLICATIONS
Soft-Boiled Masculinity:
Renegotiating Gender and Racial Ideologies in the Promise Keepers Movement
Melanie Heath
Research article published in Gender & Society (2003)
Abstract: This article examines the tensions in the identities of men who belong to the Promise Keepers (PK) movement by uncovering the social conditions that lead men to rethink gender and racial ideologies. Using participant observation and in-depth interviews, the author draws on gender and social movement scholarship to reveal how contradictory gender and racial ideologies shape PKs’ identities. Furthermore, the PKs’ impact on gender and race relations is also contradictory. PK fosters men’ s growth on an interactional level, allowing men to embrace a more expressive and caring masculinity that includes cross-racial bonding. Simultaneously, however, PK ignores, and indirectly reinforces, the structural conditions that underpin gender and racial privilege among white men.
Keywords: masculinity; gender and race relations; social movements; religious movements; ideologies
Manhood Over Easy:
Reflections on Hegemonic, Soft-Boiled, and Multiple Masculinities
Melanie Heath
Book Chapter Contribution in Exploring Masculinities: Identity, Inequality, Continuity and Change (2015)
(Book Editors: C.J. Pascoe and Tristan Bridges)
Summary: Reflecting back on Melanie Heath’s research (2003) that drew on participant observation and in-depth interviews with twenty husbands who identified as Promise Keepers (PK) and their wives, this chapter analyzes the case of the Promise Keepers as a way to think through the multiple masculinities approach to gender. What can this group of Christian men tell us about masculinities after a decade of research has developed? Heath’s reassessment of the PK movement indicates that the multiple masculinities approach can be enriched by the additions of Bourdieu’s concept of “field” and as well as insights from intersectionality theory. This chapter examines how PK men play the “field” to embrace a softer image of masculinity as “enlightened” but as still hierarchical to maintain their position as leaders. The evangelical field allows non-privileged men to participate alongside those who are privileged in the benefits of hierarchical gender relations while at the same time maintaining a racial hierarchy that does little to address the structural inequalities that marginalize men of color. Similarly, PK men are able to be more emotionally expressive, but only in spaces without women to ward off possible challenges to their heterosexuality. The chapter combines approaches of field theory and intersectionality to offer a powerful conceptual metaphor for illuminating the structural arrangements of gender hierarchies and their intersections with race, class, and sexuality.
Keywords: masculinities, intersectionality, Bourdieu, field theory, Promise Keepers
Espousing Patriarchy:
Conciliatory Masculinity and Homosocial Femininity in Religiously Conservative Families
Melanie Heath
Research article published in Gender & Society (2019)
Abstract: Drawing on in-depth interviews with individuals in current and former plural Mormon fundamentalist families, the author demonstrate how gender is structured relationally in plural marriage, dependent on noncoercive power relations. Men perform a “conciliatory masculinity” based on their position as head of the family that requires constant consensus-building skills and emotional labor to maintain family harmony. This masculinity is shaped in relation to women’s performance of “homosocial femininity” that curbs men’s power by building strong bonds among wives to deflect jealousies and negotiate household duties. Heath argues for the importance of studying masculinities and femininities together as a relational structure to better understand specific religious and family contexts.
Keywords: conservative religions; masculinity; femininity; polygyny; fundamentalist Mormonism; gender relations