Between want and should : masculinities and neoliberal subjectivity in men enrolled in the Bachelor of Arts : a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Social Anthropology, Massey University, Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand
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2020
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Massey University
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This thesis examines constructions of masculinity in the context of a neoliberal university. It draws primarily from the theory of hegemonic masculinity, a theory of masculinity that posits that gender is organised hierarchically with a narrow ‘ideal’ and dominant construction of masculinity in the premier position of power over women, femininity, and other marginalised expressions of masculinity (Connell, 2005). In the Aotearoa New Zealand context, strength, stoicism, heterosexuality, and practicality describe the hegemonic form of masculinity, despite greater fluidity of gender expression in recent years. Concurrently with hegemonic masculinity, dominant ideals of neoliberalism stress personal control, management, and responsibility via a highly individualised understanding of (economic) success. In higher education, deeply financialised discourses shape how institutions offer their qualifications and how students engage with and utilise their education. Narratives around employability and personal returns are dominant as students must emphasise how their education will allow them to best exploit the job market for their personal benefit. Together, the discourses of dominant masculinities and neoliberal higher education profoundly shape the way men navigate university. I carried out semi-structured interviews with six men enrolled in Bachelor of Arts degrees at Massey University in Albany, Aotearoa New Zealand. The interviews were analysed discursively to elucidate the way men construct ideas about their educational choices in line with ideals of masculinity and neoliberalism. The most dominant emergent themes were: conceptualising arts degrees as ‘risks’; the role of interpersonal care; and the containment of men within normative ideas about what they should be doing at university. Together, masculine and neoliberal ideals reveal a profound tension within the lives of participants. They are caught between the expectations of traditional values of masculinity and profit-focussed neoliberal self-management which compel them to make educational choices that satisfy the expectations of both. This results in participants implicitly and explicitly positioning themselves within the ideals of both systems, despite also knowing that their education is outside of the norms of said systems. They use economic and gendered discourses to justify their choices to pursue arts degrees, which redeems and repositions their degrees within normative expectations for education. Despite the challenges of being placed between these ideals, participants show that there are ways to successfully balance the demands of both through conscious efforts to connect masculinity and neoliberal outlooks to their current education and planned futures. The construction of hegemonic masculinity pressures men into behaviours and values related to stable and productive employment futures for the purpose of being able to provide for dependents. This aids in the continuation of the current gender order by guiding men into choosing careers which allow them to gain access to a provider position. To make an employment or education decision that does not readily connect to future stability as a provider is perceived as inherently risky and imperils one’s ability to appear normatively masculine. Although participants view themselves as atypical for their choice of education, contemporary discourses around masculinities provide a flexible and adaptive resource for participants to nonetheless firmly position themselves in ways that highlighted their masculinity. Participants can manage the riskiness their chosen careers present to their gender identity by stressing outcomes from their education that allow them to achieve masculine ideals, for example, favouring a clinical counselling path through psychology due to the expected financial returns. To this end, neoliberal economic discourses around profitability play an important role in the ability for men to justify their study decisions. Actively assessing the ability of their chosen paths to result in financial success enabled participants to circumvent a risk to personal profitability related to arts degrees’ unclear connection to marketable skills. Financialised framing provided by neoliberal values allowed participants to elucidate the educational path most likely to grant good returns and connect these returns to the expected future stability of employment traditionally valued by masculinity. In this way, the areas of crossover between masculinity and neoliberalism provided the most effective justification for their choices to study arts degrees and allowed them to connect their personal desires for ameliorative social action to existing norms around what men should expect from work. For participants, arts degrees carry gendered and economic connotations that needed to be acknowledged and managed in order to highlight the personal possibility for success and maintain connections to norms of masculinity. Participants’ future careers necessitate engagement with interpersonal and emotional labour via care work. As care work has feminine connotations, and femininity is expected to be avoided by men, there was a need to ‘masculinise’ their expected labour to create a distance from appearing feminine. To do this, participants stressed longer term successes and achieving positions of authority to ‘fix’ society, as well as financial returns, to place the care work they would perform within normatively masculine expectations of future successes. This processes of redrawing boundaries around labour and emphasising specific outcomes to stress normative successes illustrates the remarkable flexibility drawn from masculine and neoliberal values for men to position themselves as part of a continuation of the existing gender order. Identifying and redrawing the boundaries of acceptable behaviour for men was an important strategy for participants rationalising their decisions to study an arts degree. Participants were perceptive of the social constructions of arts degrees as ‘frivolous’ or relatively disconnected from contemporary conceptualisations of success. However, they could actively access neoliberal and masculine discourses to assert how their decisions reflected a carefully chosen path with ‘realistic’ achievements. The difference between ‘realistic’ and ‘unrealistic’ employment outcomes from an arts degree were deeply influenced by the ability for participants to construct their education within normative boundaries for financial stability. This meant that participants ideal outcomes from their education were always placed within employment and employability frames that fit within the boundaries of neoliberal and normatively masculine career aspirations. The findings of this research demonstrate that dominant ideas about masculinity and how one should compete in the labour market simultaneously dictate what men should do and expect at university. Men’s goals in university are contained within gendered and economic realities which make educational options that conform to those realities more attractive to pursue than those options that do not. As a result, this thesis speaks to the way men and masculinities change due to contextual pressures, and how these changes can occur without destabilising the overall normative structure of gender and a neoliberal sense of self.