Masculinities Between Morality and Ethics: An Analytical Framework for Critical Studies on Men and Masculinities

Critical Studies on Men and Masculinities (CSMM) has developed as a field through its engagements with four enduring preoccupations: (1) how do men and masculinities come into being; (2) how do men and masculinities sustain patriarchal social arrangements; (3) how might they transform to engender feminist social change; and—at a metatheoretical level—(4) how does CSMM as a knowledge system understand these processes of masculine becoming? The aim of this article is to outline how social anthropological insights on morality and ethics can advance responses to these basal questions that continue to guide CSMM. It argues that the anthropology of morality and ethics can enable CSMM to analyse how the production of masculinities is bound up with subjects’ actions and judgements with respect to moral criteria. Drawing on anthropological theorizations of morality and ethics in relation to social reproduction and agency, this article proposes an analytical framework that opens up two modes in which morality and ethics come to matter for the study of masculinities: as attachment to existing social structures, and as doubt which creates a margin of freedom for change.