Reflections on masculinities, their social constructions and their “crises”

Abstract

The purpose of this text is to analyze hegemonic and hybrid masculinities, as well as their relationship, which has focused on young, white, and heterosexual men, and has thus reproduced structures of gender, race and sexual inequalities among other conditions that interweave and sustain the inequalities that are positioned in social structures, marginalizing those subordinate masculinities. This, without leaving aside studies that problematize the relational and power condition implied by the binary division of gender. In this sense, recent studies are analyzed to approach from the postcolonial theory the bases that still establish a unique subject that invisibilizes the representations of otherness. In this way, it is highlighted that hybrid masculine practices function to strengthen symbolic and social boundaries, as well as contribute to eternalize hierarchies in more subtle ways.

Finally, the objective of the article is to understand that the new masculinities have generated emerging models that allow them to penetrate more easily into spaces contested by women or marginalized groups where the latter have gained space. For all these reasons, we ask ourselves if these new forms are strategies to sustain the domination of historically hegemonic and powerful groups.