Gender Identity The Cause Of Male Domination Summary

In the concluding paragraph of “Is Male Gender Identity the Cause of Male Domination?”1, Iris Marion Young remarks, “…gender theory can be an enormous aid in consciousness raising about contemporary masculine ideologies, by showing some of the sources of their misogyny.” (Young, 34) Thus, to trace the cause of male domination and raise consciousness one must also look at the flip side of the coin, vis-à-vis what the masculinity studies have to say about the causes of male domination.

The ground work on masculinist studies began in the 1990s and it is still an inchoate academic discipline. Men in academic settings started questioning the imperatives of patriarchal power when prodded by the feminists’ challenge. It soon became apparent that central to the task of creating intellectual paradigms that question the entitlement of men, was the

Victor J. Seidler adds to this incipient field, asserting in his pioneer work, Rediscovering Masculinity: Reason, Language, and Sexuality, “Crucially, for men, … learning how we have become the men that we are… we can begin to subvert [the] domination [of power]” (Seidler, 12)

According to Seidler, to think whether it is possible for men to change, it is requisite to examine masculinity as a “historically-emergent experience.” (Seidler, 3) Thus, he goes on to have “…an understanding of a particular masculinity in its social and historical formation.” (Seidler, 1) At the heart of this investigation is the emergent identification of masculinity with reason. Ever since the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century, men have sought to silence the voices of others in the name of reason. They overtook the public sphere and attempted to define the very meaning of humanity in terms of the possession of reason. Aligned to this very idea is the notion of civilisation, which came to