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Abstract

This article intends to stimulate conversation and critical thinking about the concept of ‘caring masculinities’ and its ongoing relevance to the field of critical studies of men and masculinities (CSMM). Caring masculinities is subject to debate around its theoretical premises, its potential as a feminist concept, and the limits of the empirical evidence base that underpins the concept and its associated implications. We respond to some of these ongoing critical conversations, in part by suggesting that the concept is sometimes deployed in ways that depart from or even possibly misconstrue the concept. Highlighting the nuance, capaciousness, and clarity of the concept, as theorised by Karla Elliott, we substantiate the argument by drawing on emerging data from our ongoing research with men in front-line, low paid care-work in Australia, thus, including men who have so far largely been excluded from studies on caring masculinities.

Keywords

caring masculinities critical studies of men and masculinities non-domination

Introduction

This Sociology in Action article intends to stimulate critical consideration about the ongoing relevance of the concept of ‘caring masculinities’ to the field of critical studies of men and masculinities (CSMM). While used relatively widely – and increasingly in the last decade – in some areas of CSMM, caring masculinities is subject to debate around its theoretical premises, its potential as a feminist concept, and the limits of the empirical evidence base that underpins the concept and its implications. We offer a brief commentary responding to some of these ongoing engagements, in part by suggesting that the concept is sometimes deployed in both theoretical and empirical work in ways that depart from or even possibly misconstrue the concept. We further the argument by turning to novel insights from emerging analyses of initial rounds of data collection in our ongoing research into men’s experience of front-line, low paid care-work in Australia. By expanding the concept’s use to include men who we argue have, thus far, by and large been excluded from studies on caring masculinities, we set about reiterating the relevance of caring masculinities in theory and practice, once more highlighting the nuance, capaciousness, and clarity of the concept, as theorised by Elliott (2016).

We proceed, first, with a brief recapitulation of the concept’s genesis, and highlight the core components outlined in Elliott’s (2016) theorisation of caring masculinity. Second, we discuss some (mis)understandings of the concept as defined by Elliott. Third, we provide a glimpse into the data from our ongoing research that works with the concept.

A brief history of the concept of caring masculinity

Invigorated by scholarly attention to how boys and men’s avoidance of care is a key impediment to gender equality, the terminology of ‘caring masculinity’¹ began circulating in policy documents across Europe and in the UK in the early 2000s. While not quite using this exact language, in 2006 the European Commission Advisory Committee on Equal Opportunities for Women and Men highlighted the need to cultivate and normalise new forms of masculinity. Early uses of the term in the UK, took a different direction, with efforts to cultivate in boys a ‘caring masculinity’ emphasising a rejection of violence and ‘laddish’ behaviour and an embrace of open expression of feeling without embarrassment. Francis and Skelton (2005), for instance, highlighted how the DfES publication ‘Using the National Healthy School Standard to Raise Boys’ Achievement’ posits the potential for caring masculinity to remedy boys’ underachievement in attainment relative to girls. These authors were deeply sceptical of the idea, asserting that, given femininity is constructed in relation to masculinity and caring is ‘unequivocally stereotyped’ as a feminine practice,² the very idea of a caring masculinity was ‘jarring’, ‘nonsensical’, and evidence of ‘the extent to which commentators will go to advocate more feminine behaviour in boys without openly advocating that they behave like girls’ (Francis and Skelton, 2005: 128, original emphasis). This line of thinking was extended in Zyngier’s (2009) critique of ‘how to help failing boys’ guides that extolled the value of caring masculinity, but which Zyngier (2009: 113) chided as evidence of a ‘recuperative but not progressive masculinity’.

Despite these misgivings, other feminist scholars began attending to the possibilities of caring masculinity, with the terminology often part of rather than central to the writing. For instance, Heath’s (2003: 423) work on the ‘soft boiled masculinities’ of particular social movements in the US surfaced the social conditions that underpinned the possibility for radical rejections of racial difference and the embrace of ‘expressiveness and caring masculinity’. Around the same time, Boyle’s (2002) research with Australian prehospital emergency service workers explored the tensions of navigating between hegemonically ascendent and emotionally constrained organisational culture, yet traced practices of caring masculinity on the ‘front stage’ of the work. Hokowhitu’s (2007) socio-historical analysis of the construction of Māori masculinities in Aotearoa New Zealand further exposed a history of ‘loving and caring masculinity’ that has been silenced by colonial constructions of Māori men.

At the intersection of scholarly and policy-oriented work, comparative research across multiple European countries, (e.g. Gärtner et al., 2007) and research by Holter (2007) ensured the concept of caring masculinities gained further traction. The former explicitly centred the concept as it set about challenging ‘the perception of caring as a gender-related burden and an undervalued activity in society’ (Gärtner et al., 2007: 3), with particular attention to pragmatic reasons of family care (e.g. care for children, but with the caveat that care is much more than this). While mainly focussing on fatherhood, Holter (2007) nevertheless asserted that caring masculinity concerns many other relations ‘like friendship and gay partnerships’ (p. 426). In both cases, this literature promoted men’s engagement in caring practices; each case also recognised that such engagement already existed yet needed further fostering. This impulse was paralleled in the US, where Deutsch (2007) argued that the voluminous studies showcasing how ‘doing gender’ upholds gender inequality required complementary focus upon social interactions that reduce gender difference.

Hanlon’s (2012) research on men’s care in domestic settings in Ireland built upon feminist scholarship on care to further cement the issue of caring masculinity as a core dynamic of social life requiring significant academic attention. Key to Hanlon’s contribution was a consideration of the complexities of men’s stories, at once revealing the ways that men can recognise and respect nurturing femininities while remaining relatively care-free, and yet others still stress that caring practices can transform masculinity and create more caring men. The significance for the possibilities for caring masculinity was then also taken up in a large pan-European study entitled The Role of Men in Gender Equality (Scambor et al., 2014). Here, Scambor et al. (2014: 569) specify caring masculinities is an ‘appropriate concept in order to shape the way toward gender equality’. In addition to highlighting the need for policy reforms that ‘recognise and encourage men’s gender equal . . . sharing of care tasks’, they further opened up the definitional boundaries of care in this context, insisting that it is more than just childcare, and can include men’s ‘rejection of violence and the ability to connect with others . . . caring for friends and colleagues as well as . . . for oneself’ (p. 570). Informed by cumulative developments in the previous decade’s empirical research, Elliott (2016) drew together key scholars of feminist care ethics – among others, Tronto (1993), Kittay (1999) and Held (2006) – bringing these into conversation with hooks’ (2004) writing on nondominator culture to offer a sustained theoretical consideration of caring masculinities. Ultimately, Elliott (2016: 241, our italics) underlined that caring masculinities are those ‘masculine identities that reject domination and its associated traits and embrace values of care such as positive emotion, interdependence, and relationality’ (see also Prattes, 2022).

Critical reflections on the concept

As a sub-field of critical gender studies, CSMM is motivated by a justifiable impulse to foreground the role of masculinities in men’s domination of women, gender diverse people, children, and indeed other men. This starting position drives a healthy scepticism of concepts and ideas about empirical claims for productive shifts in masculinities. Accordingly, despite overtly resting on the important ‘feminist recognition of the potentials of gender equality’ (Elliott, 2016: 241), the concept of caring masculinities sometimes attracts challenges to its utility for CSMM’s aims. These critiques, we will suggest, often rely on a mis-deployment and/or subtle misreading of the concept.

First, a chief concern is whether caring masculinities represent a departure from hegemonic masculinity – the contextual and historically mobile pattern of gender practice that ensures and legitimates patriarchal dominance over women (Connell, 1995). Rather, research scrutinising men’s practice of care frequently describes caring masculinities as bound up with or an extension of hegemonic masculinity through the incorporation and celebration of men’s care in ways that entrench rather than disrupt the gender order. Hunter and colleagues’ (2017) critical engagement with the fatherhood literature argues such broadening of hegemonic masculinity, and a similar theme permeates Nayak’s (2023: 8) discussion of fathering studies situated as a rebuttal to Elliott’s ‘claim that caring masculinities is the antithesis of hegemonic masculinity’.

Using subtly different conceptual vocabulary, others such as Allan (2023), Kluczynska (2021), and Eisen and Yamashita (2019) postulate men’s caring better reflects hybrid masculinity (Bridges and Pascoe, 2014). Which is to say that ‘change’ here works through ‘negotiation, appropriation, and translation, through the transformation of what appears counter-hegemonic and progressive into an instrument of backwardness and patriarchal reproduction’ (Demetriou, 2001: 355). The strategic incorporation of some practices associated with marginalised and subordinated masculinities – or here, femininities – becomes instrumental in stabilising and reproducing masculine hegemony. Such messaging also permeates Collinson et al.’s (2023) proposition that care and dominance should not be understood as mutually exclusive.

The insight provided by research such as Hunter et al. (2017) or Nayak (2023) is valuable in its own right as a critique of men’s practices, but is unsustainable as a critique of the caring masculinities concept. Indeed, such engagements rely on a partial reading that ultimately situates Elliott’s theorising as a straw person. In short, given Elliott articulates that caring masculinities, as above, ‘reject domination and its associated traits and embrace values of care’, the most such observations can ultimately do is to describe cases that lack one or both constitutive elements as not caring masculinities. The secondary, sometimes implicit, assessment about the significance and ‘conceptual resilience’ (Nayak, 2023: 14) of hegemonic masculinity also starts to fall down here because Elliott does not nearly deny this. In fact, Elliott (2016: 246–248) explicitly details the value of hegemonic masculinity for theorising the relationship between the constructions of cultural idealised notions of masculinity and the associated costs of patriarchy for men and women, locally, regionally, and globally. Moreover, Connell (2022) herself emphasises the need to ‘theorize more egalitarian forms of masculinity, which, we may hope, prefigure ways for men to live in a gender-equal society’ and stresses a need for research that ‘yields stories of positive change, as well as stories of violence and oppression’.

An arguably more nuanced concern with caring masculinities has been the extent to which it risks becoming a white concept. Prattes (2022) and Nayak (2023) offer important starting points for a decolonial approach to caring masculinities that troubles the idea of white middle class men as exemplars of caring masculinities, with marginalised men rendered as ‘deficient carers’ (Prattes, 2022: 724), though each tread in subtly different directions. Nayak’s critique, building on arguments noted in the previous paragraphs, proceeds with a view about the ‘shortcomings to the caring masculinities thesis’ (Nayak, 2023) and the capitalist-inspired material impediments to men’s care in the Global South. Meanwhile, Prattes draws attention to the need for a more encompassing use of the concept of caring masculinities and the productive possibilities this can bring when sufficiently infused with a focus on race and the coloniality of labour; namely, a ‘critique and challenge of the dominating power that the center holds and [a] stand against hybrid incorporations of non-dominant elements of masculinities into the malestream’ (Prattes, 2022: 722).

Elliott’s work, grounded in feminist care ethics and Black feminist scholarship, aligns with Prattes’ proposition, and this alignment is visible in Roberts and Elliott’s (2020) use of literature from the Global South to argue that the margin can be a site for radical re-imagining of the gender order (See also Roberts et al., 2021). Despite suggestions that caring masculinities have ‘been insufficiently theorized and barely been investigated empirically’ (Ruby and Scholz, 2018: 81), we maintain in league with Elliott that as a practice caring masculinities can represent an important intervention in the patriarchal gender order. Underscoring this point, we now provide a thematic analysis derived from the initial data collection from our ongoing study of men’s experience of low paid, front-line care work in Australia. We argue for the continued relevance and highlight the concept’s capaciousness by discussing both pillars as outlined by Elliott: embracing care and rejecting domination.

Our ongoing study

Accounts of contemporary men’s care about and for others are often taken up in research on the ‘involved’ or ‘new father’ (Prattes, 2022). There is also a small, established body of literature on caring masculinities and professional workers (e.g. Cottingham, 2017 on nurses; Cannito and Mercuri, 2022 on social workers) which explores ‘when, how, and under what conditions [. . .] men escape instrumental forms of rationality and engage in caring practices’ (Hanlon, 2022: 10). There is, though, limited research on the social experiences and processes that drive the possibility for care and its attendant relationship with masculinity among men in low paid, front-line care work. Our ongoing project, funded by the Australian Research Council, seeks to remedy this through attention to men currently employed as ‘Personal Carers and Assistants’ and ‘Aged/Disabled Carers’ in Australia. This research is significant as it, first, retraces where and how men turn to care, and second, ascertains continuities of men’s caring practices in their work life and private life.

Data collection is currently underway and involves two steps: focus groups and narrative biographical interviews conducted with men³ in regional and metropolitan areas. All participants work in roles that do not require tertiary education and are recruited via social media targeted recruiting and snowballing. At the time of writing, we have conducted and transcribed five focus groups and 13 narrative biographical interviews. Data are being coded using Dovetail, a computer-assisted analysis software platform optimised for collaborative analysis. Here, we focus on ‘connection’, an emerging theme that is crucial in the focus groups and that surfaces in many of the men’s individual narrative biographical interviews. The building of ‘strong relationships’, ‘bonds’, or a ‘genuine connection’ with ‘the people that you care with’ – as Juan⁴ termed it – is crucially important to our participants. For this article, we selected four men who differ in age, racial, ethnic, and class background, as well as migration status, thus disrupting the narrow association of men’s caring practices with privileged men only.

Juan (52) grew up in regional Australia and is a support worker in a residential facility catering to formerly houseless members of the LGBTIQA + population aged 50 years and over. In addition, he volunteers for another LGBTIQA + community organisation in his spare time. About the process of building connections with residents as a man in the health care and social assistance sector, Juan shares the following:

I think sometimes it can be a work in progress with people and it really doesn’t matter if you’re male or female, it’s just – not all the time. But sometimes it’s just what kind of person you are, whether you connect with them, whether they trust you [. . .]. But in terms of my experience with that, I think with anyone the more of a connection you have with people and the more they can see that you’re there to genuinely help them and you’re authentic and [. . .] they get to know who you are, opens up a little a lot of the barriers that may come up at the start because you are, you’re a man doing what a lot of women are doing there. (Juan, Focus Group 2)

In our interviews and focus groups, the theme of connection is often discussed in relation to what Hanlon (2012) calls ‘other-centred dispositions’. As care ethicists have long argued, care work links the physical tasks of caring for another, with feeling concern – caring about another (Ungerson, 1990). For Hanlon (2012), ‘caring about’ refers to this ‘other-centred disposition’, something ‘that caring work engenders’ (p. 31).

Tom (21) also grew up in Australia and works in two different support roles – both in hospital settings. He shares that before starting his roles in the health care and social assistance sector he had underestimated the rewards that come with what we here refer to as connection:

Yeah, I think very much that [human connection] is a really rewarding part of the job that I didn’t perceive going into the role. I think we hear a lot about kind of the physical material elements of personal care, the [. . .] feeding, showering people, and wiping butts and stuff. We don’t consider the human interaction that goes on there and kind of the tricky navigation of being able to sort of complete those things in a way that is not just ticking things off but dignified and being able to enrich someone’s day. Because often in personal care we don’t necessarily have huge amounts of power to be changing the circumstances for someone, but we can change some of those day-to-day things and do them in a way that is dignified and yeah, I get a real kick out of that. (Tom, Focus Group 3)

For Tom, and many other men who work in this field, it is not only important that the work is done, but also how the work is done – with dignity for those being cared for.

Juan, introduced above, also shares how he cared about his clients and wanted to make a difference for them. Following a passage in which he articulates the rewarding aspects of his role, he speaks about navigating the challenges and witnessing the struggles that some of his clients experience in old age:

Sometimes that can be off-putting because the environment that you’re in can be a little bit depressing. It’s sad to see where peoples’ lives are at that point of their life. When you look at it to see how they lived their life [when they were] younger and where they are at the end of their lives and they’re alone, they don’t have anyone. It gets to you a little bit. It’s a little bit of a motivation for me because I’m – it spurs me on to make a little bit more of a difference to this person. (Juan, Focus Group 2).

While acknowledging the challenges and rewards inherent to the work of care, several participants report having changed into care work because they were burnt out in previous, often corporate, careers and/or were looking for an occupation that, to them, feels valuable. Several respondents speak to how it was especially through being connected to their clients through their care work that their own mental health improved, attesting to the benefit that involvement in care work holds for men (see Hanlon, 2012; King and Elliott, 2021).

Marcus (39) was born in Asia and trained overseas to be a doctor. After completing his degree and returning to Australia, he could not find a job in his profession and started to work as a support worker in aged care. Both in the focus group and his narrative biographical interview, Marcus spoke at length about how he experienced being a caregiver simultaneously as receiving care himself through the exchange with the care recipient.

You [Juan], you [were] commenting on the human interaction, the connection. And I didn’t really express it clearly [before], but I think others also understand you. And I think that the reward we experience is not so much to make a difference in people’s lives – that in a very little way, in a subtle way. That the connection I build, and how people long to see us every time – It restores our (emphasized) mental health in a way. And it helps me. [When clients] talk about their past lives. And you are part of it. And you are probably a bit more – and then that brings tears to their eyes. And then you sense that connection. So, when you are driving home on the day you feel – you connected with another individual. And you just feel great about yourself. (Marcus, Focus Group 2).

Without wanting to romanticise the work of care and the real and structural constraints of care-giving in neoliberal economic contexts, many respondents share how giving care can also work reciprocally to replenish the caregiver.

These excerpts attest to how men in our sample satisfy the first pillar in Elliott’s conceptualisation of caring masculinities by embracing care, interdependence, and relationality through some of their practices. We now turn to the concept’s second pillar – that of rejecting domination. While the absence of dominating behaviour is more difficult to document, we observe some glimmers of this in our material to date. We return to Tom (Focus Group 3):

[to] be in positions where you are working with vulnerable people but where you are able to come in with compassion and kindness [. . .] which are not sort of traditionally masculine traits and I feel very – I guess empowered in those situations almost in the way that you would feel being a parent. I mean I’m not one myself but in terms of being able to nurture and empower people who are vulnerable with the sort of the privilege that I have.

We read this as describing a non-dominating practice. Tom acknowledges power differentials in concrete care relationships with vulnerable people, yet, he does not seek to control or dominate his clients. Instead, he understands the power he has – the ‘privilege’ – as triggering the responsibility to care in ways that involve compassion and kindness. His caring practices, and the power he possesses within them, lead not to domination but evince another-centering focus. Being able to actualise this other-centering disposition, which is not, he states, a traditionally masculine trait, makes him feel good about himself.

Another realm of practices that could signal non-domination is that entering support roles that are ‘low’ in status as well as remuneration can be a step down in terms of occupational mobility. Reading this occupational downwards mobility as evidence of non-dominating practice is not straightforward as the reasons for choosing a career in support work are complex, often emerging from a bundle of considerations and multiple motivations (sometimes involving restrictive access to labour markets and difficulties of finding other jobs because of discrimination due to class status, race, ethnicity, or nationality). Still, the emerging data indicates that the motivation to do something meaningful and contribute to a more caring society can trump other considerations and/or be the most important reason why men enter the profession.

Liem (52) was born in Asia and migrated to Australia where he worked successfully in the IT sector for most of his working life. He states that in the past he has been ‘very disconnected from the realities of life’ (Liem, narrative biographical interview). He chooses to work in the disability support sector because it is important to him to do something ‘valuable’ with the ‘rest of his life’. Talking to care work’s low prestige in general, and particularly support roles, Liem acknowledges he was unaware of these perceptions before entering the field:

It was certainly a bit later on that I started talking to ex-colleagues and people who were from professional white collar type backgrounds and still working there that I started to understand that there was a perception that perhaps I’d taken a step down and they all went, oh, good on you. You know, it’s a noble thing to do. And I’m like, well, I don’t know. Is it really? Like, I don’t know. I couldn’t really gel with that. (Liem, Focus Group 5).

While Liem was previously unaware of the low value ascribed to such care work, he withstands these challenges and continues to work in the field. Liem, like other respondents, actively seeks to contribute to a more caring world. These men understand their hands-on care work as a contribution to larger society; their work has value to them and, in turn, makes them feel valuable.

Conclusion

This article accentuates the relevance of the concept of caring masculinities, extends the concept beyond its typical application, and, in doing so, clarifies what we argue are pervasive misreadings of the concept. On the back of a short genealogy of the concept we adumbrated a series of applications that stray from the conceptualisation of caring masculinities offered by Elliott as practices that embrace care and reject domination. We work with the concept of caring masculinities in our ongoing study with men in support roles in the Australian health care and social assistance sector and, thus, with a sample of men who are not usually included in scholarship on caring masculinities. Interrogating caring practices of these men marginalised due to class, race, ethnicity, or nationality status, we iterate the importance for research attuned to a complex, intersectional landscape of power and show that caring masculinities, as a concept, is capacious enough to hold such a reality. We offer an initial analysis of the theme of connection in our empirical data and retrace how men in our sample centre the cared for (via other-centred dispositions) and show willingness to recede from hegemony through their practices. In other words, in interactions with men who work in care roles that do not require tertiary education we find both pillars of the concept of caring masculinities: Men who, embracing care, are committed to contribute something of value to larger society through their caring labours and who reject dominating practice while doing so. This is against the grain of recent critiques and offers a potent reminder that caring masculinities, conceptually and empirically, remain worthy of serious sociological consideration.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article: This research is funded by a grant from the Australian Research Council,under the ‘Discovery Projects’ scheme,award number DP220103315.

ORCID iD

Riikka Prattes

Author biographies

Steven Roberts is a Professor of Education & Social Justice,School of Education,Culture and Society,and Associate Dean,Graduate Research at the Faculty of Education,Monash University. He is a researcher of masculinities and social change,and also youth transitions,with a particular interest in social class inequality. His books include Young Working Class Men in Transition;Gender,Masculinity and Video Gaming (with Marcus Maloney and Tim Graham);and Masculinity,Labour and Neoliberalism (edited with Charlie Walker).

Riikka Prattes is a Research Fellow at the School of Education Culture and Society at Monash University. Previously,Riikka held postdoctoral positions at the programme of Gender,Sexuality,and Feminist Studies at Duke University and a visiting fellowship at Paris Lodron University Salzburg. She is a founding member of the Revaluing Care in the Global Economy network and serves on the network’s advisory board. Riikka’s research focuses on care ethics,men and masculinities,and decolonial theory and has appeared in journals such as Feminist Theory,Men and Masculinities and Essays in Philosophy.

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