Masculinity in Crisis? A study on the Threat to Masculine Identities through Unemployment

The formation of identities within contemporary society is a recent and key focus of postmodernist theorising and empirical research. Beck suggests that a fragmentation in traditional institutions of reproduction like the family and work has obscured social roles. The study of men and masculinities has been one of the most vigorous in contemporary postmodernist scholarship as writers have begun to explore the diversity of men's experiences, conceptions of masculinities and their power relations. Where traditional enactments o f masculine identities have been perceived as unproblematic, authors began to suggest that the social roles within which men were typecast were in desperate need of overhaul. Masculinity became a problematic construct and needed to be deconstructed and re-evaluated. With the change in gender roles, especially women's increased participation in the workforce, traditional social roles were altered. My interest lies in examining how these alterations affected men's perception of themselves in society. Men have long been typecast in instrumental economically derived positions wherein masculinity, male identity and male performance all centre on work. In light o f this alleged centrality of employment and occupational status in the lives of men, unemployment might be seen as a providing a situation where masculinity is under challenge. Also, from the arena of the public worksphere comes the concept of a sense of place. No longer finding a location in a place of work through the context of employment and often feeling out of place at home in the private sphere, the unemployed male may have a sense o f placelessness. This thesis investigates an alternative sense of place available to unemployed men and examines its effects on re-affirming alternative masculine identities