Young Men, Footwear and the 'Doing' of Masculinities

by Victoria Robinson, Jenny Hockey and Rachel Dilley

Canadian Sociological Association: 
Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences,
University of Victoria British Columbia, 3rd-8th June 2013.

At the beginning of June the team presented a paper at the CSA annual conference. Using data from interviews with young male participants the paper refutes the overly simplistic and negative claims by Shadow Health Minister Diane Abbott that masculinity is in crisis.  As we have shown throughout our research, shoes provide a lens through which to understand the multiple ways identities are practiced and transformed everyday and throughout life course. Although perhaps more popularly associated with women, shoes have proven to be as revealing about masculinity as they are about femininity. By interviewing men about their choices of footwear the paper restores the male voices so distinctly absent from Abbott's assumptions, giving a much more nuanced insight into the ways changing masculinities are experienced and negotiated. We contend that it is through practice that historically and culturally-specific norms, beliefs and values about the nature of masculinity both come into being and inform men’s subjectivities and actions. As social and material contexts change, however, so practice alters, and being a man is achieved differently. Indeed, we would argue, one becomes a somewhat different kind of man depending on what shoes one decides to don each morning, and over the life course.

Click here to read the conference paper.

UPDATE: An extended paper has since been published in the NORMA International Journal for Masculinity Studies (may require institutional access).