Raewyn Connell: Research, Politics, Social Change

By Raewyn Connell

Painters have their Retrospective Exhibitions, poets their Selected Poems, chess masters their Best Games, singers their Greatest Hits. But a researcher? It seems bold, even vainglorious, to present my Greatest Hits and Best Games. So much of social science is collaborative, so much depends on organisations, networks, shared ideas and shared excitement. This book is not an autobiography, but it is a collection of work by one researcher over forty years. I hope to show by example how intellectual projects can develop, how different lines of thought can meet and weave.

The collection is arranged in five sections, concerned with class structure, gender relations, the making of masculinities, the social dimension of education, and the global economy of knowledge. It includes some of my best-known writing and allows me to raise questions about change. These fields all involve questions of social justice. When I started out, I assumed that accurate knowledge and good understanding would support action for social justice. Sometimes that assumption was battered — at other times I could be more optimistic.

Choosing the articles wasn’t easy. It wasn’t a matter of picking favourites. I wanted texts that would say something relevant to readers now, and texts that would show the development of a field through time. Unexpectedly, that meant a tilt towards theory. I mostly do theoretical work close to empirical studies, whether fieldwork or archival; I try to think in the presence of the data, so to speak. So here it is. It may or may not be my Best Games or Greatest Hits, but it is the best collection of my work. I hope it will be useful to anyone interested in how ideas develop, how social science is built, and what directions we might take intellectual work in the near future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: May 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9780522879636

Book preview

Introduction

1

Singers have their Greatest Hits, painters their Retrospectives, chess masters their collections of Best Games. But a researcher? A social researcher? It seems vainglorious to try to collect the best. So much of social science is collaborative, so much depends on organisations, networks and movements, shared ideas and engagements. Anyway, how do we know what’s the greatest or the best?

But it may be worth looking at a social researcher’s trajectory, way of working, situation in the world—and the knowledge those conditions allow. Much of my writing is based on life-history interviews, which ask for that kind of information from other people. This book is not a life history, but perhaps it can be a case study: a collection of the changing work of one researcher over nearly fifty years.

2

Why do social research? I had a clear purpose when I began. It was the mid-1960s and the war in Vietnam was building towards its horrifying peak. Australia, a minor player in that war, was ruled by a corrupt, reactionary gang of politicians and businessmen. It was a deeply unjust society: the rich lived in mansions, the poor struggled for basic living conditions, Indigenous people were treated with particular viciousness. I was finishing a degree in history, a subject I loved, in a university department that emphasised close-focus documentary work. I was being taught to concentrate on small and remote problems, while the world went up in flames. I asked myself what kind of knowledge really mattered in this world, and social science came top of the list. So I enrolled for graduate study in social science, and by the 1970s was a full-time researcher and teacher.

Of course, many others were concerned with these issues; there was a movement. I had some busy years as a student activist, campaigning, writing manifestos, marching in demonstrations and trying to start collectives. When I began an academic job, a longer-term effort became possible: building research and teaching programs, and connecting with groups able to use research findings. That was a crucial point: if knowledge mattered, part of my job was to make it available.

Therefore, as well as writing articles for academic journals and papers for conferences, I wrote and spoke in other forums: for unions, social movements, the Labor Party, teacher organisations, literary magazines and mass media. Later, I wrote some reports for governments and for the United Nations, not to mention a pamphlet on socialist strategy for a left union group. When the internet arrived, I set up, with a colleague’s help, a website called www.raewynconnell.net. I have given video and audio talks, some of which became podcasts or YouTube videos.

So, if this book tells a story, it’s about what happens when the ambition to produce knowledge relevant to social justice and change meets the practical conditions of work in universities, located—most of them—far from the centre of the global economy of knowledge.

3

I have been sharply critical of universities, and have fought, not very successfully, to make them more democratic. The Good University spells out that idea. Despite my criticism, I have relied on what universities gave me: a salary and office, co-workers and students, research funds, the possibility of travel, and many friendships. Academic researchers depend absolutely on the skills of administrative, professional, technical and maintenance workers, and on other organisations, including libraries, publishers and professional associations, to provide the practical environment for our work.

From the start, much of my research has been done through teamwork. Collaborative projects are under-represented in this book, so I’ll emphasise the fact here. Some projects were designed jointly, then carried out and written up together. For the projects that I designed myself, I usually had research associates who soon became colleagues and co-authors. Collaborations are not magic: some led to conflict, some stalled. But most did generate energy, and in some there was a wonderful interplay of intellectual excitement and personal support. I’m very grateful to all the groups I have worked with.

4

About the author: I was born during World War II and grew up in the shadow of the atom bomb—literally, as eastern Australia was downwind from British bomb tests in the 1950s. I’m descended from settler-colonial families who joined the British invasion of Australia in the nineteenth century. I’ve had class privilege, race privilege and language privilege. I went to public-sector schools and universities in Australia and was given, for the time, an excellent education. I gained a love of history and literature, an interest in psychology, a curiosity about natural science, and a grounding in several European languages, only one of them dead.

I have held teaching jobs in three Australian universities and one in the United States, and have taught for shorter stints in other countries. I have been a union member all my working life; I’m now a life member of the National Tertiary Education Union. I joined the Australian Labor Party in the 1960s and stayed a member until the 1990s, when the party lurched so far to the right that I got seasick. I belong to several professional associations for social science, and have been to more conferences than I could shake a stick at. Being a professor in rich countries meant money and visa privilege for international travel. I have visited about thirty countries for lectures, seminars, conferences, interviews and discussions.

5

Social research on a substantial scale is not cheap. I decided early that to get funding I would sell my soul to the state, but not to the corporate world. I have had grants for basic research from the national agency, the Australian Research Council, and its predecessor, and for applied projects from federal and state government agencies such as departments of Health and Education.

I don’t make a sharp distinction between applied and basic research, but I’m conscious of different ways that research agendas develop. Sometimes they start from an expressed need for new knowledge. In the early years of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, activists from the gay community in Sydney, hard hit by illness and deaths, proposed to social scientists at Macquarie University a joint effort to produce knowledge about sexual practices that was urgently needed by community educators. We were able to get government funding, and a long-term research program followed. In other cases, a critique of current knowledge is the starting point; finding that information is missing, or a certain field is stuck or intellectually cramped, or otherwise in need of a new departure. That was the position with knowledge about masculinity in the 1980s (Chapter 1), and about the Australian ruling class in the 1970s (Chapter 5).

There are times when the work goes on without much drama, each study adding some detail to what was known before. There are times when things stagnate, or an apparently promising approach gets nowhere. Research projects do fail, though we hate to say so. There are times, too, when things move unexpectedly fast, when one move leads to another at a rising pace. I learned to bodysurf as a child, on Sydney’s lovely beaches. There’s a great pleasure in catching a wave just as it breaks, and feeling the surge of ocean all around as you plane through the water. Sometimes research has felt like that.

6

An important part of research is communicating about it. I think of writing as a craft, and I’ve searched for good models. I write a little poetry and read a great deal more, and I’ve paid attention to poets’ technique. (I once recited passages from Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’, backed by a band playing 12-bar blues, to an amazed inner-city audience in Sydney. Yes, it was the sixties!) In prose, I’ve learned from writers such as Patrick White and Alice Munro. In the research world, I’ve learned style mainly from the historians I admire. Whatever the models, I’ve aimed to write in a clear and unpretentious way that would still convey complex ideas and sustained arguments.

That demands thinking about the readers—what they bring to the encounter, and what my writing can and cannot do for them. I have tried to teach that approach, too. I have held writing workshops, and a few years ago wrote a booklet, Writing for Research, which is available to download for free from my website. So far it has been accessed 55 000 times: please go there, it should be a lot more!

7

What kind of knowledge has this effort produced? That sounds like a question from a very fierce and final examination paper: Define your working life in 200 words, and don’t write on both sides of the paper. I’ll try to answer within the word limit.

I have tried to produce a realistic social science, grounded empirically and flexible about method. I emphasise practice, things actually done in specific situations; and social agency, the capacities of people and groups to transform their situations. I try to recognise the here-and-now-ness of practice, its embodiment and its place, in local or in global terms.

The main aim has been knowledge relevant to struggles for social justice. That requires analyses of social structure, and much of my work has been to map existing patterns of power, privilege and oppression and to understand their dynamics. There are multiple structures in social life, and I have tried to clarify their entanglements in education, in organisations, in intimate relations and in the economy of knowledge.

A concern with agency has a strong consequence: we must be concerned with the effects of action, the downstream. The historicity of social life is fundamental; social science must concern time, transformation and possibility. To grapple with questions of social justice—which now include survival in the face of environmental catastrophe—is to be concerned with pathways towards structural transformations. That, I think, has been the basic direction of my work.

8

So, how to compose a collection? I have written in a variety of genres. I decided to focus on articles written for journals—more self-contained than chapters from books, reporting empirical and theoretical work directly. Rather than assemble favourite pieces, making a random assortment of topics, I decided to concentrate on specific pathways that I have followed over a span of years: concerning the making of masculinities, theories of gender, class structure, social issues in education, and the global economy of knowledge.

By choosing an early and late article from each, I hope to illustrate the transformation of knowledge itself, as well as its environment. Two broad changes will be very plain. One is the advent of neoliberal ideas and corporate-friendly policies, which became powerful in Australian life from the 1980s (chapters 6 and 8 particularly). The other is the development of postcolonial or Southern perspectives in the social sciences, a shift that has gained momentum more recently (chapters 2, 4 and 11).

My criteria unexpectedly produced a tilt towards theoretical writing. I mostly do theory in close connection with empirical work. Some rebalancing was needed. I used the old social scientist’s fallback: take a sample. I have taken extracts from three fieldwork projects and offer them in Chapter 9.

I have used an author’s privilege to make small edits here and there to improve readability. To keep the book to a reasonable length, in various chapters I have cut passages that seemed less relevant or interesting today, while keeping the most significant parts of the argument in full. These cuts are indicated in the text.

So, here it is. It may or may not have my Best Games and Greatest Hits, but it is the best collection of my work that I can put together. I’d like to think it could be an inspiration to new researchers, though I realise it’s just as likely to be an Awful Warning. Whatever it is, be welcome to my house!

Masculinities

1

Toward a new sociology of masculinity (1985)

THE WOMEN’S LIBERATION movement of the 1960s–70s promised a revolutionary change in knowledge. By the end of the 1970s not only had a new field called ‘women’s studies’ been created, but women’s concerns were being brought into the social sciences and humanities, and even the natural sciences. Yet, more was needed. To understand inequality also required ‘studying up’: that is, studying the groups that held resources and power. In gender relations, that mainly meant studying men and masculinity. At the time, the leading concept for gender analysis in the human sciences was ‘sex roles’. That included the idea of a ‘male role’. But role theory was a profoundly inadequate way of understanding power and inequality. Something more was needed, and this article was an attempt to say what it was.

The article was co-authored with Tim Carrigan and John Lee. They were my research assistants on a grant from the national government’s Australian Research Grants Committee for a project called ‘Theory of Class and Patriarchy’—possibly the first grant the ARGC ever gave for social theory. Both Tim and John were activists in the gay liberation movement, and Tim was finishing a PhD about theory. We decided to start with issues about masculinity, which were under-researched. Our first attempt to write up our work, in 1983, produced an 89-page duplicated booklet with the ironic title ‘Hard and Heavy Phenomena’, a phrase from a popular book that attempted to define what masculinity was about. We recast the text as a journal article and gave it a sober title: ‘Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity’. We sent this to an Australian journal, which had difficulties with its length, then sent it to a US journal that welcomed longer articles. It was published in Theory and Society in 1985.

The paper offered a very detailed review and critique of the ‘male role’ literature; an account of the impact of women’s liberation on the situation of men; a sardonic commentary on the newly popular genre of Books About Men; an account of gay liberation thinking about masculinity, from which came key ideas about hegemony and new masculinities; and an outline of the new approach we proposed. It was an outrageously long paper, of over 23000 words. That is too long to reprint in full here, and most of the early sections focus on now-forgotten authors and ideas. So I have chosen the final section, ‘Outline of a Social Analysis of Masculinity’, which presents the positive ideas that turned out to be influential: the plurality of masculinities, the complex way masculinities are made, the idea of hegemonic masculinity, historical shifts in the gender order, and political struggles over masculinity.

We were lucky to have published this in the United States. There was much more controversy about masculinity in the global North than in Australia at the time. Our discussion caught a wave. The paper was soon anthologised and translated. It came at the right time and helped to shape the field.

Looking back, it is easy to see its limitations. The empirical basis was quite limited. We gathered studies from psychology, sociology and anthropology, but there wasn’t much depth in masculinities research at the time. A good deal of that was soon to come; but another weakness was not so easily fixed. Almost all the research we gathered, and all the ideas we debated, came from the global North. In the same year that we circulated ‘Hard and Heavy Phenomena’, Ashis Nandy published his brilliant book about the making of masculinities under colonialism, The Intimate Enemy. It was published in Delhi, and I didn’t hear about it for another fifteen years.

Outline of a social analysis of masculinity

Men in the framework of gender relations

The starting point for any understanding of masculinity that is not simply biologistic or subjective must be men’s involvement in the social relations that constitute the gender order. In a classic article Gayle Rubin (1975) has defined the domain of the argument as ‘the sex/gender system’, a patterning of social relations connected with reproduction and gender division that is found in all societies, though in varying shapes. This system is historical, in the fullest sense; its elements and relationships are constructed in history and are all subject to historical change (Connell 1985). It is also internally differentiated, as Juliet Mitchell (1971) argued more than a decade ago. Two aspects of its organization have been the foci of research in the past decade: the division of labor and the structure of power. (The latter is what Kate Millett (1970) originally called ‘sexual politics’, and is the more precise referent of the concept ‘patriarchy’.) To these we must add the structure of cathexis, the social organization of sexuality and attraction—which as the history of homosexuality demonstrates is fully as social as the structures of work and power.

The central fact about this structure in the contemporary capitalist world (like most other social orders, though not all) is the subordination of women. This fact is massively documented, and has enormous ramifications—physical, mental, interpersonal, cultural—whose effects on the lives of women have been the major concerns of feminism. One of the central facts about masculinity, then, is that men in general are advantaged through the subordination of women.

To say ‘men in general’ is already to point to an important complication in power relations. The global subordination of women is consistent with many particular situations in which women hold power over men, or are at least equal. Close-up research on families shows a good many households where wives hold authority in practice (Kessler et al. 1985). The fact of mothers’ authority over young sons has been noted in most discussions of the psychodynamics of masculinity. The intersections of gender relations with class and race relations yield many other situations where rich white heterosexual women, for instance, are employers of working-class men, patrons of homosexual men, or politically dominant over black men.

To cite such examples and claim that women are therefore not subordinated in general would be crass. The point is, rather, that contradictions between local situations and the global relationships are endemic. They are likely to be a fruitful source of turmoil and change in the structure as a whole.

The overall relation between men and women, further, is not a confrontation between homogeneous, undifferentiated blocs. Our argument has perhaps established this sufficiently by now; even some role theorists, notably Helen Hacker (1957), recognized a range of masculinities. We would suggest, in fact, that the fissuring of the categories of ‘men’ and ‘women’ is one of the central facts about patriarchal power and the way it works. In the case of men, the crucial division is between hegemonic masculinity and various subordinated masculinities.

Even this, however, is too simple a phrasing, as it suggests a masculinity differentiated only by power relations. If the general remarks about the gender system made above are correct, it follows that masculinities are constructed not just by power relations but by their interplay with a division of labor and with patterns of emotional attachment. For example, as Alan Bray (1982) has clearly shown, the character of men’s homosexuality, and of its regulation by the state, is very different in the mercantile city from what it was in the pre-capitalist countryside.

The differentiation of masculinities is psychological—it bears on the kind of people that men are and become—but it is not only psychological. In an equally important sense it is institutional, an aspect of collective practice. In a notable recent study of British printing workers, Cynthia Cockburn (1983) has shown how a definition of compositors’ work as hypermasculine has been sustained despite enormous changes in technology. The key was a highly organized practice that drove women out of the trade, marginalized related labor processes in which they remained, and sustained a strongly-marked masculine ‘culture’ in the workplace. What was going on here, as many details of her study show, was the collective definition of a hegemonic masculinity that not only manned the barricades against women but at the same time marginalized or subordinated other men in the industry (e.g. young men, unskilled workers, and those unable or unwilling to join the rituals). Though the details vary, there is every reason to think such processes are very general. Accordingly we see social definitions of masculinity as being embedded in the dynamics of institutions—the working of the state, of corporations, of unions, of families—quite as much as in the personality of individuals.

Forms of masculinity and their interrelationships

In some historical circumstances, a subordinated masculinity can be produced collectively as a well-defined social group and a stable social identity, with some well-recognized traits at the personal level. A now familiar case in point is the ‘making of the modern homosexual’ (Plummer 1981) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One aspect of the collective process here was a change in forms of policing that criminalized homosexuality as such, creating a criminal sexual ‘type’. And one aspect of the psychological process was the creation of ‘camp’ personal style, both internalizing and sardonically transforming the new medical and clinical definition of the homosexual as a type of person.

In other circumstances, a subordinated masculinity may be a transient identity. The printing apprentices in Cockburn’s study provide one example of this. Another is provided by the New Guinea culture studied by Gilbert Herdt (1981), where younger men gain their masculinity through ritualized homosexuality under the guardianship of older men. In other cases again, the collective and individual processes do not correspond. There may be stable enough personalities and configurations of motive produced, which for various reasons do not receive a clear social definition. A historic case of this is the vague social identity of English homosexuality before the advent of ‘Molly’ at the end of the seventeenth century. Closer to home, another example would seem to be the various forms of effeminate heterosexual masculinity being produced today. There are attempts to give such masculinities an identity: for instance by commercial exploitation of hippie styles of dress; and by conservative transvestite organizations such as the Beaumont Society (UK) or the Seahorse Club (Australia). But for the most part there is no very clear social definition of heterosexual effeminacy. It is popularly assimilated to a gay identity when it is noticed at all—an equation its publicists furiously but unavailingly protest.

The ability to impose a particular definition on other kinds of masculinity is part of what we mean by ‘hegemony’. Hegemonic masculinity is far more complex than the accounts of essences in the masculinity books would suggest. It is not a ‘syndrome’ of the kind produced when sexologists like John Money (1970) reify human behavior into a ‘condition’, or when clinicians reify homosexuality into a pathology. It is, rather, a question of how particular groups of men inhabit positions of power and wealth, and how they legitimate and reproduce the social relationships that generate their dominance.

An immediate consequence of this is that the culturally exalted form of masculinity, the hegemonic model so to speak, may only correspond to the actual characters of a small number of men. On this point at least the ‘men’s liberation’ literature had a sound insight. There is a distance, and a tension, between collective ideal and actual lives. Most men do not really act like the screen image of John Wayne or Humphrey Bogart; and when they try to, it is likely to be thought comic (as in the Woody Allen movie Play It Again, Sam) or horrific (as in shoot-outs and ‘sieges’). Yet very large numbers of men are complicit in sustaining the hegemonic model. There are various reasons: gratification through fantasy, compensation through displaced aggression (e.g. poofter-bashing by police and workingclass youths), etc. But the overwhelmingly important reason is that most men benefit from the subordination of women, and hegemonic masculinity is centrally connected with the institutionalization of men’s dominance over women. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that hegemonic masculinity is hegemonic so far as it embodies a successful strategy in relation to women.