Trans*forming higher education men and masculinity studies: a critical review

ABSTRACT

White heterosexual cisgender men’s narratives saturate the literature on college masculinities, thus far, perpetuating a hegemonic and essentialist definition of masculinity and conflating sex and gender identity and expression. The exclusion of other-gendered masculine voices in turn limits possibilities to destabilize and transform hegemonic masculinity. Additionally, the emergent literature on trans* students presents a dismal outlook for an aggregated population with little if any understanding of how trans* students conceptualize gender. This manuscript provides a critical review of these two expanding strands of literature, calls for more critical interrogations of masculinity/ies from divergent perspectives, such as trans*masculine students, with potential implications to trans*forming masculinities.

KEYWORDS:

• Trans
• transgender
• transmasculine
• masculinity
• higher education
• literature review

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

T.J. Jourian is the author of ‘Trans*Forming Authentic Leadership,’ ‘Evolving Nature of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity,’ ‘We Are Not Expected: Trans* educators (re)claiming space and voice in higher education and student affairs’ and others. His research focuses on queer and trans* populations, perspectives, and leadership in higher education, justice-centered curriculum and pedagogy, and the use of critical, collaborative, and participatory frameworks and methodologies in higher education.

Notes

1 This paper utilizes trans with an asterisk ‘to include not only identities such as transgender, transsexual, trans man, and trans woman that are prefixed by trans- but also identities such as genderqueer, neutrois, intersex, agender, two-spirit, cross-dresser, and genderfluid’ (Tompkins, 2014, p. 27) and by extension trans*masculine as a broad term marking female-assigned-at-birth individuals who identify with masculinity.

2 Following the example of Rosiek and Kinslow (2015), this text capitalizes racial descriptors (e.g. Black), except for ‘white’ due to a lack of any ‘collective ‘White’ identity organized around the project of resistance to institutionalized racism’ (p. xxxvii).