![Sample our Built Environment journals, sign in here to start your access, Latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5926/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Built-Environment.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
By telling the story of an agricultural university in Peru, this article shows how a specific professional formation forges a strong linkage between engineering and masculine identities in water management. Although these identities come to be seen as self-evident or even natural, they are the outcome of diverse, repeated, and ritualized performances as part of the everyday life of the university. Through collectively enacting and experiencing such cultural performances, engineering students are trained to do science and technology in specific ways, ways that embody particularly masculine symbolic repertoires. On becoming part of a professional society, through rites of passage such as hazing and field work, students simultaneously learn to behave as engineers and become ‘real’ men. Building on and sometimes actively re-working existing societal markers of hierarchy and difference, male engineers in this process distinguish themselves from non-engineers, women and ‘other’ men. With careful interviewing and observation of agricultural engineers, the article suggests an interpretive framework to analyse the multiple cultural and performative repertoires that ‘engineer’ specific masculinities.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the reviewers and the editor for very helpful comments and Alvar Closas for suggesting .
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Durkheim, “The Elementary Forms of Religious Life,” 1912.
2 Oré and Rap, “Políticas Neoliberales,” 2009; Rap and Wester, “The Practices,” 2013.
3 ‘Masculine’ is between quotation marks to remind the reader that this is a label applied by the researchers. This is to leave open the question: ‘On what basis do the researchers name or label something as masculine?’ To assign meaning like this is a human and contentious process, shaped by specific cultural and political discursive repertoires, hence we do not claim to arrive at universal ideas of man- and womanhood. This effort is part of an ongoing academic debate on gender.
4 In this article, we give little attention to the early entrance of women students to the university, their increasing numbers and participation over time, and how women of different generations and backgrounds have dealt with the masculinities described here. Because we carried out a series of interviews with these women engineers, we will write a successive paper on this particular topic.
5 Liebrand, “Masculinities among Irrigation Engineers,” 2014.
6 Whitehead, Men and Masculinities, 2002.
7 Faulkner, “Doing Gender in Engineering Workplace Cultures I,” 2009.
8 Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1959, p. 15.
9 Munro, “The Cultural Performance of Control,” 1999; Rap, “Performing Accountability,” 2017.
10 Durkheim, “The Elementary Forms of Religious Life,” 1912; Richards, “Private Versus Public?” 2004, p. 261.
11 Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 1973; Kennedy, “Viewing Wildlife Managers as a Unique Professional Culture,” 1985.
12 Connell and Connell, Masculinities, 2005.
13 Butler, Gender Trouble, 1999.
14 Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 1962.
15 Butler, Gender Trouble, 1999, p. 179.
16 West and Zimmerman, “Doing Gender,” 1987; Brickell, “Performativity or Performance?” 2003.
17 Green, “Queer Theory and Sociology,” 2007.
18 Faulkner, “The Power and the Pleasure?” 2000; Zwarteveen, “Men, Masculinities, and Water Powers in Irrigation,” 2008.
19 Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine, 1999.
20 Turner, The Ritual Process, 1969.
21 Connell and Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity,” 2005, p. 838.
22 Rap, “The Success,” 2006.
23 Connell, Masculinities, 1995.
24 Piña Osorio, La Interpretación, 1998.
25 Faulkner, “The Power,” 2000; Oldenziel, Making Technology, 1999.
26 Kennedy, “Viewing Wildlife Managers as a Unique Professional Culture,” 1985.
27 Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, 1961, p. 242.
28 Almeida and Queda, Universidade Preconceitos & Trote, 2005.
29 Simmons, “The Criollo Outlook,” 1955; Mendez, “Incas Si, Indios No,” 1995; de la Cadena, “Are Mestizos Hybrids?” 2005.
30 This section is strongly based on: Oré and Rap, “Políticas Neoliberales,” 2009.
31 Cleaves, Professions and the State, 1987.
32 Cleaves, Professions and the State, 1987.
33 Cleaves, Professions and the State, 1987, p. 9.
34 Brandth and Haugen, “From Lumberjack to Business Manager,” 2000; Zwarteveen, “Making Water Engineering Masculine,” 2017.
35 Vanderghem, La Escuela Nacional de Agricultura y Veterinaria, 1993.
36 Olcese Pachas, Enfrentando la Adversidad Camino a la Gloria, 2002.
37 Oré, Agua bien común y usos privados, 2005.
38 Popularly known by the criolla song from the hacienda era: ‘A la Molina no voy más’, in which workers decide that they will no longer return to La Molina, because of their maltreatment.
39 Oré and Rap, “Políticas Neoliberales,” 2009.
40 Olcese Pacheco, Enfrentando la Adversidad Camino a la Gloria, 2002, p. 2.
41 In 1969, the military government of general Velasco Alvarado promulgated the Agrarian Reform Law to distribute the land of large haciendas among agrarian cooperatives and societies of social interest, as well as a new Water Law, according to which the Peruvian State centralized and assumed control over water management in the country.
42 Douglas, Purity and Danger, 1966.
43 Turner, The Ritual Process, 1969.
44 Connell and Connell, Masculinities, 2005.
45 Faulkner, “The Power and the Pleasure?” 2000, p. 107.
46 Kennedy, “Viewing Wildlife Managers as a Unique Professional Culture,” 1985, p. 573.
47 Olchese Pachas, Enfrentando, 2002.
48 Maruy Tashima, “De la Regla de Cálculo a la Era Digital,” 2010, p. 2.
49 León, La Escuela Nacional de Agricultura en sus Bodas de Oro, 1994.
50 Bacigalupo Palomino, Alma Mater Molinera, 2003.
51 Laurie, “Developing Development Orthodoxy,” 2005.
52 Maruy Tashima, “De la Regla de Cálculo a la Era Digital,” 2010.
53 Maruy Tashima, “De la Regla de Cálculo a la Era Digital,” 2010, p. 2.
54 Florman, The Existential Pleasures of Engineering, 1976; Faulkner, “The Power and the Pleasure?” 2000.
55 Maruy Tashima, “De la Regla de Cálculo a la Era Digital,” 2010, p. 2.
56 Maruy Tashima, “De la Regla de Cálculo a la Era Digital,” 2010, p. 3.
57 Maruy Tashima, “De la Regla de Cálculo a la Era Digital,” 2010, p. 8.
58 Mid-1960s social conflicts in the country shook up the university. Students, workers and professors organized continuous strikes until the military government intervened violently. The university dismissed several professors and students of the left and closed the specialization of sociology.
59 Bacigalupo Palomino, Alma Mater Molinera, 2003.
60 Rap, “Governing the Water User,” 2017.
61 Tonso, “Teams That Work,” 2006.
62 Faulkner, “Doing Gender in Engineering Workplace Cultures I,” 2009, Faulkner, “Doing Gender in Engineering Workplace Cultures II,” 2009.
63 All names are anonymized in this quote.
64 Tonso, “On the Outskirts of Engineering,” 2007.
65 Downey and Lucena, “National Identities in Multinational Worlds,” 2005.
66 Cleaves, Professions, 1987, p. 73.
67 Piña Osorio, La Interpretación, 1998.
68 Almeida and Queda, Universidade Preconceitos & Trote, 2005.