Relevance is a given, is it not, with a good reference work; so are logical coherence, currency, usability, and value for money. But you do not want a tutorial – you want a review. Interestingness is a bonus, and so is long‐overdue‐ness. The International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities (yes, a plural which we will examine later) has all these in spades, and it is a book that I am very pleased to see in print. Its approach really is international and cross‐cultural. It has a sound core of concepts and explanations at its heart. It succeeds in not boring on over‐familiar ideas like marriage and leisure, friendship and sport and emotions, opening up legitimate masculinist slants on them. It does not back away from areas like working with men in prison or men's relations with women: these are often challenges in the field and equally challenges for compilers of encyclopaedias. It uses clear unpretentious language, even about complicated theory, and maintains a consistent level of objectivity, even on sexual politics. Some books about men, masculinities and maleness are for men: this is one for everybody.
Coming from the Routledge stable, the promise and expectation is high. Even so, each new reference work is only as good as itself and so we must judge it on its merits. So, defining terms of engagement first of all: it is an encyclopaedia about men (adult males, of course, with power and identity and practices and futures, just like adult females, or perhaps, some say, not just like them – think of hegemonic masculinity, an entry here). Male roles and identity and power are probably socially constructed, probably attributed to men by (post)feminist structuralist discourse, perhaps embedded in patterns of work and family life, probably framed by race and class and ethnicity. It is also an encyclopaedia about masculinities: the plural evolved in the 1970s and now needs to be used because it is a cross‐cultural and protean concept, building on Freud and patriarchy, gender relations in all cultures, enculturated through school and family, confirmed perhaps by economics, underpinned by theory like queer theory and studies of the body, and extensively examined in many contexts (for example Asian‐American masculinity, Indian masculinity, and so forth).
Around this is a constellation of related concepts and entries. There are 353 entries in all, made up of essays (of between 400 and 2,250 words), like “Male and manhood”, “Hyper‐masculinity”, “Crisis in masculinity” (that attrition in the 1990s because of feminism), “Colonial and post‐Colonial and diasporic and global masculinities”, and more. Linked with these are “Men's interests”, “Men in feminized jobs”, “Fatherhood and families”, “Marriage and divorce”, “Effeminacy” and the “Male gaze”. These are others, then, provide that core of meanings – ones we would expect to find, in fact – that define the encyclopaedia itself. A concise introduction by the editors explains how the field has developed in recent decades (and particularly from the mid‐1990s), above all internationally, and this confirms the relevance of the work now. Very much the kind of book to add to reference shelves in a college or university library, above all one supporting study of such issues.
The book includes all kinds of critical angles on the topics of men and masculinities, and this adds substantially to its usefulness. It explains what psychological and sociological, anthropological and philosophical approaches set out to achieve here, it provides a useful entry on research methodology, it teases out (in numerous entries) the political dimensions of men and masculinities, provides a lot of coherent objective information about male sexuality, identifies the main constructions and representations of maleness in the media and literature and elsewhere, offers a relatively thorough historical framework, and overall roots ideas and discussion in a firm reality. We are dealing here with real issues and real people, rather than mere intellectual constructs. This makes the book approachable by non‐experts and by readers (students, teachers, researchers in other and related fields, laity) and helps make it worth considering for reference libraries in public libraries too.
The five editors, 16 consultant editors, and some 200 contributors come from all over. Longer entries are helpfully sub‐divided and all entries are provided with useful lists of references (English‐language, from the last three or so decades). Perhaps the thematic index (provided at the front and complementing the alphabetical list of entries) shows the conceptual convincingness of the book best and this can be used, along with an excellent index, to mine the encyclopaedia systematically for particular research themes. Typical thematic groups are life course (e.g. ageing, retirement), sexuality (e.g. gay masculinities, homoeroticism, impotence), violence and crime (e.g. aggression, elder abuse, self‐harm, violence), health (e.g. infertility, depression), institutions (e.g. police, prisons, social work), theory (e.g. gay and lesbian studies, socio‐biology), cultural formations (e.g. Australian and Japanese masculinities), and masculinity politics (e.g. anti‐feminism, fathers' rights, men's liberation). See also cross‐references in the entries implement this and work coherently with the index.
This is a fast‐moving field and so, with the best will in the world, the encyclopaedia can only be a snapshot of its time. But it aims deep and wide and will almost certainly have an active life of at least five years. The e‐book alternative should be explored by likely purchasers. For any further editions, the even more fast moving field of man/masculinities and the law (along with ethics) deserves a lot more coverage, and I hope that that will appear in due course. In the meantime, we have some highly topical books from elsewhere in the Routledge list like Collier (2007) and Thomson (2008).
What we have here, then, is a reference work that will provide coherent introductions to pretty well all the central concepts in the field, connect them up, and do all this for readers coming from all directions and wanting reliable and clear information. It acknowledges that “there is no single over‐arching position that men adopt or that can be adopted on behalf of men” (page 404, entry of Men) and that “the driver for this powerful shift in the gaze on men has been feminism” (page 404, entry of Men). It is what it says – “a starting point for wider exploration” (Introduction), and we can ask for little more from any one‐volume reference work to so complex a field. This is long overdue.
