Economic Geography

What about men and boys?
Feminist work in economic geography has, as I have indicated, the potential to
transform the sub-discipline. In its development, perhaps inevitably, many of the
adherents of feminist perspectives, have been women, delighted to be able to
write their own lives into their work and to make women’s labourers visible.
Similarly, many of the recent empirical analyses have fore-grounded women.
However, gender is, of course, a relational concept. Women are what men are
not – lack or absence in a Lacanian perspective; emotional not rational, private
not public, nature to men’s culture, yet, paradoxically, a gentle civilising influence
on dominant, and aggressive masculinity. In the work that I have discussed so far
this version of masculinity lies in the background – for example in critiques of
organisational cultures that emphasis presence, long hours at the office as a mark
of commitment aggression in, for example closing deals or dominating subordi-
nates and in the work that explores different ways of managing the workplace or
combining/reconciling daily life and waged work. In some studies, masculinity
has been a more explicit focus. Despite being labelled as someone who works 
on ‘women and work’, my book about banking is as much about masculinity as
femininity; I interviewed men as well as women about their working lives and 
the culture of the bank that employed them. But in a sense, it was femininity that
absorbed me (indeed I re-examined my interview transcripts after a commentary
from Trevor Barnes and his students that suggested I had downplayed the 
place of men in my work (McDowell 2001)) and certainly a set of questions
about how women construct an acceptable performance in a male-dominated
workplace (universities as well as banks) and combined demanding employment
with raising children was a partial impetus for the study. This was a stage in my
own life when my own children were still relatively young and the competing
demands of home and work, publishing and nurturing seemed hard to reconcile. 
The piece of empirical work that followed the bankers study also grew out of
my own changing life and the questions raised by bringing up a son, but also had
the explicit aim of placing men and masculinity right at the centre of the study,
stimulated by an expanding set of literatures about the social construction 
of masculinities (see for example Connell 1995, 2000; Mac An Ghaill 1996;
Whitehead 2002; Whitehead and Barrett 2001). One of the effects of the 
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Linda McDowell

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Feminist economic geographies
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shift to a service-based economy and the associated feminisation of the nature of
work has been to relatively disadvantage young working class men who, leaving
school with little educational capital might, in earlier years, have expected to find
relatively secure and reasonably paid work in the manufacturing sector. In most
towns and cities these young men – the sort of ‘lads’ whose lives Paul Willis
(1977) so memorably captured in his book Learning to Labour – now face uncer-
tain futures as unskilled applicants for service work. The typical embodied attrib-
utes of working class masculinity – cheek, aggression, insolence, a certain style of
physical presence – are no longer valued in a labour market where deference,
docility and politeness is part of the scripted performance demanded in the 
service sector. Many of the bottom end jobs open to these men are regarded as
unacceptable by them, as an insult to their sense of masculinity, as women’s
work. Katherine Newman (1999) in her study of fast food workers in New York
showed young men found it difficult to be deferential, just as Philippe Bourgois
(1995) found in his study in a New York barrio and I did in Cambridge and
Sheffield (McDowell 2003). Young men disqualified themselves by their attitudes
and behaviours from many of the jobs available for unskilled applicants.