Men’s Stories for a Change: Ageing Men Remember

Abstract

This is an unusual and very insightful book, not easy to place in a particular tradition or discipline. It features personal stories of several older profeminist men who met together over a thirteen-year period to compose and discuss personal reflections on thematic aspects of masculinities. The methodological approach is grounded in Frigga Haug’s (1987) memory-work approach to excavating and collectively understanding gendered ways individuals construct their identity. The authors make it clear in their introduction that the passages are not meant to be confessional. On the contrary, “the mode was care and critique, not therapy†(p. xxvi). Haug states: “memory-work must, then, contain an element of practical questioning; it is not concerned purely and simply with a search for new insights†(1987, p. 69). Given the years the authors committed to the Older Men’s Memory Work Group, during which time some men left the group and one passed away before publication, it became clear that the text was, indeed, “a product of a kind of ‘slow research’ into and on our lives that can now be interrogated, analysed and critiqued by others†(p. xxvii). The stories in this book offer...