F eminist and g ender t heories

SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY IN THE CONTEMPORARY ERA
for large-scale social structures with recognition of personal experience and collective 
agency.
Connell received her doctorate in sociology from the University of Sydney, where she 
currently holds a university chair. She has also taught at the University of California at Santa 
Cruz, Macquarie University in Sydney, and Flinders University in Adelaide and has held 
visiting posts at the University of Toronto, Harvard University, and Ruhr-Universität 
Bochum. Connell’s work is widely cited in social science and humanities publications inter-
nationally. Four of her books have been listed among the ten most influential books in 
Australian sociology. She is frequently invited to give keynote addresses at conferences and 
seminars, and has done so at events in Canada, Switzerland, Germany, Senegal, and Britain. 
Connell has received the American Sociological Association’s award for distinguished con-
tribution to the study of sex and gender, as well as the Australian Sociological Association’s 
award for distinguished service to sociology.
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Akin to Chodorow, Connell is concerned about the resiliency of gender roles, and the pattern 
of practices that allows men’s dominance over women. However, rather than use object rela-
tions theory to explain these practices, Connell expands on the work of the Italian journalist, 
communist, and political activist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), who coined the concept of 
“cultural hegemony.” (See Significant Others box, Chapter 3, p. 88.) Building on Marx’s 
notion that “the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class,” and fascinated by the extraor-
dinary ideological power of the Catholic Church in Italy, Gramsci used the term “cultural 
hegemony” to refer to how the ruling class maintains its dominance not primarily through 
force or coercion, but rather through the willing, “spontaneous” consent of the ruled. In a 
similar vein, Connell uses the term “hegemonic masculinity” to refer to the pattern of prac-
tices that allows men’s dominance over women to continue (Connell and Messerschmidt 
2005:832). Connell maintains that there are many kinds of masculinities but that there is 
always one that is hegemonic to the rest and marginalizes others in a gender system. This 
does not mean that hegemonic masculinity is either monolithic or static, but, rather, that it is 
the kind of masculinity that is in a superior position. No matter what, each culture will prefer 
one kind of masculinity over others. Significantly, however, Connell maintains that most men 
do not live in the model of hegemonic masculinity, and that masculinity (as femininity) has 
internal contradictions and historical ruptures, because what is hegemonic is determined in a 
mobile relation. Above all, Connell is concerned with the changing patterns of “hegemony”: 
the dominance of particular patterns of masculinity over others.
Connell’s conceptualization of “hegemonic masculinity” has the central advantage of 
locating male dominance not solely in the microlevel and the interpersonal dynamics of the 
family, but also in the macrolevel and the public sphere. “Hegemonic masculinity” recog-
nizes not only the gendered character of bureaucracies and workplaces as well as educational 
institutions, including classroom dynamics and patterns of bullying, but also the media, for 
instance the interplay of sports and war imagery, as well as the virtual monopoly of men in 
certain forms of crime, including syndicated and white-collar crimes. In theoretical terms, 
Connell explicitly accounts for both the more “rational” dimensions of dominance (institu-
tionalized bureaucracies) and the “nonrational” dimensions (e.g., sports and war imagery), as 
shown in Figure 7.5. As Connell and Messerschmidt (ibid.:846) state, “Cultural consent, 
discursive centrality, institutionalization and the marginalization or delegitimation of alterna-
tives are widely documented features of socially dominant masculinities. . . . Hegemony 

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