No clear road map for a man to follow

It is ten years since R. W. Connell's Masculinities first appeared and convincingly demonstrated how studies of masculinity form "a comprehensive field of knowledge". But what the second edition and the new works by Tim Edwards and Victor Seidler show is that it is also a field fraught with complexity and dissent. There is not, we can safely conclude from these books, a singular way to understand masculinity and "being a man". Nor is there a clear road map of how to transform masculinities to help "realise new visions of gender and sexual justice" (Seidler).

What Connell and Edwards in particular achieve, however, is a cogent and critically engaged overview of the diverse theoretical, therapeutic and political movements that make up the field. Both also manage to anchor the abstraction that has characterised some of this work in experience and concrete social circumstance. Connell, for example, uses men's accounts of their own bodies to ground poststructuralist theorisation and show how bodily experience is embedded "in memories of our lives and thus in understanding who and what we are". With characteristic humour, Edwards uses his own broken wrist to think through some of the same ideas.

In a new introduction and afterword, Connell reviews more recent work and extends some of his thinking on the significance to masculinity of global economics, politics and culture. He argues that there is a necessary intersection between the global and the local and specific, which theorists and practitioners ignore at their peril. Connell remains chiefly focused on the social sciences, however, and has relatively little to say about work on masculinity coming via literary, media and cultural studies. It is in this respect that Edwards's Cultures of Masculinity is especially welcome. He skilfully explores the resonances and dissonances between different disciplinary approaches and argues for more integration and dialogue.

It is perhaps unfair to review Seidler's Transforming Masculinities alongside these two books. It is not a textbook in the same way and does not aim to provide an overview of the field or a systematic review and critique of key thinkers and theories as Connell and Edwards separately do.

The book works more as a series of meditations on themes laid out in the chapter headings. Chapter nine, for example, is "Fatherhood, class, 'race', power and sex"; the one that follows "Diasporas, histories, drugs and violence". The connections between these themes are not immediately clear and one of the pleasures of reading Seidler's book is the way he weaves them together, making some incisive connections and observations along the way - most importantly on the relationship between the political, emotional and therapeutic. At times, though, this approach also makes the book feel a bit directionless. It is occasionally repetitive and lacks clear signposting and some of the specific detail students might be seeking.

Seidler does not claim that Transforming Masculinities should be the first port of call for students and scholars trying to get to grips with this field. It should, though, be a subsequent stop for them, not least because of the way it deals rather differently with the need to pull back from abstraction and to honour the individual.

Matt Cook is lecturer in history, Birkbeck, University of London.