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This book looks at metrosexual masculinity through the lens of discursive approaches. The specific approaches I deploy later in this book derive from Harold Garfinkel's (1967) renowned work, Studies in Ethnomethodology. This work was principally developed as a methodology for studying social life, informed by the phenomenological ideas of Husserl and Schutz (and later with existential phenomenology, e.g. Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty). Constitutive phenomenology¹ as propounded by Husserl (1913), ignored previous philosophical concerns with the nature of reality, our existence, knowledge, values, ethics and so on, instead it sought to understand how people collectively construct meaning from their experiences of social phenomena. In other words, the collective meanings people create. So for example, masculinities and femininities are seen as meanings created collective in identifying as either male or female rather than assuming they are fundamental attributes to either sex. These are necessarily intersubjective, since they are co-created from people's interactions with each other when they experience the world. One only has to think of how differently one might interact with a GP as opposed to one's mother. As such, meanings are rooted in people's actions and words.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137404749_2

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