Book Reviews: RICHARD COLLIER, Men, Law and Gender: Essays on the ‘Man’ of Law. Abingdon: Routledge-Cavendish, 2010, pp. 292, ISBN 9781904385493, £75.00 (hbk). RICHARD COLLIER AND SALLY SHELDON, Fragmenting Fatherhood: A Socio-Legal Study. Oxford: Hart, 2008, pp. 274, ISBN 9781841134178, £30.00 (pbk)
| Author | Robert Leckey |
| Published date | 01 March 2011 |
| Date | 01 March 2011 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/09646639110200010703 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
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RICHARD COLLIER, Men, Law and Gender: Essays on the ‘Man’ of Law. Abingdon:
Routledge-Cavendish, 2010, pp. 292, ISBN 9781904385493, £75.00 (hbk).
RICHARD COLLIER AND SALLY SHELDON, Fragmenting Fatherhood: A Socio-Legal
Study. Oxford: Hart, 2008, pp. 274, ISBN 9781841134178, £30.00 (pbk).
Richard Collier’s new book, Men, Law and Gender, contributes significantly to
scholarship in relation to masculinity from a pro-feminist stance. There is no such thing
as an essential male or masculine identity, he contends; men’s identities, and masculi-
nities are constituted ‘through diverse and socially contingent practices that may them-
selves be contradictory’ (p. 2). On many matters, his conclusion is ‘it’s complicated’, and
he is right.
The book, which consists of an introduction and seven chapters ranging from around
20 to nearly 50 pages each, draws on an array of sources from many disciplines (the list of
references at the end exceeds 40 pages). Its interdisciplinary and critical character alone
would secure its socio-legal bona fides, but Collier also presents his results from two
qualitative empirical studies. One is a reading of recruitment materials circulated by
‘City’ law firms in the UK (Chapter 4). Legal scholars do not typically regard such bro-
chures as legal ‘sources’, but Collier shows them to be a rich repository. Those materials
produce figures of the corporate lawyer as ‘already encoded as a gendered, raced and
classed subject in some subtle and frequently contradictory ways’ (p. 107). Collier under-
lines the repeated references to lawyers’ work ‘in terms of the demands of physical labour
and the corporeal, a world of ‘‘getting your hands dirty’’, of ‘‘mucking in’’, of ‘‘pushing
oneself to the limits’’’, evocations of masculine labour that sit uneasily with the push for
equality and gender convergence articulated elsewhere (p. 125). He argues that a work-
place that appears ‘ostensibly equitable and just, open and inclusive’ may be ‘already
constituted at the point of entry by references to assumptions about social, economic and
cultural capital that are mediated by ideas of class, gender, race and ethnicity’ (p. 126).
The other small-scale qualitative study interviewed male solicitors at various stages of
their careers on their experiences negotiating or combining what they experienced as
work and family commitments (Chapter 6). Those interviews reveal how the nature of
highly paid legal work delivers ‘not only economic and symbolic capital . . . but also a
powerful experiential satisfaction which should not be underestimated and may itself
have a gendered dimension’ (p. 186 [footnote...
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