Jeff Hearn

Reflective Writing

I have long been interested in trying to work out how much of myself needs to be brought into writing: how much reflection is useful, or not. On the one hand, some writing is all about the author and not much else – the writer can be all too present, so that then the reader might think or say “So what?”. On the other, there is writing where the text appears to be produced by a disembodied absence, even while the topics and arguments selected and chosen show the author, perhaps implicitly. This variation, and sometimes tension, and it can be, amongst other things, a gendered and intersectional tension, prompts several possible ways forward that are both practical and theoretical. One of these is autoethnography. In fact, the short book, Birth and Afterbirth (see the section on Age and Ageing), published in 1983 was in many ways an autoethnographic text. There is a wide variety of ways of doing autoethnography – in some way or other, doing ethnography critically on the ‘auto’, the self, and how that comes to be. In this section, I bring together a range of texts that are loosely autoethnographic and reflective, including looking back to childhood, writing on how work has changed over time, attempts to place the (auto)biographical into a wider (trans)societal context, along with such texts based on collective memory work, dialogues and interviews. They span writing from the 1990s to the mid-2020s, so inevitably they differ quite a lot in focus and tone, as well as in terms of age and temporal, spatial and political context.

A selection of relevant works

  1. ‘Grans, nans and other mums’, Achilles Heel, 12, Autumn 1991, pp. 22-24. View PDF
  2. ‘Autobiography, nation, postcolonialism and gender: reflecting on men in England, Finland and Ireland’, Irish Journal of Sociology, 14 (2), 2005, pp. 66-93. Link
  3. ‘The personal is work is political is theoretical: Continuities and discontinuities in (pro)feminism, Women’s Studies, men and my selves’, NORA: Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 16(4), 2008, pp. 241-256. Link
  4. ‘(Un)writing men’s (auto)biography, (un)writing men’s history: Local, national and transnational perspectives’, Socialist History: Journal of the Socialist History Society, 36, 2010, pp. 29-54. View PDF
  5. ‘Writing as intimate friends … how does writing profeminist research become methodologically challenging?’, in Mona Livholts (ed.) Emergent Writing Methodologies in Feminist Studies, Routledge, New York, 2011, pp. 184-198. View PDF
  6. ‘Contradictory male/masculine/men’s “I”s: the unwriting of men, and the concept of gex’ [unfortunately, in the printing, the last word was changed to ‘sex’], Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses (RCEI), 66, 2013, pp. 13-24. Link
  7. ‘On men, organizations and intersectionality: personal, working, political and theoretical reflections (or how organization studies met profeminism)’, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal, 33(5), 2014, pp. 414-428. Link
  8. ‘The multiple empires of men’, an interview with Iva Šmidová, with Iva Šmidová, Gender, rovné přiležitotnosti, výzkum [Gender, Equal Opportunities, Research], 16(1), 2015, pp. 74-82. Link
  9. ‘Interview with Jeff Hearn by Mona Livholts in the RAW Dialogue Chair 16 September 2015’. Link
  10. Men’s Stories for a Change: Ageing Men Remember, with Randy Barber, Vic Blake, David Jackson, Richard Johnson, Zbyszek Luczynski and Dan McEwan (The Older Men’s Memory Work Group), Aging & Society, and Common Ground, Champaign, Ill., 2016. Link
  11. ‘Men, masculinities and the conundrum of ‘gex’: An interview with Jeff Hearn by Helle Rydstrom’, with Helle Rydstrom, NORA: Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 15(2), 2017, pp. 141-159. Link
  12. ‘Organizational ethnography in economy, business and management’, with Karl-Erik Sveiby and Anika Thym, in Andrew Herrmann (ed.) The Routledge International Handbook of Organizational Autoethnography, Routledge, New York, 2020, pp. 160-175. Link
  13. ‘Boyhood, sport and the mild brutalisation of the body’, Boyhood Studies, 14(1), 2021, pp. 104-115. Link
  14. ‘Current debates on men and masculinities: An interview with Jeff Hearn’, with Atilla Barutçu and Selin Akyüz, NORMA: The International Journal of Masculinity Studies, 8(3), 2023, pp. 161-173. Link
  15. ‘Organizing collaboratively in feminist-gender academia: An auto-dialogue on dilemmas, delights, and disillusions’, in Lena Weber, Julia Gruhlich, Antje Langer and Claudia Mahs (eds.) Geschlecht und soziale Gerechtigkeit – Aktuelle Perspektiven auf die Entstehung, Reproduktion und Transformation geschlechtlicher Ungleichheiten in Wissenschaft, Politik und Wirtschaft [Gender and social justice - Current perspectives on the emergence, reproduction and transformation of gender inequalities in science, politics and business], Springer VS Verlag, Berlin, 2025, pp. 77-88. Link
  16. ‘Decolonising studies on men, boys and masculinities ‘North’ and ‘South’: A dialogue between Kopano Ratele and Jeff Hearn’, in Deevia Bhana, Tamara Shefer and Giti Chandra (eds.) Decolonial Feminisms, Decolonising Feminisms: Transnational Perspectives, Routledge, London, 2025, pp. 59-82. View PDF
  17. ‘Emotions in older profeminist men’s collective memory work: Multi-faceted analysis and reflections’, with Vic Blake and David Jackson, Emotions and Society, 2026. Link