Katherine R. Allen, Ph.D., Editor
Guest Editors: Kevin Roy, Ph.D.; and Samuel Allen, Ph.D., LMFT

Awareness about the harmful dimensions of masculinity has grown in recent years, including men’s mental health struggles, “deaths of despair” due to opioid abuse and suicide, the uptick in mass shootings perpetrated by men, a hypermasculinized political discourse, increased intimate partner violence during the COVID-19 pandemic, and online aggression in the manosphere. Yet, Family Scientists largely remain wedded to traditional notions of masculinity. As family configurations continue to diversify, including more families headed by non-cisgender, non-heterosexual, and/or non-biological fathers, we need a critical reconceptualization of how masculinity is lived and experienced within and across generations of families. This special issue invites scholars to challenge the Family Science discipline with a more dynamic understanding of masculinities within families over time and from diverse theoretical perspectives. We seek manuscripts that address shifting patterns of socialization of young, as well as older, men; changing compositions of families and what it means for how masculinity is expressed within them; and new processes by which masculinities—and gender, more broadly—are reconfigured within and outside families. We also seek articles that adopt intersectional approaches, including how differences in masculinities, masculine socialization, and masculine expressions may vary across generations, contexts, cultures, races, ethnicities, sexualities, socioeconomic strata, religions, and other elements of identity and membership. We encourage new theoretical analyses and conceptualizations, new methodological insights, and reviews that integrate advances in masculinity research and practice in Family Science, public health, psychology, sociology, family therapy, and other related fields.

Examples of key issues guiding the special issue include:

• Which advances could help to understand sociohistorical changes to family life, including shifts in women’s employment and education that ripple into men’s lives
• Which approaches or tools can best capture changes in new processes of parenting by a full range of people in families—and the consequences of this new parenting for children and youth?
• How can theories and methodologies examine the negotiation of new family configurations, where masculinities are both done and redone in different ways?
• How can Family Science expand understanding of masculinities as distinct from, but inextricably linked to, the bodies that express and “do” them?
• How are changes in masculinities reflected in the enactment of current, or development of new, social policies?
• What are the shortcomings that exist in the ways our field has (or has not) measured masculinity? What methodological advances can be applied to the study of masculinities in families, and how might those extend our understanding of these processes within and across diverse family configurations?

Manuscripts are due by January 15, 2025. The special issue will be published March 2026. Submit manuscripts via the Manuscript Central submission portal at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jftr. Note that the submission is for this special issue. JFTR follows the style guidelines of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.). For manuscript guidelines, please refer to the details here. JFTR publishes theory and review papers, not empirical articles. For more information or questions or to discuss submission ideas, please contact the special issue editors: Kevin Roy, [email protected], and Samuel Allen, [email protected].