Exploring Hegemonic, Subordinated, Complicit and Marginalized Masculinities

Ask ten people to describe an “ideal man,” and you’ll probably hear the same handful of traits repeated: strength, control, success, and stoicism. Sociologist R.W. Connell noticed this pattern too, but instead of treating masculinity as one fixed trait, she argued that societies actually produce several competing forms of masculinity that constantly rank against, and depend on, each other. This idea, laid out in her landmark 1995 book Masculinities, gives us a much sharper lens for understanding gender in everyday life, from a schoolyard taunt aimed at a “sissy” classmate to the quiet, unearned advantages an ordinary man enjoys without ever raising his voice. Let’s unpack the four forms she identified: hegemonic, subordinated, complicit, and marginalized masculinity, and see how each one shows up around us.

An idea borrowed from politics 🔗

Connell built her framework on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, a term originally used to explain how ruling classes stay in power not just through force, but by making their worldview seem normal, natural, and unquestionable. Applied to gender, hegemonic masculinity works the same way. It subordinates other masculinities through a combination of force and social consent, rather than relying purely on physical domination. This explains why the “ideal man” of any era rarely has to fight for his status. Culture does the work for him, through films, advertisements, family expectations, and workplace norms that quietly repeat the same script until it feels like common sense.

Hegemonic masculinity: the cultural ideal at the top 🔗

Hegemonic masculinity is the most culturally valued and authoritative form of masculinity in a given place and time. It legitimizes the overall dominance of men over women and of some men over other men, demanding near-total submission from everyone positioned beneath it. This form sets itself apart from other gender identities precisely because it becomes the standard that everything else gets measured against. In an Indian setting, this ideal usually clusters around financial providership, physical toughness, authority within the family, and control over decisions that affect the household.

Why the ideal changes depending on who is measuring it 🔗

Hegemonic masculinity is not one universal template. It gets built in relation to other masculinities shaped by class, caste, race, and sexuality, which means the “top” of the hierarchy can look different depending on the community you’re standing in. A landowning man’s version of dominance in a village looks nothing like a corporate executive’s version of dominance in a city, yet both are hegemonic within their own social worlds because both set the standard that other men in that space are compared against.

An ideal almost nobody actually meets 🔗

Here’s the twist: hegemonic masculinity is aspirational, not descriptive. Very few men embody every trait it demands, consistently, in every part of their lives. The hegemonic position works less like a personality type and more like a benchmark that men get judged against, one that shifts across cultures and historical periods. A man may be the primary earner at home yet hold no real authority at his workplace. Another may be physically strong but financially dependent on his family. Because almost nobody fits the mould perfectly, other categories of masculinity become necessary to describe where real men actually stand in relation to that unreachable ideal.

Subordinated masculinity: hierarchies among men 🔗

Gender hierarchies aren’t only about men dominating women. Connell pointed out that some masculinities get pushed to the very bottom of the ladder by other men, and gay men are the clearest example of this. Because heterosexuality is treated as a non-negotiable requirement of the hegemonic ideal, gay men face cultural and economic exclusion, and in many contexts become targets of street violence, workplace discrimination, and social boycotts from their own families and communities.

India’s legal history illustrates this clearly. It took the Supreme Court’s 2018 judgment in the Navtej Singh Johar case to decriminalize homosexuality and formally recognise that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation violates the constitutional guarantees of equality and dignity. Yet legal recognition hasn’t translated into workplace protection, since no law in India explicitly bars discrimination based on sexual orientation in private employment. Field research backs this up: many LGBTQIA+ professionals report having job applications rejected once their gender identity becomes known, and some end up commuting long hours daily because landlords near their workplace refuse to rent to them.

It isn’t only about sexual orientation 🔗

Subordination doesn’t stop there. Straight men and boys who display traits coded as feminine, being gentle, disinterested in sports, or emotionally expressive, often get mocked as a sissy, nerd, geek, or mama’s boy. These labels function as informal policing mechanisms. They punish any man who steps outside the hegemonic script and remind everyone watching exactly where the boundaries of “acceptable” masculinity lie. The fear of being placed in this subordinate category, of being seen as “not man enough,” is one of the quiet forces that keeps most men conforming to hegemonic expectations even when nobody is explicitly forcing them to.

Complicit masculinity: profiting without performing 🔗

If hegemonic masculinity sits at the top and subordinated masculinity at the bottom, where does the average man fit? Connell calls this complicit masculinity, and it likely describes the majority of men. These men rarely enforce dominance directly or take personal risks defending patriarchal norms in public, yet they still receive what Connell called the patriarchal dividend, the material, physical, and symbolic advantages that come simply from being male within a system that already privileges men over women.

Think about the everyday, unspoken benefits many men receive without ever asking for them: being taken more seriously in a business meeting, walking home at night without much fear, or having a larger share of domestic responsibilities quietly absorbed by someone else in the household. None of this requires a man to be openly aggressive or sexist. He simply benefits from a structure he never had to build, defend, or even actively believe in. This is precisely why complicit masculinity is so hard to challenge; there’s no single villain to confront, just a system that rewards passive participation.

Marginalized masculinity: when other hierarchies enter the picture 🔗

Marginalized masculinity captures what happens when gender intersects with other structures of power, such as caste, class, race, or disability. It describes men who may aspire to the hegemonic ideal, and even try hard to perform it, but are denied the resources or social standing needed to ever fully claim it, regardless of individual effort.

India’s caste system offers a sharp illustration of this. Research on gender and caste shows that Dalit men are frequently taunted about their supposed inability to protect the honour of their community, a form of emasculation rooted entirely in caste power rather than any personal shortcoming. In agrarian settings such as rural Punjab, researchers have found that masculinity itself gets constructed through control over land and physical space, which dominant-caste men monopolise while systematically denying the same access to men from marginalized castes. The measuring stick for “manhood” here, land ownership, social authority, public respect, is set entirely by upper-caste men, leaving Dalit men structurally locked out no matter how closely they try to match that standard.

It’s about position, not personal failure 🔗

It’s worth repeating that marginalization here isn’t about individual men failing to “try hard enough.” It’s a structural outcome. A Dalit man can work twice as hard as an upper-caste man and still be denied the land, capital, or social respect that would let him claim the same hegemonic status. The hierarchy between masculinities, in this case, mirrors the hierarchy between castes.

Why these four forms only make sense together 🔗

None of these categories exist in isolation, and none of them are fixed personality types. They’re relational positions, and the same man can occupy different ones depending on the setting he’s in. A wealthy, upper-caste man might embody hegemonic masculinity at a family gathering, behave complicitly at his workplace by staying silent during a sexist joke, and still face subordination the moment his sexual orientation becomes public knowledge. Hegemonic masculinity sets the standard; subordinated masculinity defines its opposite; complicit masculinity supplies the mass base that keeps the whole system running smoothly without needing active enforcement from every man; and marginalized masculinity reveals that gender never operates alone, caste, class, and race always shape how masculinity actually gets lived out on the ground.

Understanding this framework matters well beyond a classroom discussion. It explains why gender-sensitization conversations can’t stop at “men versus women.” Patriarchy also polices men against each other, rewarding some and punishing others based on how closely they match a narrow, often unreachable ideal, and understanding that hierarchy is often the first step toward questioning it.

What do you think? Which of these four forms of masculinity do you notice most often around you, at home, in college, or at work? And do you think the version of the “ideal man” you grew up hearing about has shifted in recent years, or has it mostly stayed the same?

References

1. https://www.asanet.org/wp-content/uploads/attach/journals/dec20stfeature.pdf
2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/hegemonic-masculinity
3. https://sociology.iresearchnet.com/sociology-of-gender/hegemonic-masculinity/
4. https://www.humanrightspulse.com/mastercontentblog/lgbtq-employment-protections-in-india
5. https://www.ies.gov.in/pdfs/Research-Paper-Kaustubh-Rajput.pdf
6. https://www.alignplatform.org/sites/default/files/2021-03/intersecting_norms_-_south_asia.pdf
7. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0966369X.2022.2122945