Gender can be seen as a continuum, with masculinity at one end and femininity at the other and that men & women oscillate from moment to moment between the two gender poles on this continuum. I know that I am masculine because I‘m not a woman but I need a woman to know that I am a man… This gesture, articulating that masculinity is unlike femininity while at the same time needing that other, paradoxically becomes one of the defining aspects of masculinity. Masculinity is not static. It‘s always in a state of flux, hence not very easy to defined in a definite (objective) way.

Any point of view that I take is in dialogue with something else… my masculinity dialogues with something else. The dialogue implies not a single definition of the other as ―”not me” but as a continual process of ―”not me”s. To be in dialogue means that my masculinity changes by virtue of my interactions in space and time.

There is no ‘being‘ to masculinity but only ‘co-being‘. The position of masculinity is central to how it is perceived by someone else at a given moment in a given space. Consequently the same masculinity can potentially mean many different things, depending on how it is perceived. This dialogic masculinity incorporates both masculinity and the perceiver of masculinity. Or it can be stated thus that masculinity itself is composed of the relation between the perceiver and the perceived, over a period of time. Masculinity exists in response to the perception of the other, or that perceptions of the perceptions can be part of the dialogue. I might respond to a woman‘s critique of machismo/excessive masculinity by trying to moderate myself or respond to critique of softness by trying to harden myself. But either ways there is a response to the other which becomes a part of the dialogic process.

There is often an internal dialogue that takes place between parts of the self. When I try to perceive an element of my own masculinity and give it a meaning within its own situation , it can come into conflict with another thought process. Here the self and the other are contained in the same subject.