Autobiography, nation, postcolonialism and gender relations: Reflecting on men in England, Finland and Ireland

This article seeks to develop multi-layered reflections on men in England, Finland and Ireland. It connects autobiographical memories, the politics and the problematic of men, studies on men, and men’s situation in three countries and societies, and their postcolonial contexts. In each case, personal, political and academic connections with the countries concerned are explored and interlinked. Though postcolonial studies have been developed mainly by those who are members of or in an ambiguous relation to social categories that have been marginalised by colonialism and imperialism, these perspectives are drawn on to interrogate and deconstruct the dominant. Postcolonialism figures in different ways in the three countries, providing multiple means to deconstruct men, the unified, coherent, individual and collective male subject. ‘Men’, the mystified/mythologised One(s), are made material Other(s). Studying men needs to be less ethnocentric, less national(istic), and more fully located in transnational contexts.