ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to attempt an analytical application of what Bob Connell (1995) has called ‘protest masculinity’ to one particular urban context-the city of Sheffield-in the middle 1990s. We want to address the relationship between patterns of protest masculinity as an actual social practice and the pervasiveness in this particular north of England city of a series of nostalgic texts about a specifically local form of ‘hegemonic masculinity’—the so-called ‘little Mester’, or ‘master cutler’—which dominates the ‘structure of feeling’, to use Raymond Williams’ term, in Sheffield. With this objective in mind, we will note, first, the importance of a particular body of new cultural texts (local industrial heritage museums and a literature in local urban nostalgia) and its representation of the urban and industrial past (in this case, of Sheffield) and also, implicitly, work, household life and masculinity. We will then discuss the representation of northern men in television beer adverts, and particularly a recent advertising campaign by the Sheffield-based brewery of Stones.1 In the final section of the chapter, we will turn to an analysis of the vocabulary and rhetoric of a group of young men in Sheffield ‘in trouble with the law’, who were interviewed in 1994 as a part of an ESRC-funded research project.2
