Michael Kimmel

Michael Scott Kimmel (born 1951) is an American sociologist, specializing in gender studies. He holds the position of Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in New York and is the editor of Men and Masculinities. Kimmel is a spokesperson of NOMAS (The National Organization For Men Against Sexism). He is the husband of Amy Aronson, a Fordham University Professor, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Education
Kimmel earned a B.A. with distinction from Vassar College in 1972; an M.A. from Brown University in 1974; and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1981 with a dissertation titled: Absolutism and its Discontents: Fiscal Crisis and Political Opposition in Seventeenth Century France and England.

Comments regarding "fight clubs"
In an article about a "fight club" in Menlo Park, California, Kimmel remarked that there was a sadomasochistic thread running through them, and said they "are the male version of the girls who cut themselves. [...] All day long these guys think they're the captains of the universe, technical wizards. They're brilliant but empty. [...] They want to feel differently. They want to get hit, they want to feel something real."

Reception
While Kimmel is a prominent author in the academic subfield of men's studies, his work has also been critiqued for being "anti-male" or an example of "misandry." Sociologist Anthony Synnott characterized Kimmel's work in Men's Lives and Manhood in America as "particularly misandric" and "dehumanizing" for using a long list of villains as examples of men without a single positive historical image.

Articles online

 * Gender Equality: Not for Women Only, a lecture prepared for International Women's Day Seminar, European Parliament, Brussels — 8 March 2001
 * Gender, Class and Terrorism, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 8 February 2002
 * Toward A Pedagogy of the Oppressor, Tikkun, Nov/Dec 2002
 * About a Boy, in Vassar, the Alumnae/i Quarterly]], volume 100, issue 1, Winter 2003.
 * A Black woman took my job — Kimmel "argues that it is in men’s interest to work for gender equality", New Internationalist 373, 1 November 2004
 * Global Masculinities: Restoration and Resistance, article in Gender Policy Review

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