In this paper, I offer a literature review exploring the intersection of three research domains that have rarely been examined together: masculinities, political socialization, and youth wings of political parties. While scholarship on political masculinities has illuminated the gendered dynamics of leadership and institutional power, it has largely overlooked how masculinities are learned, negotiated, and embodied in the earlier stages of political engagement. Conversely, research on political socialization—particularly within youth party organizations—has seldom accounted for the gendered dimensions of how individuals internalize and reproduce political values, moving beyond the understanding of youth wings as recruitment channels. The intersection of these domains therefore remains largely unexplored, leaving underexamined how political masculinities take shape through the practices and interactions that constitute early political socialization.
Building on the concepts of hegemonic masculinity as a conceptual toolkit and on political masculinities to examine how gender relations unfolds both within and beyond institutional politics, I advocate for a renewed attention to masculinity as a contingent, context-dependent and socially situated phenomenon, with consequential implications both in terms of political representation and of broader cultural change. Specifically, focusing on early political socialization, I aim at highlighting the importance of adolescence and young adulthood as periods in which interpretative frameworks and political identities are crystallized. Youth party organizations, positioned between socialization, education, and potential political careers, offer a unique empirical ground to observe the micro-processes through which gendered meanings are reproduced, transformed, and potentially contested.
Finally, I propose an initial approach, combining phenomenological and critical sociological approaches to capture the lived experience of political masculinities in youth wings. Such an approach would privilege interpretative methods such as focus groups, ethnographic observation, and interactional analysis to explore how masculinities are enacted and learned in collective practice. By bridging critical theory and experiential sensitivity, this perspective seeks to move beyond dichotomies between structural and subject-centered accounts, contributing to a richer theorization of gendered power in political life.
