In today’s China, crisis of masculinity has already provoked widespread social anxiety. This anxious sense is particularly illuminating in the service industry. For instance, in upscale hotels, male workers struggle to achieve a balance between a gentleman serving customers with professional skills and a masculine subject with manly character. Being gentle, or becoming a gentleman, is a principle to shape male workers’gender identity and transform their everyday life in the hotels and beyond. Scholarship has shifted attention from a static mode of being masculine to a social constructionist mode of becoming masculine, showing that the cultural turn profoundly influences how scholars think about gender identity. More recent work starts to focus on the social and spatial evolvement of masculinity in order to demonstrate the social construction of gender identity. How to become a (gentle) man is not just a social issue, but also an important academic question. <br> Building upon recent theories on the social construction of masculinity in social and cultural geographies, this paper focuses on male workers in Guangzhou’s upscale hotels and the process in which their gender identity is constructed. Research methods include in-depth interview, text analysis, and participant observation. There are three major findings. First, male workers undergo a gradual journey from passive gentlemen to active gentlemen thanks to management regulations and daily practices. Second, a sense of gentility is not merely reflected through these workers’appearance, but actually naturalized in their mind. This transition attributes to their social and spatial interactions with other workers as well as customers. The naturalization of gentility heralds the crescendo of identity construction from a biological male to a social gentleman in order to suite the demand for professional gentility in upscale hotels. Finally, the difference between junior and senior male workers is explicit. While junior workers rely on the material and cultural space of upscale hotels to achieve self-discipline and self-development, senior workers convert gentility into a naturalized expression of gender identity within and beyond the hotels they work for. In sum, professional discipline, self-development, and naturalized expression work together to convert male workers into professional gentlemen with two essential characters. Externally, their appearance is standardized with business suit and tidiness;internally, they should be very gentle, courteous, humorous, and knowledgeable. These external and internal characters permeate through not only the working space of upscale hotels, but also in the mundane spaces of daily life when they are not on duty. <br> These findings concur with the recent works on the identity politics of masculinity, showing that masculinity is heterogeneous and evolved, instead of being homogeneous and static. Different spatial contexts bolster different expressions of masculinity. Theoretically, our research sheds light on the nature of identity construction for males and contends that identity construction is a dynamic process in which individuals interact with space, profession, and community. Thus, our findings depart from the works of environmental determinism on how to become a man in the literature. Practically, this paper generates valuable suggestions for human resource management in upscale hotels.
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