Politics Of Masculinity Research Articles

“Cultural Politics of Black Masculinity”: Edmund T. Gordon and Speaking the Truth in Anthropology

Transforming AnthropologyVolume 28, Issue 2 p. 131-133 ABA 50TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL COMMENTARIES “Cultural Politics of Black Masculinity”: Edmund T. Gordon and Speaking the Truth in Anthropology Keisha-Khan Y. Perry, Corresponding Author Keisha-Khan Y. Perry kyperry@brown.edu orcid.org/0000-0001-5137-0245 Department of Africana Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI, 02912Search for more papers by this author Keisha-Khan Y. Perry, Corresponding Author Keisha-Khan Y. Perry kyperry@brown.edu orcid.org/0000-0001-5137-0245 Department of Africana Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI, 02912Search for more papers by this author First published: 17 October 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/traa.12189Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume28, Issue2October 2020Pages 131-133 RelatedInformation

Beyond Birkenstocks: Finding a Foothold in the “Cultural Politics of Black Masculinity”

Beyond Birkenstocks: Finding a Foothold in the “Cultural Politics of Black Masculinity”

Alt-Virilities: Masculinism, Rhizomatics, and the Contradictions of the American Alt-Right

ABSTRACT What is the Alt-Right? As a movement still taking shape ideologically and operationally, the Alt-Right demands a research framework for analyzing both what it believes and how it functions. Adopting a morphological approach to analyzing political ideologies, I advance a new criterion for ideological classification: masculinism. Alt-Right masculinism seeks to define and enforce forms of masculinity as normative and regulative ideals with far-reaching implications for the theoretical sources the movement appropriates, the discourses it articulates, and the organizational and operational modes it adopts. Proposing a Deleuzean approach to analyzing how radical movements operate, I argue the Alt-Right functions as a rhizome. In light of these analyses, contradictions within the Alt-Right come into view: the movement seeks to instantiate patriarchal, hierarchal, and phallocentric masculinities through leaderless, networked, and acentric strategies and practices. I conclude by reflecting on how Alt-Right ideology and practice differ from mainstream rightwing masculine ideals and practices—in nationalism, capitalism, militarism, and evangelicalism—and how the development of the Alt-Right sheds new light on the construction of contemporary political masculinities more broadly.

Political masculinities and Brexit

Abstract This article examines the discourses of masculinity to pervade debates on the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union. The article outlines an association between excessive forms of masculinity and popular cultural discourses around conflict and war, constructing and reproducing a popular lexicon on the British experience of World War II in ways that are widely interpreted as symptomatic of a coarsening of political discussion. However, the article also emphasises the performative quality of these masculine discourses in line with the personalisation of politics, and stresses the scope for contestation and ridicule. The article thereby identifies the articulation of a performative masculinity with a nation-based politics of the right. While disputable and occasionally subject to derision, this produces a gendered component in any antagonistic turn in contemporary political culture.

Populist attraction: the symbolic uses of masculinities in the Austrian general election campaign 2017

ABSTRACTThe year 2017 brought about a political change in Austria. The hitherto governing coalition of the Social Democrats (SPÖ) with the conservative People’s Party (ÖVP) was replaced with a coalition between the rebranded so-called New People’s Party (ÖVP) and the right-wing populist Freedom Party (FPÖ) which lasted only 17 months. This paper aims to theorize political masculinity and populism by taking Austria as an example. It combines the theory of Pierre Bourdieu and his conceptions of the political field, masculine domination, and symbolic violence with Raewyn Connell’s theory of hegemonic masculinities and discusses how political masculinities relate to a populist political style. Examining the electoral strategies of the two right-wing parties ÖVP and FPÖ in Austria, the paper illuminates two moments of change in political masculinities when confronted with populism: the transformation from oppositional to governmental populist political masculinity on the one hand, and the populist challenge to hegemonic political masculinity on the other.

I am a bull trader by nature: performing Nigel Farage

ABSTRACTThe omnipresent ‘pint-and-fag-images’ of Nigel Farage in the media suggest an Everyman’s traditional masculinity. This article argues that in addition to the Everyman, he represents himself as a city gent through emphasising his ‘city masculinity’ as a former metals exchange trader on the one hand and his ‘gentleman masculinity’ on the other. While the former is employed to construct a charismatic strongman persona the latter appeals to English nationalist voters, enabling Farage to cater to different audiences. These findings result from a close reading of Farage’s two autobiographies, identifying the personae of rebel, businessman and gentleman and their interconnection to the city gent and demonstrating how Farage performs his political masculinity through this city gent persona.

Singing the Body: Postmodern Orality and the Female Body in the Nigerian Hip Hop Nation

The current trend in the Nigerian Hip Hop Nation (NHHN) to transgress established socio-cultural codes of ‘adult-run society’ in the Nigerian nation state has become a phenomenal postmodern signifier of urban youth difference. While this development has been acknowledged in a number of academic submissions, there has however been a dearth of scholarship to account for the temporal socio-economic/cultural imperatives that have shaped it, and how these motivations have impacted new youth identity formations, intra-NHHN power relations and the remapping of gender. Recognising Nigerian hip hop as predominantly framed around a male entertainment orientation and counterhegemonic cultural outlook, this paper argues that the present-day circulation of hip hop in Nigeria is a deconstructive, transcultural, and capitalist practice that presents an arena of youth self-(re)encounter, especially in the area of an overwhelming politics of masculinity, rethinking nation/belonging and the discursive (re)drawing of the female body. In this context, I suggest that the representation/performance of the female body in the NHHN, quite against popular notions of its vulnerability to misogyny, revolves around a site of ambivalence in which woman is both visible and discursively veiled, claiming agency within a dominantly hyper-masculinist youth (sub)culture as much as getting objectified in it. In this context, it is difficult to posit a case of ‘Nigerian feminist hip hop’ within a definitive space of black sisterhood and this requires critical contemplation.

Degenerative Realism. Novel and Nation in Twenty-First-Century France by Christy Wampole

Reviewed by: Degenerative Realism. Novel and Nation in Twenty-First-Century France by Christy Wampole Patrick Lyons Christy Wampole. Degenerative Realism. Novel and Nation in Twenty-First-Century France. Columbia UP, 2020, 296 pp. Christy Wampole's new book Degenerative Realism presents a timely theorization of a pervasive undercurrent haunting the gradual return to various forms of realism in French literature witnessed since the 1980's. In her wide-ranging study, Wampole gathers together works by Michel Houellebecq, Frédéric Beigbeder, Aurélien Bellanger, and a cast of other contemporary novelists under the mantle of what she names "Degenerative Realism," which does not refer to a coherent literary school or movement, but groups together a set of characteristics and anxious preoccupations shared by the novelists under scrutiny. Chief among these are a return to the maximalist scope of 19thcentury realism and its entanglements with "sociologism, Darwinism, Decadence, and positivism," a marked, if less openly didactic, formal and political kinship with the "roman à thèse" à la Barrès and Maurras, and an obsession with the inevitable and impending decline of Western civilization, "a collective worsening of life in the contemporary moment" (2). Part of this worsening is attributable to the progressive breakdown of boundaries between reality and fiction in a "Post-Truth" era inaugurated by the rise of the internet and the hyper-mediatized terrorist attacks of 9/11. The novels examined in this study tend to frame realism as a privileged genre for staging the impotence of the novel to capture reality in the 21st century, which in Wampole's analysis comes to reflect a double disillusionment with both novel and nation. Following a thorough conceptual introduction of its basic tenets, Wampole extends her concept of Degenerative Realism into four chapters that develop a series of more involved trends common amongst its practitioners. Chapter one strings together a collection of novels, including works by Houellebecq, Beigbeder, Yann Moix and Charles Robinson, that share a dark preoccupation with demography and population science, theories of degeneration, and the looming risk of some variation of a "great replacement" à la Renaud Camus [End Page 255] due to a perceived "feminization" of the West and rise of Radical Islam after 9/11. Chapter two shifts attention to the rise and fall of the Minitel and the rapid expansion of the internet that led to a destabilized relationship with reality and the truth and the proliferation of false information and mediated sociality. The novels considered in this chapter (most centrally Aurélien Bellanger's La Théorie de l'information [2012], Phillipe Vasset's La Conjuration [2013], and Antoine Bello's novel trilogy Les Falsificateurs [2007], Les Éclaireurs [2009], and Les Producteurs [2015]) feed off of these effects to explore the simultaneous degeneration and potential preservation of humankind, France, and the real. Chapters three and four theorize what Wampole dubs "Real-Time Realism" through respective examinations of Degenerative Realism's mobilization of journalistic materials and techniques–in part to imbue its content with a form of pressing immediacy–and its resuscitation of the political pamphlet. Both allow the degenerative realist novel to track the "breakdown of the real" in "real time" (122). Chapter three opens with a welcome reading of Jean Raspail's Le Camp des Saints (1973) as a decisive precursor to the degenerative realist novel. Raspail's deeply xenophobic, apocalyptic tale of the Global South's wholesale invasion of the Occident has received considerable attention in recent years, championed by the likes of Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, Marine Le Pen, and other far-right pundits. Wampole examines Raspail's use of news matter and statistics culled from real sources to frame Le Camp des Saints as a harsh critique of media and the Leftist press, and as a "reality check" (135) for its likeminded readers. Wampole's reading is compelling, if somewhat brief, given the vast influence of Raspail's novel for the contemporary, conspiratorial far-right in both France and the US. Wampole's reading of Le Camp des Saints is also light on critical examination of the politics of race and masculinity that so clearly drive the novel, dismissing these elements as the "manifestation of the author's own psychosexual complexes...

“In that One the Ālif is Missing”: Eunuchs and the Politics of Masculinity in Early Colonial North India

AbstractAlthough ostensibly gendered as men and frequently maintaining independent, patriarchal households, enslaved eunuchs (khwājasarās) in pre- and early colonial regimes in South Asia were often mocked for their supposed effeminacy, bodily difference, and pretensions to normative masculinity. In the Mughal successor state of Awadh (1722-1856), such mockery grew more pronounced in the wake of growing financial demands from the British East India Company and attempts by eunuchs to alienate property with wills and testamentary bequests. Through examples of verbal derision directed at eunuchs, this essay shows that not only did ideas of normative masculinity serve as a vehicle for Awadh’s rulers to defend their sovereign authority from colonial encroachment, but that notions of normative manhood continued to inform eunuchs’ own self-perception into the nineteenth century.

A double-headed hydra: Marine Le Pen’s charisma, between political masculinity and political femininity

ABSTRACTAlthough charisma is more commonly associated with masculine leadership, Marine Le Pen (MLP) is a woman politician whom supporters view as charismatic. Combining theories of hegemonic masculinity, and hegemonic femininity, with Max Weber’s typology of legitimate domination, this paper elaborates a framework for identifying how political masculinity and femininity are relationally structured within types of legitimate domination, including charismatic domination. I apply this framework to empirical analysis of the French radical rightwing leader and her supporters. Charisma, I suggest, is a form of political masculinity a woman can enact, but which allows for expression of political femininity. Drawing from participant observation data gathered on the French National Front between 2013 and 2017, and from interviews with party members, I show how activists viewed MLP as an admirably virile figure. Simultaneously, she was venerated for her feminine corporality, and her expression of feminine care, or caritas. Like a double-headed hydra, MLP was viewed as extraordinary due to her combined political masculinity and political femininity. Contra theories of hegemonic masculinity, MLP shows that a charismatic woman can perform hegemonic masculinity without being punished by supporters for doing so. Rational-bureaucratic domination, by contrast, is predominantly masculine, and allows for little expression of political femininity.

Chaos, Conflict and Confusion: Cross-Cutting Issues of Whiteness in Visual Representations of the Brother on the Downlow

Broadly this paper builds on the discourse surrounding destabilizing Whiteness in visual representation of the brother on the down low (DL). The term “DL”, which is short for on the down-low, is a common way to refer to men of color who live their everyday lives as heterosexuals, are often married to women, yet also engage in discreet homosexual relationships (Scott, 2010). Guided by the question: In what ways are brothers on the down low viewed in Black visual culture? Specifically, this paper is a literature review on the intersection of the emasculation of Black men and Black masculinity and discusses the sustained interaction of these two concepts within contemporary politics of identity, masculinity, and sexuality; with a synopsis of analyses of the literature presented through a lens of my lived experiences and so it is framed as such. This paper also focuses on categorization and institutionalization of Black men in visual culture. Then there is review a brief history of some knowledge and power plays of White hegemonic United States (US) culture and how Black men are structured and regulated by means of these social dynamics. This leads me to provide insights into these things by investigating them and looking closely at their social constructs. Ultimately, I explore and discuss the ways in which Black male sexuality and masculinity, broadly, and Black DL identity, specifically, is visually represented in literature in relationship to Whiteness.

The Identity Politics of Masculinity as a Colonial Legacy

ABSTRACTPrior to Dutch colonization, there was a clear distinction between men and women in Indonesia. However, the hierarchical structure between these gender categories is part and parcel of the colonial legacy. Masculinity was first introduced in Indonesia during the Dutch colonial period as a repudiation from femininity. This signaled a significant shift, as previously being modest and part of the community had been valued much more highly in Indonesian society than was individuality. By asking to what extent men’s gender expectations are subject to the identity politics of masculinity, and to what extent this is reflected on Indonesian popular culture specifically men’s lifestyle magazine, I intend to shed light on the incompatibility of the identity politics of masculinity with contemporary Indonesian men. Towards this goal, I analyse eight men’s lifestyle magazines, for they play a key role in contemporary modern societies, exposing men to generalized notions of what it means to be a ‘man’. Spanning the period from the earliest men’s lifestyle magazines published in Indonesia in the mid-1970s until 2015, I map contemporary narratives of masculinity in Indonesian context as a reflection of the effects colonial ideologies continue to have on Indonesian society and the division of gender roles.

“Don’t Give Up! Don’t Give in!” Gender in International Relations and “Curious” Feminist Questions

“Don’t Give Up! Don’t Give in!” Gender in International Relations and “Curious” Feminist Questions

Right-wing populism as gendered performance: Janus-faced masculinity in the leadership of Vladimir Putin and Recep T. Erdogan

Gender and populism have been extensively theorized separately, but there has not been sufficient study of the way that gender undergirds populism, strengthening its diverse manifestations. Focusing on the cases of Vladimir Putin and Recep T. Erdogan, we argue that their political performance allows them to project a right-wing populism that hides much of its political program in an ostentatious masculine posturing that has the virtue of being relatively malleable. This political masculinity allows them to position themselves at different points in time as outsiders yet insiders, bad boys yet good fathers. In their early years Putin and Erdogan established themselves as transgressive outsiders who developed a profile of power by building up their masculine, working-class biographies. As their power became consolidated, they turned to a more paternal role, fostering a conservative gender order while attacking the masculinity of their opponents and casting them as outsiders. In this way over the years they have combined political performances that have both breached the conventional gender norms and also upheld and reinforced them. The result is a Janus-faced masculinity of outsiders-yet-insiders, bad-boys-yet-good-fathers, which establishes that the leader is both the same as other men and also different from them, standing above the citizenry, mediating and fostering a conservative political order. Understanding this gender performance also helps to explain the paradox of “electoral authoritarianism” (Levitsky and Way Journal of Democracy, 13(2), 51–65, 2002; Schedler 2006), demonstrating how performed political masculinity can support and connect the cult of a popularly elected leader with conservative social and political gender norms.

Dünya Siyasetinin Kadın Liderleri ve Siyasal Erkeklikler: Göstergebilimsel Bir Okuma

Bu makalede uluslararası siyasette kadın liderlerin imajlarının uluslararası medyada nasıl sunulduğu sorusuna cevap aranmaktadır. Forbes’un 2017’nin en güçlü kadın siyasi liderler listesinde ilk sıralarda yer alan üç Avrupalı kadın lider, Angela Merkel (Almanya), Theresa May (Büyük Britanya) ve Federica Mogherini (AB) örneklem alınarak, bu üç kadın liderin medyada yansıtılan imajları göstergebilimsel bir okuma ile analiz edilmektedir. Bu analiz sonucunda kadın liderler özelinde cinsiyetçi söylem ve imajları uluslararası siyasetteki siyasal erkeklik tezahürleri üzerinden tartışmaya açılarak uluslararası ilişkilerde toplumsal cinsiyet literatürüne katkıda bulunulması hedeflenmektedir. Ayrıca, bu çalışmada, ulusal ve uluslararası siyaset ve ilişkiler, farklı kadınların farklı siyasal erkeklik tezahürlerini deneyimlemesi ile yerleşik hale gelse de tektipleşmiş kurguların da çürütülebileceğinin ipuçları verilmektedir.

Masculinizing Jianghu Spaces in the Past and Present: Homosociality, Nationalism and Chineseness

Abstract Jianghu (rivers and lakes) refers to the imagined spatial arena in Chinese literature and culture that is parallel to, or sometimes in a tangential relationship with, mainstream society. Inhabited by merchants, craftsmen, beggars and vagabonds, and later bandits, outlaws and gangsters, the jianghu space constitutes an interesting “field” (to borrow Pierre Bourdieu’s term) that produces alternative subjectivities in traditional Chinese culture. In most representations, jianghu is primarily a homosocial world of men, which honors masculine moral codes. By tracing changes of jianghu spaces over time, this paper attempts to set the spatial politics of masculinity in Chinese culture in a historical context. It unravels its dynamic interrelations with the tropes of class and nation, from the hosting of outlaws in the traditional masterpiece Shuihu zhuan (Water margin) to the resurgence of jianghu images and imaginaries as a symbol of Chineseness in post-socialist film and television. It argues that the widely referenced relationship between civil (wen) and martial (wu ) values in imperial China describes only gentry-class masculinities. By contrast, jianghu spaces lie at the margins of society and so invite an alternative conceptualization of lower-class masculinities. In contemporary China, jianghu has come to symbolize a new mode of Chinese masculinity in the global age. It can refer not only to fictional spaces in the martial arts genre, but also to social spaces that cement the “Chinese-style” relationships and networks needed for success in the reform market.

‘Undisputed’ racialised masculinities: boxing fandom, identity, and the cultural politics of masculinity

ABSTRACT Scholarship on race and gender in boxing have examined how meanings of masculinity are produced vis-à-vis a boxer’s identity. This study offers an ethnographic exploration of boxing spectator relations, especially how male fans of colour negotiate racialised masculinities outside of the ring. The subsequent analysis yields important insights into how race intersects with masculinity, class, sexuality, and nation. Drawing upon ethnographic research conducted during a Manny ‘Pac-Man’ Pacquiao vs. Juan Manuel Marquez boxing match, interviews, and critical discourse analysis (CDA), this article examines how performances of racialised masculinity permeate the fan space. In this space, African American, Latino, and Filipino American men negotiate meanings of masculinity that reproduce unequal power relations. Here, in the presence of other men of colour, differences among them are accentuated through the politics of gender relations that inevitably produce conflicts among marginalised communities and reveal competing versions of masculinity that inevitably rely upon heteronormative underpinnings.

Veteran masculinities and audiovisual popular music in post-conflict Croatia: a feminist aesthetic approach to the contested everyday peace

ABSTRACTIn Croatia, campaigners for a more critical public reckoning with the memory of Croatia's 'Homeland War' (1991–5) and the national past confront embeddings of hegemonic myths of the war into everyday life. Among these are the stardom of a musician whose 'patriotic' music claims the same moral authority as the Croatian veterans' movement and whose public persona has embodied militarised masculinity since he became a wartime star. Popular music and youth engagement with it is thus among the sites where everyday understandings of peace are being contested. By exploring the audiovisual aesthetics of the song/video through which this musician re-engaged with veterans' activism in 1998, and showing that popular music spectatorship seeps into the everyday micropolitics of young people building and contesting peace, the paper argues that for critical peace and conflict studies to understand the affective politics of post-conflict masculinities, they must combine a feminist and aesthetic consciousness.

The "Gender Problem" in Nursing: Masculinity and Citizenship in Late Wilhelmine Germany

At the turn of the twentieth century, German hospitals employed both men and women in nursing, but men were increasingly under pressure to justify their presence and resisted the feminization of their work. Led by nurse and later Reichstag parliamentarian, Georg Streiter, the German Association of [male and female] Nurses posited that working-class solidarities could secure middle-class aspirations of socioeconomic security, masculinity, family, and citizenship. While the association shifted toward a more exclusive politics of masculinity and citizenship in the 1920s, its earlier history of effectively challenging class and gender roles in nursing complicates broader political assumptions about conservative, maternalist, and Social Democratic gender ideologies in late Wilhelmine Germany.

New maps of struggle for gender justice: Rethinking feminist research on organizations and work

The 2018 Gender, Work and Organization conference was held in Sydney. That fact is relevant to the issues now facing feminist organization research. The journal was launched in 1994 in the global North, in the wake of the women's liberation movement but after a first wave of neoliberal politics. Gender studies has changed since then, especially with growing recognition of feminist thought and activism in the global South. There have been changes in the object of knowledge ‐ that is, work and organization ‐ especially managerial transformation of organizations and global economic restructuring. There are related changes in the political arena, most recently the rise of an authoritarian populism with new patterns of masculinity politics. Proposals are made for an agenda of feminist research in this field, relevant to the new circumstances and the continuing struggles for gender equality.