White Masculinity Research Articles

Beer farmers: cultivating an agribusiness atmosphere and consuming agrarian myth

ABSTRACT Agribusinesses invest in harnessing the goodwill affiliated with US agrarianism and farm iconography, hoping publics transfer the goodwill they attach to farming onto corporations. To make apparent agribusiness’s rhetorical strategies, we analyze “For the Farmers,” a 2021–2022 John Deere and Anheuser-Busch collaborative campaign to raise money for the nonprofit Farm Rescue. We theorize how productive tensions—farmers as thriving vs. farmers as needy and farms as human spaces vs. farms as machine spaces—mobilize the contradictions of agribusiness mythmaking in the twenty-first century. Our analysis of this campaign’s beer packaging and promotional video offers scholars who are invested in food rhetoric and agricultural communication an invitation to notice how agribusiness atmospheres both host contradiction about imagined pasts and recenter white masculinity to evoke a secure future based on trust of industrial-scale farming and the hydrocarbon economy. By theorizing how rhetorical affect aligns drinking beer with rescuing farmers, we offer a model of critiquing agribusiness’s reliance on myths to promote their brands.

Visualising human life in volumetric cities: City digital twins and other disasters

City digital twins (CDTs) are attracting considerable attention as a tool for the management of cities facing many kinds of crises. CDTs are three-dimensional, animated digital models of cities that display the big data generated by urban sensors in near-real-time. Most of the academic literature on CDTs consists of technical discussions of their design or implementation. This paper instead proposes a different context for understanding CDTs. It adopts an intersectional feminist and techno-cultural analysis of the visual form of power enacted by CDTs, as exemplary of a much wider turn in contemporary visual culture towards visualising the world digitally in three dimensions. Many critical accounts of this visual and volumetric regime are attentive to the forms of corporealised human life that emerge in relation to the picturing of various volumes. This paper examines how CDTs visibly co-constitute a number of digitally-mediated forms of human life, including its user and its human inhabitants. The paper argues that, while both the technological affordances and the cultural imaginary of CDTs perform the kind of powerful white masculinity that sees space as transparent and actionable, discussions of CDTs also persistently generate an excessive form of human life that is understood as untwinnable. The paper argues that masculinist anxieties around this excess erupt in another form of digitally-animated volumetric city facing disaster: the disaster movie. The paper thus makes an argument about the specific form of white masculinity co-constituted with CDTs and insists on the necessity of critical techno-cultural analyses of urban management technologies.

Geek saviours to the rescue? Primitive accumulation, astropropriation, and exoimperialism in NewSpace entrepreneurship

In this paper, we examine the contemporary commercial space race – colloquially known as NewSpace – from a Marxian, technofeminist and decolonial perspective. Theorising the emergent entrepreneurial activities aimed at the human colonisation and exploitation of outer space as part of an ongoing process of primitive accumulation, we contribute innovative conceptualisations of 21st century entrepreneurial space adventurism as exoimperialism, and the privatisation of outer space resources as astropropriation. We develop the notion of geek saviourism as a function of the new geek hegemony within normative white masculinity, used to justify species-level risk under the auspices of homo entrepreneurus, a subgenre of homo economicus. Our critical examination exhorts extreme caution regarding NewSpace entrepreneurial activities, given the longstanding trajectory of entrepreneurial coloniality they reproduce, the mythoi from which they stem, and the devastatingly unequal sociogeny they can generate.

The Joker’s Shifting Face: Eighty Years of Mad History in Batman and American Culture

That “grim jester with a twisted brain,” Batman supervillain the Joker reflects shifting social constructions of mental difference in the US across eight decades. The article reads Batman serial comics, graphic novels, and film against four key moments in Mad History: eugenics, psychiatric survivor activism in the 1960s and 1970s, the trauma discourses of 1980s popular culture, and the criminalization of mental difference in the twenty-first century. Out of this complex conversation four models of madness are derived: toxic reproduction, liberation, mad genius, and the conflation of madness with violent crime. These models work intersectionally: Joker’s madness, queerness, and exceptionally white masculinity engender each other. Because of his distinctive qualities as a visual icon, he makes Mad History more visible, too.

Medieval Pasts and Eugenicist Futures: Grant Allen, Masculinity and Early English History

ABSTRACT Grant Allen was a Victorian scholar and novelist who published widely on science, literature and history. Embedded within these publications is a fascination with early England, particularly early English masculinity. Allen saw in England's origins a blueprint for the kind of white, hegemonic masculinity he wished to see reproduced not only in contemporary English society and culture but also in the eugenic makeup of the English people as well. By reaching to early English history to legitimise his own visions of imperial white masculinity, Allen weaves a fantasy of medieval male virility into the fabric of his Victorian present. This essay discusses Allen's interest in the social apparatus of gender, contemporary eugenicist discourse and the interpretive potential of an imagined medieval past and argues that Allen uses early English history to justify ongoing colonial projects and to frame white men as the rightful heirs to global power.

Gender and Deindustrialization: A Transnational Historiographical Review

AbstractThis contribution takes stock of the growing research on deindustrialization from a gender perspective. Much of the work in deindustrialization studies is rooted in local studies, within single national contexts. This article provides a perspective that cuts across case studies and national historiographies. It reviews findings on the implications of deindustrialization for working-class masculinities and considers the extent to which research has privileged a focus on white masculinity in crisis (a theme which is more present in some national contexts than others). The article goes on to show how a more complex and nuanced understanding of gender, class, and race is emerging. It highlights women workers’ experience of deindustrialization and considers the ways in which deindustrialization is associated with a restructuring of gender relations. Acknowledging some of the limitations of the current state of research, the article points to a number of potential avenues for further enquiry.

Montana as Place of (Un)Belonging: Landscape, Identity, and the American West in Bella Vista (2014)

Abstract The American West is not just a geographical terrain but a mythical construct that occupies a powerful place in the popular imagination thanks to myriad literary and artistic works that have presented the region through specific archetypes emphasizing its vast ruggedness, white masculinity, and unique Americanness. In recent decades, revisionist scholarly and artistic works, however, have attempted to offer more nuanced perspectives on the region challenging its assumed homogenous history and fixed and stable identity. In particular, women filmmakers have recast the region through multifaceted representations underlining its complexity, diversity, and transnational dimensions. This article analyzes Vera Brunner-Sung’s film Bella Vista (2014) to examine how the film intervenes in previously constructed representations of the American West through its emphasis on transience, displacement, and belonging. Set and made in Montana, the film employs a “slow cinema” aesthetic to offer deep insights into the local and global dynamics of the place as well as the formation of identity and (un)belonging within a Western landscape. The film, as the article argues, provides a reconsideration of the West through diverse localities that are in constant relation with the outside and in turn have generated diverse individual experiences regarding the place.

Metapolitical seduction: Women's language and white nationalism

AbstractThis paper examines the enregisterment of white nationalist women's language as metapolitical seduction, in anti‐feminist conversion videos designed both to seduce men and to restore them to their proper place—above women. First, the paper analyzes the metapragmatics of submissive femininity, then the characters this far right fairy tale invents, and finally how they come to represent a metapolitical order which aligns gender, nation, tradition, and language. Women's language contributes to the white nationalist metapolitical project of resurrecting white masculinity and re‐gendering the world, also revealing mechanisms by which white supremacy is made to appear not only normal, but desirable.

The (White) Child and the Dustin Inman Society: American Ethnonationalism, Masculine Protectionism, and Racialized Citizenship

Abstract: Utilizing feminist discursive analysis, this article examines the public rhetoric and activism of the anti-immigrant group, the Dustin Inman Society (DIS), in order to analyze how and to what ends the DIS mobilizes the memory of a dead, White child in service of anti-immigrant animus. The article demonstrates that by positioning the rhetorical figure of the Child as an oracle of the national future, the DIS frames its anti-immigrant activism as nothing less than a struggle for the survival of the next generation of (White) Americans, of a sacred American-qua-White culture, and of the nation itself. This rhetorical, ideological, and affective framing of the White Child justifies and legitimizes a particular kind of ethnonationalist male protectionism against both the ‘illegal invasion’ of Latina/o immigrants and a feminized federal government. The DIS’s racist and gendered rhetoric simultaneously contributes to rising swells of White ethnonationalism and travels along preexisting channels of racism and White (masculine) supremacy that are carved deep into US society. This analysis reveals much about the complex interrelationships between White masculinity and ethnonationalism, xenophobia, and nativism, and about how these rhetorical framings aid in the (re)definition of American citizenship as racialized, able-bodied, genealogical, and above all, White.

Nostalgia, Masculinity, and Real Person Fiction: The Obama Biden and Bernie Sanders Mysteries

Published in 2018, 2019, and 2022 respectively, Hope Never Dies and Hope Rides Again, subtitled An Obama Biden Mystery, and Feel the Bern: A Bernie Sanders Mystery by Andrew Shaffer offer crime stories that feature the former President and Vice-President and, analogously, Senator Bernie Sanders as amateur investigators. Described as ‘[e]vocative of noir thrillers and bromantic buddy-cop movies’ on Penguin Random House’s website, the novels rest on a premise that, this paper argues, is carried not only by a liberal nostalgia for the Obama presidency and, in the case of Feel the Bern, small town life, but also by certain stereotypes about gender and race (‘Obama Biden Mysteries Series’). Thus, this paper asks how nostalgia, masculinity, and especially a certain kind of liberal white masculinity, and race interact with the depiction of crime in this series. Furthermore, it traces how all of these aspects are influenced by and contingent on the conventions of the (sub-)genre of real person fiction.

Spiritual Disorientation: A Study of Place in Linda Hogan’s <i>Solar Storms</i> from the Perspective of Human Geography

Linda Hogan is a Chickasaw writer grown up in the Native American Renaissance, who feels much obliged to figure out an effective way of guiding the colonized native people out of ecocide and ethnocide wrought by the Euro-American colonization. As an author wholly drenched in the indigenous cosmology, Hogan bestows great concern on the issue of place in the literary creation, which is a pivotal cosmological element in the native epistemological system and thus can be taken as a means for her to decolonize her people. This paper is to investigate the issue of colonization and decolonization through the lens of place in the register of human geography by exploring the spiritual disorientation attributed to land loss represented in her novel <i>Solar Storms </i>(1995). Based on detailed textual analysis, it is unfolded that the spiritual disorientation in the Indian community has been overtly embodied in two aspects: native men’s alcoholism and their conceding to white masculinity, and child abuse conducted by women for their suffering from intergenerational trauma, which truly represents the mental or psychological crisis of indigenous peoples triggered by and attendant to the land loss. In conclusion, the decolonizing process in Hogan’s fiction necessitates reviewing the horrible outcome of the native people’s land loss history so as to enhance their recognition of the communal place, stimulate their sense of community and develop new sites and strategies of resistance.

Intimacy, comradeship and everyday police violence: the rape of Sophie M. in German South West Africa in 1910

AbstractThis article asks whether and how gendered violence was part of the quotidian activity of state building in German South West Africa. Investigating the intimate space of a police compound, it gives a micro-historical account of how interracial sexual relations unfolded there, and how policemen’s private, intimate affairs were subject to close scrutiny by the colonial state. Rape – as distinctively masculine violence – posed a notably delicate problem to the legitimacy of the colonial state. The white masculine prerogative needed to be affirmed as the raison d’être of the colonial regime, but disorderly, unprofessional violence had to be controlled for the same reason. The case examined in this article was a rare moment in which an African woman attempted to take part in the discussion over the meaning of sex and violence. Ultimately, her articulation of what intimate, physical interactions meant to her was ignored. Instead, policemen articulated what masculine honour and comradeship meant to them. These discussions over what individual ‘honourable’ (including violent) behaviour implied were also always negotiations over the nature of colonial power and its programme.

Cobra Kai Never Dies! Generational seriality and revived legacies of The Karate Kid

AbstractThis article investigates the hallmarks of generational seriality—the term coined by Matt Hills—using Cobra Kai, and its predecessor, The Karate Kid trilogy, as case studies. It combines textual analysis of overarching themes of these texts, such as the portrayal of white masculinity, and aligned conceptualizations of class, with the examination of televisual nostalgia. It draws on existing scholarship on TV returns and revivals, exploring how Cobra Kai enters a dialogue with the fans of the franchise, and how that dialogue is articulated. While building upon the iconography familiar to The Karate Kid fans, Cobra Kai contains a great degree of self‐reflexivity, with dialogue or entire plot lines that parody regressive gender politics of the 1980s. The series brings together the generic conventions of the teen film and ample opportunities for nostalgia in its original fan base; thus, it significantly expands its appeal to two distinctive demographics.

Introduction: The New Face of Trans Visual Culture

Transness throws into question how many so-called Western cultures—i.e., those ideologically descended from the colonial project—have sutured “reality” to the “privileging of sight”. At the crux of trans-visual culture is a need to be understood outside current modes of visual apprehension. As a methodology rooted in trans-embodied experiences, trans provides a mode for decolonizing the privileging of sight and moving toward a new understanding of bodies, identity, representation, and visual culture. It is imperative to explore such methods in today’s political climate, and it is advantageous to apply them to trans-visual culture, as exponential innovations can be discerned. In this article, I will deploy a trans visual studies methodology to the work of contemporary trans masculine artist and photographer Wynne Neilly to explore how his work engages a praxis of transing identity. I will discuss how his work shifts the understanding of identity and representation to one decoupled from optical ontology and how he works to unseat White masculinity as the center of Western art and visual culture.

The continuity of settler colonial narratives: the diary of a nineteenth-century dominion land surveyor and the enduring language of harm

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the writings of a prominent Canadian nineteenth-century land surveyor and scientist to show the continuity of settler colonial narratives from his time until ours. As a Dominion Lands Surveyor, Otto Julius Klotz (1851–1923) was part of the vanguard of his white-supremacist, expansionistic, industrializing society; a group of front-line invaders who facilitated the taking of land from Indigenous people and nations, and transferred it to mostly white men. Employing a biographical microhistorical approach to settler colonialism, this research examines Klotz’s personal diary and the events contained in it. Klotz was able to live the ideals of heteropatriarchal white masculinity and middle-class respectability, and his voluminous, life-long diary demonstrates the ways in which his privilege was actively advanced by dehumanizing others. I show the ways this land surveyor mourned the world he was destroying at the same time as he celebrated the world he was bringing into being, and how this apparent contradiction is central to settler colonialism and anti-Indigenous racism, and is still with us today. I argue that understanding the continuity of settler colonial narratives can help us to better understand our world while we strive to construct decolonial narratives and find ways to reconnect to one another and the land.

Men, Masculinities, and Relational Leadership Attitudes in the Collegiate Fraternity Environment

Examinations of fraternity life have infrequently analyzed the interconnections between the focus on leadership attitudes and that of members’ adherence to masculinities. In this critical quantitative study, the authors sought to comprehend how conforming to gendered norms often associated with historically white masculinities informed relational leadership attitudes for fraternity members. Using data from 3,136 participants in a single national historically white men’s social fraternity, results from an ordinary least-squares regression analysis revealed that emotional control, self-reliance, and power over women had negative associations with the relational leadership orientations of fraternity men. Additionally, risk taking and primacy of work had positive associations with a member’s relational leadership orientation. Finally, those who identified as queer were less likely to adopt a relational leadership orientation, a result the article unpacks considering the gendered and heteronormative contexts of fraternities. It then provides recommendations for future research, as well as implications for practitioners.

“Has He Madeira of Fifty Years Standing?”: Gentility, medievalism, masculinity, and the allure of the Virginia Springs in the late antebellum South

ABSTRACT This article begins a critical revision of a historiography that has overestimated themes of honor and race in understanding constructions of elite white masculinity in the antebellum South. Gentility, too, played a decisive role in framing appropriate manly behavior. By investigating the specific interaction between the Southern discourses of gentility, medievalism, and masculinity, this article indicates a direction for significant future study of Southern elites. It first addresses these themes in a broader, conceptual sense, before turning to the embodiment and apotheosis of gentility, medievalism, and gender roles in the South: the leisure resorts of the Virginia Springs.

ONE HUNDRED NAZI SCREENS: INTERFACES AND THE STRUCTURE OF U.S. WHITE NATIONALIST DIGITAL NETWORKS ON TELEGRAM

The “Alt-Right,” a white nationalist online coalition, has collapsed amidst a revolution in digital governance termed the “regulatory turn.” Nevertheless, the regulatory turn remains incomplete because white nationalists utilize graphical user interface (GUI) design to subvert public stewardship. Why have some former Alt-Right platforms collapsed while others have grown despite increased scrutiny? The field’s account is currently limited to social media networks and rooted in positivist methods, lending a static conception of white nationalist networks that is slow to recognize cultural shifts. This paper fills the gap by comparatively critiquing the interfacing affordances of Telegram, an instant messaging app that functions as an "ideological safe harbor" for U.S. white nationalists with content aggregation, blogging, and activist use-cases. I apply interface critique to index how the manipulation of graphical user interfaces allows white nationalists to frame their browsing as a technology of mastery over and against the regulatory turn. I argue that Telegram networks coopt the enclave public, exploiting an ideology of decentralization to mystify the leverage held by white nationalist developers over their users. This occlusion redirects white masculine anxieties against publicity to justify an intensified racist fanaticism and the exportation of violence against racial, religious, and gendered outsiders. White interfacing frames GUI design as a capitalist technology that weaponizes the racist and sexist logic of the “average user” to secure the reproduction of reactionary platforms. This project furthers Internet research by developing a theory of the interface as an ideological mirror of production.

The Erotic Fictions of Finance Capitalism in The Bonfire of the Vanities and American Psycho

US economic policy in the late twentieth century privileged the financial sector by advancing generous tax breaks for wealthy Americans and traders and prioritizing union-busting and cuts to social programs, producing a violence of deprivation against the poor and marginalized others. Simultaneously, the Reagan administration sought to shore up its political coalition in the post-Watergate era by appealing to a newly engaged Christian right with conservative social policies including pushback against the sexual revolution and the formation of the Meese Commission to study restrictions on pornography. These significant changes in culture found their way into a wealth of media including journalism, films, and novels that processed the seemingly contradictory moral claims underlying these policies: greed is good; sex is bad. This article draws on financial and literary theory to examine how two iconic novels from the era, Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), exploit representations of sexualized violence to ramify and then explore the latent links among sex, violence, and finance. Each novel satirizes Wall Street’s violent indifference by embodying it in a figure of elite, white masculinity whose privilege is expressed through sex. The novels’ critiques, however, turn out to be self-contradictory, as their disavowal of the fictionality of finance is bound up with a concomitant investment in regressive sexual politics. In so doing, the novels demonstrate that culture-industry efforts to push back against economic deregulation may be allied with the cultural systems that support that deregulation or enable it.

Wolf Girls and Mechanical Boys: Whiteness and Assimilation in Bruno Bettelheim’s Narratives of Autism

In March of 1959, public intellectual, principal of the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School at the University of Chicago, and Jewish concentration camp survivor, Bruno Bettelheim published two articles that presented seemingly disparate narratives of autism. One of these narratives, that of the mechanical boy, has become ubiquitous in discussions of autism history. The other article centered on Bettelheim’s posthumous diagnosis of Kamala, who had been known as the Wolf Girl of Midnapore India due to claims that she was raised by wolves, as autistic. Bettelheim compared Kamala to other “wild” autistic children he had worked with, especially Anna, a Polish Jewish refugee who had spent her earliest years hiding in a dugout from Nazi persecution. This article argues that in order to understand Bettelheim’s portrayal of autism, it is necessary to read the narrative of the mechanical boy alongside Bettelheim’s other narratives of autism. Specifically, it is necessary to read it alongside Bettelheim’s narratives of the autistic child as “wild child/wolf girl,” as well as his comparison between autistic children and some of his fellow concentration camp inmates, who he referred to as “moslems.” While seemingly disparate, these narratives are actually deeply intertwined. These narratives of incurable “wild children” and “moslem” concentration camp inmates served as the necessary contrast to the rehabilitation/assimilation/cure narrative of the mechanical boy. Reading these narratives of autism alongside each other helps uncover the often-elided role of race in shaping professional and public understandings of autism. This article problematizes contemporary and historical formations of autism as a white, middle-class, male “disorder” by making explicit the role of race in the construction of early narratives of autism. This article will also argue that in the late 1950s and the 1960s Bruno Bettelheim used narratives of autism to promote a new model of white technocratic masculinity in the United States. The creation of this new model of white masculinity was bound up with the whitening of Ashkenazi Jewish identity. Bettelheim presented whiteness as something that Ashkenazi Jews in America could achieve through a process of rehabilitation/assimilation/cure that rid them of pathological “Jewish” traits.