White Masculinity Research Articles

“Racial Heterosexual Habitus” and Management of Racial Education Discussions Within Black Female/White Male Romantic Relationships1

Scholars (Steinbugler 2012; Twine 2010) have examined the role that the white racial lens can play in limiting the development of racial literacy for white partners in black/white relationships, while the role of gender ideologies has gone largely unexamined. Through analyzing “racially educational” conversations between 36 members of black female/white male heterosexual couples, I introduce the concept of “racial heterosexual habitus” and its influence in managing these discussions on race. I argue that it generates limits—as well as unique opportunities—for couples during these conversations about race. My findings reveal how black female heterosexual habitus orients black women to navigate these conversations by looking to black femininity to advocate against their partner's racism and sexism and to also determine the conceptual limit of these conversations in deference to protecting white masculinity. However, contrary to understandings of black middle‐class femininity, women in longer‐duration relationships advocated for themselves in defense of their partner's comments. Additionally, I show how white male heterosexual habitus limits the ability to develop racial literacy with its hegemonic masculine focus on achievement and autonomy. This work not only centers racialized gender ideologies in the study of interracial couples but also extends Bourdieu's concept of habitus.

Race Unequals: Overseer Contracts, White Masculinities, and the Formation of Managerial Identity in the Plantation Economy

Teri A. McMurtry-Chubb's Race Unequals presents a history of the plantation overseer in the American South in the two decades before the Civil War. Complicating “a society polarized by race, White people against Black people,” Race Unequals makes two key contributions (p. xii). First, it looks to an understudied but generative site in the plantation economy, that of the relationships between the wealthiest slave owners and the men they paid as wage earners. As a legal history highlighting how their conflicts played out in courtrooms, in legislatures, and on the ground, Race Unequals also foregrounds intraracial class conflict among whites that, crucially, also shaped the lives of the enslaved. McMurtry-Chubb concludes that overseers occupied a vexed position, more complicated and illuminating than historians have recognized. Because overseers labored to enforce the slave economy while also working as subordinates within it, Race Unequals argues that they are useful for understanding the formation of “managerial identity” in the plantation economy (pp. iii–iv). The book draws conclusions primarily on the plantation economy, but as its epilogue on the “legacy” of plantation management suggests, historians might well wonder about its lessons for American history as a whole.

Kristin A. Olbertson, The Dreadful Word: Speech Crime and Polite Gentlemen in Massachusetts

It is often said that words paint pictures, but The Dreadful Word is a book of sound, in which Kristin Olbertson mines the court records of eighteenth-century Massachusetts for speech crimes and, in the process, allows the reader to listen in on the conversations and frustrations—the noise—of rich and poor alike during the Bay colony’s transition from Puritan commonwealth to revolutionary hotbed. Carefully sifting and classifying the cases she uncovers, Olbertson argues that during this time, Massachusetts courts shifted their concerns about deviant speech from punishing sin to policing violations of the ‘code of politeness’, linked to ‘new ideals of elite white masculinity’ (p 2). In the eighteenth century, ‘a distinct cadre of politely pious men’ came to ‘define itself in contrast to the vulgar, the impious, and the unmanly’ (p 38). The idea of ‘the peace’ changed to reflect these new values, and as Massachusetts courts heard these cases, pronounced their verdicts, and punished offenders, their litigants and justices also performed and created the new order, one in which ‘genteel masculinity—gentlemanliness—joined godliness as a central personal quality on which claims to social and cultural authority rested’ (p 8).

Long Day’s Journey Into Night

Long Day’s Journey Into Night

Gender Considerations in Rhinoplasty.

Precise nasofacial analysis ahead of rhinoplasty is imperative. Features common to the White masculine nose are reviewed in a stepwise fashion and contrasted with those of the White feminine nose. A solid understanding of the cisgender male, masculine nose enables the plastic surgeon to determine the changes required for a successful facial feminizing rhinoplasty as a part of facial gender confirmation surgery.

Of Markets, Masks, and (White) Men: Mimetic Performances of Parasitic Publicity During the COVID-19 Pandemic

This article argues that the anti-masking and anti-vaccination subreddit community known as r/NoNewNormal is an example of a parasitic public that circulates feelings of autonomy, victimization, and militancy to advance white masculinity in the public sphere. This bundle of affects thrives parasitically on the corrosiveness of deliberative democracy and neoliberal antagonisms (e.g., mask mandates and lockdowns). We call this virulent enactment of parasitic publicity indecent public exposure (IPE) to emphasize the literal and figurative toxicity of white masculinity that has been “whipped out” during precarious times.

FHM Humour: The “Heroic Couplet of Men and Stupidity”

FHM launched its first South African issue in 2000, thereby initiating a new readership into the culture of laddish humour. As an articulation of post-apartheid masculine interest, the magazine used humour in different ways to both push back against apartheid and reinforce its core ideologies. Laddishness, it is argued, provides a carnivalesque resistance to the dominant strains of white masculinity deemed to be aspirational by other men’s magazines at the time. Through a bawdy embrace of juvenile folly and foolishness, FHM South Africa seemed to use self-deprecation and effacement as a means of troubling the ambitious materialism and corporate mobility of the neoliberal masculinities promoted in, for instance, GQ. The question is whether laddish humour was a counterfoil to “serious”, neoconservative masculinities, especially in the early years of democracy, or whether it merely served to complicate and further entrench the project of masculine hegemony.

White Masculinity and the Performance of Authorial Failure in Mark Z. Danielewski’s ‚House of Leaves‘

White Masculinity and the Performance of Authorial Failure in Mark Z. Danielewski’s ‚House of Leaves‘

Falling Stories: Cinematic Naturalism and Disability in Frank Norris’ and Stephen Crane's City Sketches

Falling Stories: Cinematic Naturalism and Disability in Frank Norris’ and Stephen Crane's City Sketches

Restorying a Black girl’s future: Using womanist storytelling methodologies to reimagine dominant narratives in computing education

ABSTRACT Background Scholarship demonstrates that Black girls’ capacities to imagine possible futures in computing are constrained by narratives of white masculinity and misogynoir embedded within computing. Building on race critical code studies and identity-as-narrative theories, we examine restorying through Black womanist storytelling methodologies for integrating Black girls’ intersectional identities when designing and reimagining their computing futures. We ask: How might womanist storytelling methods support one Black girl in restorying possible computing futures? Methods We present a case focused on one study participant, Heather’s, restorying practices situated within a larger workshop wherein marginalized youth reimagined dominant narratives about computer science (CS). This was by creating interactive quilt patches using paper circuits and microcontrollers that challenged dominant narratives of white masculinity and misogynoir normalized throughout the field. Findings We see that restorying through womanist storytelling methods allowed Heather to (1) deconstruct narratives of white masculinity and misogynoir throughout CS education by centering Black women’s ways of knowing and doing, and (2) restory the past to enact possible CS futures and identities through computing. Contribution In the discussion, we address challenges and successes with integrating Black girls’ experiences with speculative methodologies in learning sciences research.

Memorials, landscape and white masculinity: dialogic interventions in South African art

The memorialisation of place and representation of land and landscape is topical in many societies that are dealing with the aftermath of political trauma, such as Post-Colonial or Post-Soviet countries. In such contexts, artists engage with land and notions of place through processes of memorialisation and landscape representation, or very often, the undoing of these traditions as they were entrenched by regimes that are now redundant. In this article we investigate two different artistic agendas that engage with such sites in South Africa, in the work of Paul Emmanuel, and the collective Avant Car Guard. Though separated by a decade, the artworks discussed here share a dialogic engagement with existing memorial sites, or indeed, traditions that memorialise settler belonging, such as the landscape painting tradition or military equestrian monuments. While Emmanuel's work may be understood to employ a dialogic, anti-monumental strategy in response to the statue of Louis Botha at the Union buildings in Tshwane in South Africa, Avant Car Guard insert themselves in spaces where they engage parodically with memorial sites and the tradition of landscape representation. In both cases, white masculinity is called into question through self-representation, engaging with notions of Afrikaner hegemony and white anxiety.

Hardboiled Hysterics: Shell Shock and Tough Guys inThe Maltese Falcon, 1929/1941

Hardboiled Hysterics: Shell Shock and Tough Guys in<i>The Maltese Falcon</i>, 1929/1941

Review: The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging, by Rebecca Wanzo

Review: <i>The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging</i>, by Rebecca Wanzo

Nocoastjazz

Nocoastjazz

Laughter of the Oppressor: Humour, Whiteness and Masculinity in Late Rhodesia

Abstract In the 1960s and 1970s Rhodesian settlers engaged in a violent struggle to maintain white minority rule. Humour and jokes offer insights into how different sections of the settler population attempted to articulate a distinct Rhodesian-ness in this historical situation. I argue that jokes told by white men, for white men, both expressed an idealized white masculinity and engaged fears over its impossibility. In exploring these dynamics I show how humour can be used to explore the production and regulation of social identities and the symbiotic, unnerving relations between white power and white anxiety.

Beyond Machismo. Intersectional Latino Masculinities

Beyond Machismo. Intersectional Latino Masculinities

Pants on Fyre: parasitic masculinity and the Fyre festival documentaries

ABSTRACT The documentaries Fyre Fraud and FYRE: The Greatest Party that Never Happened recount the fraudulent and imprudent decision-making process that led up to the ill-fated Fyre Fest. These documentaries represent the music festival’s failure through depictions of white masculinity that seek parasitic attachment and proximity to the hegemonic ideal of masculine authority in the neoliberal marketplace. We argue that these movies map the operations of an imitative form of white masculine subjectivity that thrives in precarity, even as they recuperate the status of late-stage neoliberalism by symbolically removing parasitic masculinity from the neoliberal social order that it feeds on.

In/visible: The intersectional experiences of women of color in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine in Australia

AbstractIt is now well‐established that science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) institutions globally should invest in building diverse and inclusive workforces. However, women of color remain underrepresented in STEMM in Australia and their organizational experiences are under‐researched. To address this gap, we used a qualitative approach to explore the complex intersections of race/ethnicity and gender that may contribute to women's underrepresentation in Australian STEMM. Primary data encompassed interviews with 30 self‐identified women of color working in academia, industry, and government STEMM organizations. We drew on intersectionality theory to explore participants' experiences of their working environments and grounded theory in our analysis. This article focuses on an understudied area related to the maintenance of white male power in STEMM and everyday experiences of “in/visibility”—the paradoxical space of invisibility and hypervisibility that women of color occupy within STEMM fields. For example, various features of women of color's identities, such as physical appearance, cultural background, accent, and name, led to participants feeling “different” and hypervisible in STEMM workplaces in Australia, in which the stereotype of a white male scientist predominates. Women also felt hypervisible as race/gender tokens when they were expected to do the diversity work of the institution. In contrast, participants felt invisible when they were professionally and socially excluded from networking events, such as after‐work drinks. Women of color's experiences of having to work much harder than white colleagues to gain recognition of their organizational value also contributed to feelings of invisibility. The study findings provide deep insight into Australian STEMM cultures by foregrounding how in/visibility shows up in the experiences of women of color. This study builds on our understanding of women's STEMM careers as inextricably linked to intersectional features of social identity and white masculine power dynamics in organizations and society more broadly. We conclude by advocating for a more nuanced understanding of “women in STEMM” in Australia (e.g., via more sophisticated data collection and analysis) to ensure that national policies and initiatives benefit all women.

Deportable and Disposable: Public Rhetoric and the Making of “Illegal” Immigrant

Deportable and Disposable: Public Rhetoric and the Making of “Illegal” Immigrant

Blackness out of Place

Abstract This article explores how historical narratives and aesthetic models configuring Portuguese imperial visuality produced the absented presence of Africa and its diasporas. Despite centuries of interconnected histories of colonial domination and enslavement, but also marronage and resistance, Black subjecthood was reduced in Portugal to a “foreign” presence. These silences ossify a regime of imperial visuality premised on the hegemonic overrepresentation of white masculinity—rendered through depictions of “navigators” as paragons of historical agency. Through the analytic countervisual quilombismo, this essay confronts such elisions by engaging with Achille Mbembe’s Afropolitan call to “produce new images for thought.” Focus on countervisual maroon (quilombismo) methods of refusal and fugitivity reveals the enactment of Black sovereignty and affirms Blackness as being. By affirming Black life and autonomy, diasporic artists, performers, and everyday people interrupt colonial frames, refusing the ethnographic reduction of Blackness to a body and its classificatory markers, thus revealing possibilities for different pasts, presents, and futures.