Working-class Masculinity Research Articles

Considering masculinities at forest fires: the case of the 2021 Muğla forest fires in Turkey

ABSTRACT This article investigates emerging masculinities in Turkey’s massive Muğla forest fires of 2021 and their aftermath. The findings are based on a multi-stage qualitative field study: the disaster research was conducted in Köyceğiz and Marmaris in 2021, as well as social media research and personal observations during the fires, followed by follow-up research in 2022. Following Pacholok (2013). I argue that in the unique time and terrain frame of disaster, masculinities are contested and realized. In relation to disaster and environment, four main local constructions of masculinities are observed during the fires. They are (1) the villagers who embody traditional rural masculinities, (2) the firefighters who represent working-class masculinities based on arduous physical labour without heroism, (3) the forest officers and engineers who represent masculinities with refined state-centred engineering male rationality that aim for men’s domination over nature, and (4) the celebrities and volunteers that comprise the urbanites who represent possibilities for alternative ecomasculinities with subtle gender egalitarianism. They present particular constructions of masculinities that reveal local societal norms and expectations and the gender relations that emerged as a result of the crisis environment caused by forest fires.

Entrepreneurial working-class masculinities and curating the corporeal: social media influencers, porntrepreneurs and the case of OnlyFans

PurposeFor the most part, the majority of the research on entrepreneurial masculinities has focused on the traditional business and finance sector, capturing a masculinity infused with notions of dominance, a cut-throat disposition and corporate acumen. There has been relatively less attention focused on the reproduction of masculinities and monetized body work in digital forms of entrepreneurship.Design/methodology/approachThis conceptual article explores some of the entrepreneurial and performative skills utilized by male OnlyFans creators as they curate not only their bodies but also their sexualities in order to attract subscribers and maximize profits.FindingsMapping the relationship between entrepreneurialism and masculinity on OnlyFans is significant considering the platform’s popularity and the changing nature of digital entrepreneurship. Drawing connections to previous research on working-class entrepreneurial masculinities, we highlight how male OnlyFans creators, who are largely from working-class backgrounds, are actively practicing entrepreneurial skills.Originality/valueWe foreground the work of social media creators as sexualized and aesthetic labour, making connections between digital entrepreneurship, working-class masculinity, sexuality, and (idealized) bodies. Our article concludes with making recommendations for future research on the study of gender and sexuality within for-profit digital entrepreneurship.

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.

Gender and the Displaced Worker in Contemporary France: Women, Mobility, and Economic Restructuring Beyond the Industrial Heartlands

AbstractA considerable proportion of the research conducted within the developing field of deindustrialisation studies has focused on the loss of work in industrial closures, and on the attachments that long-serving workers feel to their former workplace. This article focuses instead on the phenomenon of constrained mobility which often occurs as companies restructure and workers are offered a choice between redundancy or relocation to another site. Steven High (2003) has examined the ‘transplanted identities’ of male workers who had moved repeatedly as plants downsized and closed across the American rust belt, highlighting a group who styled themselves as the ‘I-75 gypsies’ (after the interstate highway that runs through Michigan and Ohio). Forging a new identity articulated in terms of mobility rather than place, these men constructed a new version of heroic working-class masculinity as they moved from site to site. This article draws on a case study of the Moulinex domestic appliance company in north western France to examine how such mobility has been experienced by women workers in a region beyond the industrial heartlands. In doing so, it considers the particular relationship to place that was constructed as companies like Moulinex established factories in rural regions of France after the Second World War and the implications of this for work-based identities. The article highlights the intersecting effects of age and gender, the significance of the gendered division of labour for women's experiences of mobility, and the extent to which identities were reshaped as women moved to stay in work.

"It Takes a Man to Work in Hell": The Hairy Ape and The Self-Destructive Paradox of White Working-Class Masculinity

"It Takes a Man to Work in Hell": The Hairy Ape and The Self-Destructive Paradox of White Working-Class Masculinity

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This article examines the Rocky films, the most successful sport film franchise in the world, and the Creed films, the equally successful reboot of the Rocky universe first released in 2015. While prior criticism focuses on the Rocky films’ dated narrative of white working-class masculinity in favor of the updated racial and gender diversity of the Creed films, my article highlights the former’ enduring achievements, as well as the latter’s process of “remasculinization” despite the surface inclusiveness. The first section surveys the key issues of sport studies, (sport) film studies, and masculinity studies, in relation to the term “ideology.” The second section looks at the “negative dialectics” of ideology and utopia portrayed in the Rocky films, and reads the representation of masculinity in these films from the perspective of “post-masculinity.” Drawing upon the theme of “crisis of white masculinity” which has been ardently adopted by American literary and film texts since the 1950s, the last section argues that the Creed films create an extended Black version of this theme in a way similar to Fight Club.

Spiraling down the Smelting Pot: Economic Determinism and the Working-Class Hero in The Deer Hunter (Cimino, 1978) and Out of the Furnace (Cooper, 2013)

Abstract: Coming thirty-five years after The Deer Hunter, Out of the Furnace , a largely overlooked drama directed by Scott Cooper, seems to revisit Michael Cimino's Vietnam War classic: both focus on working-class Pennsylvania communities against the backdrop of industrial landscapes and decay, war trauma, and even deer hunting. Yet the resemblance between the two films should not overshadow their differences. Cooper's film acknowledges the material limitations of working-class life, which were partly dismissed in The Deer Hunter 's representation of a humble yet convivial Russian American community of steel workers, three of whom set out to fight for their country in Vietnam. Conversely, in Out of the Furnace , two brothers grow apart as one accepts his unsatisfactory working-class position and the other serves in Iraq, hoping to make enough money to escape the mill. This article proposes a parallel between the two films' treatment of working-class masculinity and class determinism in the Rust Belt region at two different yet comparable periods in American history.

Deadly Entanglements: Resource Extraction, Cowboy Culture and Sexualized Colonial Violence in Alberta

Drawing connections between an extractivist economy, the forms of cowboy culture (and rugged, white, working-class masculinity) that have a long history of entanglement with extractivism on the territory now defined as the province of Alberta (in western Canada) and the high rates of sexualized colonial violence against Indigenous women in the province, the authors argue that Alberta has a transient white guy problem. By analyzing the Calgary Stampede as a case study of forms of white masculinity that are supported, encouraged, prioritized and, at times, glorified in Alberta, the authors demonstrate how this transient white guy problem is proving exceedingly dangerous to many Indigenous women in particular (as well as to women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people more broadly) and diverse local communities, the land and the environment. Their analysis aims to unpack how settler-colonial logics of extractivism and cultural practices of placemaking, too often viewed as innocuous and as central to an Albertan identity, come to be deeply implicated in ongoing violence against Indigenous women.

Catch 22 of Common Man’s Masculinity in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” (1949) presents the working-class masculinity under threat. This paper has sought to argue that the threat is posed not only by the protagonist’s inability to assert his working-class masculine identity due to his (fear of) unemployment, but also by the instrumental use of reason by the employer and hegemonic masculinity. It has tried to unfold this threat in terms of R. Connell’s idea of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ and CALM report on crisis of modern masculinity published in 2014. The assumption is that Miller has depicted this threat by presenting the male protagonist in such an unfavorable situation that it relegates him to the vulnerable position of not being able to assert his masculine identity. It is also assumed that this threat is further validated by the presence of dominant masculinity. This research has sought to dramatize the playwright's consciousness of the masculinities in conflict and its outcome in America. This research is critically significant because reading this drama from the perspective of the crisis of subordinate or working-class masculinity is a far cry.

Donald Trump, Access Hollywood, and the Rhetorical Performance of Aggrieved White Masculinity

This essay examines Trump’s 2016 Greensboro rally performance of aggrieved white masculinity to shed light on the Access Hollywood scandal specifically and his appeal for supporters generally. Trump projected a persona of primitive, white, working-class masculinity; feminized the establishment through populist conspiracy; used psychological iconicity and inference to equate Clinton’s assertions with what he depicted as his accusers’ false claims of sexual assault; and dispelled their credibility through reenactment and partition. His sexism, conjoined with anger, also did displaced racist work by depicting his hypermasculine, authoritarian leadership as essential for restoring white men and the nation to their rightful places.

The masculinization of domestic cooking: a historical study of Swedish cookbooks for men

ABSTRACT This study analyzes how men’s domestic cooking is represented and masculinized in cookbooks, written by men for men and published in 1975, 1992, and 2010, respectively. Departing from the concept of domestic masculinities, it uses the methods of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis. It asks: what kind of values and ideas connected to men, food, and the home are realized in texts and images? And how are these legitimized and naturalized? As the study’s context is Sweden, a country known for its pursuit of gender equality, the study focuses on how men’s domestic cooking has been represented in cookbooks published roughly 20 years apart. The analysis shows that, while the first two books are characterized by a ‘real man’ discourse and working-class masculinity, the 2010 book represents a masculinity in line with a ‘new man image’ closely linked to consumption and materiality. However, structurally, there are few differences. Values associated with traditional middle-class masculinities, traditional gender norms, and gendered division of domestic labor are reproduced. Men’s cooking is recontextualized as a playful leisure activity. In all three books, cooking becomes another way for a man to appear successful – both in relation to other men and women, and in socioeconomic terms.

Black Lives Matter in London, June 2020: Patrick Hutchinson, instant celebrity, and changing discourses of race and class in British media

Registering the apparent popular success of the Black Lives Matter movement in the spring and summer of 2020, this essay investigates how and how far BLM’s critique of racist institutions and demands for the full recognition of black subjectivity penetrated mainstream British media.It focuses on the mediation of Patrick Hutchinson, a black personal trainer propelled into instant celebrity in the wake of counter-protests against Black Lives Matter in London, in June 2020. Hutchinson was hailed as a ‘[black] national hero’ after being shown rescuing a white counter-protester, but in ways that initially recuperated BLM for a white-centred cultural politics. First, Hutchinson’s heroism was often presented in terms of his assumed transcendence of or disaffiliation from racial identity. Second, in the context of media representations of the right-wing backlash against BLM, Hutchinson’s heroism was part of a wider discourse of race, class and masculinity, in which he was contrasted with Bryn Male (his rescuee) and Andrew Banks, a couple of abject figures identified with white working-class masculinity. The public shaming of Male and Banks constituted only a strategic withdrawal of white privilege, leaving white-centred judicial, policing, and political institutions unchallenged.In the longer term however Hutchinson and his associates have been able to foreground the centrality of black political traditions and identities to civil society. Starting with interviews with UK television’s Channel Four News, subsequently widely disseminated across different media, Hutchinson has been able to parlay his instant celebrity into a multifaceted activism that penetrates outside the celebrity spectacle into cultural, political, and educational spheres.

After Care

After Care

Constructed Masculinities: Unpicking Working-Class Masculinities through Knitting

Constructed Masculinities: Unpicking Working-Class Masculinities through Knitting

Remaking a “Failed” Masculinity: Working-Class Young Men, Breadwinning, and Morality in Contemporary Russia

AbstractMuch of the sociological work examining the changing fortunes of working-class young men has emphasized their newly precarious position as well as the “hollowed out” nature of their class subjectivities. By contrast, and echoing work on the adaptability of hegemonic forms of masculinity, this article points to the ongoing salience of working-class masculinities, drawing on longitudinal research with young men in Russia’s Ul’yanovsk region between 2004 and 2013. It examines how young men are able to shift from a position of marginality to one of a complicit, breadwinning masculinity by bringing to bear a variety of social, cultural, bodily, and institutional resources rooted in their class, gender, and ethnic location. This journey also reflects young men’s negotiation of dialogical, moral selves, central to which is their acquired ability to reflect upon different ways of being a man by appealing to wider moral currents within Russian society.

Bulldozing Brexit: the role of masculinity in UK party leaders’ campaign imagery in 2019 UK General Election

ABSTRACT Political science asks how women navigate gender on the campaign trail – do they run “as women” or do they exhibit more “masculine” behaviours to increase credibility. The role of masculinity in men’s campaigns has received less attention. Yet, men “play the gender card” too. This paper analyses the use of gender in the campaign imagery of the two male party leaders in the 2019 UK General Election campaign via an examination of their campaign tweets. It finds that the male leaders did, indeed, “play the man card”. Both leaders overwhelmingly used masculine visuals on Twitter during the campaign. Johnson demonstrated elements of “hypermasculinity” exaggerating his strength and dominance in images of traditional, working-class masculinity. Despite calls for more compassionate, read feminine, politics, Corbyn’s campaign remained located in masculine imagery through consistent displays of agency. This paper makes three main contributions to current understandings of gender and election campaigning. Firstly, it offers the beginnings of a framework of types of masculinity in campaigning. Secondly, it adds support to the thesis that men play the gender card, and that it can take different forms. Thirdly, it raises questions about the use of binary frameworks in studying gender’s role in campaigning.

El dinero no es todo: Compra y venta de sexo en la Argentina del siglo XX

El dinero no es todo: Compra y venta de sexo en la Argentina del siglo XX

“Millennials as working class”: El Rey Network and the politics of race, class, and gender

ABSTRACT This article examines how the El Rey Network departs distinctively from other competing Latinx television channels catered to the young bicultural and bilingual millennials. The cable network’s emphasis on working-class masculinity aims to appeal to the Latino millennials who increasingly identify themselves as the new working class. The deployment of a working-class perspective into its original programing, branding, and aesthetics aspires to offer a televisual space where Latinos can redefine the boundaries of their masculinity stemming from the feminization of labor and economic inequalities under the forces of capitalism. Despite El Rey’s desire to provide more visibility and presence of Latino male bodies on television, it adheres to narrow conceptions of machismo that do not speak to the intersectionality of race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, and generational differences that shape the millennial Latinx identity formation. Therefore, the case study of El Rey illustrates how the Latinx television industry has not evolved much as it presents to be. The article also contributes to the ongoing discussion about Latinx television’s efforts to construct a cohesive discourse of Latinidad and the complex meanings of race, class, and gender informing the politics of Latino representation.

Jekyll, Hyde and the Victorian Construction of Criminal Working-Class Masculinities

Violent crime has long been associated with ideas of insane and/or intrinsically dangerous masculinities in the global north. Victorian Gothic literature, generated during a period when positivist discourse around dangerousness, madness and crime was gaining in authority and coherence, provides particularly useful insights into the narratives underpinning these associations. This paper focuses on the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), which, being a work of cautionary horror written during an era of powerful cultural fascination with violent urban crime is particularly rich in such discourse. A range of methodological tools borrowed from literary criticism, legal studies and discourse analysis turn Stevenson's novella into a penetrative lens to examine the anxieties of 19th century medico-legal thinking. The many layers of the Jekyll-Hyde binary are analysed along a series of other relevant binaries that characterise many Victorian narratives around crime: reason against insanity, normativity against deviance, and respectable bourgeois masculinities against uncontrollable working-class masculinities, whose savage sexuality poses a threat to social order. Contextualised historically as part of the wider fin de siècle preoccupation with degeneration theory, as well as legally, having followed a long series of legislative and policing moves to control the disconcerting underclasses amassing in urban spaces, the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde arises as a uniquely informative testament of the profound contradictions of a terrified post-Industrial Revolution Europe – what Moretti (1982) would call a dialectic of fear. Narratives such as the ones unfurling in the Strange Case are not, however, taken as mere reflections of the activities and anxieties of the Victorian medico-legal apparatus. Rather, this paper finds that the tensions permeating the novella constitute elements of a wider narrative construct whose main achievement was the validation and naturalisation of a deeply rigid social taxonomy, justifying the exertion of social and legal control upon populations inscribed as monstrous and Other. Keywords: Law and Literature, Criminology, Victorian Studies, Masculinities, Legal Psychiatry

How Not to Aim the Camera Downward. Representing the Feminized Working Poor

The identity of the working-class woman is a particularly precarious one, as stereotypical western feminine ideals are not associated with any of the archetypical trades of the working class, which has instead embodied the masculine ideal of the manual, industrial labourer. In this essay, I argue how the struggle of working-class femininity extends to gender roles of the (former) working class more generally, investigating how this becomes apparent in photographic representations of council housing communities in contemporary art, taking Richard Billingham’s body of work Ray’s a Laugh (1996) and LaToya Ruby Frazier’s work The Notion of the Family (2001-14) as case studies. Both Billingham’s and Frazier’s work deal with the identity of the working poor from the inside: they represent the decline of the working class and the demise of blue-collar communities, lacking investment and falling prey to the dismantling of the welfare state. The image of the post-war, post-industrial (and post-feminist) underemployed female has been analysed principally by sociologists and media studies researchers in relation to reality TV programmes, which produce and represent the working class female body as abject. I will therefore employ cultural theory as well as sociological research studies by Beverly Skegg, Imogen Tyler, and Angela McRobbie to identify stereotypes of working-class femininity in visual culture to then assess their relationship to lens-based artistic representations of the working class. The analysis of working-class masculinity and its place in the post-industrial, precarious labour market has been even more limited especially regarding art (let alone photography), with the exception of Angela Dimitrakaki’s essay "Masculinity, Art, and Value Extraction" (2019). The article draws on her discussion as well as on Norbert Trenkle’s "The Rise and Fall of the Working Man" (2008) to investigate Frazier’s and Billingam’s depictions of male family members and show how the decline of the working class, through deindustrialisation, precarisation, and the dismantling of the welfare state, has impacted the image of working-class masculinity.