Cracks and Care: Pastoral-theological Reflections on the Gender Implications of the Covid-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT

This article explores the highly ambivalent impact the COVID-19 pandemic is having on gender identities, roles, and relations. Western media have reported widely on the regressive effects that have pushed women during the pandemic into the ‘double shift’ situation of having to combine home making with home office. What has caught less public attention are the many subtle ways in which the pandemic has subverted the traditional distinctions between public and private, ‘at home’ and ‘at work’, indoors and outdoors etc., that have long constituted the ideological foundation of gender relations in industrial societies. This article explores how the disruptive effects of the pandemic on the gender order provides opportunities for pastoral theology to support men in reworking their fractured male identities towards more life-giving visions of human flourishing.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19 pandemic
• gender
• men
• masculinity codes
• pastoral theology
• pastoral care

Introduction

Pastoral theology and the practice of pastoral care seek to promote human flourishing.¹ Gender is a social structure² that can constrain human flourishing and may encourage maladaptive behaviors.³ Pastoral care must therefore be attentive to gender, help care seekers to deconstruct life-limiting gender codes, and create gentle opportunities for ‘undoing gender’.⁴ The aim of this study is to explore, with a particular focus on men, how far the COVID-19 pandemic has created momentum, at both the societal and the individual level, for the undoing of gender.

One important presupposition of this study is that positive change is possible even in the context of a tragic crisis. In other words, this study employs a hermeneutic of hope for its examination of historical transformations of the gender order. Such optimism requires some disclaimers.

First of all, the COVID-19 pandemic is a terrible tragedy for humanity. The direct human costs in terms of illness and death, but also the indirect social, economic, and mental-health costs are tremendous. They must be recognized for what they are, evil, and they cannot be ‘netted out’ against anything perceived as potentially positive side effects. Reflecting on whether anything good can come out of the COVID-19 crisis does not make the crisis any less terrible.

The second disclaimer is about my own positionality and the narrowness of my vision. My own pastoral work with men is located in Brussels, the capital of Belgium. Most of these men are, like myself, ‘white’ middle-class fathers in heterosexual couples and decently paying office jobs. Consequently, much of my research work is about analysing and interpreting the lives of men at the intersections of relatively privileged positions. In our diverse and stratified society, a great number of men find themselves situated at very different intersections. Therefore, the limits to any generalizations from my observations must be emphasized.

Finally, this study investigates issues of sex and gender. Sexism and homonegativity remain acute problems in our society. Gender-based violence, exploitation, and injustice are everyday realities. Employing a hermeneutic of hope does not mean that these are denied or forgotten. Looking out for signs of change does certainly not mean that everything is well. A hermeneutic of hope is but a little torch that is needed in a dark place.

Using this little torch of optimism, what are we looking for? This study is looking for cracks in the traditional gender order. Cracks are nothing spectacular. Cracks do not reveal what the future will look like. Cracks can be an indication that an edifice will not last forever. The more cracks we find, the likelier it is that it will eventually collapse. Cracks are indicators of change. Leonard Cohen famously sings that ‘There is a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in’.⁵ Examining cracks is not only about collapse and destruction. Cracks can also be catalysts of hope and transformation.⁶

Looking at cracks is a familiar task for professionals in the practice of pastoral care. Caregivers are used to exploring the cracks in the narratives and lives of those who seek care.⁷ Caregivers know how important it is to find the right angle in a life story to see the light getting in through the cracks.⁸ Both cracks and care are at the very core of pastoral theology and practice.

Of Racoons and Warriors: The Viral Subversion of Gender Codes

In autumn 2020, faced with the second wave of infections with SARS-CoV-2, the German federal government launched the video-clip campaign ‘#besondere helden’ (unusual heroes) on social media. One of these clips shall serve here as an illustration of how the pandemic created a situation that subverted traditional social norms.⁹

The clip introduces a fictitious character, Anton Lehmann. A subtitle informs us that he was ‘in action’ in the East German town of Chemnitz in 2020. Wearing a blue open-neck shirt, a red sweater, a dark green jacket, and brown corduroy pants, he is seated in an armchair in his bourgeois living room. By his looks, voice, and demeanor, one would estimate him to be in his mid-seventies. Which implies that he is speaking to us from the 2070s, looking back to his student days. This is the story he tells:

I think it was in the winter of 2020, when all eyes of the country were on us. I had just turned twenty-two. I was studying mechanical engineering in Chemnitz, when the second wave came. Twenty-two! At this age, you want to party, study, meet someone, all that sort of thing, or go out for drinks with friends. But fate had other plans for us.

An invisible danger threatened everything we believed in. Suddenly the fate of this country was in our hands. So, we mustered all our courage - and did what was expected of us. The only right thing to do:

We did - nothing. Absolutely nothing. Being lazy as raccoons. Days and nights we stayed sitting on our butts at home and fought the spread of the corona virus. Our couch was the front, and patience was our weapon.

Yes, you know, sometimes I almost have to smile to myself a little when I think back to those days. This was our destiny. This is how we became heroes. Back then, in that corona winter of 2020.¹⁰

German audiences born between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s will be reminded by Anton Lehmann of the generation of their own grandfathers, of how these told their ‘war stories’ about the Second World War. This memory of the grandfatherly war story is the key to understanding this clip. Anton Lehmann is telling his ‘war story’ to the generation of his grandchildren. A war he fought – ‘in action’ – as a student in 2020.

War stories are one of the classic strategies to narratively construct masculinity. The mythopoetic men’s literature of the 1980s encouraged their readers to get in touch with the warrior archetype inside.¹¹ Many critical scholars have written about the complex and often mutually reinforcing relationship between war and masculinity throughout history.¹² Multiple social institutions sustain ‘martial masculinity’, from paramilitary youth movements to violent sports.¹³ Militarism and the context of war create the masculinity codes of the ‘soldier hero’ in popular culture.¹⁴ In a good summary of pertinent scholarship, Maya Eichler concludes that

the link between masculinity and the military is constructed and maintained for the purposes of waging war. Militarized masculinity, at its most basic level, refers to the assertion that traits stereotypically associated with masculinity can be acquired and proven through military service or action, and combat in particular. When state and military leaders aim to display strength through the use of military force or hope to recruit male citizens through appeals to their masculine identity, they are relying on and reproducing militarized masculinity. While men are not inherently militaristic, militarized masculinity is central to the perpetuation of violence in international relations.¹⁵

Anton Lehmann starts his war story with tropes that are familiar in the narrative construction of martial heroism. ‘It was in the winter … ’. War stories set in winter tend to emphasize the physical hardship endured by the soldier hero as a result of harsh weather conditions. The ‘invisible danger’ evokes a devious and potentially superior enemy, who ‘threatened everything we believed in’. The warriors, the audience is made to understand, were idealists who were called to defend their highest values. As convention demands, patriotism is one of them – ‘the fate of this country was suddenly in our hands’. In exchange, the whole country has its eyes fixed on the warriors, who thus apprehend ‘what was expected’ of them. Clearly, courage, as the warrior’s foremost virtue, had to be mustered, in conjunction with unambiguous moral righteousness – doing ‘the only right thing to do’.

Having thus constructed a narrative edifice of martial virtue and heroism, Lehmann’s tale takes an unexpected turn. The climactic turning point is the question what the warriors actually did in the winter of 2020. With supporting sound effects, the audience is confronted with an anticlimactic answer – ‘nothing’. Lehmann adds the amplification ‘absolutely nothing’, followed by the invocation of laziness as the key virtue in this war. Lehmann illustrates this with a highly unusual animal metaphor – ‘lazy as raccoons’. Whatever the raccoon symbolism is meant to stand for, it is traditionally not linked with military prowess or heroic masculinity. Likewise, while popular culture associates martial masculinity with the muscular arms or the exposed torso of Rambo, the male posterior is a body part that only rarely makes an appearance in heroic war stories. Furthermore, Lehmann’s theater of war is, untypically, located ‘at home’. This is not only at odds with traditional war stories, but it also shatters the most fundamental spatial distinction in the modern gender order, a point which will be discussed in greater detail in the next section. Located on a couch, consuming junk food and soft drinks, Lehmann’s warrior embodies the proverbial ‘couch potato’. Yet Lehmann does not let go of the war storey. In almost Pauline fashion, he redefines the martial semantics of ‘front’ and ‘weapon’ by attaching them to ‘couch’ and ‘patience’.¹⁶ Finally, Lehmann allows for some comic relief, when he admits the urge to ‘smile to myself’ – a facial expression traditionally absent from war heroes. And with this smirk he concludes his deconstruction of the traditional war story – ‘That was our destiny. This is how we became heroes.’

This study is not the place to assess the effectiveness of this piece of government propaganda, nor to discuss whether it was well advised, or respectful of those people who sacrificed their health and lives in more heroic activities during the pandemic. The reason why this clip is of scholarly interest is that it manages to condense in 1:35 minutes the viral subversion of the deeply gendered discourse of martial heroism. Step by step, sentence by sentence, this clip deconstructs military masculinity. It illustrates the potential of the pandemic to shake and cause cracks in the discursive foundations of the gender order. The remainder of this study sets out to inspect these cracks.

The Separation of Spheres Subverted

Most sociologists and social theorists understand gender as something that does not reside as a trait in the individual but is constructed in social interaction.¹⁷ Gender, in sociology, is a structure or institution that orders social practices, i.e. what people do with and to each other in everyday life.¹⁸ One of the most fundamental ways in which one can observe and experience the construction of gender is through the spatial separation of two distinct spheres of human activity, and the sex-specific allocation of practices to these two spheres.¹⁹ Many sociologists call this the ‘sexual division of labor’.²⁰ One could argue that this term is too narrow, because the spatial dichotomy of the two spheres extends far beyond what we usually consider labor or work.²¹ In daily life, the different spheres are experienced under several guises:

• Going to work versus staying at home

• Public life versus private life

• Breadwinner versus homemaker

• Work versus family

• Paid work versus unpaid work

• Market labor versus household labor.

• Being outside versus being inside²²

Of all these dichotomies, the distinction between economic production and social reproduction seems to provide the most useful designations of the two spheres.²³ In an industrial society, production refers to the use of labor to extract and transform inputs into marketable commodities, as in mining or steel production. Social reproduction has been described by Nancy Fraser as ‘housework, child-rearing, schooling, affective care and a host of other activities which serve to produce new generations of workers and replenish existing ones, as well as to maintain social bonds and shared understandings. Social reproduction is an indispensable background condition for the possibility of economic production in a capitalist society.’²⁴

It is important to take into account the historical context and contingency of this separation of spheres.²⁵ This particular gender order is a historical product of the Industrial Revolution.²⁶ It is closely tied to bourgeois society and industrial capitalism.²⁷ First indications of this social transformation can be observed in England as early as the late seventeenth century.²⁸ For the US, the ideological naturalization of the two separate spheres has been dated ‘in the late 1800s’.²⁹ Historians emphasize that pre-industrial societies did not know this spatial division of life worlds. Most tasks were performed by men, women, and children side by side.³⁰

The Industrial Revolution introduced our contemporary notions of gender in so far as it separated the life world into two different spheres. In the early days of the Industrial Revolution, capitalist production did not yet discriminate by sex. Children, women, and men flocked from the countryside to industrial centers and offered their labor to make a living. They were attracted by an urban life they considered superior to the one they had known in feudal societies and rural economies. The initial non-discriminatory exploitation of male, female, and child labor turned out to be unsustainable. Unrestrained exploitation of labor was not a viable business strategy. A hungry, tired, sick, and untrained work force was cheap, but proved ultimately incompatible with sustainable profit generation. The work force needed regeneration and, more technically, social reproduction. This includes food, sleep, education, relaxation, procreation, and healthcare. Some industrialists offered these reproductive services as part of the employment package.³¹ However, this model imposed a heavy responsibility on the industrialists. Eventually, they replaced it with a more convenient model. Industrial production employed only half the population in production. The excluded half of the population was forced to take on responsibility for reproduction: preparing meals, raising children, caring for the sick and the old. In this model, the allocation to the spheres of production and reproduction was based on bodies. Male bodies were used in production, female bodies in reproduction. One way to stabilize this arrangement was an ideology that naturalized this separation of the work force.³² Narratives were propagated that made it appear natural that male bodies work in coal mines, steel mills, or chemical plants, while female bodies cook dinner and look after the children. Another way to stabilize this arrangement was the ‘family wage’.³³ Production workers were paid enough that they could provide for a reproductive partner and for some offspring, who in due course would join the industrial labor force in either the productive or the reproductive sphere. Industrial capitalism clearly required both production and reproduction.

The material separation of the workforce into productive and reproductive labor did not last. In several countries, it worked as a well-oiled system only for a few decades between the mid nineteenth century and the First World War. In the English-speaking world, ‘Victorianism’ was one of the major cultural expressions of this order. However, the two great wars of the 20th centuries derailed this gender order based on the separation of spheres. In both wars, the same bodies that were needed in the mines, mills, and plants were re-employed and rapidly depleted in unproductive military activities. Suddenly, a new allocation of the work force became necessary. Female bodies had to be employed to keep up industrial production. Many of them did not want to return to unpaid work after the war.

At the material level, the separation of spheres had collapsed during war times, but after the war, in the late 1940s and the 1950s, great ideological efforts were made to get back to the pre-war gender order. The post-war epoch, especially the 1950s, saw the apogee of the dual-spheres ideology and its amplification through popular culture. Psychologists suddenly found that children’s development and well-being depended on the quasi-perpetual presence of the mother.³⁴ Men’s role in the family was relegated to that of the glorified breadwinner.³⁵ In sociology, Talcott Parson’s functionalism served to legitimize this gender order based on his distinction between ‘instrumental’ and ‘expressive’ sex roles.³⁶ These new, technical terms could hardly mask their roots in the industrial separation of work. Faith communities, meanwhile, provided religious anthropologies based on essentialist ontologies of sexual difference.³⁷

Several confluent developments since the 1960s kept putting the separation of spheres under pressure. Women insisted on directly earning their share of the family income. This undermined the family wage. Real incomes dropped to a level where single-earner households became less and less viable and double incomes became necessary.³⁸ At the same time, automatization – technical progress in industrial production – and globalization – the offshoring of industrial production to countries with lower labor cost – greatly reduced the total amount of labor that was needed in industrial production. Instead, labor was absorbed into a fast growing – but mostly low-wage – services sector. This growing commercial services sector also took over many reproductive activities.³⁹ Increasingly, the care of the young, the sick, and the elderly were transformed into commercial activities.

With this decline of industrial work and the absorption of men into office jobs, the spatial distinction between paid productive work and unpaid reproductive work turned, in a middle-class context, into a distinction between the office and the home. Although never as successful as the naturalizing association of male bodies with industrial production and female bodies with care and education, ideological efforts were expended to uphold the gendered distinction between work and home. No matter how de-industrialised work had become, the industrial notion that work had to be performed away from home was maintained. Men and women leave the home in the morning in order to spend a day at a place called ‘work’. This separation is symbolically underlined by different clothes and accessories, most notoriously the tie.

Nevertheless, the contradictions between a gender order based on the two spheres of industrial capitalism and the new realities of a post-industrial economy became increasingly noticeable. Over the past fifty years, the cracks in the gender order upheld by dual-spheres ideology have been registered by numerous scholars and popular writers, often framed as a ‘crisis’ of men or masculinity.⁴⁰

And then came the COVID-19 pandemic. In countries with strict confinement policies, office workers were no longer able to retreat into a separate work sphere.⁴¹ Suddenly both male and female bodies had to stay at home. At the same time, the work of women employed in paid reproduction, notably in health care, elderly care and childcare facilities, was suddenly re-valuated as ‘essential’. For numerous couples, this led to a reversal of traditional roles. Female bodies kept leaving the home for work, while male bodies spent many months at home. Crouched behind their laptops if lucky, unemployed or on furlough if less lucky. What some labor sociologists call the ‘reciprocal spillovers’ between family and work’⁴² peaked during the pandemic.

During the pandemic, the spatial and symbolic separation of work and home collapsed for many. The great confinement resulted in fusion. The traditional order symbolized by the distinction between ‘home’ and ‘office’ suddenly collapsed into the ‘home office’. The living room became a place for taking meals, for trying to get one’s work done, for helping children with their schoolwork, for attending business conferences, for virtual visits to friends and family, for enjoying media entertainment, and for remotely attending religious services. The material and the symbolic walls that ordered these practices through distinction and separation tumbled.

Certainly, many confined employees could not wait to get back to the office. But it is doubtful that they will ever be able to return to the status quo ante. The walls that separated the spheres have collapsed. Companies are not planning to receive all their staff back at the office. The home confinement demonstrated that economic life in post-industrial capitalism does not require the separation of home and work, that it can function rather well without it. Employers have also registered that home-based telework may lead to significant cost-savings, e.g. in terms of rent for inner-city office premises.⁴³ It is too early to say whether the pandemic dealt the final death blow to a gender order that was based on the separation of spheres. However, the cracks in its discursive foundations cannot be ignored.

The Viral Re-evaluation of Work and Fathering

How may the cracks in the old, industrial-age gender order eventually impact and transform men’s lives? Men build their identities in specific social contexts. Two important construction sites for masculinity are work and family. Although much of the literature treats them as distinct objects of scholarship, it will become apparent how deeply intertwined these two sites are for many men’s self-understanding.

Work and career have traditionally been areas of topmost importance for men’s self-definition. Many men define who they are both through what they do, and how well they do it in comparison to others.⁴⁴ As a result, many men tend to prioritize work over other concerns and responsibilities in their lives. Under the breadwinner ideology of industrial capitalism, this prioritization was not perceived as a selfish quest for self-realization, but legitimized as altruistic self-sacrifice for the sake of wife and children.⁴⁵ However, the prioritization of work often results in alienation from spouse and family, while a single-minded focus on career success leads to the neglect of alternative sources of self-esteem and purpose.⁴⁶ Such dependance on work for self-validation exposes men to severe crises in the case of illness, unemployment, and retirement.⁴⁷

Scholars of men and masculinity have observed that while women have increasingly entered occupations traditionally associated with men, there has been much less movement from men into the other direction. Thus, the range of men’s occupational choices has remained quite constrained.⁴⁸ More recently, the phenomenon of stay-at-home fathers has increasingly attracted interest, and research identified the many obstacles – including social stigma – facing men who are willing to make this choice.⁴⁹ Finally, an important issue in the context of men and work is the reconciliation of the competing demands of work and family.⁵⁰

The other side of the coin is men’s presence and engagement in the family. One much discussed issue in scholarship and popular debates is the problem of ‘father absence’ and its consequences. From a socio-psychological perspective, Alexander Mitscherlich hypothesized that paternal absence in the ‘fatherless society’ of industrial capitalism leads to authoritarianism, even totalitarianism, and to a host of other societal problems.⁵¹ Deepening these socio-psychological perspectives with a closer look at the intra-psychic dynamics of the individual, Nancy Chodorow argues that fathers’ relative absence from the socialization of their children during their formative years results in men’s devaluation of women. The dominance of the mother in the socialization of children, women’s ‘mothering’, has different effects on boys and girls. While girls develop their identity by way of identification with the mother, a boy ‘tends to deny identification with and relationship to his mother and reject what he takes to be the feminine world’.⁵² Such rejection of everything feminine can result in sexist and homophobic behaviors.⁵³ In the wake of these theoretical accounts of father absence, some scholars turned to empirical analysis of various indicators of ‘father involvement’ and examined how it benefits children’s development.⁵⁴

One of the disruptive effects of the pandemic and pandemic-related confinement measures has been the erosion of the importance of work as a site for men’s identity constructions. Many men have lost their jobs as a consequence of the pandemic. Others have been able to hang on, but often under increasingly precarious working arrangements, notably in the expanding ‘gig-economy’.⁵⁵ Home-confined office workers have experienced the domestication of their work. Deprived of business travel and business lunches, performed in the living room, and exposed to the curious eyes of other family members, office work without suit and tie has lost much of its mystique. It also looks a lot less gendered.⁵⁶

Secondly, the prioritization of work has been jeopardized in the home office, where men found themselves suddenly confronted with the demands of care. Where both spouses were confined to the home office, it became increasingly untenable for one partner to absolutize the priority of work while the other partner does not.

With a view to occupational preferences, the pandemic may have engendered some societal re-evaluation of care-related occupations. The notion of ‘essential workers’ and ‘critical services and functions’ has thrown a new light on the social value of occupations in the sphere of reproduction.⁵⁷ The association of care work with heroism, resilience, and meaning might help to undo the gendering of some occupations in public perception.

Finally, the obstacles often experienced by would-be stay-at-home fathers were suddenly lifted. Many men found this role imposed on them involuntarily. Some of them want to return to the situation before, others want to stay in this new role. In terms of structures, confinement has clearly demonstrated that working arrangements, both within the couple and between employee and employer, are possible to accommodate that role. Very broadly, then, the pandemic has accelerated a trend away from ‘the breadwinner’ to the ‘working father’⁵⁸ in dual-career relationships.⁵⁹ If Chodorow and Mitscherlich were right about the negative consequences of father absence, this trend towards greater paternal presence and involvement would also suggest a reduction in sexism and homonegativity in society, and generally more pro-social behaviors among men.

‘That’s how the Light Gets in’: caring about Cracks

Why is it important to look at economic, social, and cultural trends and locate the significance of the COVID-19 pandemic within the historical process? It is the vocation of practical theologians to look out for, notice, and ‘interpret the signs of the times’ (Matthew 16:3).⁶⁰ Pastoral theologians encounter the products of history in individual conversations. A sense of history, a sensibility for socio-historical trends informs pastoral theologians’ fascination with the concrete, the quotidian, and the particular⁶¹, and helps them to listen more attentively to their dialogue partners. The purpose of the previous sections was to explore what the COVID-19 pandemic has been doing to the life projects of individual men and how the situation of confinement impacts the construction of men’s identities at such sites as work and family.⁶²

Some men may experience some of the changes induced by the pandemic as a form of liberation.⁶³ Never before have so many men told me that they are re-evaluating the priorities in their lives. Many want to change their jobs. Some, who can afford it, are taking a ‘time out’. Some are taking parental leave to spend more time with their families. Others are starting to look for a more meaningful job. Almost all recognize their need for greater connectedness.

Other men are above all confused. They notice the cracks in the world they knew. Old habits and identities suddenly seem strangely out of place during the pandemic. Strong muscular male bodies turned out to be equipped with immune systems that are more vulnerable to viral attacks than those of women.⁶⁴ Reckless health behavior was suddenly branded anti-social.⁶⁵ The performance of hook-up masculinity⁶⁶ was interrupted once bars and other hook-up venues were closed. Cracks are becoming visible in male identities. These cracks emerge in the narratives told in pastoral conversations. Pastoral theologians may identify the cracks as opportunities for the light to get in.

What does all this mean for the practice of pastoral conversations? In the first place, it means making room for men and the realities of their lives. It means listening to them, patiently and attentively. It means listening to life narratives with a fine ear for cracks and discontinuities. It also means identifying life-limiting masculinity codes and deconstructing them jointly and gently.⁶⁷ Finally, it means looking not only at the cracks, but also through the cracks – for the light. It means preparing the way for change and transformation.

Conclusion

A commitment to human flourishing makes the deconstruction of life-limiting gender codes a central objective of a gender-sensitive pastoral care. This study has shown how the COVID-19 pandemic has generated momentum for the undoing of gender. The analysis of the ‘#besondere helden’ clip demonstrated at the example of military masculinity how the pandemic has the power to subvert traditional gender codes. Taking a more macroscopic view, this study explained how the modern gender order rests on the spatial separation of spheres as a historic product of industrial capitalism. As industrial capitalism faded, so did the ideological foundations on which this gender order was built. The COVID-19 crisis has made the post-industrial predicament visible. To see how these pandemic-induced changes manifest themselves in the concrete lives of individual men, this study looked at two central construction sites of masculinity, work and family. In both areas, the experience of the pandemic has shattered traditional gender codes. The pandemic-induced confinement policies have put into question the spatial separation of work and home and created the fusion experience of the ‘home office’. The pandemic deflated the ideal of men’s single-minded commitment to productive work and made them more attentive to the world of care and reproduction. Within the family system, confinement policies interrupted father absence and exposed men, nolens volens, to the experience of stay-at-home dads. All these discontinuities, at both societal and individual level, offer opportunities for gender-sensitive pastoral care to accompany a process of undoing gender in the lives of men and the social systems they are part of.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Herbert Anderson, Heilim Choi, Phil Helsel, Don Hood, Rochelle Johnson, Amina McIntyre, Heidi Park, Erin Raffety, and Bruce Rogers-Vaughn for sharing their insights and comments on an earlier version of this paper discussed at the “Cracks and Care” workshop during the SPT Annual Study Conference of the Society for Pastoral Theology on 19 June 2021. I am particularly indebted to Jill Snodgrass and Heidi Park for their tireless support during the preparation and conduct of the workshop. The shortcomings are mine.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek - Vlaanderen: [Grant Number 1149022N].

Notes on contributors

Armin M. Kummer

Armin M. Kummer’s research and publications explore the confluence of spirituality, late-modern society, and biblical traditions. At the Research Unit of Pastoral and Empirical Theology of KU Leuven, Belgium, he is currently engaged in a government-funded research project into gender-specific spirituality and the pastoral care of men. Armin holds prior social-sciences degrees from Cambridge and Harvard, is trained as Lutheran pastor, and ministers to working-age men in the wider Brussels area. His publications include the monograph Men, Spirituality, and Gender-specific Biblical Hermeneutics (Peeters, 2019).

Notes

1 Cf. e.g., Scheib, “All Shall Be Well,” 1–17; Moschella, Caring for Joy, 45; McClure, Emotions, xi. Carrie Doehring uses the related terminology of “life-giving” versus “life-limiting”. Doehring, The Practice of Pastoral Care, 2015, 6.

2 Cf. Risman, “Gender as a Social Structure,” 19–43.

3 For a comprehensive overview of relevant psychological scholarship, see American Psychological Association, “APA Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men”.

4 Cf. Kuratle and Morgenthaler, Männerseelsorge, 48; See also Karle, Seelsorge in der Moderne, 231–235; Kummer, Men, Spirituality, and Gender-Specific Biblical Hermeneutics, 117–120.

5 Cohen, Anthem, The Future (Sony Music Entertainment, 1992).

6 Similar use of the Cohen-inspired “cracks” imagery is made by Hennekam and Shymko, “Coping with the COVID-19 Crisis,” 800.

7 E.g. Graham, “Narratives of Families, Faith, and Nation,” 4–8; Anderson, “Common Grief, Complex Grieving,” 134.

8 Moschella speaks of “glimmers and glints”. Moschella, Caring for Joy, xii; See also Doehring, The Practice of Pastoral Care, 185ff.

9 The original clip can be found at https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/themen/coronavirus/besonderehelden-1-1811518; site accessed 26.07.2021.

10 Own translation from German.

11 E.g. Bly, Iron John; Moore and Gillette, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover; For a critical review of mythopoetic literature, see Kummer, Men, Spirituality, and Gender-Specific Biblical Hermeneutics, 5–32.

12 For a lucid dissection of the “warrior ethos” by a pastoral theologian, see LaMothe, “Men, Warriorism, and Mourning,” 819–836; See also Higate and Hopton, “War, Militarism and Masculinities,” 432–447; Hutchings, “Making Sense of Masculinity and War,” 389–404; Ferguson, “Masculinity and War,” S108–S120.

13 Cf. Edley, Men and Masculinity, 137–141.

14 Cf. Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire, and the Imagining of Masculinities.

15 Eichler, “Militarized Masculinities in International Relations,” 81.

16 Cf. Ephesians 6:10-17; 2 Co 6:7; 1 Thess 5.8.

17 West and Zimmerman, ‘Doing Gender,’ 125–151; Coltrane and Shih, ‘Gender and the Division of Labor,’ 401–422.

18 Cf. Connell, Masculinities, 71–76; Risman, ‘Gender as a Social Structure,’ 19–43.

19 Some scholars “use the term gender ideology to represent the underlying concept of an individual’s level of support for a division of paid work and family responsibilities that is based on the notion of separate spheres.” Davis and Greenstein, “Gender Ideology: Components, Predictors, and Consequences,” 89.

20 See e.g. Coltrane and Shih, “Gender and the Division of Labor”; Ferguson, “Gender, Work, and the Sexual Division of Labor,” 337–361; and Sullivan, “The Gendered Division of Household Labor,” 377–392.

21 The division of spheres also structures leisure activities, e.g., sports. Cf. Cooky, “Sociology of Gender and Sport,” 459–467.

22 The notion of separate spheres reaches as far as upstairs/downstairs and outside/inside distinctions in the allocation of housekeeping tasks among U.S. couples that consider themselves egalitarian. Cf. Lamont, The Mating Game, 142ff.

23 Holter distinguishes between “production sphere and reproduction sphere, production meaning the creation of things or nonhuman resources and reproduction the creation of human resources.“ Holter, “Direct Gender Hierarchy and Structural Inequality,” 27.

24 Nancy Fraser, “Contradictions of Capital and Care,” 102.

25 Cf. Bohan, “Regarding Gender: Essentialism, Constructionism, and Feminist Psychology,” 41; Connell, Masculinities, 68.

26 Cf. Edley, Men and Masculinity, 96; For a detailed historical account, see Shoemaker, Gender in English Society, 1650 - 1850, esp. 165-171.

27 Cf. Connell, The Men and the Boys, 63–64; Connell, Masculinities, 68.

28 Hall, White, Male and Middle Class.

29 Coltrane and Shih, “Gender and the Division of Labor,” 403.

30 Cf. ibid.

31 One can still see examples of this model in some of the former mining towns in Belgium, namely at the UNESCO World Heritage sites Bois-du-Luc and Bois du Cazier.

32 Cf. Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering, 178–180.

33 Cf. Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism, 111–135.

34 Cf. Edley, Men and Masculinity, 96.

35 Ibid., 80–82.

36 Parsons and Bales, Family, Socialization and Interaction Process.

37 Cf. Allen, “Man-Woman Complementarity,” 87–108.

38 Cf. Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism, 111–135; Fraser, “Contradictions of Capital and Care,” 112–116.

39 Holter, “Men’s Work and Family Reconciliation in Europe,” 428.

40 Examples for this frequently alarmist crisis discourse are publications like Goldberg, The Hazards of Being Male; Tiger, The Decline of Males; Clare, On Men: Masculinity in Crisis; For a critical perspective on the discourse of crisis, see Anderson and Magrath, Men and masculinities, 180.

41 Cf. Alipour, Fadinger, and Schymik, “My Home Is My Castle – The Benefits of Working from Home during a Pandemic Crisis,” 104373.

42 Cf. Coltrane and Shih, “Gender and the Division of Labor,” 415.

43 For an overview of sociological literature on telework, see Bjursell, Bergmo-Prvulovic, and Hedegaard, “Telework and Lifelong Learning,”.

44 Cf. Kilmartin, The Masculine Self, 167–185.

45 Cf. Bernard, “The Good-Provider Role,” 1–12.

46 Cf. Kilmartin, The Masculine Self, 167–185; Smith and Winchester, “Negotiating Space,” 327–339.

47 Cf. Brooks, Beyond the Crisis of Masculinity, 19; For a pastoral theological perspective, see Culbertson, Counseling Men, 35–45.

48 Cf. Fouad, Whiston, and Feldwisch, “Men and Men’s Careers,”, 503–524; See also the critical discussion in Anderson and Magrath, Men and masculinities, 233–250.

49 Cf. Rochlen et al., “‘I’m Just Providing for My Family’,” 193–206; Heppner and Heppner, “On Men and Work,” 49–67.

50 Cf. Holter, “Men’s Work and Family Reconciliation in Europe.”

51 Cf. Mitscherlich, Auf Dem Weg Zur Vaterlosen Gesellschaft.

52 Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering, 176.

53 On homophobia, see Kimmel, “Masculinity as Homophobia,”, 223–242.

54 Cf. McKelley and Rochlen, “Furthering Fathering,”, 525–550; Lamb, The Role of the Father in Child Development, 5th ed. (New York (N.Y.): Wiley, 2010).

55 On precarious work in the gig economy, see Crouch, Will the Gig Economy Prevail?.

56 For two classic accounts of gendered workplaces, see Kanter, Men and Women of the Corporation; Joan Acker, “Hierarchies, Job, Bodies,” 139–158.

57 Cf. Thomason and Macias-Alonso, “COVID-19 and Raising the Value of Care,” 705–708; Bahn, Cohen, and Rodgers, “A Feminist Perspective on COVID-19 and the Value of Care Work Globally,” 695–699.

58 Cf. Ranson, “Men, Paid Employment and Family Responsibilities,” 741–761.

59 Cf. Alon et al., The Impact of COVID-19 on Gender Equality; Globisch and Osiander, Sind Frauen die Verliererinnen der Covid-19-Pandemie?, IAB Forum (Nürnberg: Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung, November 2020); Hupkau and Petrongolo, “Work, Care and Gender during the COVID-19 Crisis,” 623–651; Mooi-Reci and Risman, “The Gendered Impacts of COVID-19,” 161–167. See also the country-specific studies in the same issue.

60 Good examples of political pastoral theology are Rogers-Vaughn, Caring for Souls in a Neoliberal Age; LaMothe, Care of Souls, Care of Polis.

61 Cf. Walton, “Seeking Wisdom in Practical Theology,” 5–18.

62 On masculinity as identity work and life project, see Kuratle and Morgenthaler, Männerseelsorge, 94–99.

63 Cf. Hennekam and Shymko, “Coping with the COVID-19 Crisis,” 800.

64 Cf. Scully et al., “Considering How Biological Sex Impacts Immune Responses and COVID-19 Outcomes,” 442–447.

65 On gendered health behaviours, see Courtenay, “Engendering Health: A Social Constructionist Examination of Men’s Health Beliefs and Behaviors,” 4–15; Reny, “Masculine Norms and Infectious Disease: The Case of COVID-19,” 1028–1035.

66 Cf. Kuperberg and Allison, “Gender and Hooking Up,” 315–327.

67 On the deconstruction of masculinity codes, see Kummer, “Liberation, Therapy, and the Reconfiguration of Men’s Gendered Identities in Pastoral Care,” 72–83.