Masculinity and affect: new possibilities, new agendas

ABSTRACT

The aim of this special issue is to create a greater dialogue between affect studies and masculinity studies. The contributions to the issue explore how affect functions as non-discursive intensities that may enable new forms of gendered subjectivities that subvert core tenets of masculinity, as well as how affect may be channeled into masculinities that reaffirm hegemonic or normative gender constructs. In this introduction, we discuss how masculinity studies has approached men and emotions, outline theoretical approaches to affective masculinities that may help scholars rethink and destabilize masculinity, and discuss how affect and masculinity may be approached methodologically.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• affect theory
• affective turn
• emotions
• masculinity
• feminist theory

The former Danish musician Chili Klaus (a.k.a. Claus Pilgaard) has become something of an internet celebrity for eating extremely hot chili peppers with famous people. Sometimes he also visits other YouTube channels such as Hot Ones (2015), hosted by the American Sean Evans who is known for tasting very hot chicken wings with celebrities. In a 2015 episode, the two men meet to eat the Caroline Reaper, taken to be the hottest pepper in the world. Soon after eating the pepper, they start to sweat and cry, and their limbs go limp. Their response looks to be a largely bio-physical reaction to the chemical substance and strength of the pepper. At least to start with, they do not seem to be expressing any particular emotion; they do not cry because they are sad, for instance, but due to the strength of the pepper. The video seemingly illustrates a process or a relation between humans and fruits (yes, chili peppers are fruits) encountering each other. Man eats pepper, and it makes him sweat.

But one element of the reaction seen in the video is not purely biological but related to masculine subjectivity. In other YouTube clips in which men eat the Caroline Reaper, they vomit, run around, shout, drink large amounts of water, open a window to get some air or take off their clothes. In this case, Chili Klaus and Sean Evans withhold pain while remaining constantly focused on the camera. One could say that they enact a restrained or stoic masculinity for their public. By virtue of performing such masculine self-control, they present themselves as able to eat the hottest of all chili peppers, perhaps even as used to doing so. If eating the pepper could potentially create a number of different bodily states and provoke various uncontrolled behaviors, their act is to some extent channeled into a specific form of masculinity, one which evokes their prior experience of eating this pepper as well as culturally legible notions about men, risk, extremity, and self-control which they mutually reinforce. Simply put, their masculine enactment focuses on pain tolerance: ‘You can also feel it in your ears’, Klaus notes. ‘In my neck’, Sean adds. Later, he states, ‘Tough. As much pain as I’ve been in a while […] This is what we go through’. Klaus continues, ‘Say hello to Sean, a living proof that it’s very tough to run … to run an internet channel’. But it’s also a culinary experience, as Klaus comments: ‘[It’s painful] but it’s very tasteful too’.

While their experience eating the Carolina Reaper conveys masculine self-control, at the same time the pepper enables new forms of male relationality that one might not expect alongside stoic masculinity. At the end of the video, the men look at each other tenderly, hug affectionately, and then Klaus tells Sean ‘I love you, man’, to which his friend lovingly responds that he loves him as well. This unexpected male tenderness could be seen as expressing a form of laddish homosociality in which Sean and Claus bond in the experience of enduring and overcoming pain. But one could also argue that the experience of eating the pepper enables a brief moment of intimacy, or that the very intensity of the experience creates a loving bond or the conditions necessary for such a bond to be expressed. These middle-aged, normative-seeming men would presumably not have embraced or uttered the affectionate words to each other without the pepper having affected them in the first place. In other words, the video reveals that what we might call ‘affective intensity’ has the potential to create unexpected masculinities or unexpected relationalities between men. Such hard-to-define intensities do not always do something to normative masculinity, of course, and a hyper-masculine, homosocial, stoic bond still remains an integral part of the affective relation. The intimacy does not overturn certain traditional or classic constructs of masculinity or homosociality and suddenly open up radical new ways of being or relating. But whether expected or unexpected, these kinds of relations between masculinity and affective intensities – which we distinguish from emotional intensities – are what interest us in this volume. What would it mean in critical studies of men and masculinity, we and the contributors ask here, to move from a focus on ‘emotion’ to one on ‘affect’, or to balance an interest in both of these phenomena?

Men, emotions, and critical masculinity studies

There is nothing new about scholarly work that thinks about emotions and masculinity. Probably because so many men have a rather ambivalent relationship to their own and to others’ feelings, at least in certain cultural contexts, masculinity studies has been interested in emotions for decades. Most of the first generation of masculinity scholars within the social sciences wrote on the topic, including Hearn (1993), Kimmel (1994) and Seidler (1989) (see de Boise & Hearn, 2017 for an overview of the topic). Early accounts are also found in Connell’s (1987) discussions of Freudian psychoanalysis and of the role of cathexis (emotional attachment) in upholding the gender order. Within the humanities, scholars have explored historically specific constructs and experiences of what we today may understand as ‘emotion’, ‘emotions’, or ‘feeling’, including topics such as crying, woundedness, and sentimentality (Chapman & Hendler, 1999; Ekenstam, 1998; Ellison, 1999; Furneaux, 2016; Shamir & Travis, 2002; Travis, 2005; Vaught, 2008). An important, early book from a humanities scholar on masculinity and emotion is Middleton (1992).

Contemporary masculinity has frequently been understood as unemotional, emotionally impaired, or somewhat stoic, which is seen as a consequence of western gender norms. As hooks (2004) has pointed out:

The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem. (p. 6)

While hooks see men’s emotion regulation as a central tenant in patriarchy, Kimmel (1994) locates it more specifically in the male anxiety of not being seen as meeting masculine norms:

If masculinity is a homosocial enactment, its overriding emotion is fear [since] what we call masculinity is often a hedge against being revealed as a fraud, an exaggerated set of activities that keep others from seeing through us, and a frenzied effort to keep at bay those fears within ourselves. (pp. 129–131)

This disciplinary idea of men’s emotional incapacity has its roots in what we would call a western masculine emotional regime where stoicism and emotion control are central. Vic Seidler’s work focuses on this approach to emotions. In his seminal book in masculinity studies, Rediscovering masculinity (1989), he argues that, ‘As men we learn to treat emotions and feelings as signs of weakness. This makes it difficult for us to come to terms with our emotional lives and relationships’ (p. 157). Displaying weakness is difficult for men ‘since this threatens our very sense of masculinity’ (p. 158). This emotional situation results largely, according to Seidler (2007), from the Cartesian split between body and mind, in which men are inherently associated with reason. René Descartes also clearly differentiated between body and soul and between materiality and immateriality, associating women with the former and men with the latter. Men have since become connected to rationality, while women are tied to the earthly, the corporeal, and the irrational. In order to take responsibility and make decisions for themselves and others, men are expected to subdue insecurity and other troubling feelings. As one part of a Christian legacy, the body has also come to be seen as an instrument of men’s will, a machine that can be rationally and objectively controlled in full.

A common argument in work on men and masculinity is that this masculine emotion regime creates problems for individual men. As hooks (2004) argues in the quote above, stoicism is a form of psychic self-mutilation that cripples men. Similarly, Seidler (1989) notes that ‘a fear of intimacy has held men in a terrible isolation and loneliness’ (p. 162). It is said to cause depression and suicide, to keep men from seeking medical help and social support, and to hold them back from developing intimate relationships with male friends (e.g. Courtenay, 2000). Paradoxically, this gendered emotion regime has also been taken as a cause of men’s anger and violence. Men’s emotional incompetence and the cultural expectations on men to be unemotional end up making them too emotional. They certainly have feelings, but of the wrong kind (cf. Hearn, 1993), and consequently the unemotional man turns into the angry man. Recent developments in American politics, with the omnipresence of the angry Trump voter, have brought increased visibility to anger as a viable emotion for a certain brand of white masculinity.

While critical studies of men and masculinities have since the late 1980s explored men’s ambivalent relation to emotions and emotionality, some of this literature might today appear problematic, particularly in light of developments in poststructuralist thought. First, much of the research has been based on binary thinking, where universal and often essentialist ideas about men and their emotional lives are proposed (see Galasiński, 2004). It is important to differentiate between different groups of men and how emotions and emotionality may differ due to class, sexuality, disability, and age, as well as different local settings and relationships. An example of recent work that judiciously avoids essentialism and focuses on specific contexts is Kabesh’s (2013) book on postcolonial masculinities and emotions, in which she explores the emotional lives of men whose collective ancestral memory is intertwined with colonialism, the aftermath of 9/11, and the Arab spring from a Fanonian psychoanalytic perspective. She demonstrates how narratives about the shadowy Arab man continue to play out in anti-immigration discourse and deeply affect the lives of these ‘other’ men.

Second, in some of the literature, emotional regimes are primarily presented as a repressive force that functions in what Foucault (1978) would call a ‘juridico-discursive’ fashion. Gendered emotion regimes prohibit individual men from experiencing certain feelings that exist prior to their expression, and in the end create emotional difficulties or struggles for men themselves (e.g. loneliness, depression, suicide) or for others (e.g. violence, aggression). Individual men, then, may be portrayed as victims of a universalizing emotional regime of masculinity.¹ This line of argument is particularly evident in Seidler who writes, for instance:

Because our traditional notions of masculinity place us at such a distance from our own emotional lives, it makes it difficult for us to know our own emotional needs, let alone respond to others. (1989, p. 159)

This liberatory model means that a man needs to allow himself to feel the emotions that he could experience if he could untrain his responses, reverse his cultural upbringing, and locate his inner emotional self. While this model may apply to some men and their cultural representation, it does not necessarily permit other forms of male gender performance to come into being. The very idea of cultural constraints on emotion reify lack of feeling expression in the first place by suggesting that masculinity is subjected to forms of emotion that already exist and thus that the male body does not produce new forms of feeling outside those constraints.

This ‘constraint’ approach to masculinity may mirror broader thought on the topic outside the academy and academic work that is then appropriated by academics. Chu (2014) writes with respect to this line of thinking in American popular discourse:

Starting from the assumption that there is something wrong with boys, these books [on boys’s socialization leading to emotional disconnection] emphasize their alleged emotional and relational deficiencies (as compared to girls) and aim to identify what is wrong and who or what is to blame. Boys’ emotional capacities and relational strengths are rarely mentioned, much less addressed. (p. 7)

A more dynamic model of acceptance and resistance may be needed. Chu cites work such as Way (2013) as she conducts her own study that ‘both emphasizes [boys’] agency and awareness and considers what factors influence and motivate individual boys as they respond to their gender socialization’ (2014, p. 9). In addition, as Sam de Boise points out in this volume, recent literature in masculinity studies is critical of the idea that all men are unable or unwilling to display emotions and has argued for the emergence of more ‘emotional men’ who may, in fact, take on emotional labor in romantic and familial relationships in ways that subvert core tenets of hegemonic masculinity.

Finally, much of the traditional work on emotion in masculinity studies tends to place emotions within the individual man without reference to the porousness of feeling. We obviously experience emotional states within our bodies, but when placing feelings firmly within discrete individuals as part of individual subjectivity, we may overlook the relational aspects of affect and – in particular – how other bodies and materialities (such as red hot chili peppers) contribute to producing, transforming, and transgressing emotions. And we may ignore how emotional expression is in turn transmitted to other bodies and could move around and coalesce around spaces and places. Consequently, we would suggest that we need to understand affective masculinities as not only embodied expression regulated by gendered emotion regimes but also as the action potential of human and non-human bodies (Deleuze, 1988). Male bodies exist in and as a network of affective relationships that suggest dynamic and complicated ways to consider a man’s affective responses.

Toward affective studies of masculinity

With a substantial and influential body of thought from the so-called ‘affective turn’ (Clough, 2007) in the academy, masculinity and affect can now be thought of together. While feminist and queer theory were in on the ground floor of developments in affect studies, masculinity studies has been much slower to develop relations to affect. This may seem odd given the history of thinking about emotion and masculinity referenced above. What this volume proposes is a series of articles that aim to help invent a subfield of masculinity studies predicated on incorporating affect as well as a subfield of affect studies focused on or taking masculinity into account.

While affect is generally understood as distinct from ‘emotion’ in affect studies, affect does not reject emotion whole handedly. If emotion is largely culturally coded because a male subject learns how to be emotional, how to express emotion, or how to avoid emotion, affect is a quite different phenomenon. Once a man expresses a culturally legible emotion, he has already had a non-discursive corporeal response to something outside himself, as the Chili Klaus case illustrates. The emotion he feels is already a putting into the language of something ineffable and visceral. Articulating an emotion means it is already too late to find affect. Calling a reaction ‘joy’ or ‘anger’ or ‘sadness’ is a retroactive coding or stabilizing of a difficult-to-define, non-discursive intensity within him that assumes that the feeling is easily knowable and definable and that it belongs to him. There is already a history to a man’s articulating ‘I am angry’ or to the assumption of his anger if not directly articulated as such. The very articulation of anger may assume that the emotion belongs to him and may ignore that something has been transmitted from other bodies or from inanimate objects. In this sense, emotions can be understood as capturing and stabilizing slippery affect, or putting into language something that is culturally legible. The field-defining affect theorist Brian Massumi writes that an emotion is ‘the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal […] the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions […] It is intensity owned and recognized’ (2002, p. 28). But the insertion of an emotion means that something has escaped and that affect cannot be contained in any single body and that affect’s escape from emotion can be perceived: ‘The escape of affect cannot but be perceived, alongside the perceptions that are its capture’ (p. 36, his emphasis). Still, affect is very difficult to discuss in academic writing since ‘there is no cultural-theoretical vocabulary specific to affect’ (p. 27). We admit the contradiction in terms of even trying to study or to write about affect and accept that what we must do as scholars is to take into account as best we can the ineffable and expressions of the very difficulty of discussing affect, which will always be interpretive.

While affect has always been with us, even if not understood as such or articulated using the same terminology, it has become more prominent in recent years. For Massumi, ‘affect is central to an understanding of our information- and image-based late capitalist culture […] our condition is characterized by a surfeit of [affect]’ (2002, p. 27). Global capitalism and neonationalism attempt to manipulate affect for its own white masculinist ends, appropriating and deploying it (in the media and in other forms) in quantities so vast we have trouble understanding affect’s limits.² If affect is so prevalent today, then understanding twenty-first-century masculinity requires that it be taken into account as part of its makeup and functioning.³

In some cases, work on masculinity and emotions seems to have already embedded within it ideas that affect studies scholars might label affect, but is not called as such or is not taken up as an explicit or central object of analysis. As an important book in the sociology of emotions, to take one example, Kimmel’s Angry white men (2013) documents a demographic of frustrated, white men in the United States after the election of Obama, focusing on the ‘emotion’ of anger. His important study of anger is very contextualized and very specific with respect to a cultural moment in U.S. culture (predating Trump): the emotion of anger ‘fixes’ – in Massumi’s terms – a very strong visceral response to certain imagined elements of contemporary American culture. The book is about the culturally legible emotion of anger, albeit one that functions in a specific way. But in this book Kimmel also focuses on the ‘rage’ of a class of white American men closed out of a changing economy (or being ‘raging mad’), a feeling concept closer to affect than the emotion ‘anger’ as it suggests an energy or a viscerality not fully emotional. Kimmel does not articulate in his analysis a Massumi-esque fixing of affective energy in emotion, but again the concept is not fully absent from the analysis either. In a discussion of angry men who call in to American right-wing radio superstar Rush Limbaugh’s show, Kimmel notes how the host transforms a man’s reactions to cultural context into anger: ‘What starts as sadness, anxiety, grief, worry is carefully manipulated into political rage’ (p. 32). Kimmel’s focus is on the ‘translation of emotional vulnerability or insecurity into anger’ (ibid.), but a lesser-defined affect may well be part of what is translated into anger. To talk of insecurity or vulnerability is already to culturally code subjective experience, but what if something even more undefined is being translated on the radio? That affect may not simply come from that man calling in to the radio show or it may not just belong to that individual man, but rather it may be circulating through culture in difficult-to-locate ways. Affective studies of ‘angry white men’ might consider not simply the ‘translation’ of insecurity to anger, but also the undefined intensive energy into ‘anger’. The body itself, with its intensities, may be part of what is channeled into ‘anger’. It might also consider that which escapes from the individual, or what cannot be captured in anger, the remainder not part of the translation. Something may be lost in translation and signs of what does not get channeled may be noted. And the radio format and the quality of sound in the phone may be part of the way affect is channeled specifically. The specifics of the channeling situation may also be relevant. In this case, the radio may have an effect on the affective channeling. How, for instance does the lack of the visual on the radio change what happens to affect? What is the role of voice? By paying attention and attempting to grasp the non-representational, affect studies may highlight the role of lightning, color, space, smell, movement, and sound in producing hetoromasculine atmospheres and channeling the masculinity of affect (Anderson, 2014; Gottzén, 2017a). In this volume, Andrija Filipović, for instance, sees normative masculinity as affective noise which complicates the boundaries between the private and public in the urban soundscape. In public squares, the life of straight masculinity is often loud and clear, deafening for those who are queer, meaning that closets are not simply spatial, discursive, or even visual but also sonically constituted and may literally silence queer subjectivities.

Potential methodologies

Why should one bother to take affect into account in masculinity studies? What interest is there in considering something as ineffable as affect? Social science scholars who work in the sociology of emotions have often shared with us that they do not necessarily see why affect – instead of emotions – should be taken into account in their work. Others have expressed concerns that they cannot know when they see or hear it or how to study it. Kabesh notes at the start of her book for instance, ‘I do not know how to make sense of the visceral quality of emotions and the bodily sensations that are produced’ (2013, p. 11). What issues might there be with studies in which an individual man simply has emotions that define his subjectivity? Is slippery affect really necessary to consider?

The easy answer, of course, is that affect is a key element of subjectivity and should be factored in to all wings of gender studies. If Massumi is right that affect has increased in the digital age, then we need to think about affect as part of the digital gendered world, not to mention the neoliberal world in which we live in. But more specifically, the move from affect to emotion is an important process with respect to gender: it is part of the way that gender functions. Hegemony works in part by playing on affective intensities, by coopting them. A scholar could study how affect is channeled into ‘anger’ and how that channeling functions as a tool serving hegemonic ends. Donald Trump could be studied as a man who channeled – and continues to channel – affect for racist and masculinist ends. How did he do that channeling linguistically, gesturally, affectively? How did men respond to that channeling and how would they describe its effects and its origins? How did affect circulate and get stuck on certain bodies? Does affect ever not get channeled in that direction? Similarly, it would be possible to do an ethnography of right-wing men’s rights groups with respect to affect. In what ways, one might ask, do they channel affect and what do they do with affect? How do they articulate the non-representational? How does the ineffable nature of affect relate to their attempts to achieve hegemony? In his work on men’s rights group in North America, Allan (2016) notes for instance that the ineffable nature of affect may be one way in which men justify their need for increased hegemony: if they have affective reactions beyond language and cultural containment, then their affective responses are beyond critique or reproach. This beyond-questioning could be studied ethnographically by interviewing men involved in such groups to determine the discursive and corporeal strategies used to capture their affects and to translate them into something undefined. What is the real-world role of that justification? Or, an ethnographer might attempt to determine how affects are not allowed to be put into language or any other form of representation.

Allan’s piece for this volume, too, asks how ‘cruel optimism’, from Berlant’s (2011) well-known book of the same name, functions with respect to the repetition of affective failure over and over for ends that nonetheless embody the performance of masculinity. As Allan writes: ‘Masculine subjects are […] constantly in a process of negotiation between affect and masculinity, where the goal of masculinity is cruel optimism’. Optimistic affective negotiation means that male subjects continue to move toward unachievable masculinity again and again, repeating the same process of channeling affect in ways that are detrimental to male bodies. Allan’s theoretical model is not focused on the role of discourse, but could be extended to consider how this negotiation process relates to channeling affective intensity.

These examples have focused on ways in which affect reaffirms hegemonic gender constructs. But affect can also do something very different to masculinity, something much more hopeful. Seigworth and Gregg (2010) write in their well-known introduction to their edited volume The affect theory reader, that affect ‘can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension’ (p. 1). What if that affective movement or extension moved or extended normative or hegemonic masculinity into new forms or new ways to think about gender? The chili pepper example with which we began this introduction reveals a moment of gender revamping, one in which masculinity is transformed by affective intensity. Affect might allow for other ways of doing masculinity as the hard intensity of affect itself overflows and shocks the system of masculinity, leaving it transformed in some ways or less hegemonic or less ‘hard’ than it had been before. The intensity of the pepper allows for a situation in which masculinity can function as a kind of blank slate and love, even if for a moment. Extending Deleuzian ideas on affect into the realm of masculinity, Reeser (2017) has made this argument with respect to ways in which affect is represented culturally:

Autonomous affect may break the hold of masculinity on a discretely defined male body, or it may disintegrate a body, rendering it vulnerable or connected to other bodies. Affect may be such an intensity or such an attack on normative masculinity that it wins the battle by overpowering it. (p. 111)

This kind of process may still be a kind of hegemonic struggle coded in terms of masculinity – explaining why Reeser talks about the ‘masculinity of affect’ – but the end result may nonetheless be one of a force that overpowers, subdues, and transforms masculinity. Affect may be the fire needed to fight fire. Affect may also ‘queer’ normative masculinity by opening it up to new non-heteronomative ways of being or representing (Reeser, 2019) or by resisting what Moon (2008) calls ‘the heterosexualisation of emotion’. It may, as Clifton Evers describes it in his work on affect, masculinity, and surfing, lead to ‘a conceptual project that might help to distinguish the possibility […] of a dynamic persona, of a male body that moves and surfs like thought’ (2004, p. 29; see also Evers, 2009). For these reasons, affect offers potentiality vis-à-vis gender studies: it allows for a model in which masculinity does not have to just become aware of its repressed or hidden emotions or ‘get in touch’ with the emotion that lies deep within, but rather affect may help produce some new kind of feeling male subject not yet culturally defined. What will become, for instance, of Chili Klaus’ moment of love? Will it be repeated or will he seek affective intensity in part to express such love? Will he imagine new moments of male-male relations? Will his male viewers? Or, on the contrary, will those moments be covered up and forgotten so that normative masculinity can return in full force? Could the expression of love resulting from affective release intensify so that non-intensity can better remain the order of the day? Focusing on affect, de Boise argues in his paper here, may help masculinity scholars to interrupt the narrative of a ‘softening of masculinity’ simply because men are able to display a larger palette of feelings. For instance, men committed to loving relationships may be also be deceitful, hateful, and abusive, and heterosexual love in itself ‘may help to sustain gender inequalities through everyday bodily affective practices’.

A key element of such an approach is that the lingering of affect or the allowance for the recurrence of affect might be one way in which to transform or to unknow hegemonic masculinity. It may not be that affect arises forcefully and suddenly, but that it holds or it returns, and that the very recurring nature of that holding pattern allows for a continuing or cyclic process of becoming in gendered terms. Chili Klaus may want to return to the scene of affective intensity again. Or an adolescent boy watching the video on YouTube may want to imitate the stunt in order to have that moment of affection with another man. Affects that could be labeled as discomfort or awkwardness, for instance, might be signals of a masculinity affected by something as yet undefined in easily accessible terms (Reeser, 2017). They may avoid the normativity of comfort. As Scott Kiesling argues in his contribution to this volume from a sociolinguistic perspective, to feel at ease ‘is the quintessential aspect of a masculine stance’ and constitutive of hegemonic masculinities. ‘Masculinities that try hard, that are nervous’, he posits, ‘are less hegemonic’. A relational discomfort, left as undefined and not contained as a defined or categorized form of relation, could bring attention to masculinity’s non-hegemony or its unknowingness. It may leave gender relations as undefined and open-ended instead of assumed to be a given way. While discomfort may reinforce normative masculinity, it could also be a temporary break with the heteromasculine privilege of being at ease and in tune with the environment. Encountering what Ahmed calls the ‘feminist killjoy’ (2010) and their constant remarks about injustice and sexism may produce discomfort. Experiencing what Gottzén (2018) terms ‘chafing masculinity’ may help men recognize their own sexism and privilege as it reveals the comfort (white, heterosexual) men usually take for granted.

There are intellectual problems with affect. Not everyone would agree that a distinction between affect and emotions is easily made or even productive (e.g. Brickell, 2014). If affect and bodily capacities are seen as not being outside culture but always already mediated by their history, affect and emotions become difficult to separate in practice (Anderson, 2014). Apart from such epistemological conundrums, maintaining a strict division between affect and emotions poses ethical challenges as there is a risk of reproducing a Western mind-body and discourse-bodily reality dualisms. Thien (2005) has trenchantly critiqued affect theory for its universalist and ahistorical tendencies, and for portraying affects as transpersonal experiences. This academic approach, she contends, reproduces a binary that represents feelings as feminine, while distant and transhuman affect is masculinized. Her caveat is especially important for masculinity studies. Affect may also move us away from engaging with power geometries, embodied experience and the political materialities formed through emotions (Tolia-Kelly, 2006).

What if the affect-emotion binary does not hold because affect is not fully non-discursive? Following Barad’s (2007) argument that every phenomenon is material-discursive, Mia Eriksson argues in her contribution here around terrorism that affect, as an immanent and lived bodily experience, needs to be seen as both material and discursive. Similarly, Dominique Grisard, while agreeing with Massumi that color manages to affect and activate bodies directly (and therefore may bypass reflection and critique), points out that color’s ‘affective pull is connected to both its visual and symbolic powers so that it becomes impossible to distinguish between the different powers at work’. By analyzing the ‘pink boy’ phenomenon, that is, gender-nonconforming children assigned male at birth, she argues that affect is always already discursive, and therefore gendered, sexualized, classed, and racialized in historically specific ways. Such work continues to question and refine affect’s potentiality and its functioning.

By emphasizing relationships between different bodies, affect theory highlights the encounters with the other such as between the interviewer and interviewee and the author and the reader. Stories do not simply represent, for we are affected by other’s affect; they affect and move us (Probyn, 2005). A coming-out story may impact the audience’s feelings and actions. But it is not only the audience that is potentially affected, the audience may also affect the individual coming out and force them to stay closeted (Gottzén, 2017b). Affects are dynamic processes between those involved in encounters, and can be studied as such. This special issue engages in these kinds of affective readings or reactions to events or situations. Natalie Kouri-Towe explores the affective responses to Omar Khadr, the Canadian teen accused of war crimes in Afghanistan in 2002, arguing that notions of dangerous Arab and Muslim masculinity and affective fields of terror – including fear over the potential threat of terrorism – saturated media representations of Khadr, but in complicated ways. While Kouri-Towe focuses on public affective reactions to terrorism, Mia Eriksson explores her own troubling encounter with abject masculinity. In reading literature on the Norwegian white supremacist terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, she found herself identifying with the terrorist, an identification that led to an intense affective experience of anxiety and disgust, but also to an emotional self-reflexive elaboration on shame and guilt that can be called a kind of productive thought.

It is our hope that much more work at the intersection of masculinity studies and affect studies will be produced and that this academic intersection will – like affect itself, in the words of Seigworth and Gregg – ‘serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension’ (2010, p. 1) in gender studies. The seven articles in this volume offer not only trenchant readings or analyses of specific cases, but more broadly, they open up new ways to approach intersections between affect and masculinity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Todd Reeser is Professor of French and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, USA. A scholar of gender and sexuality studies, he has published the monographs Moderating Masculinity in Early Modern Culture (2006), Masculinities in Theory (2010), and Setting Plato Straight: Translating Ancient Sexuality in the Renaissance (2016). He is at work on a book tentatively titled “Transgender France: Universalism and Sexual Subjectivity.”

Lucas Gottzén is Professor in the Department of Child and Youth Studies, Stockholm University, Sweden; Affiliated Researcher at the Centre for Gender Studies, Karlstad University; and Editor-in-Chief of NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies. Research interests primarily concern gender, sexuality and youth, particularly focusing on relations between affect and space in men’s violence against women.

Notes

1. Connell (1987) presents a somewhat different model, arguing that men, as the bearers of power, could not suffer emotionally. While women’s pain is structural, ‘men’s pain is merely “personal”’ (Seidler, 2007, p. 11). Seidler (2007) is critical of this argument since, he argues, it obscures men’s feelings of powerlessness that may be due to their intersectional positions.

2. On the preponderance of affect and global culture in the neoliberal era, see, for instance, Reber (2016).

3. For lengthier discussions of possible relations between masculinity and affect in broad, theoretical terms, see Reeser (2017a, 2019). Other recent work on masculinity and affect includes de Boise’s book on music (2015); Evers’s writings on surfing (2004, 2009); Garlick’s work on technologies of embodiment (2017, 2019).