Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive of over 1400 titles.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
New Populism is not so much about content but, rather, the feeling of aggrieved entitlement in search of content. This condition, established in Part II, requires a different understanding of cause than that used in class-forward accounts. This chapter introduces an alternative, non-linear model of cause, which asks how (on what energy) rather than why (for what reason). What animates New Populism, and how does it move—the body, and from one body and place to another, changing as it does so? Put simply, whose feeling is aggrieved entitlement; on whose behalf is it felt? The chapter suggests that this highly infectious feeling prefers the name of ‘The People’ to its own. It outlines the book’s claim that aggrieved masculinity is the beating heart of New Populism. Dominant manhood, wronged and endangered, is its animating figure.
This chapter checks the portrait rendered in the previous chapter for anti-populism, a condescending response to ‘The People’ that basically proves their point. Situated in the January 6 US Capitol insurrection, it takes a closer look at the ‘we’ who critique New Populism. Anti-populism is rejected as oblivious to its own implication in populism; namely, it induces aggrieved entitlement in the act of critiquing it. The chapter calls everyone to reflect on their participation in New Populism. Countering the usual depiction of populist uprising, it introduces the notion of downrising to reveal the fuller scope of contributors and complicities. Even the left plays a role, when casting ‘the base’ (rank-and-file supporters) as the new ‘white trash.’ In step with the mask-ulinity episode in Chapter 4, the chapter rereads the Capitol riot as evidence of the increasing communicability of feeling. Sensations of aggrieved entitlement are more in charge than most care to admit.
The work of Parts I and II bear fruit in Part III, which revisits the cause of New Populism. Most analysts point to socioeconomic and demographic changes as the decisive stimuli for the populist surge. This chapter systematically unravels that analysis of cause in three turns. It challenges economic (class-mainly), socioeconomic (a combination of class and cultural marginalization), and socioeconomic ‘plus’ (racial and religious resentments) explanations. Even when expanded beyond its reasonable limits, the concept of class cannot well explain New Populism. Class-forward analysis, any assessment that leads with socioeconomic unrest, breaks down.
For those who could use an introduction or refresher, this chapter describes what populism is and entails. Drawing on and distilling a large body of scholarship, it offers five “clues,” or vital signs, that populism is afoot: (1) a language of popular sovereignty (‘The People’ versus ‘the elite/establishment’), (2) antagonistic vibe as virtue, (3) a direct and intimate mode of leading and organizing, (4) a performative style that savors “flaunting the low,” and (5) an undeserving third party (an Other) with whom the elite/establishment are in cahoots.
Part IV explores how aggrieved masculinity continues to multiply exponentially and what to do about it. The chapter proposes to treat it as an actual, not merely metaphorical, pandemic of feeling. To start, we must admit what COVID-19 exposed: that manly grievance has become a public health problem. This chapter makes that case, demonstrating how violence motivated by aggrieved masculinity, often targeted toward Others, poses a generalized risk, as evident in US mass shooting patterns. Climate denial and destruction, also linked to aggrieved masculinity, endanger public health as well. The rise of New Populist “anger management” (from Chapter 10) exacerbates the public health threat by turning manly grievance into policy. Any residual hard–soft division—between class and culture wars, for example—is shattered by this chapter, which shows how New Populist culture wars endanger everyone, including the very men they seek to benefit.
This chapter delves into how aggrieved masculinity intensified after it was declared all but extinct. The chapter suggests that the online culture wars of the late 2000s and 2010s better illuminate the rise of New Populism than the socioeconomic and demographic shifts marked in Chapter 11, though all of these are involved. During this period, the “manosphere” (the online phase of anti-feminist men’s movements) became a major political player. The manosphere cultivated the focus on Western Man under siege and perfected the edgy, countercultural vibe that fuels New Populism today. The chapter identifies the manosphere as the ‘super-spreader’ of New Populism. This is neither technological determinism nor a linear account of cause (why, for what reason, or in response to what event). Instead, this is the version of cause introduced in Chapter 12 (how, or on what electricity, does something move). The manosphere propels New Populism’s global surge with a transnational economy of attention and amplification.
Is populism fueled by a feeling of manhood under attack? If gender is the impetus, are there better ways to respond? This book upends prevailing wisdom about contemporary populism. Whereas most attribute its global rise to socioeconomic shifts, this book makes the case for a different cause by taking seriously the prevalence of certain men and manly energies in today’s populist politics. Aggrieved masculinity is the shared feeling at the heart of these movements, and their worldwide outbreak should be reread accordingly—as a sign that a seething sense of “manly right, wronged” has gone viral and global. COVID-19 delivered a stark warning about this pandemic of manly outrage: It endangers public health. This book introduces “viral masculinity” as a novel way to meet that growing threat by tackling the deep connection of our social and physical worlds. Leading with gender without leaving class, race, and other vital factors behind, the book develops a new course of action toward populism today. It compels us to ask not what populism says, but how it spreads, and to realign our efforts accordingly. You need not know or care about gender to get invested in this analysis. You need only be invested in our common future.
This chapter develops a sociophysical model of gender. It starts by condensing the purposeful venting from the previous chapter into five ‘bad’ habits of gender analysis and ways to break them. It then explains how these habits hold us back, by affirming a foundational binary that values certain people and things over others, to the detriment of all involved. The chapter captures this harm with concepts crucial to the rest of the book, such as the practice of “Othering” and the gender binary’s sacred trinity, which consists of the “universal subject,” “Western Man,” and “the self-contained individual.” These are three renditions of the same fantasy, a quest for impermeable Man that is not sustainable because our bodies are, in fact, permeable. In place of the gender binary, the chapter advocates gender biodiversity and builds a corresponding model of gender as a defining force in the world. This approach sensitizes us to the daily contact we make with gender and its less conscious, sensory aspects. Where Chapter 2 deconstructs, Chapter 3 reconstructs in order to equip the reader with fresh gender knowledge and skill.
In what sense is gender real? This chapter reviews Part I’s answer to that question, which boils down to this: Our bodies are physically constituted by gendered sociality, whether we’re aware of it or not. Yet the gender binary denies the basic porosity of our bodies, insisting instead that autonomous, self-contained Man is possible and desirable. The fantasy is killing us, literally. The book will demonstrate that planetary survival depends on our capacity to abandon the gender binary and its conceits. Preparing readers for what follows, the chapter summarizes key features of the new mode of gender analysis developed in Part I.
Is populism fueled by a feeling of manhood under attack? If gender is the impetus, are there better ways to respond? This book upends prevailing wisdom about contemporary populism. Whereas most attribute its global rise to socioeconomic shifts, this book makes the case for a different cause by taking seriously the prevalence of certain men and manly energies in today’s populist politics. Aggrieved masculinity is the shared feeling at the heart of these movements, and their worldwide outbreak should be reread accordingly—as a sign that a seething sense of “manly right, wronged” has gone viral and global. COVID-19 delivered a stark warning about this pandemic of manly outrage: It endangers public health. This book introduces “viral masculinity” as a novel way to meet that growing threat by tackling the deep connection of our social and physical worlds. Leading with gender without leaving class, race, and other vital factors behind, the book develops a new course of action toward populism today. It compels us to ask not what populism says, but how it spreads, and to realign our efforts accordingly. You need not know or care about gender to get invested in this analysis. You need only be invested in our common future.
