Abstract
This article derives from considering the interrelations of two sets of long-term international work: that on interdisciplinary crisis studies and that on critical studies on men and masculinities. More specifically, it interrogates the place and potential of crisis and crises in the politics and problematics of men and masculinities, including how crisis can be a driver of critical studies on men and masculinities. Further to this, four main forms of deployment of crisis within critical studies on men and masculinities are interrogated. There is a well-elaborated debate on what has come to be called ‘the crisis of masculinity’. Interestingly, this takes very different shapes, sometimes even opposite constructions, in different parts of the world and within different discourses. Even with this diversity, crisis is often presented as ‘fact’, identity and a result of ‘role confusion’ for boys, young men and men around what it might mean to be a boy and man in contemporary times. This approach contrasts with those foregrounding more endogenous crisis tendencies, first, within patriarchal relations and then of gender itself, with associated deconstructions of men and masculinity. Meanwhile, within critical studies on men and masculinities, there has been a relative neglect, at least until recently, of large-scale global crises. Key examples include financial crisis, political crisis, ecological crisis and pandemic crisis. In short, there appears to have been over-recognition of the ‘crisis of masculinity’, some recognition of crisis tendencies of patriarchal relations and of gender, and under-recognition of crises created or reinforced largely by certain men and masculinities globally and transnationally.
Introduction
Roitman (2014: 8, 39) reminds us that ‘crisis and critique are cognates … crisis is the basis of social and critical theory’ and, moreover, argues that ‘(c)risis is a blind spot that enables the production of knowledge’. So, we can ask: what happens when we put interdisciplinary crisis studies (ICS) (Bergman-Rosamund et al, 2020) alongside critical studies on men and masculinities (CSMM) (for example, Kimmel et al, 2005; Gottzén et al, 2020)? ICS can learn from greater engagement with CSMM, and vice versa, in terms of both theoretical development and substantive studies of crises, men and masculinities. However, my focus here is on what CSMM can gain from taking a more critical look at crisis/crises, drawing on the insights of ICS. More specifically, the place and potential of crisis and crises in relation to the politics and problematics of men and masculinities are examined. As such, this article has aims that are limited, but potentially far-reaching.
The article is thus structured as follows. First, ICS is introduced briefly. ICS needs to attend to superordinate social categories, specifically, in this context, the social categories of men and masculinities, as part of intersectional gender analysis. Second, some key features of CSMM are summarised, before discussing how the development and elaboration of CSMM as part of wider public discourse can be understood as stimulated by and deriving to a considerable extent from problematisations of men and masculinities within various national and supranational crises. Third, beyond this, the uneven deployment of crisis within CSMM is outlined. Within CSMM, the notion of the ‘crisis of masculinity’ is widely employed, especially in terms of ‘role’ or ‘identity’. Mainly endogenous crisis tendencies in patriarchal relations that construct masculinities, and in gender, and associated deconstructions of men and masculinity, are also employed, arguably insufficiently. Macro, transnational and global crises have been underexamined, at least until recently, with notable exceptions. The concluding discussion brings together analyses of interlocking global material-discursive crises, men and masculinities.
ICS
Crisis and ‘crisis talk’ (Hearn and Roberts, 1976) appear to be everywhere in (inter)national politics and policy, mainstream media and social media: economic crisis, fiscal crisis, climate crisis, political crisis, information crisis, migration crisis, gender crisis, technology crisis and pandemic crisis. The word and the concept of crisis may indeed seem overused (Roitman, 2014: 5), sometimes overlapping, sometimes not, with disasters, tipping points, catastrophes and major transformations, whether in everyday, political or academic discourse.
There are a host of approaches to and definitions of crisis. Crises can be understood as possible large-scale change following what seem small or short events in a narrow time window that are characterised by non-proportionality in their effects (Walby, 2015). A somewhat different take on crisis is seeing it as a shock to prevailing wisdom and dominant policy or other paradigms (Sum and Jessop, 2013) that is objectively overdetermined, with more than one set of sufficient causes and conditions, rather than a single cause, but also subjectively indeterminate and unpredictable. Crises can have a deep structure, showing otherwise hidden social and power dynamics, yet also operate through everyday crisis experiences.
In a recent overview in this journal, the Lund University Crisis Theme Group set out some key features of ICS: interdisciplinarity; gender and intersectional relations in crises; temporality, spatiality and scale; differentiation, multifacetedness and multilayeredness; and process(es) and contradictions within chains of crises. Crises occur as precursors to, contagions from or consequences of other crises in what can be thought of inter-crisis relations (Bergman-Rosamund et al, 2020). Crises are rarely in isolation. Crisis that does not obliterate continues and evolves. Crises are also sometimes clearer in retrospect, after what may not at first appear as crisis; crisis and crisis practices, individual and collective, are not necessarily performative.
Even though there are clearly major material and dire crises of various kinds across the world, crises are both materially real and discursively constructed, even within the limits of some versions of social constructionism less connected or concerned with material conditions. Crises and ‘crisis talk’ can easily be effectively rhetorical, with different political and other deployments and construals of ‘crisis’ by individual and collective actors across different scales and scopes, and for diverse ends.
CSMM
CSMM is part of women’s and gender studies and the long-running interrogation and problematisation of gender and intersectional gender relations (Friedman and Sarah, 1983; Hanmer, 1990; Gardiner, 2002). CSMM has expanded considerably over the last 40 years or more and refers to critical, explicitly gendered studies of men and masculinities that engage with feminist and other critical gender scholarship, as opposed to supposedly non-gendered, non-feminist or anti-feminist approaches. Studies range from examinations of masculine psychology, ethnographies of particular men’s activity and studies of discursive constructions of masculinities, to societal and structural analyses.
CSMM comprises historical, cultural, relational, materialist, deconstructive and anti-essentialist studies on men and masculinity by women, men and further genders – rather than the idea that the gendering of men derives from a fixed, inner trait or core. Within CSMM, tensions can persist between naming men and masculinities, and deconstructing and decentring men and masculinities (Hearn, 1996; Starck and Luyt, 2019). With the former emphasis, men and masculinities are named but not necessarily problematised; with the latter, the very notions of men and masculinities are problematised. These emphases are not mutually exclusive; on the contrary, both are needed. While not playing down debates between different traditions, CSMM entails specific, rather than an implicit or incidental, focus on men and masculinities, informed by feminist, gay, queer and other critical gender scholarship. Men and masculinities are recognised as intersectionally gendered, with unequal, sometimes contradictory, relations to gendered power (both among men and between men, women and further genders), and as variable and changing across time (history) and space (culture), within societies, and through life courses and biographies.
Starting out from critiques of sex role theory in the 1970s, the most-cited theorisation in and around CSMM foregrounds power-laden masculinities framed in relation to patriarchal relations (Carrigan et al, 1985; Connell, 1987; 1995). The concept of hegemonic masculinity has been a central pillar, along with complicit, subordinated and marginalised masculinities. Hegemonic masculinity has been defined variously, but most notably, as ‘the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women’ (Connell, 1995: 77). Yet, with societal transformations and change, hegemonic masculinities are not fixed, but adapt in responding to this ‘problem of legitimacy of patriarchy’. There have been many applications and interpretations of masculinities theory, and hegemonic masculinity in particular, in theoretical, empirical and policy studies (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005; Hearn et al, 2012; Morrell et al, 2012; Messerschmidt, 2019), as well as a range of critiques (see Hearn, 2012b).
In focusing on and so de-naturalising masculinities, men as a social category may even be re-naturalised in some applications and interpretations, assuming that it is masculinities that vary, without attention to the given social category of men. Thus, the concept of hegemony has been widely used in too restricted a way in some operationalisations of hegemonic masculinity. But what is more hegemonic than the social category of men? This means focusing on men as both a social category formed by the gender system and collective and individual agents, often dominant agents, though not necessarily so, together constituting the hegemony of men (Hearn, 2004) or part of gender hegemony generally. While there is much feminist literature problematising ‘women’ as a category (Riley, 1988), ‘men’ as a social category is typically not problematised or much less so. Instead, there is a need to analyse not only, or not so much, masculinity/ies per se, but the naming, identification, construction, historicising, problematising and deconstruction of men as both persons and a gender category.
The first wave, they suggested, ‘was concerned with the problematics of male role performance and the cost to men of attempting to strictly adhere to dominant expectations of masculine ideology’ (Whitehead and Barrett, 2001: 15). The second wave, beginning in the early 1980s, focused on ‘the centrality of male power to dominant ways of being a man’ (Whitehead and Barrett, 2001: 15). This second wave of CSMM saw the emergence of Connell’s (1987) concepts of the gender order and hegemonic masculinity. The third wave of CSMM drew influence from feminist post-structuralism and looked at ‘how men’s sense of identity is validated through dominant discursive practices of self, and how this identity work connects with (gender) power and resistance’. (Whitehead and Barrett, 2001: 15)
These three ‘waves’, even with the limitations of such generalities, have some resonance with Lorber’s (2005) framing of three feminisms. In addition, there is arguably a turn to a possible fourth wave of CSMM, bringing together some features of both the second and third waves, along with non-Global North, de/postcolonial, more global and world-centred framings, an emphasis on transnational patriarchies and processes, and more complex epistemological positionings.
The remainder of this article focuses on the place of crisis in CSMM and its significance for ICS. In studying men and masculinities, the notion of crisis has been employed unevenly – explicitly over-employed in some ways, arguably under-employed in others.
Crisis as a driver of CSMM
Before going further, it is necessary to reflect briefly on how crisis appears to have spurred the very development of CSMM. Seen historically, crisis can be understood as ‘a moment when observers begin to notice that assumptions about masculinity and expected male behavior are being undercut by circumstance and social psychological changes’ (Gilbert, 2005: 16). Such historical shifts can be from many positions and motivations, often not clearly or consciously articulated at the time. As part of public (often global) discourse – that is, implicit and explicit political, policy, media and academic debate and discourse – CSMM engages with problematisations of men and masculinities. Indeed, problematisations of what formerly appeared to be more stable categories of men and masculinities within crises of varying scales and impacts can act as drivers of CSMM in different parts of the world.
While particular critical studies of men and masculinity have often been contextualised within the nation state as a form of ‘methodological nationalism’ (Beck, 2000), supranational disruptions of national and imperial power appear, in retrospect, to have prompted CSMM (Hearn, 1987). Geopolitical crises that appear to have directly or indirectly, and often swiftly, prompted the growth of CSMM include: fracturings of the dominant fiction in and after the Second World War (Silverman, 1992); loss or partial loss of the British Empire (Tolson, 1977); US defeat in Vietnam (Bliss, 1985); post-socialist turmoil in Central and Eastern Europe (Novikova et al, 2003; 2005); and gender change post-apartheid (Morrell, 2001; Shefer et al, 2007). Such (supra)national and regional shifts all create both uncertainties and new forms of gender relations and domination for some men and masculinities. It is as if disruptions and sometimes losses or realignments of some men’s local power, even within national autocracies, may be accompanied by or translated into some degree of collective reflection on men and masculinities, if only less than consciously or in a non-gendered way. In seeing in retrospect crisis as a driver of CSMM, the notion of crisis is invoked as an exogenous force. In this sense, ‘global’ issues have been there within and before CSMM.
The uneven deployment and potential of crisis within CSMM
We now turn to some rather different, albeit interconnected, uses of crisis that draw on, to an extent, but do not match exactly, the three, now four, waves identified earlier (see Figure 2). First, crisis is examined in terms of the ‘crisis of masculinity’ in its various interpretations, often employed at the micro, interpersonal and identity levels. This is the most widely used, probably overused, notion of crisis in CSMM, understood as deriving from forces exogenous to men and masculinities. Second, crises are understood as largely endogenous, that is, immanent within men, masculinities and the gender system, in two main ways: endogenous crisis tendencies in patriarchal relations that account for the crisis construction of masculinities; and endogenous crises tendencies of gender, accounting for the crisis deconstruction of men and masculinity. These framings of crisis are more compatible with the second and third waves of CSMM, respectively, noted earlier. Finally, macro, global and transnational crises of and by men are considered. This approach is still typically, if not always, implicit and often unnamed, underused or even ignored in much of CSMM. On the other hand, in very recent years, there is increasing attention to these questions of crisis at the macro, global and transnational scale. These four conceptualisations of crisis partly concern different analytical levels, but they also fundamentally feed from one to the next, both temporally and more profoundly – in other words, the unresolved aspects or shortcomings of each conceptualisation provide the ground for the next (as represented diagrammatically in Figure 2).
Waves of CSMM and forms of crisis
Citation: Global Discourse 12, 3-4; 10.1332/204378921X16334429502843
The ‘crisis of masculinity’
The first phase or wave of critical studies of masculinity refers to the development of the sex role paradigm in the 1970s to apply more directly to questions of masculinity…. Though varied to some extent, the key emphasis of these studies was, first, to demonstrate the socially constructed nature of masculinity and its reliance on socialisation, sex role learning and social control; and second, to attempt to document how these processes were limiting and perhaps even harmful to men in terms of their own psychological and even physical health.… The pressures of performance, whether in the bedroom or the boardroom, and an emphasis on emotional repression – or the commonly quoted syndrome of ‘big boys don’t cry’ – were particularly common targets. (Edwards, 2006: 2, emphasis added)
Scholars have debated the actuality of the ‘crises’ afflicting masculinities for decades, reviewing diverse challenges to boys’ and men’s senses of identity, from the trials of public school (McDowell, 2000), accusations of chauvinism, and exclusionary defenses of male privilege from feminism and other civil rights movements (Robinson, 2000) to health problems caused by risky activities (Ricciardelli et al, 2012). Such trends have appeared, to some analysts, to throw privileged groups into ‘crisis.’ Other scholars regard that discourse as a cliché and retort that masculinity appears always already to be in crisis, a performance that seeks attention and solace more than it indicates actual trends in well-being.
Crisis talk is often seen as related to coping with changes in boys’ relative educational attainment, men’s position in labour markets, changing gender/sexual/family forms and power relations, and impacts of globalisation on what are represented as previously relative stable interpersonal and local gender hierarchies. In some cases, the crisis is portrayed more positively, as in men responding positively to the changing and more powerful position of women and seeking more equal relationships, or more negatively, as in eugenicist concerns, backlash against feminism, ‘the flight from commitment’ (Ehrenreich, 1983) or bemoaning (some) boys’ underachievement.
The crisis of masculinity has been most discussed in Western Europe, North America and Australia, with some commentators interpreting such changes as a ‘loss of masculinity’ and the ‘feminisation of men’ as, for example, the male breadwinner role becomes less dominant and women’s entry into labour markets and higher education increases in many contexts. The notion has also been invoked elsewhere. For example, in the post-Soviet period in Russia, the notion of crisis was used in relation to declines in men’s health and life expectancy, and statements of men no longer being real men (Zdravomyslova and Temkina, 2012). Other examples come from the rapid pace of change in China (Zheng, 2015).
Much debate has linked crisis to changes in labour markets, work, occupational cultures, work-based solidarities (Morgan, 2005), family and their connections that lead to ‘crises’ for individuals or groups. Such ‘feminisation’ of men’s labour leads to some men’s struggles to adapt to affective labours in service work, teamwork, cultures of care and similar. Such challenges to masculine identities and men’s sense of entitlement are driven by globalisation, neoliberalism and the ‘deindustrialization that has made breadwinning difficult for relatively privileged workers … [or] the rebellion from family obligations that consumerist individualism inspires’ (Pietilä et al, 2020: 307).
Another recent set of examples concern how for some men, especially young men, the loss of, and experience of threat to, material and status entitlement has brought a variety of negative responses and difficulties in dealing with their psychological vulnerability, and for this to then be resolved through association with new masculinist communities on the online manosphere and new communal identity, such as incels, MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) or Alt-Right supporters (Hodapp, 2017; Mogensen and Helding Rand, 2019). It is necessary here to distinguish between studies that invoke the ‘crisis of masculinity’ thesis in critiquing the negative psychosocial consequences of ‘the male sex/gender role’, and the men’s right’s movement’s co-option of the concept, lamenting ‘the loss of manhood’ for retrogressive political purposes.
The major point here is that it is the rapidity of change and the apparently largely exogenous nature of change that account for the ‘crisis of masculinity’ through social and economic changes that then impact on gender relations and patriarchal power. Interestingly, emphasis on the impact of the mainly exogenous nature of crisis matches the discursive structure and limitations of sex-role theory, whereby social change comes to masculinity largely through external social and technological change, as in transitions from ‘traditional’ to ‘modern’ sex/gender roles and associated identity acquisition, rather than gender power dynamics (Gerhardt, 1980; Carrigan et al, 1985). Finally, in this section, in its variability and flexibility, the notion of ‘the crisis of masculinity’ can also be understood as a boundary object between and across various academic, political and popular forms – in a not-dissimilar way to how hegemonic masculinity functions as a boundary concept for various, more critical traditions.
Crisis tendencies in patriarchal relations and constructions of masculinities
the framing of the ongoing decline of men’s authority and power in both the public and private spheres as a crisis suggests that these shifting norms, as well as the gains achieved by women and other marginalized identities, are inherently negative. Such framing suggests that it is instead good and proper for the aforementioned authority and power of men to not only be restored, but also remain unchallenged. (See Roitman, 2014: 11–13)
The second phase or wave of critical studies of masculinity emerged in the 1980s primarily out of immense criticism of the first wave … the sex role paradigm was now commonly seen to be both dubious politically in implying some kind of level playing field between the sexes and limited theoretically in its purchase on masculinities in the plural sense rather than in the singular sense of one, often white, Western and middle-class, model.… a common and often unifying theme here was more political, as most of the authors involved were overtly pro-feminist in their stance on most issues, in seeking an alliance with feminism, and indeed in defining themselves. (Edwards, 2006: 2, emphases added)
[It] suggests that the gender order is crisis-prone rather than alternating between periods of crisis versus stability. This is seen as a result of inherent contradictions and tensions in gender practice. These ensure that hegemonic masculinities are always undergoing challenge and change (Connell, 1993; Donaldson, 1993) in order to offer a more successful strategy of legitimizing some men’s dominance over women and marginalized or subordinated men (Connell, 1995), such as working-class or homosexual men. Challenge is directed at different features of the gender order at any particular historical moment. Its ultimate impact is also uneven. (Starck and Luyt, 2019: 433)
Despite some superficial similarities, patriarchal structural crisis tendencies are distinct from the ‘crisis of masculinity’. Crisis tendencies are portrayed as inherent within patriarchal relations and arising from women’s struggles against patriarchal power relations, production relations and cathexis relations. Thus, crisis tendencies can be a form of dynamic relations and reactions with and against threats to power, now seen at a more systemic level of analysis, not of identity anxiety, role strain/stress or tensions in sex/gender roles. Thus, here, crisis could be seen as another word for structural power struggles – and men’s reactions and responses to them, enacted in masculinities, collectively.
Support for the concept of crisis tendencies in understanding gender relations may … be found in discussion surrounding gender violence. Connell (1995) notes that challenge to dominant gender practice often encounters violence. Men’s dominance over women is maintained as a result. The crisis in masculinity thesis implies that there are periods where systems of domination are absolute. Challenge to dominant gender practice is supposedly absent during these periods. Yet, if this thesis were correct, one would not expect to observe instances of gender violence. This is clearly not the case. (Starck and Luyt, 2019: 433)
Thus, violence, that is, gendered violence, becomes part of crisis tendencies and their continuing. This involves explicit attention to the place and potential of crisis in the construction of men and masculinities, including how men and masculinities are produced by and within crises and their concomitant violences.
This brings the need for a short excursus on crisis and violence. As Confortini (2006: 357) writes: ‘the gender order naturalizes and reproduces unequal and violent social relations.… violence and gender power relations are mutually constituted in all spheres of social life’. There is ongoing debate on crisis, violence, risk, men and masculinities. Crisis, men, masculinities and violence/violation interlink in many ways. Violence can itself be seen as crisis, and violence creates crisis – whether it is interpersonal violence, intimate partner violence, imperialist violence, anti-imperialist violence, terrorist violence and so on. Likewise, violence connects with many aspects of men and masculinities, for example, in ways of being men, men’s practices, various masculinities, a reference point, the domination of most forms of violence, and individual/biographical accounts and societal explanations (Hearn, 2012b). Violence can thus be considered as a relation of men, masculinity and crisis, with men’s violence creating and producing crisis, and crisis (and post-crisis) producing men’s violence.
Having said this, violence and the threat thereof can be understood from contradictory positionings: violence as enactment of power, so that (hyper)masculinity is the source of both violence and crisis; or violence as a reaction to loss or threat of loss of power – a source of both violence and crisis. This is only part of the story. Violence can also be understood as part of some men’s responsibility or irresponsibility; violence can also be enacted as self-sacrifice (Gilmore, 1990), along with the dispensability of many socially less-valued men. Importantly, such enactment and threat of violence, and, interestingly, its apparently contradictory rationales, can be understood as one manifestation of the very crisis tendencies of patriarchal relations outlined; to echo (Starck and Luyt, 2019: 433), ‘[t]he ubiquity of gender violence is indicative of crisis tendencies in the gender order’.
Crises tendencies of gender, and deconstructions of men and masculinity
The third wave of studies of masculinity, rather like the potential third wave of studies of femininity, is clearly influenced by the advent of post-structural theory, particularly as it relates to gender in terms of questions of normativity, performativity and sexuality.… A common theme … is the importance of representation and its connection with wider questions of change and continuity in contemporary, and in some more historical, masculinities and identities. In addition, many of these studies of cultural texts are relatively positive in their emphasis, whether more overt or covert, on the sense of artifice, flux and contingency concerning masculinities. (Edwards, 2006: 2, emphasis added)
In short, gender and sexuality have themselves been subject to greater problematisation through a range of political and intellectual debates and influences: ‘the concept of crisis becomes a prime mover in poststructuralist thought: while truth cannot be secured, it is nonetheless performed in moments of crisis, when the grounds for truth claims are supposedly laid bare and the limits of intelligibility are potentially subverted or transgressed’ (Roitman, 2014: 34). The ‘moments of crisis’ invoked here, that is, within a post-structuralist frame of reference, concern epistemological gaps between structure, power, knowledge, identity and necessarily gender. Dominant uses of the social category of men are contested and contingent, to the extent that men and masculinity could be said to be in endogenous crisis, even if ‘crisis talk’ is not so often used explicitly within post-structuralist writing. Yet, post-structuralist renderings of men and masculinities are bound up with a crisis of gender. This is for several reasons.
First, there is the widespread assumption that ‘men’ are based in the biological as foundational, yet the assumed sex of ‘male’ is a variable ‘summary’ category, summarising many various bodily – or assumed to be bodily – variations (Fausto-Sterling, 2000): chromosomal, hormonal, genital, somatic and so on. Some of these can be changed to an extent, some not. It is difficult to give a fixed foundational definition of ‘male’ in a binary sense, not least from studies on intersex and transgender studies. ‘Male’ can also be used for beings ranging from foetuses to traces of the long dead, human and non-human. Second, there are shifting relations of claimed identity, physiological variation, embodiments and social movements, as in the deconstructions that LGBTIQA + (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer, agender +), non-binary, gender-plural (Monro, 2005), gender-ambiguous and gender-diverse politics and practice bring to any closed category of men, such as masculinity without men (Halberstam, 1998; Wiegman, 2002; 2012). Third, the social category of men is (re)created in everyday life, institutional practices and interplay with other social categories, such as class, ethnicity and sexuality (Lykke, 2012). Fourth, complex issues of the ‘real’ and the ‘representational’ arise from the diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and virtualisation. Finally, there is the broader question of human–animal/non-human relations, which also problematise fixed, dominant and supposedly autonomous notions of men and masculinities. In summary, from all these points, to develop an analysis of the hegemony of men, men need to be denaturalised and deconstructed, just as postcolonial theory deconstructs the white subject or queer theory deconstructs the sexual subject.
With all of this, gender itself has become a critiqued concept, as in gender/sex (Lykke, 2012) and ‘gex’ (Hearn, 2012a), and moves to the decolonialising of gender, recognising the coloniality of gender and rereadings of capitalist colonial modernity (Lugones, 2010). In different ways, these crisis tendencies of gender seek to move to undoing gender (Butler, 1990), beyond gender, post-gender and degendering in deconstructing men and masculinities (Lorber, 2005). They provoke crises of men and masculinity, with a variety of fractured, fragmented and discursive responses and theorisations of/against sovereign male identity/ies (see Silverman, 1992; Läubli and Sahli, 2011; Hearn, 2019: 59).
Expanding the focus of crisis: material-discursive global crises of/by men and masculinities
The three main approaches to crisis highlighted thus far cover many debates and perspectives, but there is still a very large canvas of crisis to be addressed. This is especially so with the turn to the ‘big picture’ (Connell, 1993) and the impact of postcolonial (Ouzgane and Coleman, 1998; Kabesh, 2016), decolonial (Boonzaier et al, 2020; Ratele, 2021), transnational (Hearn, 2015), global and world-centred approaches (Connell 1998; 2014), along with growing emphasis on geography and spatiality (Hopkins and Gorman-Murray, 2014), in CSMM. There has been a major expansion of research with an explicitly gendered focus on men beyond and across national borders in regional, global, transnational and de/postcolonial terms or contexts (hooks, 1984; Cornwall and Lindisfarne, 1994; Morrell, 2001; Cleaver, 2002; Pease and Pringle, 2002; Jones, 2006; Shefer et al, 2007; Donaldson et al, 2009; Cornwall et al, 2011; 2016; Ruspini et al, 2011; Hearn et al, 2013; 2018; van der Gaag, 2014). Such researches ‘highlight the effects of colonization, the consequences of racial hierarchies, and the cultural and psychological correlates of global economic dependence. If we take such concerns, not as marginal but as central to the analysis of masculinity, a major change in the field of study becomes possible’ (Connell, 2014: 224). From some positionalities, these broadenings may appear as largely exogenous, but they are also endogenously pursued (Hountondji, 1997), notably, from Global South, indigenous (Innes and Anderson, 2015) and de/postcolonial work (which has always been partly about men and masculinities) (Fanon, 1967). Such shifts in crisis focus parallel those in (pro-)feminist activism from more personal change to more global change (MenEngage Alliance, 2020).
Postcolonial and decolonial scholarship has been part of the impetus to bring together insights of macro-historical political economy and post-structuralism (or the crisis tendencies of patriarchal relations and the crisis tendencies of gender), both bridging and moving beyond the second and third waves of CSMM. These are also epistemological shifts, as in post-constructionism (Lykke, 2010), new materialism (Garlick, 2016) and materialist-discursive approaches (Hearn, 2014; 2015; see also Akrich and Latour, 1992; Haraway, 1992), which are simultaneously material and discursive, as in the focus on the hegemony of men and possibilities of the abolition of ‘men’ as a social category of power – and both more material and more discursive than many approaches to masculinities. These various interconnected geopolitical-epistemological moves mean significant expansions of the scale and scope of CSMM in which crisis is endemic if often implicit. They point to crises that have been, until recently, oddly neglected in much CSMM: the material-discursive global crises of/by men.
There are many possible contemporary global, transnational crises, such as: financial crises; crises of war, political oppression and human rights; crises of work, automation and ICT vulnerability; and, most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic (Ruxton and Burrell, 2020). Yet, until recently, for these obvious, often dire crises, the notion of crisis has typically, with notable exceptions, been downplayed and unnamed in the bulk of CSMM, with global crises often remaining implicit as a loose unnamed background. Having said that, scholars in and around CSMM are increasingly taking up these themes, as well as men’s part in them, even when not using crisis terminology. Thus, here, we are concerned with the question of how men and masculinities are involved in producing, and complicitly implicated in, global and transnational crises – often multiple, intertwining, engulfing, holistic crises for the whole planet, albeit with uneven effects on men, masculinities and further genders.
Space does not allow an extended exposition of the relevance of such crises for CSMM, and so for simplicity, three short illustrations are taken up here:
bio-environmental-ecological crises
societal-political crises
economic crises
First, and in reverse order, let us consider crises of economy, capitalism and financial systems. Economic crisis, though well studied in the history of capitalism and imperialism, has often been approached without highlighted attention to intersectional gender relations generally or CSMM specifically. One major historical thesis is that as the organic composition of capital (the ratio of the value of materials and fixed costs [constant capital from earlier labour] embodied in the production of a commodity to the value of labour power [variable capital] used in making it) rises more than the rate of surplus value (the exploitation of extra unpaid time), profitability and additional value fall, leading to a slump in investment and gross domestic product (GDP). Reviewing this process from the 19th century, Ba (2017: 81) writes: ‘hegemonic structure of trade and financial relations meant that during the long 19th century the financial conditions of Great Britain heavily influenced financial (and to some extent real sector conditions) in peripheral countries, which fostered bubbles and the subsequent financial crises’. In this model, contagions of economic crises tend to move from more central to more peripheral locations. These ‘economic’ statements may be accurate, but they are often abstracted from gender relations and the power position of men and masculinities, including at historical times when women did not even have suffrage and when children were a fundamental part of capital accumulation. Men were the transnational drivers and controllers of economic power, profit, risk and unequal benefit. Men (and women and children) were and are part and parcel of economic crises.
Gendered economic capitalist crises have become intensified through financialisation, financial risk and speculation, with crises shifting from finance to economy, to fiscal, to political (Walby, 2015). These are all gendered, whether we are talking of the place of men and men’s domination within the financial system, or of the dependence of capital on unpaid labour, predominantly by women. Piketty (2014) has addressed the rising ratio of financial profit to profits in the productive sector, as the (financialised) returns on capital exceed the rate of GDP growth and drive increasing polarisation, threatening extreme inequalities. The financial sector exceeds by about 12 times the world’s GDP; in the European Union (EU), banking exceeds GDP by three times. In the foreign exchange market of about US$5 trillion a day, about 3 per cent is linked to internal trade, the rest is speculation (Philpponnat, 2014). Moreover, ‘(a)lmost a half of the world’s wealth owned by 1 percent of the population.… the bottom half of world’s population owns same as richest 85 people in world’ (Fuentes-Nieva and Galasso, 2014: 2–3), with men dominating the super-rich. That certainly constitutes a crisis – and one of high relevance for CSMM.
Economic and financial crises can also be viewed in terms of gendered institutions of financial accumulation (Elson, 2010; Bettio et al, 2013; Griffin, 2009; 2013; Walby, 2013; Hearn, 2015). Key features researched include: gendered institutional regimes, sexism and misogyny, and female-discriminating discourse (Zaloom, 2006; Ho, 2009; Enloe, 2013); financial sector privilege, performance/performativity in masculinity discourses and ‘financial masculinities’; and impacts on domestic economy. Interventions by finance ministers, financial boards, economists and banks maintain a ‘strategic silence’ on gender, with deflationary, male-breadwinner, state cuts, rather than higher-tax, policies having less effect on men than women (Young et al, 2011). Men’s domination of international financial institutions is clear (Schuberth and Young, 2011), as is the hegemony of men in global supply chains (McCarthy et al, 2020).
Second, somewhat similar observations around men’s domination can be made in relation to contemporary political crises: democratic deficits; de-democratisation; decline in legitimacy; the rise of populism, the Far Right and ultra-nationalism; and electoral subversions – ‘powers of misogyny, populism and open racism have come out in the open and are now operating in the corridors many of us naively thought were safeguarded for democracy and sometimes progressive change’ (Mellström, 2017: 1). In recent years, with the rise of global ultraconservative, xenophobic, kleptocratic and dominating men leaders and masculinity, claims of authoritarianism as virtue have become mainstream, for example, in Egypt (el-Sisi), the Philippines (Duterte), Russia (Putin), Saudi Arabia (Salman), Turkey (Erdoğan) and the US (Trump), spawning a growing interest in dominant political men and masculinity. Crises, such as the pandemic crisis, have further legitimated authoritarianism. Interestingly, at the same time, such dominating masculinity is sometimes accompanied by an unpredictable Trumpian fluidity (Messerschmidt and Bridges, 2017). Such changes are globalising and, in a sense, distinct from the (supra)national crises that have acted as drivers to CSMM discussed earlier.
These matters are, in some senses, well studied in political science, though often without strong engagement with CSMM. There is now a significant literature explicitly on men, masculinities and geopolitics (Zalewski and Parpart, 1998; Hooper, 2001; Parpart and Zalewski, 2008), and a growing literature on more specific crises, for example, the gendered dynamics of corruption (Mayer, 2016; MacLean, 2017; Portillo and Molano, 2017). There are immense possibilities for explicitly gendered studies of political crises created by men, led by men and often using rhetoric directed primarily at men through masculinist imagery, language and ‘logic’.
The third illustration concerns bio-environmental-ecological crises, including around animals and non-humans, climate change, energy, extractivism, food, meat eating, oceans, transport, water, and impacts on the planet and sustainability. These derive very much from the tendencies of some men and masculinities towards domination and exploitation (of humans and non-humans, the environment, and the planet), and disregard for the effects of actions, with damaging environmental consequences. Men play a key role in environmental damage – this is a planetary crisis. This is a long-established theme within eco-feminism. Currently, critical research on the place of men and masculinities in attacking the natural environment is growing fast (Enarson and Pease, 2016; Hultman and Pulé, 2018; Garlick, 2019; Pease, 2019; Pulé and Hultman, 2021). It is here that the notion of global crisis as in ‘ecocidal’ crisis in the (M)Anthropocene is most explicitly and urgently named and articulated in CSMM.
Many aspects of bio-environmental-ecological crises are being pursued in and around CSMM, with multiple interconnections and overlaps. One example is food crisis around meat eating and associated environmental damage created overwhelmingly by men and masculinities (Aavik, 2021; Adams, 2010 [1990]). Another concerns transportation and how, in given income groups, women–men differences in energy consumption are largest there (Räty and Carlsson-Kanyama, 2009). Differences reduce with more income but do not disappear; automobility is heavily linked with certain masculinities. More broadly, Pease (2019; see also Enarson and Pease, 2016) has examined global environmental crisis in relation to societal relations of (pro-)feminism, gender power, privilege, men and masculinities. He goes beyond some current formulations and ‘rebranding’ of masculinity/ies, as in ostensibly more ecologically oriented ecomodern masculinity, to a feminist politics of men, masculinities, (anti-)violence and environmental sustainability.
Concluding discussion
CSMM can learn much from more explicit critical engagement with ICS, and vice versa, as part of attending to superordinate social categories, in this context, the social categories of men and masculinities. At its simplest, CSMM raises the question of the place of men and masculinities within and in relation to different forms of crisis. As discussed, within CSMM, there has been an uneven deployment of the notion of crisis, from the ‘crisis of masculinity’ through to multiple ‘global crises’. Although there are now studies on most aspects of global crisis, within political, policy and academic debate, there is still remarkable neglect of the contribution of different groupings of men and different masculinities to the production and reproduction of global crises.
Crises occur within given social relations, with gender inequalities frequently intensified during and after crises (see Centre for Gender and Disaster, 2020). Gender relations operate in and through crises in the structuring of institutions and organisations, power and inequalities, the form crises take, the distributions of harm, and the very content of crises. The three examples of global crises discussed – economic, political and bio-environmental-ecological – share certain features regarding the hegemony of men and dominant masculinities, most specifically:
the powerful effects of certain groupings of men, with elites, state and military leaders, corporate and finance leaders, autocrats, oligarchs, dictators, and the super-rich creating crises, sometimes suddenly and dramatically;
men’s domination of and specialisation in violence (and non-specialisation in care), from the interpersonal level to the planet, which produces both immediate and longer-term crises (the concept of a violence regime brings together analysis of, and change around, interpersonal, local, societal and global/transnational crises [Hearn et al, 2020]);
widespread social tendencies among many men and masculinities, such as around meat eating and automobility, which produce crises in a slower, long-term way;
the uneven impacts of crises on men and masculinities, linking with intersectional social realities, in relation to, for example, racialisation, class, age, disability, sexualities and gender, among further inequalities; and
the impact and effects of men and masculinities on children, young people, women, further genders, non-humans and the planet.
While economic, political and bio-environmental-ecological crises each have their own dynamics and relations to men and masculinities, they interconnect and are likely to mutually reinforce each other. These crises are all part of, and constitutive of, the contemporary economic–political–ecological ‘ecosystem’, with intertwining, engulfing, holistic crises, perhaps for the whole planet. Economic exploitation, financialised capitalism, growing inequalities, anti-democratic movements and ecological damage work together, with multiple material-discursive feedbacks. In contrast to the call for ‘equality, liberty and fraternity [or responsible solidarity]’, economic exploitation and inequalities are both anti-democratic in themselves and facilitated by anti-democratic movements, and these social forces together facilitate ecological damage – against the interests of the majority: no mass of people favour destroying their own living environment.
The materiality/discursivity of crises, men and masculinities is not only immediate and local, but global and transnational, in intersection with the regional and local. Global crises of/by men and masculinities thus often involve multiple crises, arguably with the convergence of economic, political and ecological crises, along with convergences with further domains, notably, militarism, media and even education and entertainment. Global crises interlock materially/discursively, with connections and feedbacks across and between institutions, organisations and crises overwhelmingly led by and tending to reproduce the hegemony of men and dominant masculinities. Likewise, men and masculinities themselves are material-discursive, in part, constructing and being constructed by global economic/political/ecological crises, their representations and, moreover, frequent avoidance in knowledge production.
Analysing men in and of the world means attending to the relations between the local, personal, bodily performance of men and globalising, transnational, world-centred, (sometimes hyper)patriarchal politics, including the unsustainability of many of the institutions of men (Hearn et al, 2018). Change appears to be operating with greater acceleration, partly socio-technologically driven. This makes for urgent, future-oriented research, policy and activism in real time, including the potential for, and possibilities of, anti-patriarchal political and academic practices without domination and exploitation. Many possible (future gendered) crises remain – nuclear warfare; artificial intelligence (AI)/robotic warfare and militarism; total ecological collapse; human–AI machine singularity; and the biotech revolution of life (Tegmark, 2017) – as well as apocalyptic crises, in all of which men and masculinities are likely germane.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks for the multiple constructive comments from anonymous reviewers that greatly assisted in the revision of this article. I also thank the members of the Crisis Theme Group, the Pufendorf Institute for Advanced Studies, Lund University, for the congenial company and many stimulating discussions that inspired this article.
Conflict of interest
The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.
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