School of Social and Political Science

Description

The central question I ask in this talk is if we ought to think about men as violent or vulnerable? To explore this question I use a cultural sociological perspective, rooted in queer-feminist thinking, to understand the lived realities, violences and vulnerabilities of men in the Global South (India and South Africa), as well as the Global North. As I will empirically demonstrate on the one hand, men enjoy patriarchal power of various forms, yet at the same time, structural inequalities as well as neoliberalism produce profound masculine anxieties. Men are obligated by heteropatri­archy to be ‘macho’ gendered actors but at the same time the everyday inequalities of race, class and caste hurt and limit them. How then do we understand masculine domination in contexts where men are both powerful and perhaps also vulnerable? I hope to develop the concept of macho vulnerability as an analytical tool to unpack this par­adox wherein macho masculinity produces gendered privilege for men, but also a profound sense of masculine vulnerability. Framing men as macho, as well as vulnerable and fearful, opens up possibilities of critical but empathic queer-feminist analysis of men’s everyday realities.