The “manosphere” is once again having a moment. Since the term appeared sometime during the 2008 financial crisis, its breadth and influence have only grown. Like other ideological vortexes that prey on alienated subjects, its appeal comes from its ability to make conformity and bootlicking look like provocation. The internet has made its tendrils hyperefficient, but the crisis isn’t new. Masculinity has always functioned as a synonym for power itself, for patriarchy, for an ancien régime of established authority that never fully recedes. The question isn’t whether there is a crisis of masculinity, but whether analyses of it—from the left or the right—can escape the twin traps of fascist reaction and utopian fantasy.
Maxi Wallenhorst examines how contemporary far-right figures (podcasters and political commentators) create a “crisis of masculinity” not as a coherent ideology but as an entrepreneurial talking point. Reading this panic of sexual politics alongside Klaus Theweleit’s canonical Males Fantasies (1977), Wallenhorst considers whether analyses of masculinity are still reacting to a reductively utopian sexual optimism. Theweleit also appears in this issue in conversation with curator Marius Babias and artist and filmmaker Clemens von Wedemeyer. Focusing on amateur films shot by the Nazi officer Harald von Vietinghoff-Riesch during his Wehrmacht service, the three discuss the private and intimate moments that adorn military expansion and total war.
This issue also features an excerpt from Tareq Baconi’s beautiful queer memoir Fire in Every Direction. Baconi describes hearing his father recount his mother’s participation in Palestinian solidarity movements in Beirut before the Lebanese Civil War. Through the retelling, Baconi sketches how notions of what it means to “be a man” are always in conflict with revolutionary courage, but also how patronizing elements of masculinity can appear even in expressions of profound care and love. McKenzie Wark expounds on the concept of “femmunism” by taking us to a rave where straight culture and queer culture clash. Drawing on her experience “as a transsexual woman who came out late,” Wark uses the dance floor to imagine a society where it isn’t gender as such that gets abolished, but “compulsory genders and their hierarchy.”
What do men and pets have in common? Humanity’s evolution has always been a process of self-domestication, writes Ingo Niermann. This is the point missed by the manosphere’s panic about declining masculinity: humans have been getting “softer” for thousands of years. Jasmine Amussen explores her lifelong attraction to a certain type of white male—armed, angry, and politically incoherent—and the American manifestations of this archetype, from Timothy McVeigh to Luigi Mangione.
Mary Walling Blackburn shreds masculine territorial control by playfully re-rendering it as machinic sound art jamming over landscapes, into and out of bodies, and across class divides. Reflecting on his memories of masculinity as an Afghan youth, Fahim Amir asks how the weaponization of patriarchal masculinity conceals a broad range of gender dynamics that swirl across polar orders and cultural regimes. Beginning with her own reflections on an upbringing in Mexico, Julieta Aranda looks at masculinity across Latin America as caught in its own cycle of perpetuating violence and destruction—the only way it can (poorly) express freedom and possibility. What would it mean for men to be capable of birthing worlds, asks Aranda, rather than only defending and controlling them?
