Distribution, assemblage, capacity: new keywords for masculinity?

Reconfigurations of illness and masculinity on Instagram

“…Taken together with the economy of attention of Instagram itself, the algorithmic folding of content, and the linking through hashtags, tagging, and sharing, the subject we meet on Instagram is assembled according to the way Rosi Braidotti describes the "enfleshed Deleuzian subject" as "rather an 'in-between': it is a folding in of external influences and a simultaneous unfolding outwards of affects" (Braidotti, 2000, p. 159). Campana (2015) suggests that to understand masculinity, we must investigate how it is distributed across bodies and emerges as various actors engage in the shared performance of masculinity; the individual's claim to masculinity relies on -or is merely a symptom of -a larger system in which masculinity is produced and managed (Campana, 2015;Hickey-Moodey, 2019). Following recent research on the crossroads of assemblage theory and studies on men and masculinity, we move beyond the individual male body in order to explore how masculinity and illness become assembled in the performative making of connections between human and non-human elements on social media.…”

Vital Masculinity: Assemblages of Debility and Capacity in the Danish Lifestyle TV ShowReal Men

“…Viewing masculinity as dynamic and ever-changing assemblages allows us to acknowledge gender as performative and contextual and to examine for instance urban masculinities or rural masculinities as unstable connections in their specific contexts. In our analysis of Real Men we in particular want to include a focus on masculinity as being not exclusively a human quality and on the connections between humans and the things that identified as masculine (Campana 2015, Hickey-Moody 2019 Of special relevance for our approach to the Real Men show is also the understanding of masculinity as desire and following this the constant fear of failure. With reference to Kimmel and Berlant's work, Jonathan Allan suggests approaching hegemonic masculinity as a form of "cruel optimism".…”