Returning to the ‘Man’ question in the posthuman predicament?

Abstract

This journal is founded upon the premise of an emancipatory call for investigating, presenting, finding and opening up for new and alternative masculine gendered subjectivities. We do that by collecting and presenting work that almost always offers us keys to possibilities for reconsidering, rethinking and possibly exiting historically inherited and contemporary forms of masculinity. As such we are of course part of a long history of feminist and profeminist work that articulates and frames our fears and hopes regarding ethically acceptable and potentially less destructive forms of masculinities. This is also true for the four articles in this current issue of Norma: ‘Intersectionality and social justice in programs for boys and men’ Keddie, Amanda; Flood, Michael & Hewson-Munro, Shelley; ‘The reflective process of the perpetrator: representations of rape in novels of C.N. Adidche and V.T. Nguyn’ Cohen, Omri; ‘Rituals of (un)changing masculinity: cohesion or diversity? A study of the fraternization traditions of Swedish cadets’ at the Military Academy’ Malmio, Irja; and ‘Filial obligations, affect and masculinities: Vietnamese-Australian young men being and becoming good sons’ by Garth Stahl and Yang Zhao. However, before giving a brief introduction to these articles in the end of this editorial, I will articulate some concerns in contemporary masculinity studies as well as reconnecting to some others that are part of our Norma’s scope of questions. As we are moving into new theoretical landscapes in masculinity studies where the connection to feminist theorizing is a constant junction to be revisited, we return to some of the ground pillars of masculinity studies such as the ‘Man question’. Such concerns are addressed in an upcoming volume (fc. Mellström & Pease, 2022) where several key thinkers in the field are taking on the question of how to calibrate masculinity studies in relation to the contemporary posthuman predicament of our world. My reasoning here draws upon some of the ideas raised in this forthcoming volume. In times of uncertainty caused by wars, climate crisis and political backlashes facing any progressive change concerning gender and sexuality, we are even more confronted with basic ontological questions connected to power and existence. Feminist theorizing has for a long time addressed such questions, not least in the theoretical wave of posthuman feminism, new materialism and theories of affect in the last decades. This wave of scholarship has come to reformulate and reinvigorate a large umbrella of onto-epistemological questions concerning subjectivity, sex, gender, sexual difference, bodily appearance, systems of affect, relationality, matter, agency, human and non-human, ecology and technology. The umbrella is far too extensive to meaningfully summarize here, but there are certain questions that reoccur with a new emphasis. The ‘Man question’ is no doubt one of those and where is that question better addressed than in masculinity studies? However, masculinity studies have, with a few exceptions (cf. Garlick, 2016, 2019; Matthews, 2018; Mellström, 2016, 2020; Pease, 2021a, 2021b; Reeser & Gottzen, 2018) only begun to consider the conceptual vocabulary and ideas of posthumanism, affect theories and new materialism. This wave of scholarship is a multidimensional move, pointing to affect,