Macho Vulnerability: A Postcolonial Sociology of Gendered Power and Anxiety
Macho Vulnerability: A Postcolonial Sociology of Gendered Power and Anxiety
SPEAKER BIO
Dr Shannon Philip is Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality at the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge and Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge. He is also a Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. His first book is titled Becoming Young Men in a New India: Masculinities, Gender Relations and Violence in the Postcolony published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.
ABSTRACT
The central question l ask in this talk is if we oughtto think about middle class 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 self-identified 'middle class' men in New Delhi and Johannesburg. 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.
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