Deleuze And Masculinity 3030017486, 9783030017484

This book uses Deleuze’s work to understand the politics of masculinity today. It analyses masculinity in terms of what

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Deleuze And Masculinity
 3030017486,  9783030017484

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements......Page 7
Contents......Page 9
About the Author......Page 11
List of Figures......Page 13
1 Introduction......Page 14
Situating the Empirical Data......Page 21
Why Deleuze and Masculinity?......Page 22
Hegemonic Masculinity......Page 31
Works Cited......Page 39
2 Performativity, Assemblage, Affect......Page 42
Performativity......Page 43
Assemblage......Page 49
Affect......Page 58
Conclusion......Page 71
Works Cited......Page 73
3 Schooling Masculinity......Page 76
The Psychoanalytic Boy......Page 78
The Spinozist Child......Page 91
Schooling Masculinity After Deleuze: Protest, Striation and Minor Refrains......Page 93
Protest Masculinity for a New Millennium......Page 102
Conclusion......Page 110
Works Cited......Page 111
4 Masculinity, Disability and Sexual Publics......Page 114
Hierarchies of Disability, Masculinity and Sexuality......Page 118
Sex/Ability......Page 131
Deleuze and Disability......Page 136
Michael Stokes ‘Veterans’; Recuperation and Refusing Pity......Page 145
Me Before You......Page 150
Conclusion......Page 155
Works Cited......Page 157
5 Carbon Futures: Masculine Economies, Performative Materialities......Page 161
The Politics of Surfaces......Page 163
On the Politics of Oil: Masculinity and Post-carbon Transitions......Page 173
Financial and Environmental Gendered Fictions......Page 175
Empire and Legitimate Knowledges......Page 184
People Who ‘Know What They Are Talking About’......Page 187
Conclusion......Page 189
Works Cited......Page 190
6 Conclusion......Page 193
Works Cited......Page 198
Index......Page 200

Citation preview

Anna Hickey-Moody

DELEUZE AND

MASCULINITY

Deleuze and Masculinity “This book is an intervention—both critical and clinical—on how to reach environmental, social and psychic sustainability… Anna Hickey-Moody takes a passionate stand against the social pathology of dominant toxic masculinity, its real-life as well as epistemic violence and its carbon heavy economic of waste and devastation… Erudite, funny, daring in its theoretical speculations and yet grounded in the empirical analyses, this book provides food for thought and vitamins for the soul.” —Rosi Braidotti, Utrecht University, The Netherlands “Anna Hickey-Moody’s Deleuze and Masculinity is an indispensable contribution to the vibrant field of masculinity studies as it works to dismantle dominant, toxic masculinities while affirming the generative promise of a range of alternative masculinities…. For scholars in disability studies, ecotheory, and beyond, Hickey-Moody’s work should be required reading.” —Robert McRuer, George Washington University, USA “This timely and urgently needed book offers a crucial re-reading of Deleuze’s ideas to align with existing agendas in masculinity studies. Hickey-Moody skilfully identifies and challenges cultures of masculinity to argue for a more nuanced way of thinking about and doing masculinity. Her chapter on disability in particular… takes existing conversations in both critical disability and critical trauma studies into new and uncharted places, forcing us to rethink how both gender and disability are constructed and performed.” —Katie Ellis, Curtin University, Australia “This is an important book that offers both a fresh conceptual and methodological set of tools for researchers in masculinity studies. Drawing on feminist and queer scholars of gender and masculinity, such as Butler and Connell, Hickey-Moody carefully extends the reach of their thinking elaborating how Deleuzian theories of affect and applications of feminist new materialism can help us to grapple with the performative and material dimensions of masculinity. Hickey-Moody helps us to rethink what is hegemonic and what is toxic about masculinity by uncovering the relational assemblages of how masculinity is practiced via a range of carefully analysed case studies. The conclusions offer

helpful insights that show how by thinking about masculinities differently, we can imagine more equitable futures which hold capacities for masculinities to be done differently.” —Jessica Ringrose, University College London, UK “From the place-based protest masculinities of schoolboys to the performative masculinity making politics of oil and Empire, Anna Hickey-Moody brings depth and breadth to the field of masculinity studies in Deleuze and Masculinity. With a Deleuzian twist, each chapter keeps the complex formations of masculinity assemblages in formation and flow. Dive in and become un-stuck with how to re-imagine the more-than of what masculinity can become.” —Emma Renold, Professor of Childhood Studies, Cardiff University, UK

Anna Hickey-Moody

Deleuze and Masculinity

Anna Hickey-Moody School of Media and Communication Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology Melbourne, VIC, Australia

ISBN 978-3-030-01748-4 ISBN 978-3-030-01749-1  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01749-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: “HUMAN NATURE” by Witchoria a.k.a Victoria Siemer This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book is dedicated to my Ph.D. student and friend, Dr. Paul Andrew Brian Priday 25/09/1945–11/05/17 Always a gentleman

Acknowledgements

The empirical research that informs this book is largely funded by the Australian Research Council Grant, FT160100293 Early Start Arts to Counter Radicalization. More information about this project can be found at: www.interfaithchildhoods.com and I would like to thank the Australian Research Council for their generous support of my work. I would also like to thank the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne and the Digital Ethnography Research Centre for providing a rich intellectual home for my work and supporting me with the award of a Vice Chancellors’ Senior Research Fellowship 2017–2020. Many ideas presented in this manuscript were developed across the period of 2009–2012, while teaching a course called Cultures of Masculinity in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. I would like to thank my students and colleagues associated with the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies across these years, especially those who either taught with me or supported the course, including Clifton Evers, Jessica Cadwallader, Shé Hawke, and Paul Priday. Thanks to Sarah Hill at Newcastle University, UK for reading the chapter on masculinity, disability, and media and Felicity Colman vii

viii      Acknowledgements

from Kingston University, London for drawing my attention to my use of Deleuze as a method for thinking about gender. Chapter 2 was presented to the Department of Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway in London in 2018, and Chapter 3 is partially comprised of a reworked version of my chapter on Little Hans published in Deleuze and Children (eds. Bohlmann & Hickey-Moody, 2019). It is reprinted here with permission from Edinburgh University Press. Chapter 5 was presented as a Department Seminar in 2016 in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. Thanks to those who engaged with early stages of this work as presented publicly, especially Tim Laurie. This book began as a collaboration developed with Tim, but as we wrote, we wrote two very different books and I very much look forward to reading Tim’s brilliant musings when his monograph is finished. The points about the role that children’s friendships play in my methodology and the importance of sad affect for thinking about media representations of disability were originally made by Tim in our early conversations. Thanks also to Marissa Willcox at RMIT for her work formatting the manuscript and to my mum, Penny Moody for always believing I had something important to say, for reading early drafts and then feeding me when I was finishing the manuscript.

Reference Bohlmann, M. P. J., & Hickey-Moody, A. (2019). “Introduction”. Deleuze and Children. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Contents

1 Introduction 1 Situating the Empirical Data 8 Why Deleuze and Masculinity? 9 Hegemonic Masculinity 18 Works Cited 26 2 Performativity, Assemblage, Affect 29 Performativity 30 Assemblage 36 Affect 45 Conclusion 58 Works Cited 60 3 Schooling Masculinity 63 The Psychoanalytic Boy 65 The Spinozist Child 78 Schooling Masculinity After Deleuze: Protest, Striation and Minor Refrains 80 Protest Masculinity for a New Millennium 89 ix

x      Contents

Conclusion 97 Works Cited 98 4 Masculinity, Disability and Sexual Publics 101 Hierarchies of Disability, Masculinity and Sexuality 105 Sex/Ability 118 Deleuze and Disability 123 Michael Stokes ‘Veterans’; Recuperation and Refusing Pity 132 Me Before You 137 Conclusion 142 Works Cited 144 5 Carbon Futures: Masculine Economies, Performative Materialities 149 The Politics of Surfaces 151 On the Politics of Oil: Masculinity and Post-carbon Transitions 161 Financial and Environmental Gendered Fictions 163 Empire and Legitimate Knowledges 172 People Who ‘Know What They Are Talking About’ 175 Conclusion 177 Works Cited 178 6 Conclusion 181 Works Cited 186 Index 189

About the Author

Anna Hickey-Moody is a Professor of Media and Communication at RMIT University and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, 2017–2021. She holds visiting professor positions at Columbia University, USA, Goldsmiths College, UK, and the Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. From 2013 to 2016, she was the Head of the Ph.D. in Arts and Learning and Director of the Centre for Arts and Learning at Goldsmiths College. She has also held teaching and research positions at the University of Sydney, Monash, and UniSA, Australia. Anna is known for her theoretical and empirical work with socially marginalized figures, especially young people with disabilities, young refugees and migrants, those who are economically and socially disadvantaged, and men at the margins of society. She is also known for her methodological expertise with arts practice, or practice research, ethnography, and methodological invention. Her books include Imagining University Education: Making Educational Futures (2016), Youth, Arts and Education (2013), Unimaginable Bodies (2009), and Masculinity Beyond the Metropolis (2006). Anna has also edited a number of collected works, books, and journal editions. Recent publications include a themed edition of the journal xi

xii      About the Author

Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies 2016 38(1), and an anthology on art practice with Rowman and Littlefield: Arts, Pedagogy and Cultural Resistance, (2015). Anna has also published collections on disability and media, (Disability Matters, Routledge, 2011) and Deleuze and social politics (Deleuzian Encounters, Palgrave, 2006). Anna teaches and supervises in the areas of disability, youth culture, masculinity, arts practice as method.

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3

David’s car Declan’s identity picture Brad Ivanchan, by artist Michael Stokes Twitter screenshot 1 Twitter screenshot 2 Twitter screenshot 3

91 91 136 174 174 175

xiii

1 Introduction

Masculinity studies has developed as an inherently interdisciplinary project since beginning in the 1970s. As part of broader growth, scholarship has devoted much time and energy to understanding and questioning the concept that boys are in crisis. Some scholars argue that masculinity has been synonymous with discourses of crisis since the 1700s, as a focus on unattainable ideals lead to anxiety about failure. These discourses persist; but are certainly not the dominant way in which masculinity is learnt in cultural pedagogies of gender. To a great extent, masculinity is largely taught and learnt through embodied and symbolic sets of practices that take place in a range of places and are distributed across often quite complex networks. Online and offline, between generations, cultures and classes, the gender performance that is popularly recognized as ‘masculinity’ is fluid in the different ways it can embody or represent courage, leadership, protectiveness, strength, power, control and command. This book is written from an appreciation of the complexities of the lives of men, and with a view to increasing the resources available for understanding experiences of lives of men. There are two parts of such a project. Firstly, this entails translating or re-reading Deleuze’s ideas in ways that align with existing agendas © The Author(s) 2019 A. Hickey-Moody, Deleuze and Masculinity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01749-1_1

1

2     A. Hickey-Moody

of Masculinity studies. Secondly, this involves critical engagement with cultures of masculinity that need to be challenged and changed in order to free existing experiences of masculinity from spectres of failure and crisis. Men’s culture, and products marketed at men, have started responding to, and trying to change, configurations of toxic masculinity. For example, a popular shaving product recently released a digital advertisement that opens with a montage of news reports on bullying, #MeToo and toxic masculinity as the reversed question is asked by a narrator over images of men self-reflecting while staring into their bathroom mirrors. Recognizing the potential for change, the advertisement calls men to speak back to toxic gender performances, to be the change they want to see in the world. This popular cultural example is one of many existing attempts to change instances in which toxic masculinity is polluting social formations, and causing physical, emotional and psychological harm to boys, men and women who live gendered identities that do not align with the ideals espoused by aggressive men. As the book unfolds, I will also argue that some configurations of toxic masculinity are leading to the continued exploitation of our natural resources and the increasing degradation of our environment. Capitalist economies rely on the production and consumption of specific ideas about gender in order to maintain economic power through global assets such as the carbon market. This imbricated system of power articulates across many realms. The fossil fuel industry, the carbon futures trading market, carbon heavy car culture, and indeed, the disciplinary construction of ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ knowledges of ‘what matters’ when it comes to considering environmental science and thinking about carbon are all shaped directly and indirectly by ideas about gender. There are myriad ways in which masculinity is culturally valued, produced and consumed, however, the fossil fuel industry is a male dominated profession that valorises certain kinds of performances of masculinity, the carbon futures trading market is largely run by men, and most car cultures are male oriented. These are just three examples I choose to explore in detail in Chapter 5, but they are of significance in introducing this book because they map out just some of the many ways in which problematic gender configurations have become part of the status quo of late

1 Introduction     3

capitalist life and need to be rethought. Deleuze’s philosophy offers us rich resources for rethinking and expanding contemporary configurations of masculinity studies scholarship. Indeed, Deleuze’s thought is only sporadically being taken up in masculinity studies and this book is intended as a resource to support the translation and application of philosophy into the more applied experiences of masculinity. With a view to challenging and changing negative cultures of masculinity in order to free existing experiences of masculinity from spectres of failure and crisis, I want to examine the #MeToo movement as an example of why we need a richer array of ways of thinking about, and doing, masculinity. The “#MeToo” crisis has shown that toxic configurations of masculinity still need to be shifted, and I argue that Deleuze’s thought offers us resources that help us to think beyond/in addition to binaries, hierarchies and to complexify power dynamics. Perhaps surprisingly, the “#MeToo” movement, as it is now known within popular consciousness, has taken many years to reach the level of visibility it is currently afforded. It began in 2006 when the North American civil rights activist Tarana Burke founded the “Me Too” movement to raise awareness of sexual assault and abuse. It was not until October 2017 that the New York Times picked up the issues that Burke had raised by publishing an article about the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, alleging that he ‘paid off ’ his sexual assault and rape victims. Following this, the actress Alyssa Milano encouraged women to say “#MeToo” if they had experienced sexual harassment or assault and the “#MeToo” hashtag became viral on social media. By December 2017 Tarana Burke was one of a number of women named “person of the year” by Time magazine. This very contemporary timeline shows us that women have been deprived of basic human rights such as personal safety across history and into contemporary times. Redresses are only beginning to be made in some areas, and reconfiguring ideas of masculinity is part of these changes. Indeed, the fantastic backlash to #MeToo made by misogynistic white, North American men (and led by the current American president, who says he fears for the plight of white men in North America) shows us that even the small redresses that are being achieved as a result of the movement are causing significant repercussions. Changes that have been effected as a result of the movement

4     A. Hickey-Moody

include the fact that in North America nine male members of Congress either resigned or declined to run for re-election after facing substantiated charges of sexual misconduct. Two White House officials left after being accused of spousal abuse and three congressional candidates lost or quit their campaigns. These changes have occurred despite the fact that “Trump is quietly making it harder to report Sexual Harassment and Discrimination” (Peck, 2017, online), through changing legislation but also through modelling and valuing cultures of misogyny, racism and exploitation. For example, Trump reversed an order made by Obama that forbade federal contractors from keeping sexual harassment discrimination cases secret. Obama’s 2014 rule prevented companies from settling such disputes silently through arbitration and out of the public eye. “This … [is] a clear sign of the administration silencing women”, said Jessica Stender (Peck, 2017, online), senior staff attorney for Equal Rights Advocates, and a women’s rights non-profit. “In this atmosphere, (of MeToo fall-out for Harvey Weinstein) … Trump’s administration actions look remarkably like a real-time backlash to the growing assertion of female power” (Peck, 2017, online). The culture surrounding these performances of toxic masculinity is imbricated in State and institutional power. For example, in January 2017 Trump signed what is called his “gag rule”, that is meant to prevent health clinics from talking about abortion. Such state power is thought about by Deleuze in his work with Guattari as a form of machinic enslavement, through which social relations and desires, such as the woman’s right to choose and free access to good quality health care, is rendered subordinate to a despotic signifier. In this instance, Trump’s doctrine acts as statist thought, which is the particular signifier that is raised up to the status of standing for the whole, in order to create a despotic signifier. The despotic signifier overshadows or silences all others, so that the other of this signifier (in this case a woman’s right to choose) is defined as radically excluded. Deleuze and Guattari ­contrast state power against what they call ‘the War Machine’ which is a process through which capture and overcoding can be avoided. Deleuze and Guattari choose the name War Machine because war is the “surest mechanism directed against the formation of the State” (1987, p. 357). In contrast to the potential of the War Machine to escape coding

1 Introduction     5

and despotic signification, Deleuze and Guattari view the ‘state’ as a particular kind of institutional process that is produced through social relations that arise from believing in fixities and representation. The state exists primarily as a process, and there are three particular kinds of state form within Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, although the differences between them are not of relevance for our discussion here. What matters to me, in terms of understanding how translating misogynistic sentiment into state legislation can, for example, silence and also dictate woman’s experiences, is that the state-form is defined by the practices of ‘overcoding’, ‘despotic signification’ and ‘machinic enslavement’. These three practices are forms of control that shape expression and desire so that it aligns with state interests and will. The concept of despotic signification explains the fact that in statist thought, a particular signifier (such as Trump’s word) is taken to stand in for ‘the whole’ (e.g. the complexity of North American women’s experiences of early pregnancy), and also the ‘other’ of this signifier (e.g. the desire for abortion) is radically excluded. Despotic signification is a system of radical silencing and it is carried into systems and cultures through practices that Deleuze and Guattari call ‘overcoding’. Practices of overcoding impose meanings arising from despotic signification on to the various processes through which social life and desire operate. In contrast to the libidinal, or foundational and psychic overcoding which occurs through capitalism, states often overcode through policy and rhetoric rather than capitalism’s preferred tools of desire and affect. Overcoding also destroys that which cannot be encoded. Thirdly, ‘Machinic enslavement’ occurs when groups of social relations and desires, which Deleuze calls ‘machines’, are rendered subordinate to the regulatory function of the despotic signifier and incorporated in an overarching statist totality. The three forms of state power combined together are persuasive, as shown by the recent struggles of the #MeToo movement to be recognized in Parliament, despite an increasing archive of evidence proving institutionalised and enduring male sexual harassment of women in professional circumstances. For example, in looking to substantiate claims against Weinstein that were a foundational part of the #MeToo movement, Jodi Kentor and Megan Twohey located sexual harassment allegations against Mr Weinstein dating back to 1990.

6     A. Hickey-Moody

Weinstein resigned from his company’s board as a result. Shortly after this, Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie said they too had been harassed. Even being able to make this claim to being harassed required a certain amount of symbolic work to be undertaken—the invention of harassment in state law required a process politically very different from state ‘overcoding’, but which similarly made a word signify experience, thus legitimating the experience. Teaching at Cornell university in the 1970s, Lin Farley developed the term ‘sexual harassment’. Eleanor Holmes-Norton was the first woman to head the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission in North America and she supported the 1981 development and publication of “Guidelines for Responding to Sexual Harassment in the Workplace”. In 1986 the United States supreme court ruled that sexual harassment was an “issue” for which people may be held legally accountable (Victor, 2017, online). This process of enshrining experience in law illustrates the kinds of validation that occur through developing legislation. After the recent Hollywood revelations made as part of the #MeToo movement, countless women outside Hollywood said they had experienced similar harassment in their own industries. The hashtag #MeToo, quickly spread through social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, as popular culture and popular consciousness added affect and individuation to the experience that had been made valid by women’s work. However, the state has responded to the #MeToo movement as if it were an attack on state power disguised as critique of the misogyny that lies at the heart of Trump’s responses to the movement. Trump himself denies any wrongdoing in relation to sexual harassment, even though more than a dozen women have accused him of explicit sexual harassment. Trump adopts a position of being immune to these allegations, and flatly denies them (Westneat, 2017, online). The #MeToo movement only works as a war machine, or a space of decoding state power, if the accused are susceptible to shame. Trump is still in office despite the allegations against him, and his senators. Jeremy Diamond (2018) maps some of Trumps’ attacks on women starting with him being accused of lewd behaviour in the wake of a Hollywood tape. Drawing on a press release from October 2016, Diamond quotes Trump saying: “when you are a star, they [women] let you do it. You can do anything….grab

1 Introduction     7

them [women] by the pussy. You can do anything.” While asserting that it was a “scary time for young men”, Trump said “Young women are going great”. While several men have been accused of sexual harassment of women, “Trump has focussed on backing up the accused. He has offered few words to women.” When asked if he was afraid for his sons or his daughters Trump Jnr said “Right now I’d say my sons. I’ve got girls and I’ve got boys and when I see what’s going on right now it’s scary [for boys]”. Much resistance, or “deterritorialization” intended by the #MeToo movement is overcoded again by state power. Australia has also felt waves of response in relation to #MeToo, with dynamics of the state against the war machine illustrated in similar ways. In 2016, The Sydney Theatre Company says it received a complaint at the end of the run of “King Lear” that alleged misconduct by the actor Geoffrey Rush has occurred and went on for several months. However, this was not held up in court and the enduringly patriarchal apparatuses of state and industrial law remain the primary processes through which such experiences can be validated. Women and ­children are marginalised and mistrusted within these systems. Attempts to speak out are silenced, or punished, for example, the Australian actor Craig McLaughlan was charged with a number of sexual assault offences and he responded by suing media outlets reporting the cases for defamation. One might say while the #MeToo movement has tried to create changes in the gender dynamics of contemporary culture, more is needed. As Deleuze and Guattari explain; “war maintains the dispersal and segmentarity of groups, and the warrior himself is caught in a process of accumulating exploits leading him to solitude and a prestigious but powerless death” (1987, p. 357). War machines attack the state, yes, but the soldier still dies alone and without power. In opposition to the war machine, state structures work through relation or what Deleuze and Guattari call filiation. This is an arboreal or tree-like system that breaks apart or “deterritorializes” differential skills in order to root them; or legitimize them as ways of becoming and forces of production. Here, we can start to develop a sense of the embedded and processual ways in which state power legitimates and disavows experience in ways that are specific to gender and which also co-constitute gender. Further work in this space is urgently needed.

8     A. Hickey-Moody

Situating the Empirical Data The empirical fieldwork that informs this book has arisen from a project that is designed to shift; and also move away from, a discursive centre of configurations of toxic masculinity as the focus for how we understand relationships between religions. Men engaging in acts of terror had become (and often still is) the primary way in which relationships between religions are perceived in news media and popular culture. To my mind, such representations miss much of the point of religion. In these discourses, visual and material cultures of religion are ignored, and are replaced by extremist ideology. My project was designed to tell different stories about religion; stories that are embedded in communities, complicate gender roles, and that situate visual and material cultures as a core part of experience. The research methods employed for this project are ethnography, interviews, focus groups, a quantitative survey and an in-depth series of making practices which children. Much of the data arising from the qualitative research explicitly examines experiences of gender and data relating to experiences of masculinity and social constructions of masculinity is considered in Chapter 3. This empirical data set is comprised of qualitative and quantitative material from the UK and Australia, although the anecdotes and experiences that inform this book, by chance, largely arise from UK data. I discuss my ethnographic sensibility and practices in greater detail later in this introduction, and it is an ethnographic sensibility shaped by responsiveness to my surroundings. I am consistently engaged with acts of responding to communities, researchers, materials. In these processes of engagement and responsivity, ideas of how things “should be”, plans and technical issues can be overlooked. In John Law’s now classic volume on empirical research called After Method: Mess in Social Science Research (2004) Law reminds us that: the world is … textured in quite different ways … academic methods of inquiry don’t really catch these … parts of the world are caught in our ethnographies, our histories and our statistics. But other parts are not, or if they are this is because they have been distorted into clarity. (p. 2)

1 Introduction     9

Such a distortion into clarity invents clarity as much as it subjugates mess. Mess is not just generative, it is inherently creative. Gender is messy and is always already an ongoing act of creation. Australian researcher Stephen Muecke characterizes his “ethnographic approach to postcolonial study” as necessarily involving fieldwork “including mistakes and observations of other organizations tripping up or taking zigzag routes” (2018, p. 219). Here, ethnography is a method through which one tries “with difficulty – to follow and understand various other ways of knowing and maintaining knowledge” (2018, p. 219). Such ways of knowing and maintaining knowledge include non-verbal, embodied, aesthetic practices that communicate complex ways of belonging and being. The empirical data that informs Chapter 3, and which I draw on in the introduction below, is the result of being with communities, in places that belong to communities and sharing experiences with boys and men in ways that change in relation to the research participants. The stories I tell are those that have stuck with me, like burrs to a cloth, pricking at me, reminding me they are there and have a purpose.

Why Deleuze and Masculinity? This project has an empirical imperative. While undertaking fieldwork in Manchester in May 2017, a friend’s daughter made the offhand suggestion that we might go out to a concert. Ariana Grande from North America was playing: it was going to be a great night. Her friends from college were going. I had terrible jetlag, as I was not long off the plane from Australia. I really couldn’t face a concert. We settled for watching RuPaul’s drag race on television and going to bed early. I still felt the world was spinning. The next morning, I joined a very sombre mood at the primary school in which I was undertaking my ethnography. The concert to which I had almost been taken had been the site of what was being framed as a terrorist attack. An angry man had blown up the Manchester Arena stadium, a stadium that was largely filled with young girls and their parents. The children with whom I was working were profoundly upset. Their classmates had been at the concert. They drew

10     A. Hickey-Moody

multiple images of Manchester bees and Union Jack flags in attempts to recreate their own sense of safe emplaced identity. These acts of communicating through icons suggested to me they wanted to hold on to what they saw as something solid, having had the frailty of our existence laid bare. There was clearly a gender agenda framing this. The shrine to bomb victims looked like a tweenage girl’s bedroom, assembled in the middle of Manchester city. A sea of pink ribbons, balloons, flowers and candles filled a street allocated for the memorialization of the bombing and the memorial affectively communicated the fact that the majority of victims were girls. Twenty-three people were killed, including the attacker, and 139 were wounded, more than half of them children. The bomber, Salman Ramadan Abedi, was a 22-year-old British Sunni Muslim of Libyan ancestry. His story exemplifies the moral panic discourses that have risen to characterise discussions of Muslim ­religion in mainstream media. While radicalization is indeed terrifying and unjust, it is also very rare. It is sexist and racist to characterise an entire religion based on the acts of a very small percent of men who claim identification with the religion. Only a few weeks later, I had an alarmingly similar experience while undertaking fieldwork in a primary school in South East London. A man had driven his car through pedestrians walking on the footpath. The attack undertaken on civilians and killing 4 people at Westminster was carried out by Khalid Masood, a 52-year-old Muslim convert born in Britain under the name Adrian Russell Ajao. Again, this act was framed as an attempt, according to police, to carry out “Islamist-related terrorism” that was “inspired” by Islamist militant groups overseas. What was left out of this characterization was the fact that these are very specific cultures of masculinity, more than they are cultures of religion. Muslim culture is global and complex, articulating in myriad ways, yet, as a religion, remaining concerned with service, love and loyalty. These two incidents that shaped my very early fieldwork were concerned with protest masculinity, a concept I discuss further as this book develops. Men’s violent assertion of their power is not a religion. It is a gendered performance of anger. The school children I was working with couldn’t understand why someone might do such a thing. I realised the urgency with which

1 Introduction     11

we need to reconsider ideas of legitimate masculinity. Through terrorist attacks, gun shootings, domestic violence, and political bigotry, toxic masculinity that is prone to violent forms of protest has become an increasingly urgent social issue that needs to be rethought. More than this, the terms on which masculinity is constituted need to be rethought. The more I pondered these two attacks as examples of toxic masculinity rather than performances of “religious extremism”, I came to see that there are many ways in which toxic masculinity, as it is currently configured, is killing us: women and men, girls and boys alike. As the two bombing attacks make plain, this murder is literal, not symbolic. Through mass shootings, bombings, war, and terrorism, toxic configurations of masculinity take lives. However, toxic masculinity is also damaging the environment, perhaps beyond repair, through gendered understandings of natural resources, social roles and political hierarchies. It is for these reasons, as well as to open up the ways in which masculinity can be lived and loved, that we need to think about masculinity differently. Deleuze offers resources for seeing and valuing ways of doing masculinity ‘differently’. The points that inform this call to arms have been made in various ways, and across various registers in Masculinity Studies for many years now. Most importantly we need to realise that of course very few forms of masculinity are toxic, and while the critical approaches I develop here focus in part on changing toxic masculinity with a view to creating sustainable social and environmental futures, this focus is not supposed to imply that masculinity is necessarily synonymous with toxicity. It is not. Masculinity and toxicity can, indeed, be radically different things and hegemonic constructions of masculinity often are just that: constructions, with no political, emotional or psychic power. As I show, Deleuze’s work offers methods for understanding what I call cultural pedagogies of gender and analysing masculinity in terms of what it does, how its operates, and what its affects are. I am a scholar who is engaged with the project of creating social change for gender justice. In this respect, I am looking to shift amalgamations, or assemblages of, toxicity and masculinity. I see little merit in the project of paying further attention to existing configurations of masculinity that, while not

12     A. Hickey-Moody

necessarily ‘toxic’, either clearly or implicitly enjoy the privileges arising from the patriarchal organizations of power and in attempts broaden conversations about masculinity have written on male plus sized models (Hickey-Moody, 2016), masculinity and disability (Hickey-Moody, 2009) and masculinity and refugee youth (Hickey-Moody, 2013; Savage & Hickey-Moody, 2010). In 2009 I began teaching Masculinity Studies, having researched the field prior to this time in my postdoctoral work (Kenway, Kraack, & Hickey-Moody, 2006). Both ventures: teaching core concepts and substantive areas of scholarly interest in Masculinity Studies, and also my more specifically focused research work, have made me acutely aware of the importance of conceptual and methodological frameworks for masculinity. Ways of thinking open up possibilities for ways of seeing, and sometimes, ways of being. This working history has also taught me that frameworks and methods for thinking can change what is conceived of as possible in gendered terms. Deleuze offers us a method for reading gender in terms of how it is produced and what it does, he offers us an empirical method for seeing the production of gender and its associated cultural politics. There is a growing body of work on Deleuze and masculinity that foreshadows and, of course, informs the arguments developed here. Some of the earliest work includes Katherine O’Donnell’s (2009) work on Spinoza, Massumi, affect and masculinity and Torkild Thanem and Louise Wallenburg’s work (2010) bringing Freud and Marx together to ‘bugger’ a theory of masochism in a manner inspired by Deleuze. These two papers, amongst others, can chronologically be considered the beginning of a now much more developed dialogue between Deleuze Studies and Masculinity Studies. Particular concepts in Deleuze’s oeuvre demonstrate more significance in this field than others and I offer accounts of these ideas across the course of the book. A newer issue for consideration is how the work of Deleuze, and his collaboration with Guattari, might provide resources that assist with reconfiguring toxic patterns and performances of masculinity, and I also think through what such a process of reconfiguration might look like. Broadly, the book begins discussions of Deleuze’s thought as a method for understanding cultural pedagogies of masculinity, and I very much hope this methodological focus is of use to future Deleuze scholars.

1 Introduction     13

This monograph is, of course, by no means exhaustive or a complete catalogue of possible readings of Deleuze in relation to masculinity. It is a book of beginnings. In investigating masculinity and methodology, this book responds to the questions: What does masculinity look like after an encounter with Deleuze’s thought? What methods does Deleuze offer us for thinking about what masculinity ‘does’ rather than what it ‘is’? There is no single answer to these provocations, and there are many possible ways in which these questions could be answered. I have adopted a pragmatic approach in responding to these questions, shaping the first two chapters around Deleuzian concepts that have proved ­generative in masculinity studies and then presenting case studies of themes and discipline areas that have applied Deleuze’s work to the study of men’s lives. To be more specific, I begin in Chapter 2 by discussing how the concepts of affect and assemblage have contributed to and, in some instances transformed, the work undertaken by the foundational concept of performativity in gender studies. Performativity is a term that describes gender as an embodied practice of citation, an unconscious ‘copying’ of other examples of gender that have already been performed. Affect is different from performativity, affect is a change in one’s capacity to act, an increase or decrease in bodily limit. However, one’s performativity is affectively conveyed and affectively learnt and taught. They are words that characterise the politics of visceral possibility and action. Assemblage, the second Deleuzian concept I mention in relation to Chapter 2, is the French term for ‘arrangement’. In Deleuze’s ontology the term assemblage refers to the importance of context and highlights the fact that all acts/objects/bodies are, in fact, assemblages themselves and are extensions of context as much as they can also be singularized and seen to have individual agency. As I show in Chapter 2, these two ideas of affect and agency have extended the use of Judith Butlers’ work on the performance of gender significantly in masculinity studies (for example Butler (1990)). In Chapter 3, I turn to examine Deleuze and Guattari’s work on the psychoanalytic boy which is largely exemplified by their writing on Little Hans. I think through the gendered and sexual politics of their approaches to psychoanalytic models of young masculinity. The second half of this chapter shifts registers from the theoretical to the empirical

14     A. Hickey-Moody

as, drawing on the empirical data I introduce above, I examine contemporary lived performances of young masculinity. Responding to the fieldwork from my current research project, I examine some new ways that Deleuze and Guattari’s work can animate the lived politics of contemporary young masculinities. The two halves of this chapter are brought together by research in the sociology of education that takes up Deleuze and Guattari to think about empirical worlds of masculine youth. Through Deleuze and Guattari we can see how boys perform gendered ideals in their attachments to place, their imaginative play and their use of symbols. I offer one of many possible examples of how materialist and psychoanalytic readings might sit side by side, rather than being mutually exclusive. In understanding the lived, messy worlds to which I am called to respond in my fieldwork, I draw on the concepts of protest masculinity, and gesture towards ideas of striation and minor refrain as methods that help understand the ways the boys in my research learn and remake gender. Protest masculinity is an idea that was developed by Raewyn Connell to describe performances of masculinity that are expressions of class-based resentment. To put this another way, protest masculinity is a term often used to explain working class men’s anger at their place in the world. One boy in particular performs a very strong protest masculinity, although in this instance the protest is in response to an intersection of race, class and gender, not simply class alone. I consider these acts of protest through the idea of striation, a concept developed by Deleuze and Guattari to express practices of organization and binding. Just like rocks that form over hundreds of years develop ridges that run across and through them, cultures grow barriers, lines, borders: these are “striations”. Striations are material and psychic demarcations of territory, crafted by social worlds and by the agency of time. Striations running across boy’s lives mark out territories they want to enter, to own, to change, to avoid, and at times they set perimeters against which they want to rebel. Above, I introduced the concepts of the State and the War Machine. The State striates space, while the War Machine smooths space. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) suggest the State moves like a game of chess, whereas the War Machine operates like a game of Go. Deleuze and Guattari explain that:

1 Introduction     15

Chess is a game of the State, or of the court: the emperor of China played it. Chess pieces are coded; they have an internal nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations, and confrontations derive. They have qualities; a knight remains a knight, a pawn a pawn, a bishop a bishop. Each is like a subject of the statement endowed with relative power, and these relative powers combine in a subject of enunciation, that is, the chess player or the game’s form of interiority. Go pieces, in contrast, are pellets, disks, simple arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or third-person function: “It” makes a move. “It” could be a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant. Go pieces are elements of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no intrinsic properties, only situational ones. Thus the relations are very different in the two cases. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 352)

In this quote Deleuze and Guattari are trying to explain the subjectifying effects of smooth and striated spaces. Smooth spaces create non-subjectified moving objects and striated spaces create subjectified moving objects with a specified “form of interiority”. I would argue that the tasks I ask the boys to perform, and against which (in the data reported in Chapter 3) they rebel, are striating lines. These boys don’t want to fit in, join in, belong. They see themselves as not fitting any existing script, mould, or striation. They dislike rules and popular uses of space: striations that tell them how to use their time and where their bodies should be. Rather than conform to the striations of the school yard that maps out the place to play as the ‘playground’, these boys have found their own play spaces. These secret play-scapes are the boy’s own refrain of the schoolyard. The places where they can do their own thing and express themselves as they choose. The refrain is a concept developed by Deleuze and Guattari, and it offers a way of understanding these boys’ rebellion that extends the reading of protest masculinity. The concept of the refrain is named after a bird song. Like birds sing out into their territory to find a mate, to voice their presence and to mark their space, a refrain is a practice of place-making, a ritual or set of habits that embed people, animals or things in place. The boy’s refrain is a physical pathway they have built through the hedges that border the schoolyard, they have a well-worn

16     A. Hickey-Moody

and carefully hidden route around the yard that they show me, that leads to a play place which they see as their own. Just as a bird has a song that it sings in its nest, to mark home as a home, the boys have a game they like to play in their space. These examples help us understand how boys’ protests can also be quite creative acts; and show that boys learning to be boys and performing their gender identity are complex processes of rebellion, invention and embodiment. This chapter also shows that psychoanalysis and Deleuze and Guattari’s thought are not mutually exclusive. The two can sit side by side. In Chapter 4, I turn my focus to a subfield of masculinity studies, one in which Deleuze and Guattari’s work has had a notable, sustained and continuing impact. Disability is a politically contentious issue and the ways in which disability is read are very gendered. The field of disability and masculinity studies has taken up the work of Deleuze and Guattari in a fashion that is almost unparalleled save, perhaps, for the take up of Deleuze and Guattari in the field of sociology of education. I examine the gendered nature of disability and I canvass some of the substantive scholarly contributions that have been made to this interdisciplinary space before turning my attention to a case study of the work of North American photographer Michael Stokes and his photographs of amputee war veterans, which I read in terms of affect and attempts to recuperate masculinity. I then turn my attention to the popular Hollywood film Me Before You, which offers a parallel representation of disability as emasculating, indeed, as so emasculating that the disabled protagonist chooses death over life as a man with a disability. Both these texts are constructed in light of the culturally gendered (feminized) readings of disability that dominate popular cultures. Stokes’ photography and Me Before You are, I argue, gendered public pedagogies of disability. They also call a particular public to attention and, in so doing, they perform feminised ideas about disability in public. To put this another way, both texts suggest that disability is something that needs to be ‘made up for’ if one is to succeed as a disabled man. This chapter shows us that Deleuze and Guattari’s work on affect offers a new dimension to existing discussions of public culture. As I have shown elsewhere (Hickey-Moody, 2015a, 2015b), pack logic is indeed at play in the affective formation of public culture.

1 Introduction     17

Chapters 5 and 6 of this book is a provocation, both to the field of masculinity studies and to those working with Deleuze. I move from working to acknowledge how Deleuze’s work has (and can) shift masculinity studies, to ask scholars to take up Deleuze’s thought to re-shape gendered economies of knowledge and matter that support and contribute to systems of patriarchal domination which are mediated through environmental exploitation. This chapter draws on my earlier work (Hickey-Moody, 2015a, 2015b; Hickey-Moody & Laurie, 2015) showing us that Deleuze’s work on the surface from The Logic of Sense can help to show up the gendered politics of ‘things’, or surfaces. All surfaces have a depth that co-constitutes the surface, and the surface itself is made to make sense through the construction of knowledges that generate sense. This interrelationship between knowledge and matter helps us to see the relationship between gender and materiality, and to understand the very gendered ways in which knowledge and matter come to exist. I consider the gendered production of carbon, from the feminized, environmentally friendly ‘carbon rich’ soaked soils produced by the feminized ‘Mother Earth’, to the masculine frontiers of the carbon futures trading market. I argue that the extraction of carbon masculinizes it. Its circulation in capitalist economy has become so central to the workings of capitalism that it is unlikely we will see carbon free futures unless we address the politics of masculine performativity that are embedded in contemporary capitalist arenas such as the carbon futures trading markets, Formula 1 racing cars, and other carbon built vehicles for homosocial masculine intimacy. More than this, we need to reconsider the gendered nature of knowledges surrounding the environment and the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sciences. A carbon neutral future is a matter of redressing current configurations of toxic masculinity. In preparation for chapters to come I now canvas some methodological issues, which are important because the ways in which Deleuze conceptualizes social and material worlds do not map neatly onto existing discourses of masculinity studies. Rather, they offer a new method for approaching the core concerns at the centre of studies of masculinity. My discussion necessarily begins with the concept of hegemony, which is central to Masculinity Studies, although as I have intimated, is it an idea that does not translate directly into Deleuze’s thought.

18     A. Hickey-Moody

Rather, Deleuze offers us new ways of thinking about this important idea. I outline the importance of hegemony for masculinity studies before suggesting some other ways we might explore similar themes through Deleuze’s work.

Hegemonic Masculinity R. W. Connell is an Australian sociologist who is also considered a founding thinker in masculinity studies. Her work challenges us to think about masculinity in terms of social power as well as individual agency. Many scholars have found her ideas useful, especially her concept of a dominant, or hegemonic masculinity amongst a range of alternative kinds of masculinities. There is an extensive literature on hegemonic masculinity, developed by Connell and other theorists, who have made subsequent revisions of the concept. Here, I detail four key points arising from Connell’s work that are central to the ways hegemonic masculinity has been taken up in the field. This is by no means an exhaustive survey of Connell’s influence or impact; I discuss some aspects of the concept of hegemonic masculinity that have been particularly popular. I explain Connell’s argument that there are multiple masculinities, outline the concept of hegemonic masculinity and discuss the fact that both these theoretical positions draw our attention to the socially constructed nature of masculinity and contend that practices and meanings of masculinity are complex and embodied. One of the earliest pieces of Connell’s work in masculinity studies is “Men’s Bodies”, an essay written in 1979 and published in her 1983 book, Which Way is Up? Essays on Sex, Class and Culture. Here, Connell suggests that masculinity is an imaginary ideal against which all men compare themselves. Key points introduced in this early piece include the fact that gender is socially constructed, that sexual difference should not be assumed as a given and that masculinity is learnt as something that can be achieved. These positions, while refined and reworked, can be identified in much work in masculinity studies today. “Men’s Bodies” contains Connell’s earliest attempt at theorising how hegemonic masculinity is formed as an imaginary ideal against which all men compare

1 Introduction     19

themselves. She explains that hegemonic masculinity is interested in the connections between the biological and social, in the individual male body and in the prevailing norms about masculinity, which she sees as expressed most obviously in sport. Beginning with psychoanalytic accounts of the development of male heterosexuality and dominance of the family structure, Connell draws on feminist object relations theory to claim that the individual’s creation of ‘masculinity’ depends on separation from the mother, the feminine. She then moves from the familial and domestic to the social and institutional, arguing that our society privileges the masculine at the expense of the feminine. Building on this early work, in Which Way is Up? hegemonic masculinity is a term used to refer to an idealised masculinity, one that contains no evidence of femininity. Hegemonic masculinity identifies a vision of a ‘pure’ masculinity, a fantasy, founded on qualities such as force, competence, strength and skill. The language of sport, especially the language used to describe competitive, contact sport, closely mirrors many ideals of the hegemonic man. Men are, in Connell’s vision, trained to dominate, just as a boxer must train if he wants to dominate his opponent. It is easy to find evidence for this in popular descriptions of sport: boxing and football were for a long time described as not being games for girls or women, and a popular derogatory description of a male player’s ability still is that he is hitting or throwing like a girl. Extending the arguments in Which Way is Up?, in 1985 Connell published an influential essay co-authored with Tim Carrigan and John Lee, titled “Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity”. This article explains and builds on the fact that the mid-eighties were a significant historical moment for the field of masculinity studies, they were a moment when gay liberation came to the fore in US, Australia and elsewhere. Social developments seemed to prove Connell’s argument about the multiple nature of masculinity and confirm her early critique of sex role theory. In many ways, “Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity” remains a theoretical touchstone for understanding Connell’s ideas, because it sets out so much of the existing literature on masculinity and positions Connell’s ideas in relation to the field. This article also remains significant because of its early use of the term hegemonic masculinity, which is then taken up in Connell’s work from the 1990s onward. The 1995

20     A. Hickey-Moody

book, Masculinities, and the collection of essays in The Men and the Boys (2000), usefully elaborate several of the key themes of Connell’s work on masculinity. Connell also states the concept of hegemonic masculinity powerfully within these publications, for example, in The Men and the Boys she explains that: The hegemonic form need not be the most common form of masculinity, let alone the most comfortable. Indeed, many men live in a state of some tension with, or distance from, the hegemonic masculinity of their culture or community. Other men, such as sporting heroes, are taken as exemplars of hegemonic masculinity and are required to live up to it strenuously – at what may be severe cost, in terms of injury, ill health, and other constraints on life. The dominance of hegemonic masculinity over other forms may be quiet and implicit, but may also be vehement and violent, as in the case of homophobic violence. (Connell, 2000, pp. 10–11)

To put this another way, hegemony and hegemonic masculinity are only at times embodied individually, and are more often an atmosphere that is “quiet and implicit”. The ideal of hegemonic masculinity is everywhere, it is inescapable in contemporary culture and it is expressed acutely in acts of vehemence and violence. Hegemonic masculinity is a way of the male gender maintaining power over women, but it is also a way that some men retain power over other men. The real question we need to address through Connell is the degree to which hegemonic masculinity can be an insidious form of power, the ways hegemonic masculinity operates through phrases like ‘throwing like a girl’, through the implicit suggestion that masculinity and physical performance are synonymous, through the aesthetic codes men learn and use to regulate their gender performance. The acceptance of these cultural norms, acquiescence to insidious, often unconsciously reproduced cultural forms of the regulation of gender is an example of what Deleuze and Guattari (1983) characterize as people fighting for their own slavery. They explain: the astonishing thing is not that some people steal or that others occasionally go out on strike, but rather that all those who are starving do not steal as a regular practice, and all those who are exploited are not continually out on strike: after centuries of exploitation, why do people still

1 Introduction     21

tolerate being humiliated and enslaved, to such a point, indeed, that they actually want humiliation and slavery not only for others but for themselves? (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 29)

They go on, in the same passage, to further argue that: “that is why the fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly, and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered: ‘why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it was their salvation?’ ‘How can people possibly reach the point of shouting: More taxes! Less bread! ’” (1983, p. 29). The example of the UK’s Brexit vote seems an apposite case in point here. This appetite for, and acquiescence to, a dominant power system aligns with the ways in which hegemonic masculinity remains a repressive gendered style and practice. This unconscious acquiescence is how hegemonic power maintains currency and is given power in gendered cultural economies. ‘Hegemony’ is a concept that the Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci took up and developed in a particular way, mobilizing a Marxist epistemology to argue that modes of possessing power are developed in order to retain power. Powerful men behave in ways that ensure their power is retained. While Deleuze does not write about hegemony per se, he does discuss social power and the political work that is involved in maintaining social power. In particular, Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of molar and molecular, and major and minor examine formations of social power. Molar is a term Deleuze and Guattari use to refer to large social formations, ‘molar’ aggregates are things like social classes, genders, races. Molecular is, as the word suggests, much smaller scale, it is about lived experiences and is the perspective adopted when we want to see the ways in which life can complicate ‘molar’, or categorical ways of seeing the world. Both these words offer critical resources for rethinking gender politics, in terms of molecular interventions in molar performances of hegemonic masculinity or developing critical perspectives on molar gender ideals taught by economic, cultural and social structures. Continuing in a similar vein of discussing the broad social and economic politics of culture, major, as the word suggests, is drawn from the musical contexts in which it is employed, and is a noun that Deleuze

22     A. Hickey-Moody

and Guattari use to describe power structures and aesthetic registers in existing, dominant paradigms. Deleuze and Guattari develop the concept especially in relation to literature. However, the concept of the power of the majoritarian, or dominant form, carries well beyond music and literature. Majoritarian models for masculinity are taught on a daily basis through trades, industries and disciplines dominated by men, through assumptions about what a man might do, might look like, and what they might desire. The minor, like the minor key in music, is often a subculture, but is constituted in sets of practices that are often unnoticed, what Deleuze and Guattari might call ‘a little refrain’ (1987, p. 272), a means of becoming. Minoritarian ways of learning to be and become a man need to be recognized and valued. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that: only a minority is capable of serving as the active medium of becoming, but under such conditions that is ceases to be a definable aggregate in relation to the majority. Becoming-Jewish, becoming-woman, etc. therefore imply two simultaneous movements, one by which a term (the subject) is withdrawn from the majority, and another by which a term (the medium or agent) rises up from the minority. (1987, p. 291)

The minor, then, is a political position representative of marginalized cultures and peoples. The majoritarian (average, standardized) is a demographic not measured by physical mass but, rather, by cultural power. Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 291) describe the exemplar of majoritarian community, as a culturally imagined, virtual human template in relation to which the majoritarian standpoint as a primary position of reference is justified. The molar and the majoritarian are cultural imaginings as much as they are sets of practices, collectives of power rather than a physical mass. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) elaborate this point through suggesting that: When we say majority, we are referring not to a greater relative quantity but the determination of a state or standard in relation to which larger quantities, as well as the smallest, can be said to be minoritarian:

1 Introduction     23

white-man, adult-male, etc. Majority implies a state of domination, not the reverse. It is not a question of knowing whether there are more mosquitoes or flies than men, but of knowing how ‘man’ constituted a standard in the universe in relation to which men necessarily (analytically) form a majority. The majority in the universe assumes as a pregiven the right and power of man. (p. 291)

As this quote suggests, the majoritarian position is one which constitutes an analytic and political majority and which is assumed as a benchmark for the ‘power of man’ (1987, p. 291). This incorporeal body of power is the analytic position of ‘average’, ‘standardized’ and ‘normal’. The majoritarian standard of a ‘normal’ human is reflexively constructed through establishing borders between ‘man’ (as the average or normal) and his ‘other’. As I note above, Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 340) argue that social investments occur between two poles, the ‘molar pole’ (social consolidation) and the ‘molecular pole’ (dispersion/minoritarian becomings). Molar and molecular forms of masculinity can be found in popular articulations of masculinity and in sets of practices undertaken by men that might not align with popular expectations for gendered performance. Different types of libidinal investment pass between the two poles (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 340). In creating a unity, libidinal investments move from the molecular to the molar through a process of sedimentation, or aggregation. Molar entities are bodies such as nation-states, people or cities. Methods of molarization and dominant forms of gendered performance are plays of machines, machines overcoding minor aggregates as they build their power. These concepts map onto the social politics discussed by Connell in the concept of hegemonic masculinity, as hegemonic gender identities work to change less typical or less popular gender performances to align with a ‘norm’. For example, in “Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity” Carrigan, Connell and Lee explain that: What emerges from this line of argument is the very important concept of hegemonic masculinity, not as “the male role”, but as a particular variety of masculinity to which others – among them young and effeminate as well as homosexual men – are subordinated. It is particular groups of

24     A. Hickey-Moody

men, not men in general, who are oppressed within sexual relations, and whose situations are related in different ways to the overall logic of the subordination of women to men. (Carrigan, Connell, & Lee, 1985, p. 86)

The practice of subordinating particular kinds of gendered identities connects hegemonic masculinity and majoritarian/molar discourses and cultures. The molar social position outlined by Deleuze and Guattari and quoted above details the accumulation of social power in a similar fashion to the way hegemonic masculinity functions. This relationship between Deleuze and Guattari’s thought and hegemonic masculinity as a foundational concept of masculinity studies has not been explored as comprehensively as it might, and certainly provides a rich avenue for consideration. Deleuze does not write about masculinity explicitly, although in his work with Guattari he discusses the case study of Little Hans’ in Freud’s work in some detail. This case study has significance for masculinity studies as a field because it is the primary place where Freud developed his theory of castration and masculine sexual development. Psychoanalytic theory also provides a key resource for the work of Judith Butler, whose writing on gender performance is absolutely central to masculinity studies. As such, Butler’s work on gender performance, Freud’s work on Hans and Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of this work, form the respective foci of chapters one and two of this book. My discussion is but a beginning of the work that needs to be undertaken in relation to these rich resources for the field. Psychoanalysis, then, could be said to constitute a method that is central to masculinity studies and the field of gender studies more broadly. It is also a powerful discourse that Deleuze and Guattari examine in Anti-Oedipus and to which their collaborative work responds. Alongside the importance of psychoanalysis for the field, sits the significance of empirical methods for researching masculinity. Such methods are diverse and are absolutely central to disciplines concerned with the study of masculinity, such as sociology, education, nursing, cultural studies, social work and other disciplines committed to social justice. Methods of engaging with the empirical vary greatly across the spectrum of qualitative and quantitative methods. Engaged discussion of the

1 Introduction     25

variations I refer to is outside the scope of this introduction. I do, however, need to outline my own methodological approach for undertaking empirical fieldwork with boys that I discuss in this book. In undertaking ethnographic fieldwork with children, my research practices are shaped by a particular orientation to children. Ethnography is an embedded method for understanding systems of cultural value. While undertaking the ethnography drawn on in this book, I lived in the areas I was researching, I attended the schools in which I was undertaking research at additional times to those required to conduct the research and I developed a sense for the place and culture about which I write. Responsiveness to children, listening to them and reworking research objectives in relation to children’s attitudes and desires is central to my research practice. In the ethnographic excerpts in Chapter 3, I discuss an example that details two boys refusing to join in art making fieldwork activities. These activities are set as a way of eliciting indirect discourse from children, understanding what and how they think about issues through exploring the issues obliquely. The ‘data’ generated by this ethic of engagement is primarily led by the boy’s tastes and interests, and, as such, the boys’ friendship needs to be considered as central to the research methodology, as their enjoyment of playing together and their desire to keep playing together rather than join in with others is clearly central to how they express themselves. The case study at the heart of Chapter 3 is drawn from the larger data set I introduced above, generated through ethnographic work with children and their parents across the UK and Australia. Identities have been anonymized. As I have suggested, ethnography is an immersive cultural research method, through which the researcher becomes familiar with the culture being researched and is thus able to articulate systems of cultural value that are specific to the research context in question. My ethnographic methods include digital and creative practices as well as observation. The systems of social value expressed by two of the children form the focus for the second half of Chapter 3 and the knowledge presented here was developed in collaboration with the boys about whom I write. The ethnographic practice used to generate data here features arts workshops for children and focus groups for their parents, alongside embedded engagement with school and community culture. In the arts

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workshops, the children begin by making ‘identity pictures’. These pictures can be self-portraits, or, if the children choose, they can be a less literal collection of favourite colours and textures, or images of things with which children identify. Often children draw objects or symbols such as mobile phones or flags. The ethnographic vignettes included in this book are a ‘thick description’ (Geertz, 1973), or an embedded account of experience, written in the first person as part of my ethnographic field notes. I very much hope they offer a sense of the boys with whom I work, their energy, their humour and their attachment to each other. It is with enthusiasm, then, that I turn to examine core concepts in contemporary Masculinity Studies that have been developed in direct response to Deleuze’s work. This discussion of assemblages and affect begins with an introductory treatment of Judith Butler’s work on performativity, as the central nature of this concept created the space for the kinds of theoretical work undertaken in various ways through the concepts of assemblage and affect in masculinity studies. Acknowledgements   This work was funded through the Australian Research Council Grant, FT160100293. More information can be found at www. interfaithchildhoods.com.

Works Cited Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York and London, UK: Routledge. Carrigan, T., Connell, R. W., & Lee, J. (1985). Toward a new sociology of masculinity. Theory and Society, 14(5), 551–604. Connell, R. W. (1983). Which way is up? Essays on sex, class and culture (illustrated ed.). Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Connell, R. W. (1995). Men’s bodies. In R. W. Connell (Ed.), Masculinities (2 ed., p. 324). Berkeley: University of California Press. Connell, R. W. (2000). The men and the boys. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-Oedipus (R. Hurley, M. Seem, & H. R. Lane, Trans., Vol. 1). Minneapolis and New York: University of Minnesota Press.

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Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans., Vol. 2). London and New York: Continuum. Diamond, J. (2018). Trump says it’s ‘a very scary time for young men in America’. CNN. Retrieved from https://edition.cnn.com/2018/10/02/politics/trump-scary-time-for-young-men-metoo/index.html. Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic Books. Hickey-Moody, A. (2009). Becoming–dinosaur: Collective process and movement. Aesthetics. In L. Cull (Ed.), Deleuze and performance (pp. 161–180). Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press. Hickey-Moody, A. (2013). Youth, arts and education: Reassembling subjectivity through affect. (p. 176). Volume 85 of Routledge Advances in Sociology. London: Routledge. Hickey-Moody, A. (2015a). Being different in public. Continuum, Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 30(5), 531–541. Hickey-Moody, A. (2015b). Carbon fibre masculinity. Angelaki, Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 20(1), 139–153. Hickey-Moody, A. (2016). Why fashion needs more big guys embracing their curves. The Conversation. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/ why-fashion-needs-more-big-guys-embracing-their-curves-56738. Hickey-Moody, A., & Laurie, T. (2015). Geophilosophies of masculinity: Remapping gender, aesthetics and knowledge. Angelkai, Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 20(1), 1–10. Kenway, J., Kraack, A., & Hickey-Moody, A. (2006). Masculinity beyond the metropolis. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Muecke, S. (2018). Goolarabooloo futures: Mining and Aborigines in NorthWest Australia. In J. K. Watson & G. Wilder (Eds.), The postcolonial contemporary (pp. 208–223). New York, NY: Fordham Press. O’Donnell, K. (2009). Affect and the history of women, gender and masculinity. In M. G. Valiulis (Ed.), Gender and power in Irish history. Ireland: Irish Academic Press. Peck, E. (2017). Trump is quietly making it even harder to report sexual harassment and discrimination. The Huffington Post. Retrieved from https:// www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/trump-sexual-harassment-discrimination_us_5a15b385e4b03dec8249b7e5?ec_carp=7937960515406366238. Savage, G. C., & Hickey-Moody, A. (2010). Global flows as gendered cultural pedagogies: Learning gangsta in the ‘Durty South’. Critical Studies in Education, 51(3), 277–293. http://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2010.508808.

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Thanem, T., & Wallenberg, L. (2010). Buggering Freud and Deleuze: Toward a queer theory of masochism. Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 2(1). https:// doi.org/10.3402/jac.v2i0.4642. Victor, D. (2017). How the Harvey Weinstein story has unfolded. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/business/harvey-weinstein.html. Westneat, D. (2017). Why is Trump off the hook in MeToo movement? Because we let him off. The Seattle Times. Retrieved from https://www. seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/why-is-trump-off-the-hook-inmetoo-movement-because-we-let-him-off/.

2 Performativity, Assemblage, Affect

Deleuze’s thought offers new methods for thinking about traditional themes in masculinity studies and it introduces concepts that bring a fresh approach to how I see masculinity and undertake masculinity studies as a discipline. Conceived as a sub-field of gender studies, the field of masculinity studies has been shaped by Judith Butler’s early and foundational work on gender performativity. The focus of this chapter is weighted towards how Deleuze’s work can change how we see masculinity rather than explicating Butler’s theory of gender performativity, but I explain the concept of performativity below for those who are new to the field. Simply put, gender performativity is the way people unconsciously learn and ‘cite’, or act out, gendered ways of being. Deleuze offers us a different way of understanding how the ­performativity of gender works, through the concepts of assemblage and affect. In order to understand the relationships between performativity, assemblage and affect, and to canvas the impact these ideas have had in masculinity studies, I offer an overview of these concepts to explain some ways assemblage and affect can be considered in relation to Butler’s idea of performativity. I am suggesting that through working with Deleuze we can advance similar arguments about gender, those that © The Author(s) 2019 A. Hickey-Moody, Deleuze and Masculinity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01749-1_2

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became possible through working with Butler, despite the notable differences in the scholarly frameworks they mobilise. These differences in the broader structure surrounding their scholarship are not my focus, indeed I have written on this elsewhere (Hickey-Moody & Rasmussen, 2009). Notably, Butler is indebted to Hegel and Deleuze is critical of Hegel’s negative dialectic. Drawing on Deleuze’s own interest in, and commitment to, a practical or pragmatic approach to theory, I look at what the idea of performativity ‘does’ and what the ideas of affect and assemblage ‘do’, rather than trace the theoretical underpinnings of these ideas. As I go on to show, affect and assemblage bring out the ‘liveness’ of gender performance and heighten the role played by social and material contexts in our understandings of how gender performances articulate.

Performativity Scholarship on masculinities has been profoundly shaped by Butler’s work on the iterative, performative nature of gender identity. In 1988 Butler published an essay titled ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’ in the Theatre Journal. This contains her initial discussion of the idea that gender is a socially constructed performance in which the individual agent acts, but does not have complete agency. This concept of gender performativity forms the centrepiece for her early foundational text Gender Trouble (1990). In this book, Butler critiques the then-popular conception that sex (i.e. male and female genital body markings) ‘causes’ or produces gender (masculinity, femininity). To put this another way, Butler disputes the fact that gender is an expression or performance of sex. Furthermore, in Gender Trouble Butler interrupts the idea that sex markings (genitals) cause sexual desire towards the opposite sex. This flow of heterosexual desire is popularly framed as a kind of continuum between sex, gender and sexuality, and this is the start of what Butler calls the ‘heterosexual matrix’, an assumed heterosexual identification which she works to disrupt. It is Butler’s contention that both gender and sexual desire are flexible and are not necessarily ‘caused’ by biological factors such as

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chromosomes or genitals. Specifically, she contends: “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; … identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (Butler, 1990, p. 25). In other words, masculinity is a performance; or an accumulation of performances. Masculinity is what a body does at particular times, rather than a universal and unchangeable condition of ‘who you are’. I read this as being very compatible with Deleuze’s position that empirical thought should be developed through, and as a result of experience. Both positions are critical of the idea that lived experience results from an existing truth. Butler asks us: “Does being female (or male for that matter) constitute a ‘natural fact’ or a cultural performance, or is ‘naturalness’ constituted through discursively constrained performative acts that produce the body through and within the categories of sex?” (Butler, 1990, p. viii). We all perform gender, and so it is not a question of whether or not we should do a gender performance, but a question of what form our gender performance will take. By choosing to think critically about how they perform masculinity, men can work to change gender norms and modify binary understandings of masculinity and femininity. If one considers that to some extent gender is acquired, that gender is learnt and developed in relation to ideas that are never completely inhabited by anyone, then masculinity is an ideal which everyone always (and only ever) ‘imitates’. Masculinity is a powerful social fiction around which bodies and subjectivities are organized. Butler famously uses the example that drag performance imitates the ultimate structure of gender, revealing to us all the fact that “gender itself as an imitation” (Butler, 1995, p. 32). She explains that: If a performative provisionally succeeds (and I will suggest that ‘success’ is always and only provisional), then it is not because an intention successfully governs the action of speech, but only because that action echoes prior actions, and accumulates the force of authority through the repetition or citation of a prior, authoritative set of practices. (Butler, 1993, pp. 226–227)

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This repetition of ‘authoritative’ (as opposed to marginal) practices is very important. Indeed, some kinds of gender performances are not recognizable because they do not cite existing tropes. Think about the authoritative practices of masculinity that frame contemporary life: as I write, the international political landscape is populated by figures of masculinity such as Donald Trump, Scott Morrison, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farrage. The spectrum of global political performativity is clearly heterosexual, conservative, middle class, materially white, and male, with the notable exception of Angela Merkel. The four men cited above most likely believe that their (hetero)sexuality is indeed a ‘natural’ performance of their gender. In trying to separate the assumed ‘naturalisation’ of the sex/gender continuum, Butler advances a series of critiques which will be familiar to many of you; for those who are new to this field, I consider these critiques below before moving to show how similar concerns can be attended to through notions of affect and assemblage. Furthermore, the concepts of affect and assemblage can be read as bringing new dimensions to gender performativity, in the respect that they acknowledge the embodied and contextual nature of gender performances. Butler is firmly arguing against: “The presumption of a binary gender system [that] implicitly retains the belief in a mimetic relation of gender to sex whereby gender mirrors sex or is otherwise restricted by it” (Butler, 1990, p. 6). Butler’s first criticism of the sex/gender continuum then, is that it sets up a very specific set of binaries: male/female, natural/cultural. The naturalisation of the sex/gender continuum means that we think about bodies and people in a specific way. For example, society still has a considerable amount of difficulty in categorising bodies who aren’t male or female and, at times, even has difficulty respecting people who we think don’t inhabit a sex/gender category clearly. Butler’s second criticism of the sex/gender system is that just focusing on a split between sex and gender fails to grasp the complexity of actual gender performances. Performativity does not mean consciously acting out gender roles or ‘pretending’. An easy misreading of this possibility has often been made, because Butler argued that drag could be examined as an example of performativity. Drag queens are indeed men pretending to be women; which shows that femininity, as a performance of

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womanhood, is a learnt performance, or an act. Drag, Butler suggests, is one way we can draw attention to the contested political terrain of gender and to the important recognition that gender and sexuality, produced through our acts and statements, are implicated in relations of power. When it is a man performing drag as a woman, the ‘imitation’ that drag is said to be is taken as an ‘imitation’ of femininity, yet the ‘femininity’ that is imitated is not understood as being an imitation at all. Yet, if one considers that gender is acquired, that it is learnt and taken on in relation to ideals that are never quite inhabited by anyone, then femininity has to also be seen as an ideal which everyone always and only ‘imitates’. Taking this de-stabilization of the ‘naturalness’ of masculinity as the theoretical ground on which contemporary masculinity studies has been built, I want to problematize some of the popular ‘scripts’ that have become interwoven with masculinity, such as crisis and hegemony. Scholarship on and popular discourses of masculinity both regularly ­suggest that men are in ‘crisis’: for example, globalisation is causing crisis for farming men because free trade agreements mean they can’t compete with cheap international imports, boys are in crisis because they don’t have enough engaged male role models, working men are in crisis because women are taking their jobs. For example, Borland and Coelli (2015) examined changes in occupational structure between 1966 and 2011. They found that between the 1980s and 1990s, the number of middle skilled jobs declined and the number of low skilled jobs rose, which led to “job polarisation”. Employment clustered at the top and bottom of the spectrum. From the 1970s to the 2000s both the middle and lower skilled jobs declined. Between 1966 and 2011 jobs that have a high routine task component declined. Compared to other Western countries the level of job polarisation in Australia is the same as in Europe and North America. Borland and Coelli (2015) show that job occupation changes led to increased earning inequality, especially between mid 1980s and 2000s and suggested that increased use of computers has raised the productivity of high skilled workers and lowered the relative demand for low skilled workers (2015, p. 3). Job polarization is predominantly affecting men in the workplace, partly because the original male workforce base is being replaced by computerisation, but also

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because many middle-income white males have seen their jobs go and not return. Such narratives are not new: as scholarship on masculinities shows us, masculinity has been ‘in crisis’ since the 1800s and, as such, hegemonic masculinity can be seen as somewhat synonymous with crisis. Masculinity today continues to diversify. There are lots more ways to be a man—to do masculinity as Butler might say—than there were say, 40, or even 20 years ago. This is arguably a result of greater opportunities for men as well as women. For example, men can publicly get ‘in touch’ with their ‘feminine’ side, have and voice feelings, and many men are taking advantage of these opportunities. At the same time, we can also say that masculinity is still linked to themes of power and privilege— both in the public sphere (government and business) and privately (for example, men are still often thought of as romantic pursuers even though many are still poor communicators). The fact that there are such conflicting narratives about men starts to make some sense of the fact that we often think about masculinity as being ‘in crisis’. There are two main tenets to the oft-reported idea that masculinity is in crisis. On the one hand, there is the breakdown of traditional family structures. The notion of fatherlessness, for example, is a relatively rare social phenomenon. The ‘precursor’ to contemporary ‘fatherless boys’ is the much rarer ‘bastard son’. A notable difference between the two is that single mothers now typically raise their sons whereas most bastard children needed to be paid for by a father figure of some kind, whether adopted through marriage or working for a master. The collapse of traditional working-class industries as employers of manual male labour, further exacerbated contemporary crisis discourses. These seemingly disparate concerns (fathers and employment) are in fact inextricably intertwined. As evidence for a crisis in masculinity, people often point to the decline in work opportunities for young men. In such instances, people are usually talking about the decline in blue-collar manual labour. Automatisation and the globalisation of labour markets have led to a large reduction in the number of manufacturing and mining jobs in the developed world. Further, the rise in new technology means manual labour jobs aren’t as relevant as they once were, or at least not in a strictly economic/industrial sense, and nostalgia for them isn’t going

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to bring them back. If blue-collar jobs in manufacturing and other kinds of heavy industry are never going to return, then why do men continue to mourn them? Men mourn blue-collar jobs because they represent nostalgic and seemingly uncomplicated forms of masculinity for which contemporary society does not necessarily have roles. Bluecollar masculinity symbolically represents a time before the modern ‘crisis’ in masculinity that was caused by the industrial revolution and subsequent technological developments. A range of scholarly disciplines have explored the idea that men are in crisis in different ways. One line of argument running through this scholarship is that the industrial revolution and modernity have caused the crisis in masculinity, and this position is explored in the work of theorists such as Josh Cohen (1996), Catherine Davies (1997), Georg Simel (1984), Rita Felski (1995), Anne Witz (2001), and Barbara Marshall and Anne Witz (2003). However, ideas of masculinity being in crisis pre-date the industrial revolution. Roger Horrocks offers us a powerful example of scholarship on ‘crisis masculinity’. He suggests that the crisis in masculinity is actually a way men come to know their ‘true selves’. Horrocks argues that: “Men and manhood have been lifted out of a deep unconscious by feminism” (1994, p. 12), and that now “men come together in a new way, not as macho upholders of male ­supremacy, but in an attempt to get beneath the stereotypes to a more vulnerable and more primitive male identity” (1994, p. 16). The notion of a ‘true’ masculinity that can somehow be reclaimed or reconstructed through therapy runs throughout Horrocks’ work. What is interesting is that in order to have a ‘crisis’ in masculinity, one must also have an ideal of masculinity from which one has strayed. As such, perspectives like Horrocks’ recreate grounds for crisis. Kimmel offers a more historically aware perspective on the concept of masculinity in crisis, and his perspective is valuable because through his historical research, he demonstrates that crisis discourses pre-date the industrial revolution. In some way, masculinity has always been in crisis. Despite this fact, masculinity studies still relies on essentialist ideas of the gendered subject, even in light of the influence of Butler’s anti-essentialist position. For example, the idea that masculinity can actually be ‘in crisis’, that it has an ideal or most desirable form and that it falls

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into crisis when the ideal form is not achieved, is a clear perpetuation of an essentialist ideal. Butler’s work on performativity is a key resource in responding to the crisis masculinity discourses because the idea of gender performativity profoundly critiques the assumption embedded in a ‘crisis of masculinity’ that masculinity is firm, and that therefore, there is an ideal masculine form that can be achieved. This assumption that gender is stable and the associated possibility that gender might be in crisis, is shown by Butler’s work as being complex social and psychological fictions. However, these fictions are more than just complex. They are assembled from physical, emotional, and psychological parts that connect, or are put together to make what might be seen as a performance of gender. While Butler does not use the language of assemblage, she does show us that performances of gender are iterative, they accumulate and are co-constructed through the coming together of social, material and psychological factors. This “coming together”, or as Deleuze would say, this “assemblage” is itself performativity. In the next section of the chapter I move on to examine some of Deleuze’s work on the assemblage and argue that this concept can be seen to work in ways that have similarities to Butler’s concept of performativity.

Assemblage For Deleuze, and Deleuze and Guattari, our world is made up of assemblages. This is a physical as well as conceptual argument, and I explain material and conceptual assemblages in what is to follow. In their collaborative work together, Deleuze and Guattari move from discussing ‘machines’ to ‘assemblages’ in expressing the connectedness of the material world. In Deleuze and Guattari’s early work (Anti-Oedipus, 1984) they talk about machines: “machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-sourcemachine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth machine coupled to it” (1984, p. 8). This concept of the connectedness of matter to meaning,

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this kind of functional ontology, is brought into focus through their work with the idea of the machine to start with and then the concept of the assemblage in their later work (A Thousand Plateaus 1987, What Is Philosophy 1998). Deleuze and Guattari discuss the differences between machine and assemblage as they conceive them through stating: That is in fact the distinction we would like to propose between machine and assemblage: a machine is like a set of cutting edges that insert themselves into the assemblage undergoing deterritorialization, and draw variations and mutations of it. For there are no mechanical effects; effects are always machinic, in other words, depend on a machine that is plugged into an assemblage. (1987, p. 333)

Both assemblage and machine are concepts that focus on context and the connections that context creates. The concept of the assemblage expresses something larger than the machine, as assemblages are composed of lots of smaller machines. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari explain that assemblages are both conceptual and material; they are composed of connections in thought and in the material world. To use their words, there are “machinic assemblages” (physical things) and “assemblages of enunciation” (ideas). The two, of course, always intersect, and overlap in complicated ways, as material cultures change thought, and vice versa. It is in the nature of this intersection that we can see the relationship with Butler’s concept of performativity. Agency is complicated in performativity: we can’t simply decide to change our bodies, or feel our bodies into a new way of being socially received. Such decisions are, and must, be accompanied by series of acts that, as performative occurrences themselves, help create material and social change. Material and conceptual changes entail different kinds of work but are both required to reshape gender. So, for example, a person cannot decide to invent a new gender and simultaneously have that gender recognized, because other people don’t know this other gender exists: there are no discursive frameworks, or conceptual assemblages, which recognize the materiality of their gender performance. This interaction between what Butler

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would call the performativity of matter and the performativity of discourse is characterized by Deleuze and Guattari as the intersection of material and conceptual assemblages. Material assemblages, or the connections that make up the world of ‘physical things’ are discussed by Deleuze and Guattari as machinic assemblages. They state: We may draw some general conclusions on the nature of Assemblages … On a first, horizontal axis, an assemblage comprises two segments, one of content, the other of expression. On the one hand it is a machinic assemblage of bodies, of actions and passions, an intermingling of bodies reacting to one another; on the other hand, it is a collective assemblage of enunciation, [a related set] of acts and statements, of incorporeal transformations attributed to bodies. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 88; italics in original)

So the machinic or material assemblage of bodies, of actions and passions and “intermingling of bodies reacting to one another” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 88), is an expression of the material world. A machinic assemblage has a physical form. However, we come to understand the material world and the physical form of the machinic assemblage through collective assemblages of enunciation, or through thought that expresses the material form. What we believe is possible, what we think we see, shapes the affective capacities of the material world. Deleuze and Guattari describe assemblages of enunciation through saying: Collective assemblages of enunciation function directly within machinic assemblages; it is not impossible to make a radical break between regimes of signs and their objects. Even when linguistics claims to confine itself to what is explicit and make no presuppositions about language, it is still in the sphere of a discourse implying particular modes of assemblage and types of social power. (1987, p. 7)

Discursive formations have a co-constitutive relationship to the material world. This point is made astutely by Butler in Gender Trouble, where she states: “If there is something right in Beauvoir’s claim that one is not

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born, but rather becomes a woman, it follows that woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or end. As an ongoing discursive practice, it is open to intervention and resignification. Even when gender seems to congeal into the most reified forms, the ‘congealing’ is itself an insistent and insidious practice, sustained and regulated by various social means” (Butler, 1990, p. 33). Both Butler, and Deleuze and Guattari, then, remind us that thought and matter exist in relation to each other. They are co-constitutive. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari, examine the intersection of the conceptual and the material, explaining that: There are no individual statements, only statement-producing machinic assemblages. We say that the assemblage is fundamentally libidinal and unconscious. It is the unconscious in person. For the moment, we will note that assemblages have elements (or multiplicities) of several kinds: human, social, and technical machines, organized molar machines; molecular machines with their particles of becoming-inhuman … We can no longer speak of distinct machines, only of types of interpenetrating multiplicities that at any given moment form a single machinic assemblage, the faceless figure of the libido. (1987, p. 36)

This quote shows us one perspective (and Deleuze and Guattari themselves change their perspectives at different times throughout their books) on the relationships between social/human and material machines. These machines are required in order to produce assemblages of enunciation, or conceptual assemblages. An example can be found in what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call the ‘order-word’. They explain: as long as linguistics extracts constants, it is incapable of helping us understand how a single word can be a complete enunciation; there must be an ‘extra something’ that ‘remains outside of the scope of the entire set of linguistic categories and definitions’, even though it is still entirely within the purview of the theory of enunciation or language. The orderword, its immediacy, gives it a power of variation in relation to the bodies to which the transformation is attributed. (p. 82)

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Order-words (explicit statements or commands) change the way we think about matter—they are performative. An order-word can make a couple married, can pronounce a person dead, announce a gallery to be open, and so on. In the same way that performative speech acts transform how we see the world, by naming genders and pronouncing legal states of affairs, order-words make an ontological judgement about matter: they perform a concept. This is but one example of the connectedness between ideas and things that is carried in language. Assemblages of masculinity can thus be seen as not specific to ‘individual’ bodies, but rather as extended across, and connecting, ­ human bodies, matter, ideas, contexts. This argument has been made a number of times in the field of masculinity studies and can perhaps be seen as one of the most significant ways in which Deleuze and Guattari’s work has been taken up in this scholarly field. For example, in his essay “Distribution, Assemblage, Capacity: New Keywords for Masculinity?”, Joseph Campana (2015) employs the concept of assemblage as a way of understanding how masculinity operates. Campana uses the assemblage to show his readers that masculinity is distributed, arguing that masculinity is shared across bodies. Like Deleuze and Guattari (1987), Campana argues that the individual self, or individual body, cannot be seen as a standard, or even useful, unit of measure of masculinity. Campana points to research on ancient Rome which argues that the performance of masculinity was distributed across multiple bodies of a household. Laurie Nussdorfer frames the Roman homeowner as “symptom” of household’s masculinity, the homeowner is a composite of a larger set of masculinities (Nussdorfer, 1992, quoted in Campana, 2015, p. 692). Work on the “policing” of young men’s sexuality in early modern France (Hardwick, 2015) shows that the government of gender and sexuality is wide in scope and extends beyond the monitoring or care of individual selves and flesh: “The administrative structures that produce and manage masculinity might be more revelatory at this moment in the critical history of masculinity than … individual masculine styles, identities and bodies” (Campana, 2015, p. 693). Flesh that is seen as gendered and acts that are seen as sex are recognized as such through assemblages of enunciation: governmental processes that produce ‘facts’ and statements about matter.

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The distributed nature of masculinity helps us understand ways that masculinities range from small and intimate ‘molecular’ instances to larger discourses that are interwoven into the fabric of national and transnational structures. Campana draws on research on the Spanish empire (Behrend-Martinez, 2007) to argue that masculinity can be highly transactional, and that often certain ‘performances’ (such as the capacity to have penetrative sex) are transactions required to prove or sustain masculine status. Here, masculinity is an assemblage of national and transnational structures and individual acts: “The mechanic is part of the machine, not only as a mechanic but also when he ceases to be one. The stoker is part of the ‘room of machines,’ even, and especially, when he pursues Lina who has come from the kitchen. The machine is not social unless it breaks into all its connective elements, which in turn become machines” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 81). Social, geographical, and emotional geographies and material bodies are ­co-constituted and exist relationally. Campana (2015) suggests that distribution, assemblage and capacity are new keywords for masculinity and reads Brendan Kane’s (2015) writing on representations of English masculinity in Ireland and North America in order to clarify something paradoxical in the way masculinity is distributed: The salubrious attention to gender and nation that has characterised the study of masculinity might be in danger of becoming too terrestrial, too landlocked, which is to say too fixed to the borders of the nation-state. … masculinity might be less cartographic than atmospheric, which is to say masculinity is constituted by complex systems of interrelation hovering over and impacting seemingly grounded identities. (Campana, 2015, p. 693)

Campana persuasively argues that masculinity is an atmosphere, or an assemblage, which is composed of a wide array of actors, objects and networks. Masculinity is constituted through connections between objects and actors, none of which are the sole repository of masculinity. Not simply social construction, masculinity is materially and conceptually produced through an assemblage of performative events. This concept of the assemblage of masculinity, then, offers us “a more refined

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understanding of social construction as the creation of forms of connectivity ” (Campana, 2015, p. 694; italics in original). Campana concludes that: “Masculinity inheres in the connections between disparate and sometimes seemingly arbitrary actors and objects. Imagine, then, masculinity not as essence or identity, social construction or performative iteration, but as connectivity” (2015, p. 694). Through Campana, masculinity can be read as connections between things that are then identified as masculine. When we bring the concept of the assemblage to bear on masculinity we can see that gender is rarely conceived as exclusively a human quality, it is indeed performative, contextual and not static. Campana further (and perhaps more usefully) contends that masculinity studies as a field might profit from considering how the study of a “wide array of creatures encourages a dialogue about capacities, capabilities and potencies that would draw together scholarship on masculinity with scholarship on ability and disability as well as scholarship on animals and other non-humans” (2015, p. 694; italics in original). Campana’s contribution to thinking about masculinity through assemblages enacts some of the utility in thinking through the concept of the assemblage: masculinity is distributed, it is more than human, it is performative. Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas of assemblages of expression and enunciation bring a richness to the distributed and intersectional articulations of masculinity that Campana maps. Changing the ways that ideas and ideals of masculinity are configured, thinking through assemblages of enunciation means we can recognise performative connections that express masculinity in more specific and located ways, we can think masculinity differently and value it in new ways. Another example of the utility of assemblage for thinking critically about masculinity is Renold and Ringrose’s (2017) use of Deleuze’s theories of assemblage to understand image tagging on Facebook as what they call ‘phallic touch’. They explain the significance that Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theory has for them methodologically through stating that: Deleuzo-Guattarian assemblage theory has been vital. Assemblage theory decentres the subject, to show how it might be made up of and

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criss-crossed by multiple external forces, or the non-human, inorganic and technical kind. It thus enables us to map the dynamic processes of an extended subject. (2017, p. 2–4)

This is just the beginning of a longer examination of the utility of the concept of the assemblage which they adopt as a method for understanding sexist practices of sexual objectification that they call ‘phallic tagging’. Renold and Ringrose (2017) suggest that we are now seeing new formations of sexual objectification in which the more than human is foregrounded (p. 2) and they: explore the affective potentialities and blockages inside and across our phallic assemblages so as to avoid the Oedipal plot of phallocentric theory (Irigaray and Deleuze and Guattari in Lorraine, 2008) which has everything tied up in ways that straight jacket our intellectual endeavours to map the messy and complex realities of living mediated lives and extended relational selves. (Renold & Ringrose, 2017, p. 4)

Drawing on data from qualitative studies across urban London and rural Wales, Renold and Ringrose map how “Facebook ‘tagging’ can operate as ‘phallic touch’ in ways that shore up and transgress normative territories of dis/embodied gender, sexuality and age” (Renold & Ringrose, 2017, p. 2). They call for more creative approaches to be used in considering girl’s (and women’s) sexual and material intra-actions in online platforms and hope to provide a more dynamic account of what they call “phallic assemblages”, and how this might work in unknown and predictable ways. Through interviews and focus group discussions, Renold and Ringrose uncover how girls encounter cyber bullying and ‘exposure’ when, for instance, a sexual or ‘dirty’ photo they sent to a past boyfriend is posted online and they are tagged in it on Facebook. They talk further about encounters they have with boys that tag themselves in other girls’ photos and make it their profile picture so that they can ‘claim’ the girls photo for their own. Renold and Ringrose characterise these practices as ‘non-consensual phallic touch’ and a ‘non consensual phallic digital union’. They use Deleuze’s assemblage theory to understand the invasive force of contemporary digital corporeal culture in young

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people’s everyday lives. Renold and Ringrose map the territorializing phallic tagging assemblages that teen boys and girls are caught up in and captured by as “digital tagging as phallic touch” and “compulsory coupledom”. The final assemblage “jaks breasts” explores the distribution of disembodied body parts through their tagged participation in Facebook comments. By using Deleuze and Guattari’s (1984) assertion that “desiring-machines are everywhere” Ringrose and Renold use this assemblage theory “to form sexuality assemblages (Fox & Alldred, 2013) to glimpse and map the affective ‘ontological intensities’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) of those often imperceptible micro-moments of (territorializing) forces and (de-territorialising) becomings” (Renold & Ringrose, 2017, p. 5). They argue that the processual and more than human nature of boys’ digital sexual exchange demonstrates the materiality of these practices which they theorise as digital non-consensual phallic touch (2017, p. 9). They: “conceptualise how tagging operates as a vector of posthuman digital touch ” (Renold & Ringrose, 2017, p. 8). For Renold and Ringrose, then, assemblage theory offers them a way of: Mapping the multiplicities of what else the phallus can do … [they argue that] … Deleuzo-Guattarian assemblage theory … keeps the potentialities of affective force relations in flow – potentialities that are often imperceptible through humanist phenomenological cartographies so prevalent in the social sciences. (Renold & Ringrose, 2017, p. 23)

Both online and offline, by conceiving subjectivity as an assemblage, or mixture of folds, that aggregate spaces, times and materialities, we can begin to understand the material connectedness of men (and boys) to the contexts in which they work and the places they inhabit. Such an intensive relationship to context, either in the form of men’s connectedness with, or other responses to environment, is a theme that runs through the field of masculinity studies and I explore some aspects of this connectedness in the chapter on carbon futures. Saliently, and as Renold and Ringrose suggest above, machinic assemblages of masculinity (or material configurations of gender) generate particular affects and exist within specific affective economies which come to be seen as

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part of the performative assemblage of masculinity. As such, the concept of affect also offers a critical tool for reading gender and understanding performative economies of masculinity. It is to this concept I now turn.

Affect The past ten years have seen a burgeoning of work on affect and increasing entanglements of this work with applied scholarly ideas and practices (see Clough & Halley, 2007; Danvers, 2016; Ringrose & Renold, 2014; Todd, Jones, & O’Donnell, 2016). At the start of the millennium, Braidotti famously asserted that the “enfleshed Deleuzian subject … is a folding-in of external influences and, simultaneously, a unfolding outwards of affects ” (Braidotti, 2000, p. 159; emphasis added). Human beings are a mobile, enfleshed memory that repeats (or sometimes contravenes) the economies of value in which their body is immersed. The Deleuzian body is, ultimately, a folded up, embodied series of memories. As noted elsewhere (Hickey-Moody, 2009, 2010, 2013) these affective scholarly entanglements draw on different intellectual traditions, notably the respective masculinist lineages of Silvan Tompkins, Gilles Deleuze, Baruch Spinoza and the newer, interdisciplinary field of ‘affect studies’. Scholarly entanglements of affect do not always intersect with work on assemblages, but I want to show the relationship between affect and assemblage is configured by thinking through how the affect is produced by the assemblage. I argue that assemblages generate specific forms of affect in the form of gender. In short, the two concepts operate together. As such, this chapter now turns to explore connections between Deleuze and Guattari’s work on affect and contemporary discussions of masculinity, and brings together work on emotionality, feeling, materiality and what Bennett (2004) calls “the force of things”, in masculinity studies. In so doing, I establish the theoretical foundations for later chapters in which material economies come to play an increasingly important role. Contemporary work on masculinity and affect maps minoritarian genealogies of affective thought, in which men’s bodies, emotion, care and creativity are foregrounded as sites and spaces of political

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importance. Drawing on Niccolini (2016) I enmesh minor genealogies of masculinity and affect with the contention that the politics of masculinity is also a politics of the materiality of socioeconomic bodies, ability and disability, geographical spaces and environmental futures. Masculinity studies theorists need theoretical frameworks that are responsive to these material and emotional conditions of contemporary life, and they must approach these considerations as a political project. Affect is used in academic work with two slightly different meanings. Affect can be pre-cognitive, so it can be a change that occurs before consciousness, and, secondly, affect is also a word used to describe emotional responses (this is a cognitive reading of affect). For Deleuze and Guattari, affect is precognitive. An affect in an increase or a decrease in the capacity to act of a given body or assemblage. Deleuze, and Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of affect is derived quite directly from Spinoza, who states: affects … have therefore certain causes through which they are to be understood and certain properties which are just as worthy of being known as the properties of any other thing in the contemplation of which we delight. I shall, therefore, pursue the same method in considering the nature and strength of the affects and the power of the mind over them which I pursued in our previous discussion of God and the mind, and I shall consider human actions and appetites just as if I were considering lines, planes and bodies. (Spinoza, 1677/2001, p. 98)

Through affects, human actions and appetites are increased and/or decreased. As bodies are affected they become greater or lesser and more or less competent in certain ways. Spinoza (1677/2001, p. 63) suggests: All ways in which any body is affected follow at the same time from the nature of the affected body, and from the nature of the affecting body … therefore the idea of these affections necessarily involves the nature of each body, and therefore the idea of each way in which the human body is affected by an external body involves the nature of the human body and of the external body.

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Affects are the products of connectedness. They are made through bodies and contexts rubbing up against each other, acting on each other, thinking and being together. Spinoza, and Deleuze and Guattari after him, believed that bodies are constituted in part through their relations with others (Gatens & Lloyd, 1999, p. 77). In arguing that “the idea of each way in which the human body is affected by an external body involves the nature of the human body”, Spinoza (1677/2001) reminds his readers that constructing bodies and actions in thought is an ethical enterprise (p. 63). What a body might become, how a body is received, already “involves the nature of the human body”. In other words, our understanding of the constitution of the body impacts on how we relate to, and ‘deal with’, the body and it also shapes the possibilities that are afforded to the body. As I have suggested, Deleuze employs the term affect like Spinoza, to refer to changing bodies, but he also uses the word to talk about art and the ways assemblages in/of art impact on embodied subjectivities. For the purposes of my discussion here, I am leaving Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari’s work on affect and art (notably the material on affect from Francis Bacon and What Is Philosophy) to the side and I focus on the ‘everyday’ or lived experience of affect as a change in capacity to act. Deleuze and Guattari discuss this change in capacity through the notion of affectus, the increase or decrease in subjective capacity made by an affect. In Spinoza, Practical Philosophy Deleuze (1988, p. 49) articulates affectus as: “An increase or decrease of the power of acting, for the body and the mind alike.” He then expands this definition through arguing affectus is different from emotion. While emotion is the psychological striation of affect, the way in which our experiences of change are captured by subjectivity, affectus is the virtuality and materiality of the increase or decrease effected in a body’s power of acting. More specifically: The affection refers to a state of the affected body and implies the presence of the affecting body, whereas the affectus refers to the passage from one state to another, taking into account the correlative variation of the affecting bodies. Hence there is a difference in nature between the image affections or ideas and the feeling affect. (Deleuze, 1988, p. 49)

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Affectus, then, is the materiality of change: it is ‘the passage from one state to another’ which occurs in relation to ‘affecting bodies’. The image affections, or ideas, to which Deleuze refers, are generated by a specific kind of movement. Increasing or decreasing one’s capacity to act is the modulation of affectus: the virtual and material change that prompts affection or the ‘feeling of affect’ in consciousness. In Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, Deleuze explains: [t]he affections (affectio ) are the modes [forms of life] themselves. … These affections are not necessarily active, since they are explained by the nature of God as adequate cause, and God cannot be acted upon … At a second level, the affections designate that which happens to the mode, the modifications of the mode [affectus], the effects of other modes on it. These affections are therefore images or corporeal traces first of all … and their ideas involve both the nature of the affected body and that of the affecting external body. … [then, quoting Spinoza’s Ethics ] ‘The affections of the human body whose ideas present external bodies as present in us we shall call images of things … And when the mind regards bodies in this way we shall say that it imagines. (Deleuze, 1988, p. 48)

This quote explains affection as a signifier of affectus; Deleuze is arguing that feelings mark embodied modulations. This is his Spinozist framework for thinking about the ways in which ideas and interactions create changes. For Spinoza, substance is the stuff of which life is made. It is expressed in modes, which are changed (affected or ‘modulated’) by affections (affectio ). Affectio are traces of interaction: residues of experience that live on in thought and in the body. They make affects. Aspects of human bodies; molecules, muscles, blood, bones, communicate with each other, exist in relation to each other, and in relating, form an assemblage, mixture or body. Moving beyond the body, contexts and relations between human bodies are equally as constitutive of corporeal capacity. Like Spinoza, then, Deleuze (2003, 1990) and Deleuze and Guattari (1987) explore ways of thinking of the body as a changeable assemblage that is highly responsive to context. For Deleuze and Guattari, each body’s embodied mind is a performance of difference, the mind

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is the ‘idea’ of the body; human consciousness is a product of corporeality. Our subjectivity is the embodied accumulation of our actions. It is impossible to compare the individuality of each body: every person has ‘the individuality of a day, a season, a year, a life (regardless of its duration) — a climate, a wind, a fog, a swarm, a pack’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 262). The relationship between Spinoza’s philosophy and Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the body is evident in their (1987, p. 262) often cited contention that every body is ‘… a longitude and latitude, a set of speeds and slownesses between formed particles, a set of nonsubjectified affects’. Here, as in the passage from Spinoza’s Ethics quoted by Deleuze earlier, we are reminded that the body is an extension of substance, a variation of the two universal attributes of thought and extension. Human bodies are consistently re-making themselves through their actions: relations, interests, the contexts in which they live. Emotions are a barometer of affectus and are one of the ways in which bodies speak. Emotions are confused ideas, they are a registration of affectus and they make co-ordinates for thought: our capacities to affect and be affected are set up by experience. For example, Spinoza (1677/2001, p. 63) suggests: All ways in which anybody is affected follow at the same time from the nature of the affected body, and from the nature of the affecting body … therefore the idea of these affections necessarily involves the nature of each body, and therefore the idea of each way in which the human body is affected by an external body involves the nature of the human body and of the external body.

This quote illustrates Spinoza’s belief that bodies are largely made through relations with others (Gatens & Lloyd, 1999, p. 77). Affect shapes the possibilities we afford the body, ourselves and others. Offering a frame for beginning the project of thinking masculinity through affect, in his 2016 article Conceptualizing an Ethology of Masculinities: Do We Know What Masculinities Can Do?, Terrance McDonald proposes a new theoretical conception of masculinities that altogether breaks with “ideals” of masculinity. Rather than restructuring masculinities, a project that necessarily appeals to a desire to

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produce a “better” masculinity, McDonald suggests a new conceptualisation that tries to move beyond rigid conceptions of masculinity. McDonald makes a persuasive case that we should embrace the “uncertainty of becoming” (McDonald, 2016, p. 2). He argues, and I agree, that Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of immanence (and the subsequent work of Braidotti, Grosz, Colebrook) along with Spinoza’s Ethics (and the work of Gatens and Lloyd, who I draw on above) can further an understanding of masculinities “as ex post facto culturally, socially, and historically constructed as a priori male” (McDonald, 2016, p. 2). Deleuze and Guattari state that “there is no ‘becoming-man’ because we construct men not through an immanent experiencing of becoming but through a transcendent ideal that is produced through a retroactive judgment of what constitutes a man ” (2016, p. 2; emphasis added). Definitions of what a man embodies are always written after the fact. McDonald seeks an alternative conceptualisation of masculinities that moves away from transcendent judgments of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ performances of gender, towards a Deleuzian/Spinozist ethics privileging bodily capacities for affecting and being affected. In this new conceptualisation, masculinities are a creative, non-human force with no allegiance to the male body other than its capacity to affect it or be affected by it. McDonald contends that transcendent ideals of masculinity continually defer and deny embodiment because they give an illusion of a transcendent, ‘outside’ meaning or ideal that can never be achieved: the hegemonic ideal that leads to ideas of crisis when it predictably cannot be achieved. He persuasively argues that it is better to embrace the uncertainty of becoming than attempt to restrict someone into rigid form. In discussing the Spinozian difference between morals and ethics for Deleuze; McDonald (2016) argues that we cannot rely on value systems that impose an a priori distinction, such as those that categorize masculine and feminine, because such moralistic rulings exclude the difference of each unique moment/event. Such contextual awareness is embedded within an ethical framework and this allows us to see masculinity as a set of capacities or affects: as a series of bodily capacities, as what a body can do, not as an innate or essential ‘thing’. Affect is also a critically important concept for understanding the shift from morality to ethics (Hickey-Moody & Mallins, 2008), and

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moving from a transcendent, or abstract criteria for judging bodies, to a performative and embodied method of assessing what bodies do. If particular bodies have affects that increase capacity, they are generative; and can be seen as creating positive affect. However, if affects limit or constrain a body’s ability to persist they are negative. We can consider certain sets of affects as gendered, for example, as masculine. The generation of particular kinds of capacities is also a performance of masculine affect. This generation of capacity, or the production of a set of masculine affects, is not necessarily attached or connected to body that is sex marked male. Affection arises from interactions with other human and non-human bodies, and also from ideas (discourses or belief systems) that inform these interactions. In Spinoza’s Ethics it is impossible to deem an idea or a body as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ because this distinction does not tell us what it can do. A body does not have truth; it has an effect: it increases or decreases other body’s capacities to act. It is in constant fluctuation as it enters into various relations with other bodies in diverse contexts. As such, context is crucial for ethics, and for assessing gendered affects, especially once we consider that bodies also include discourses and other non-material bodies. Philosophies of affect and immanence such as the work of Deleuze and Spinoza, alongside the writing of many masculinity theorists (Connell, 1987; Haywood & Mac an Ghaill, 2003; Kimmel, 1992; Mac an Ghaill, 1994), share the aim of decentralising man’s experience as universal. McDonald leads the way in reframing the theoretical foundations of sociological masculinity theory through adopting a philosophy of immanence that opens up new directions in masculinity studies. The new directions McDonald envisions should do away with the attachment to (hegemonic) masculinity as theory and practice committed to transcendent ideals. McDonald cautions against replacing one set of masculine ideals deemed negative with more “positive” behaviours, as this continues a commitment to transcendent ideals applied as a form of judgement, and is thus restrictive: “The point to be made is that as long as there are predetermined expectations grounded in transcendent ideals for what a body should be, then our creative force will be limited and constrained” (McDonald, 2016, p. 12; emphasis added). He continues, stating that:

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By simply replacing a set of expectations with another, we continuously frustrate the potentials of bodies and fail to qualitatively differentiate modes of existence. This leads us away from understanding the relations between particular bodies and the effect of particular contexts on those relations, which is necessary for creative and affective environments that are generative or life sustaining. Conversely, by only implementing transcendent ideals and morality, we allow toxic environments to persist and we are merely responding after the fact by dispelling violators for being bad. This does not take into account the context or the responsibility of a community to foster conditions that are generative. (McDonald, 2016, p. 11)

In fostering generative conditions, McDonald proposes a move towards an ethology of masculinities: “that seeks to map the relations between masculinities, the affective powers and affects of a masculine body, and other bodies” (McDonald, 2016, p. 11); and does not limit a consideration of masculine bodies to that of men. Masculinities, then, have no qualifying or requisite allegiance to men other than through historical, political, and sociocultural contexts. They are sets of affects, capacities and ways of doing. Masculinity is a capacity, a way of moving, of generating action. In his article Masculinity as Cruel Optimism Jonathan Allan uses Berlant, Sedgwick, and Kimmel to argue that masculinity is form of what Lauren Berlant calls cruel optimism, something that “exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle” (2018, p. 1). In the tradition of scholarship on masculinity in crisis, Allan (2018) positions masculinity as something seldom achievable. He uses Kimmel’s ‘angry white male’ to work through the governing options of masculinity studies. Allan understands masculinity as a gendered and affective space, and argues that while masculinity is so often posited within popular culture as being achievable, in reality, it is not. No amount of gym workouts, fast cars or six figure incomes will appease the ever growing imperative to be a bigger and better man. Allan argues that masculinity is located in a fear of failure and he critiques the prominence of homophobia and homohysteria as effeminophobia. Allan asks what the ‘real life’ implications are for considering masculinity as a cruel optimism by looking at a case from the field of men’s health studies. Kimmel’s use of shame is instructive here, in relation to homophobia and the affective space of

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masculinity as built around fear, specifically, fear of failing or not being “man enough”. He uses the semantics of fear and shame to link queer theory and masculinity studies, as both queer identity and masculinity are too often based on experiences of fear and shame. Moving shame and fear into the realm of ‘post-colonial subjectivity’ Allan returns to Sedgwick’s classic Between Men to understand what shame does in alienating the person being shamed. The problem of being “man enough”, however, is not necessarily a matter of being shamed, but rather, that masculinity is so often configured as shame. Masculinity: “resides in a cruel optimism that highlights not only the shame of masculinity, but also the dread that is felt in having been shamed, being shamed, and the possibility, if not promise, of being shamed once more again” (Allan, 2018, p. 187). Allan also uses Kimmels’ idea of masculinity as paranoia to highlight how “we are always fearful of being outed as not masculine enough” (Allan, 2018, p. 181). Later, Allan aligns masculinity to the idea of dread, in the respect that masculinity becomes the thing which men must disavow, and yet he argues that men will be entirely unsuccessful in this disavowal, therefore men must rather ‘attach and destroy’, a destruction that is not limited to masculinity, but to themselves and their bodies as a seemingly masculine subject. He goes on to study men’s health in relation to masculinity, and says “to study men’s health, like studying shame and masculinity, is to find oneself caught between the immediacy of the individual, and the abstract nature of the universal” (Allan, 2018, p. 185). If masculinity is indeed governed by a fear of losing masculinity, then this fear means that masculinity itself becomes the problem to which we must attend (2018, p. 186). Allan’s final point is to say that critical studies of men and masculinities have an obligation to “think deeply about the dynamics of affect, especially shame, dread and fear, that have been so central to the field and our conceptualisations of masculinity” (Allan, 2018, p. 187). Another argument for the utility of affect in masculinity studies can be found in Gordon Waitt and Elyse Stanes’ Sweating bodies: Men, Masculinities, Affect, Emotion. Waitt and Stanes’ focus on the gendered experience of sweat and particularly experiences of visceral disgust and shame. After Deleuze, Waitt and Stanes draw on Foucault, Deleuze,

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Braidotti and Probyn in asking “what bodies can do?” But they reframe the question to ask what [should we make] of the body-that-sweats? Or, to put this another way, how is sweat done? What are the gendered politics of how bodies sweat? Drawing on Braidotti’s (1996, 2000) account of the (posthuman) body, gendered subjectivities emerge within material (bodies, things, objects) and expressive (ideas, affect/emotion, desire) forces that fold or assemble bodies within particular contexts. Waitt and Stanes show us that: “It is therefore possible to think of assembling masculinity within a context of situated body sizes, shapes, phenotypes, gestures, practices, ideas and desires while also in combination with the sensual responses to the myriad of material objects, including sweat” (Waitt & Stanes, 2015, p. 31). Drawing on Elizabeth Grosz’s (1994) feminist classic Volatile Bodies, Waitt and Stanes examine the gendered threat/possibility of contamination brought by viscous bodily fluids and the contrasting masculinist desire to possess a solid body. In inquiring about the affective and emotional relationships of the sweaty body-becoming—the body affected, the male body in process, they draw inspiration from Probyn’s (2000) visceral approach. Probyn (2000) models her eating body, which is a body in process, a body always becoming, as a Deleuzian assemblage. Taking the eating body in process to become the sweating body, another kind of body always-already in process, Waitt and Stanes show how bodies are affected every time sweat is sensed. Sweat shows us that bodies have been affected, it is a thermometer of a becoming and it has the capacity to affect other bodies. Yet what is most interesting about their paper for those concerned with the utility of affect for masculinity studies is the creative space opened up by their reading of Probyn’s work on affect. Their sweaty affect neither draws explicitly on Deleuze or Tompkins, it’s a generalised mixture of the idea of affect with what is made possible by other theories of affect. So, for example, the authors move from considering sweat as an affect to almost theorising affects produced by sweat. A Deleuzian take on sweat and affect would be that sweat is the residue of an affect, it’s the by-product of a change in capacity to act (running faster, bonding with others, feeling scared). For Waitt and Stanes, however, sweat and affect together become all kinds of different things. They suggest that:

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the affect of sweat is conceived as an intensity that is neither fully objective nor quite subjective. Affects, as referred to here, are linked to emotions, and understood as series [sic] of non-conscious, physiologically-intense experiences. While affect has a basis in physiology; their [sic] registration is always mediated through context, socialisation and discourse. (2015, p. 32)

However, just shortly afterwards, this materialist-social definition of sweat as an affect becomes reshaped, and sweat and affect are no longer presented as articulating together. Here, they suggest: “The affects and emotions of encountering sweat in a particular context is [sic] conceived as one example of disjunctive becoming where bodies are assembled afresh” (2015, p. 32). This conceptual slipperiness seems to be part of the author’s enjoyment of the concept, as here affect moves between being material and being an assemblage of materiality, emotion and context. In exploring the male body in process Waitt and Stanes draw on empirical fieldwork with 17 participants living as men. These men each report their sweaty body as a source of pride in the sports culture to which they belong. Sweat signifies they successfully possess a “blokey masculinity” and they experience working up a sweat as “cleansing” within their vernacular philosophy of self-care: “Exercising with sweat becomes a visceral reminder of how the slim, fit, athletic body of the sports-person inhabits a privileged status within the nexus of sport and urban space” (Waitt & Stanes, 2015, p. 33). Of course not all sweating men are necessarily fit men. Sweat can also signify discomfort and unwanted or unintended exertion. However, the sweat of bodies within the context of team sports facilitates embodied connections and can thus be read as a signifier of successful masculinity. Men see, feel and smell each other’s sweat in team sports, and this sensuous signifier of exertion and bodily becoming through athletic performance is often used to confirm dominant gendered discourses of what it means to be a man in the relationships that constitute a collective ‘team’ within group sports. In sporting assemblages, the composition of bodies, affects and encounters with sweat are used to code embodied experiences as being either ‘good’ or ‘bad’; sweating is judged as a signifier

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of performance and sweat sustains gender identities along conventional lines of mateship. Lurking behind politics of mateship “is the recognition of the historically gendered, classed and ethnic regimes of bodily hygiene that brings a mantle of visceral disgust and shame that are capable of transforming gender identities” (Waitt & Stanes, 2015, p. 34). If, as I suggested above, masculinity is a set of affects, or the capacity to act in certain ways, then certain kinds of sweat, or sweat that is produced in certain contexts, can be read as the successful performance of a hegemonic or desirable masculinity. The significance of thinking through affect for masculinity studies extends well beyond the individual body and embodied performances of gender, to encompass city spaces and ideas of state, nationhood and global citizenship. As I suggested above, matter is affective and gendered, and as such, so is space, geography and place. This point is made most astutely by Cameron Duff (2017) in his paper examining “The Affective Right to the City.” Working from the concept of the “right to the city” proposed by Lefebvre and taken up by human and cultural geographers, Duff foregrounds the embodiment of a right to the city as an affective (rather than just social or juridical) question, through his ethnographic research into homelessness in Melbourne. Homeless populations in Melbourne are not exclusively male but are predominantly male. Extending Judith Butler’s (2015) work on a performative theory of assembly and the “right to appear,” Duff works to “reframe homelessness as an embodied struggle for place” (2017, p. 2). He states: “one should never ask what the right to the city is, or what it means; rather one should ask what it does. What particular set of affective and performative enactments does it enable?” (2017, p. 4). Duff skilfully explicates the relationship between performativity and affect, stating: Affect may be understood as the vital, lived transition that all performativities express. To the extent that all performative utterances and practices call into being that which they seek to name, affect may be regarded as the vital force of this performative expression. Affect traces the body’s social and material becomings as it is swept up in the performative power of language and practice.[…] Affect is the vital measure of the lived, corporeal transition all performative practices initiate. (2017, p. 5)

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Duff shows us that Butler herself hints at the affective dimensions of performativity through quoting her statement that explains: “Sometimes it is not a question of first having power and then being able to act; sometimes it is a question of acting, and in the acting, laying a claim to the power one requires” (Butler, 2015, p. 58, cited in Duff, 2017, p. 6). In the case of the homeless people Duff studies, objects and materials (mattresses, collected possessions) “became central to the affective and performative expression of a right to the city, facilitating the appearance of the homeless body, conveying the conditions of that body’s precarity, and confirming the inadequacies of its social, affective and material supports” (2017, p. 11). The assemblages that Duff characterises, perform homelessness and connect human bodies, objects, places, and policies to publics. Through affect, the political performances of everyday life are mediated across urban assemblages that are gendered, raced, and classed. For masculinity studies, Duff’s work can be taken as a means to illustrate the connectedness of affect and assemblage and the performative nature of affect. There are methodological implications here for further empirical research on masculinity. Perhaps masculinity studies needs to create space for some research agendas that are concerned with capacities to act, with sets of affects that are associated with bodies that are sex marked male? This is not to disavow the importance of identity-based work on men who are sex marked male and who perform masculinity, which is both politically and practically imperative. We need gender and sexuality research specific to lived experiences of men, but we also need space for work that eschews the framing of binary sex and gender and, ideally some blurring in between the two. An ethology of masculinity might be an empirical and theoretical investigation of cultural trends that are deemed masculinist, with particular attention paid to the kinds of assemblages that create masculine affects and a focus on the impact of these cultural formations on the lives of men. This has the capacity to show the embodied, psychic and financial impacts that affects of masculinity have on men. To put this another way, ideals of masculinity are often very difficult to live up to. Attempting to do so, some men labour for hours in low-paid, physically demanding ‘manly’ jobs. Others work

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financial frontiers of the stock market, join the largely male professions of engineering or IT, or rise to management in a feminised field such as nursing or teaching. Some struggle to pay huge car loans for vehicles that affirm their gender identity, or drink to forget the gap between their experience of themselves and popular ideals of masculinity. The cost of popular cultural value systems surrounding ideals and affects of masculinity is embodied by men on a day to day basis, but also by women (as subjects of domestic violence, rape, harassment, abuse) and, as I will show, by our environment. Deleuze’s work can help us to differentiate between bodies and affects that become attached to bodies and can show how affects interpolate bodies and produce feelings and actions. A fine-grained analysis of affective economies of masculinity will allow us to understand the impacts of images and ideals of masculinity on men and on their peers and contexts.

Conclusion The experience of being a man is shaped by ideas of what ‘men’ are supposed to be like. The contexts where bodies that are sex-marked ‘male’ can live are often saturated with ideals of masculinity and Deleuze’s work on affect and assemblage. They can help us to understand the impact of the ideas around masculinity on men’s lives. Media discourses and institutional expectations teach gender ideals every day, making assemblages of masculinity that interpolate bodies through systems of affect. These assemblages of affective masculinity create particular capacities to act. Deleuze’s ideas offer a nuanced means of understanding affective drives and mapping the influence of context. I began this chapter through outlining Butler’s famous critique of the sex/gender distinction and the ways she complicates agency through her concept of gender performativity as a practice of citationality. Gender performances are co-constituted by materiality, social expectation, possibility, and conceptual recognition. Masculine gender performances have been famously considered by Connell, as well as others, as hegemonic: an idealistic model for consideration which automatically leads to crisis. No-one can sustain an ideal indefinitely. With the performance of masculinity,

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and indeed with hegemony, comes crisis, as Kimmel so aptly shows us. Masculinity can also be associated with fear and shame, as Allan makes plain. Crisis articulates across administrative structures, employment industries and on the affective levels of gender and sexuality politics. As such, assemblages of masculinity in crisis became key to how we understand the contemporary man. Unpacking how this works in greater detail, the material and conceptual theories of assemblage as outlined in the work of Deleuze and Guattari and other contemporary social theorists, shows us how contexts, ideas and practices articulate relationally in creating experiences of masculinity. Joseph Campana uses the concept of assemblage to show us how masculinity is produced and distributed across social and administrative structures. Assemblages composed of objects, bodies, contexts, policies, fold together to make masculinity. Moving from affect and becoming to ethology, McDonald offers us a model for thinking about masculinity as only ever relational—as a product of connections between bodies (not necessarily between bodies that are only sex marked ‘male’). This relationality articulates in myriad ways; as Waitt and Stanes show us, one way in which masculinity articulates is through sweat. The assembled masculine body sweats as a performance of gender, and often, as so many masculinity theorists have shown us, as a performance of intimacy between men. Corporeal resistance is also a critical form of agency—a point that Duff extends from thinking about the body sweating to the body in the city. Corporeal bodies are affectively distributed across larger spatial and material assemblages. They can be extended in all kinds of ways in and across space. Collectively, these arguments, along with Allan’s insightful work on the affects of shame and fear as being attached to masculinity, alongside Renold and Ringrose’s exposition of the utility of the assemblage for understanding the distributed performance of masculinity, show us that we can no longer think about masculinity as individual and static. Through the concepts of performativity, assemblage and affect, masculinity has to be understood as relational, distributed, produced and context-specific. This is the inherently performative, or affective; distributed and contextually specific theory of masculinity I take forward in the chapters to come. I now turn my gaze to young masculinity and educational discourses, in an investigation of how gender performance is learnt.

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Works Cited Allan, J. A. (2018). Masculinity as cruel optimism. NORMA International Journal for Masculinity Studies, 13(3–4), 175–190. https://doi.org/10.1080 /18902138.2017.1312949. Behrend-Martínez, E. (2007). Unfit for marriage: Impotent spouses on trial in the Basque region of Spain. Reno: University of Nevada Press. Bennett, J. (2004). The force of things: Steps toward an ecology of matter. Political Theory, 32(3), 347–372. https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591703260853. Borland, J., & Coelli, M. (2015). Information technology and the Australian labour market. Australia’s future workforce (pp. 131–141). Braidotti, R. (1996). Patterns of dissonance (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Polity Press. Braidotti, R. (2000). Teratologies, Deleuze and feminist theory (pp. 156–172). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Butler, J. (1988). Performative acts and gender constitution: An essay in phenomenology and feminist theory. Theatre Journal, 40(4), 519–531. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (1993). Critically queer. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 1, 15–22. Butler, J. (1995). Melancholy gender-refused identification. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 5(2), 165–180. https://doi.org/10.1080/10481889509539059. Butler, J. (2015). Notes toward a performative theory of assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Campana, J. (2015). Distribution, assemblage, capacity: New keywords for masculinity? European Review of History, 22(4), 691–697. https://doi.org/10. 1080/13507486.2015.1028337. Clough, P. T., & Halley, J. (2007). The affective turn: Theorizing the social. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cohen, J. (1996). James Ellroy, Los Angeles and the spectacular crisis of masculinity. Women: A Cultural Review, 7(1), 1–15. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/09574049608578254. Connell, R. W. (1987). Gender and power: Society, the person, and sexual politics. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Danvers, E. (2016). Criticality’s affective entanglements: Rethinking emotion and critical thinking in higher education. Gender and Education, 28(2), 282–297. Davies, C. (1997). Modernity, masculinity and imperfect cinema in cuba. Screen, 38(4), 345–359. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/38.4.345.

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Deleuze, G. (1988). Spinoza: Practical philosophy (R. Hurley, Trans.). San Francisco: City Light Books. Deleuze, G. (1990). Expressionism in philosophy: Spinoza (M. Joughin, Trans.). New York, NY: Zone Books. Deleuze, G. (2003). Francis Bacon: The logic of sensation (D. W. Smith, Trans.). London: Continuum. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1984). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (R. Hurley, M. Seem, & H. R. Lane, Trans., Vol. 1). Minneapolis and New York: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans., Vol. 2). London and New York: Continuum. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1998). What is philosophy (H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. Duff, C. (2017). The affective right to the city. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 42, 516–529. Felski, R. (1995). The gender of modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gatens, M., & Lloyd, G. (1999). Collective imaginings. New York, NY: Routledge. Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism. Bloomington, USA: Indiana University Press. Haywood, C., & Mac an Ghaill, M. (2003). Men and masculinities. Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press. Hickey-Moody, A. (2009). Unimaginable bodies: Intellectual disability, performance and becomings. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense. Hickey-Moody, A. (2010). Youth arts and the differential becoming of the world. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 24(2), 203–214. Hickey-Moody, A. (2013). Youth, arts and education: Reassembling subjectivity through affect (p. 176). Volume 85 of Routledge Advances in Sociology. London: Routledge. Hardwick, J. (2015). Policing paternity: Historicising masculinity and sexuality in early-modern France. European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire, 22(4), 643–657. Hickey-Moody, A., & Mallins, P. (Eds.). (2008). Deleuzian encounters: Studies in contemporary social issues. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Hickey-Moody, A., & Rasmussen, M. L. (2009). The sexed subject in-between Deleuze and Butler. Deleuze and queer theory (pp. 37–53). Horrocks, R. (1994). Masculinity in crisis: Myths, fantasies and realities. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Kane, B. (2015). Masculinity and political geographies in England, Ireland and North America. European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire, 22(4), 595–619. Kimmel, M. (1992). The contemporary ‘crisis’ of masculinity in historical perspective. In H. Brod (Ed.), The making of masculinities: The new men’s studies (pp. 121–153). London and New York: Routledge. Mac an Ghaill, M. (1994). The making of men: Masculinities, sexualities and schooling. Maidenhead: Open University Press. McDonald, T. H. (2016). Conceptualizing an ethology of masculinities. Men and Masculinities, 21(1), 56–71. https://doi.org/10.1177/10971 84x16652662. Niccolini, A. D. (2016). Terror(ism) in the classroom: Censorship, affect and uncivil bodies. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 29(7), 893–910. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2016.1174897. Probyn, E. (2000). Sporting bodies: Dynamics of shame and pride. Body & Society, 6(1), 13–28. Renold, E., & Ringrose, J. (2017). Selfies, relfies and phallic tagging: Posthuman participations in teen digital sexuality assemblages. Educational, Philosophy and Theory, 49, 1066–1079. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857. 2016.1185686. Ringrose, J., & Renold, E. (2014). “F** k Rape!” Exploring affective intensities in feminist research assemblage. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(6), 772–780. Simel, G. (1984). On women, sexuality and love. New Haven, CT: Chicago University Press. Spinoza, B. (1677/2001). Ethics (E. M. Curley & S. Hampshire, Trans., 6th ed.). London: Penguin Classics. (Original work published in 1677) Todd, S., Jones, R., & O’Donnell, A. (2016). Special issue of gender and education: Shifting education’s philosophical imaginaries. London: Taylor & Francis. Waitt, G., & Stanes, E. (2015). Sweating bodies: Men, masculinities, affect, emotion. Geoforum, 59, 30–38. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. geoforum.2014.12.001. Witz, A. (2001). Georg Simmel and the masculinity of modernity. Journal of Classical Sociology, 1, 353–370. https://doi.org/10.1177/14687950122232585. Witz, A., & Marshall, B. L. (2003). The quality of manhood: Masculinity and embodiment in the sociological tradition. Sociological Review, 51(3), 339–356.

3 Schooling Masculinity

In this chapter, I provide some resources for thinking about how masculinity is learnt, through examining the ways boyhood is conceived both explicitly and implicitly in Deleuze and Guattari’s work. I then turn to my attention the impact that their thought has had on contemporary studies of masculinity and youth, particularly in relation to work emerging within the field of the sociology of education. Drawing on empirical data from ethnographic fieldwork with young boys in South East London, I model some new ways in which Deleuze and Guattari’s thoughts might be employed to think about young masculine identity, embodiment and relationships with the human and more than human world. Through the concepts of striation, minor and molar, I examine boys’ geographically embedded and affectively expressed production of their masculine identity. As such, this chapter is a thematic collection of material on boyhood, youthful masculinity and Deleuze/Deleuze and Guattari’s related concepts. I specifically do not offer a totalising position on a ‘Deleuzoguattarian theory of boyhoods’; rather, I examine why their theories might be useful for thinking about youthful masculinity. This is, firstly, because Deleuze and Guattari’s respective positions on boyhood, articulated through © The Author(s) 2019 A. Hickey-Moody, Deleuze and Masculinity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01749-1_3

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their writing on Freud’s study of “Little Hans”, and their writing on Spinoza and childhood, run contra to each other. These different parts of their work advance almost oppositional models for reading childhood, and at no point do they discuss (let alone reconcile) the conflicting aspects of these ideas. The point I see as most significant in the first half of the chapter is the fact that Deleuze and Guattari’s work on boys is not entirely antithetical to psychoanalytic perspectives. While much of their theoretical work is grounded in a critique of psychoanalysis, there is some utility in bringing together the different perspectives brought to light through psychoanalysis and Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas. Secondly, my review of the emerging field of Deleuze and masculinity in education shows the diverse and expanding ways Deleuze’s thought is of use in thinking through masculinity in the sociology of education. When it comes to understanding empirical experience and the ‘lived’ world of children who identify as boys, as presented in my empirical data, neither Deleuze and Guattari’s work on Freud’s Hans nor their writing on Spinoza and childhood prove to be the most fruitful. Respectively, these positions either present a psychoanalytic subject with a heterosexual orientation as a primary model for subjectivity, or unintentionally devalue what childhood is worth (or capable of ) and remove the capacity for children to have reason or intuition. I read the take-up of theoretical work in the sociology of education as testimony to the utility of their ideas, which shows that Deleuze and Guattari’s broader catalogue of concepts, rather than their work on childhood and the little boy, are actually the most useful resources they offer to those thinking about the lived experiences of boys. Developing my own model for thinking through youth and masculinity with Deleuze and Guattari, I extend existing work being undertaken in sociology, and in the sociology of education, in examining lived experiences of young masculinity in relation to theoretical ideas that further animate the data. But firstly, I begin by recounting the very different things that Deleuze and Guattari say about little boys and the child.

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The Psychoanalytic Boy The psychoanalytic model for subjectivity that Deleuze and Guattari critique is important for their readers to understand. Deleuze and Guattari’s concern with psychoanalysis finds a specific focus in their attachment to Freud’s study of Hans, and their repeated engagement with him as a figure for thought. Anti-Oedipus is a text that demonstrates substantial interest in disrupting the psychoanalytic model of subjectivity that has been developed in relation to Freud and which has become central to capitalist economies. Although Anti-Oedipus does not engage directly with Hans, it does take the Oedipal subject that Hans was seen as representing as a focus of substantive critique, and Deleuze and Guattari directly discuss Hans repeatedly in later works. The point I make in engaging with this work is that both Freud and Deleuze and Guattari’s methods are more similar than one might anticipate. To my mind, they respectively suffer from a case of what they characterize as “interpretosis” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 114); namely, they largely ignore the empirical experiences of young boys in an attempt to justify their theoretical ideas. The discursive analysis I undertake here is not in any way intended to be critical of the clinical utility of Freud’s thought, but rather, I question the ethics of including Hans’ experience in the development of Freud’s ideas. Freud did not actually see Hans during the time of the case study, he analysed Hans’ actions as relayed by Hans’ father. In undertaking the following critique of the case study of Hans as model for thinking the psychoanalytic boy, the text with which I am primarily concerned is Freud’s “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five Year Old Boy”, although prior to the publication of this text, “Little Hans” was written about by Freud in “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” and “The Sexual Enlightenment of Children (An Open Letter to Dr. M. Fürst)” in 1907.1 1Freud

writes in this early letter about the importance of not concealing the facts of sexual life from children, and he states that: It is undoubtedly nothing else but the customary prudishness and their own bad conscience over sexual matters that causes adults to adopt this attitude of ‘mystery-making’ in front of children;

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Hans (Herbert Graff aka Little Hans), a little boy living in a middle-class family in Vienna, was a subject of Freud’s theoretical analysis. During the course of his analysis, Hans was getting to know his newly born younger sister and, until the age of 3.5, he was seemingly happy enough. At this point, Hans developed anxiety around a number of issues, including an extreme fear of going outside. His father and mother began talking to Freud about Hans. Hans’ mother was Freud’s patient and his father was a member of Freud’s weekly study-group. Freud saw Hans just once across the course of his “treatment” and, as I have suggested, the majority of the “analysis” Freud conducted was undertaken through correspondence with Max, the father. Freud suggested topics of conversion and possible readings of Hans’ statements to Max. This very mediated method is not an accepted clinical practice (and has been broadly critiqued by many, notably Wolpe and Rachman in 1964, then Edel in 1968). The general consensus in scholarship is that Freud worked to justify his existing theories through his discussions with Hans’ father, rather than actually engaging with Hans. Edel’s now classic essay on “What Little Hans Learnt” engages closely with Wolpe and Rachman’s earlier critique and is more empirical in analysis than Deleuze and Guattari’s own discussion of Hans. Edel concludes her essay with an observation with which I very much agree, but which also can be applied to Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of little Hans. She suggests that: Theorists who continue to fit pragmatic data into exclusive conceptual modes might profitably pause over little Han’s comment to his father after his visit to Freud: ‘Does the Professor [Freud] talk to God, … as he can tell all that beforehand’. (1968, p. 203)

Freud’s case study itself leads to quite peculiar readings of childhood. It radically separates Hans from the psychosocial world of his parents and the geography of his everyday life. To show exactly how Freud

but possibly a part is also played by a piece of theoretical ignorance on their part, which we can counteract by giving the adults some enlightenment. (Freud, 1907, online)

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seemingly missed some notable aspects of Hans’ life that arguably were articulated in his subjectivity, I briefly discuss Hans’ family and daily routines. Hans’ mother was Freud’s patient in the first instance. Olga suffered from acute agoraphobia (the same condition that Hans became gripped by as his analysis progressed). In addition to Olga being Freud’s patient, Hans’ father, Max Graff, was part of Freud’s “Wednesday group”, a regular informal education event organised by Freud and billed as a weekly meeting of people interested in psychoanalysis. Members of the meeting group were Freud’s informal students and their attention gave Freud a space in which to test his ideas. Olga and Max, Freud’s patient and student, were encouraged to marry by Freud. This alone would suggest the Freud was not well positioned to offer an independent analysis of Hans and it also limits the possible ways Hans’ experiences can be interpreted. Furthermore, it is clear from both the parents’ history with Freud that the domestic and psychosocial world that made up Hans’ everyday was thick with his mother’s neurosis and his father’s desire for psychoanalytic interpretation, or what Deleuze and Guattari (1983, p. 114) have called “interpretosis”: interpretation that is more concerned with itself than the empirical event being interpreted. Both factors substantially detract from the roles that Hans’ empirical experiences and psychic world were ever able to play in his own “analysis”. It is clear that Hans’ parents did not have a happy marriage. There were intense conflicts inside the relationship. Max reported his wife Olga’s aggressive outbursts and bouts of depression following sexual relations to Freud. Clinically, depression following sexual relations can be a symptom of sexual abuse in childhood although this possibility does not seem to have been considered by Freud, despite the fact Olga’s depression caused significant disruption to her household. She suffered from agoraphobia and ‘rejected’ the daughter (Hans’ little sister) after she was born. Extracting Hans from this very provocative environment, Freud’s theories relate to his own interest in the development of heterosexuality, incest and intra-family relations more than Hans’ direct experience. I will briefly discuss aspects of the case that became sites for Freud’s “analysis”.

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Freud takes interest in the fact that Hans asks his parents if he can sleep over at his female friend, Maridel’s house and he then later shows particular interest in a bourgeois girl in a restaurant. While Freud draws a link between these two incidents, they are not necessarily related, and are not necessarily ‘proof ’ of a developing heterosexuality. Maridel is Hans’ landlord’s daughter. Sleepovers with friends are common for children. Bourgeois girls can be interesting: their dress, their smell, their manner of engagement. There are numerous reasons why Hans might have shown interest in the girl in the restaurant. Freud not only assumes the events are linked and are proof of a heterosexual identification, he argues that Hans’ interest in these people is repressed sexual desire for his own mother, Olga, and that: “Desire for Maridel must be an avatar of a supposedly primary desire for the mother” (Deleuze, Guattari, Parnet, & Scala, 2007, p. 90). The other peculiar territorialisation undertaken by Freud in his work with Hans was to suggest that Hans’ fear of horses was actually a fear of his father and of being castrated by the father. To be more specific, Hans’ fear of horses was attributed both to sexual arousal by the mother and then a subsequent fear of being castrated by the father. Horses and horse drawn carts were an everyday mode of transportation in Vienna in the early 1900s and Hans’ family lived opposite a coaching inn. During the course of his “analysis” Hans saw an overworked horse collapse in the street, a spectacle that could lead anyone to develop a paralysing fear of horses, particularly as the horse is clearly much larger than little Hans. However, as this phobia of horses became more pronounced, it was given various sexual interpretations by Freud. He alternatively claims that Hans’ phobia of horses is an expression of too much sexual attention from his mother, and also that Hans thinks the horse is his father, and he is scared of the horse because he thinks it might castrate him. While these respective interpretations may have been correct, Hans may also have also simply feared horses because they are very large, and hooved. Koyuncu (2017, p. 72), drawing on Ross (2007), argues that “Little Hans’ fear of horses cannot be associated exclusively with his Oedipal complex, but is also a ‘communication of the traumatic abuse in the home’ (Ross, 2007, p. 779) … the case itself involves Little Hans’

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reports of his little sister being beaten by his mother”. I contend that this is a far more accurate reading of the case than Freud provides, which is surprising, seeing as Freud was already involved in the very unhappy marriage, should have known Olga’s potential history of sexual abuse, definitely knew about her depression, anxiety and agoraphobia, and her mistreatment of her youngest child, which was extensive. The younger child, Hans’ sister, eventually took her own life. The case study of Hans is rather obsessively populated by Hans’ parents paying attention to Hans’ interest in “widdlers” (penises). Hans’ parents even allow him to believe that all genitals are in fact, a penis. This is perhaps also a form of what Freud calls “mystery making”, a tactic he argues that parents use to avoid talking to their children about sex. Very surprisingly, Freud is not critical of Hans’ parents’ acquiescence to his belief that vaginas and bottoms are the same as a penis. In his letter examining what he has called “The Sexual Enlightenment of Children”, Freud discusses Hans as an example of infantile sexuality through focusing on Hans’ fascination with his widdler, or penis, saying: I know a delightful little boy, now four years old, whose understanding parents abstain from forcibly suppressing one part of the child’s development. Little Hans has certainly not been exposed to anything in the nature of seduction by a nurse, yet he has already for some time shown the liveliest interest in the part of the body which he calls his ‘widdler’. When he was only three he asked his mother: ‘Mummy, have you got a widdler too?’ His mother answered: ‘Of course. What did you think?’ He also asked his father the same question repeatedly. At the same age he was taken to a cow-shed for the first time and saw a cow being milked. ‘Oh look!’ he said, in surprise, ‘there’s milk coming out of its widdler!’ At the age of three and three quarters he was on the way to making an independent discovery of correct categories by means of his observations. He saw some water being let out of an engine and said ‘Oh, look, the engine’s widdling. Where’s it got its widdler?’ He added afterwards in reflective tones: ‘A dog and a horse have widdlers; a table and a chair haven’t.’ Recently he was watching his seven-day-old little sister being given a bath. ‘But her widdler’s still quite small’, he remarked; ‘when she grows up it’ll get bigger all right.’ (I have been told of this same attitude

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towards the problem of sex distinction in other boys of similar age.) I should like to say explicitly that little Hans is not a sensual child or at all pathologically disposed. The fact is simply, I think, that, not having been intimidated or oppressed with a sense of guilt, he gives expression quite ingenuously to what he thinks. (Freud, 2002, p. 4)

Freud makes the link between Hans, his sexual interest in his mum and his interests in penises quite a focus, and, as Edel showed in 1968, Freud’s is but one of many possible interpretations. Edel suggests: Considering the case now from the point of view of interpersonal psychoanalytic theory, it is particularly noteworthy that neither the Freudian approach nor a recent psychoanalytic summary of the case questions Hans’s fearfulness beyond its classical Oedipal implications. Yet it is clear from the data that a great deal was going on besides Hans’ interesting dialogues with his father. It is Hans’s mother who has threatened him about masturbation; it is also his mother who threatened to beat him with a carpet beater. It is presumably with his mother that he ‘used to stamp his feet in a rage, and kick about, and sometimes throw himself about when he was out of the chamber.’ These data are not brought into the foreground by either the father or Freud, apparently because they are irrelevant to the drama of biological incest which Hans is supposed to be enacting. Yet such data certainly qualify the mother for symbolic transformation into a phobic object as much or more than the father. (Edel, 1968, p. 199)

Indeed, the mother’s violence and threatening behaviour is a likely cause of Hans’ anxiety. Not only are there numerous problems with the way that the case study and the analysis were undertaken and developed by Freud, the theoretical ideas that the case study was used to build are also problematic. The heterosexual, psychoanalytic subject modelled through Hans is both sexed and gendered in very limited ways. Deleuze and Guattari’s specific writings on Hans show us some of these limits, but again fail to engage with the empirical data. Deleuze and Guattari’s work on Hans features in A Thousand Plateaus and a co-written essay in Two Regimes of Madness. In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari begin their modelling of schizoanalysis as a rhizome through examining the figure of Hans, saying:

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Look at what happened to Little Hans already, an example of child ­psycho-analysis at its purest: they kept on BREAKING HIS RHIZOME and BLOTCHING HIS MAP, setting it straight for him, blocking his every way out, until he began to desire his own shame and guilt, until they had rooted shame and guilt in him, PHOBIA (they barred him from the rhizome of the building, then from the rhizome of the street, they rooted him in his parents’ bed, they radicled him to his own body, they fixated him on Professor Freud). Freud explicitly takes Little Hans’s cartography into account, but always and only in order to project it back onto a family photo. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 4)

The details of Freud’s analysis of Hans versus other possible interpretations could form the focus of an entire chapter, and I have specifically chosen not to devote so much space to this largely because of the problematic ethics of both Freud’s analysis and Deleuze and Guattari’s writings. Both largely appropriate Hans’ biography as a means of justifying their theoretical ideas. As engaging as both Freud and Deleuze and Guattari’s theories are, they both fail to acknowledge and respond to the lived phobia and distress of Hans’ life, which clearly needed empirical treatment that was not provided. Deleuze and Guattari show us the ways in which psychoanalysis can “overcode” and “territorialise” experiences, through their discussion of Hans both in A Thousand Plateaus and The Interpretation of Utterances, but they follow Freud in appropriating Hans’ experience to support their theoretical development. In so doing, they ignore the fact that Hans was gripped by terror and agoraphobia to such an extent that, for example, he would not likely have been cured by a sleep over at a friend’s house. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that: In the case of Little Hans, studying the unconscious would be to show how he tries to build a rhizome, with the family house but also with the line of flight of the building, the street, etc.: then how Professor Freud’s intervention assures a power takeover by the signifier, a subjectification of affects; how the only escape route left to the child is a becoming-animal perceived as shameful and guilty (the becoming-horse of Little Hans, a truly political option). But these impasses must always be resituated on the map, thereby opening them up to possible lines of flight. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 14)

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Hans’ supposed becoming-horse is a questionable interpretation of his empirical experience, as Hans is terrified of horses. Becoming is a matter of affective resonance, of emulating similar refrains and developing shared capacities. Hans does not produce affects akin to those of the horse, he does not feel, act or look like a horse. He does not imagine he is a horse. Hans is terrified of horses and fears they will invade even his bedroom. How is this fear, then, a becoming? In some respects, Deleuze and Guattari’s scholarly enthusiasm for Hans, while exploitative, is easily understood. Little Hans was the first famous scholarly consideration of sexuality in childhood. Yet, Deleuze and Guattari are not particularly interested in childhood sexuality and are critical of psychoanalysis broadly. Freud, too, infers a range of sometimes contradictory and often unassimilated theories of childhood sexuality. But if each of these theorists’ work cannot fairly be reconciled into a single monolithic story of child sexuality, Little Hans is as close to a general theory of child sexuality as Freud comes, which is why the Hans case study is a foundational figure for the development of Freud’s Oedipus complex. Through Freud, the Oedipus myth detailing the repression of incestuous desire came to be the dominant discourse about child development, and also the story about ‘normal’ sexual development in children rather than the experience of a particular child (Hickey-Moody, 2018). The stage-by-stage operation of the supposed repression of incest is mapped out in the following schema: all boys aged 3.5 want to kill their father so they can sexually possess their mother, a desire that becomes nullified when they realise their father has the power to castrate them. Fearing castration, boys acquiesce to their father’s power and project their sexual desire for their mother on to women other than their mother (such as a playdate or girl at a café). Oedipal psychoanalytic ideas about both phobia and “normal” (hetero)sexual development became the templates on which child sexual activity was discussed and these ideas were premised both on a linear developmental subject and the redundancy of polymorphous perversity2 (Freud, 1963, p. 87; Hickey-Moody, 2018, pp. 135–145) after the Oedipal phase. 2Polymorphous perversity is a stage of childhood development in which children experience distributed pleasure (through body parts sucking, anal pleasure). This pleasure becomes reinscribed in the genitals during the Oedipal phase. Freud’s original “case study” of Hans, while

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In Little Hans, sexuality is both constructed and defined as the named-as-hidden core of the modern subject. Hans is also the most extended account of the child subject in Freud, melding the speakably sexual child subject with a model for heterosexual psychological development (Hickey-Moody, 2018). Freud’s basic premise was that all neurotic behaviours in adulthood stemmed from repressed sexual feelings in childhood, keeping in mind that here, “sexual” should be interpreted in the broadest possible way to include sensual pleasure from sucking (on mother’s breast) and sensation in the anus, as well as non-sexual touching of parts of the body, thumb sucking and so on (Freud, 1965, p. 74). The drive behind these unconscious desires is supposedly a child’s longing for their parent of the opposite sex. Furthermore, this process of the boy child having desire for his mother and unconsciously fearing his father’s revenge through castration also leads to the phenomena of “identification with the aggressor”, or the boy’s active efforts to master his anxiety by taking on his father’s qualities and becoming like his father in order to prevent such retribution. It is therefore seen by Freud as a process that is central to the becoming of a boy child’s ‘maleness’. This process of mother-desire, father-fear, and father-identification, is seen as the key in boys becoming like their fathers and, further, this is seen as being essential to the development of their gender identity and sexuality. By understanding these issues in the developing child, and by the provision of an unrepressed and open environment where sexual anxieties can be expressed, Freud suggests that neurosis in later life can be avoided. Freud hypothesises that, if it is accepted and recognised for what it is while it is occurring, then childhood sexual neuroses can be worked through, leading to “normal” sexual development in later life. While this organisation of power and pleasure within Freud’s model of subjectivity is interrogated by some of Deleuze and Guattari’s attempts to disrupt presumptions that the subject is, or should be, a unified social organism, they take up the figure of Little Hans quite willingly as a site for analysis. Before moving on to briefly discuss Deleuze and methodologically concerning and ethically very problematic, offers a public discussion of the sexuality of children which ostensibly created public space for thinking and speaking about child sex.

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Guattari’s other model for childhood, which I call the Spinozist child (Hickey-Moody, 2013), I briefly examine some impacts that the Hans case study has had on masculinity studies as a field. Ken Corbett’s (2009) field defining book Boyhoods offers an accurate acknowledgement of exactly this impact. Corbett situates Hans as the archetypal figure of masculinity that he indeed has become and, in so doing, frames the role that Hans (or, I should say, Freud’s selective interpretation of Hans) has played in grafting Oedipus from myth to person (2009, p. 19). Specifically, Corbett explains that the Oedipus complex: … is a theory that continues to stand as the canonical psychological narrative of masculinity: we have known a boy to be a boy through his phallic preoccupations and castration fears, enacted alongside and through his desire for his mother and his rivalry with his father, which in time resolve via the boy’s separation from his mother and his identification with his father. (2009, p. 19)

The constitution of gender, therefore, becomes synonymous with internalising the beliefs and behaviours of one’s parent of the same sex. Repression of incest and, supposedly, repression of same-sex desire also become constitutive of gender and sexuality. Corbett continues his examination of the impact that Freud’s preoccupation with repression has had on how we understand subjectivity through explaining that: … the analysis of repression becomes Freud’s mark. It is noteworthy that as Freud turns toward his analysis of repression, he presumes adequate or untroubled attachment to security: the object (the mother) in this case, according to Freud, was secure. (2009, p. 23)

As early as 1968 Edel showed that Olga was the likely cause of Hans’ anxiety. Regardless, as I have shown, Olga was not in any position to provide her son with a secure attachment, as she was experiencing both depression and agoraphobia. Gerome Wakefield, Professor of Social Work and Psychiatry at NY University suggests (14 December 2008) that John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth’s theory of infant attachment and maternal deprivation illuminates the parent-child interactions

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recorded in the “Little Hans” study, and once again point towards some quite different interpretations to those Freud made at the time. John Bowlby was a child psychiatrist and analyst, practising from the 1940s to the 1970s. He graduated from Cambridge University in 1928 with a degree in psychology and pre-clinical sciences. Later he completed a medical degree and finished his training as a psychoanalyst in 1936 (aged 30). Bowlby went on to research the nature of the relationship between mothers and infants from the earliest age (Bowlby, 1990). His findings, which were grounded in longitudinal studies of bonding behaviours in animals, led him to a 1948 study of the hospitalisation of children and disruption of the mother/infant bond (Bretherton, 1992, p. 761). Based on his research, Bowlby came to the understanding that a child’s tie to its mother is not based on sensuous oral gratification, which was the Freudian premise (Brown, 1961, p. 21), but rather, on the evolutionary function of protecting the child from danger and preserving its life (Bretherton, 1992, p. 766). It is to this end that the complex behavioural system of infants (sucking, crying, eye contact, etc.), and the mother’s responses to these, closely tie the mother and infant together with varying degrees of security depending on the consistency of the maternal response. From this perspective, a child’s attachment behaviours go hand in hand with the parental response; those infants experiencing the most responsive maternal attention being the most securely attached and those experiencing the most unpredictable maternal response as the most anxiously attached. This perspective also demands that events in the whole family are taken into account, not the libidinal longings of the infant alone. Bowlby “… came to believe that actual family experiences were much more important, if not the basic cause of emotional disturbance” (Bretherton, 1992, p. 760). Bowlby saw the parents, their own behaviour and their own childhood experiences, as essential in the treatment of a child’s distress. Bowlby’s work was expanded and strengthened by his colleague Mary Ainsworth who worked with him at the Tavistock Clinic in London in the early ’50s; and there followed a rich working partnership for them both for many years (Bretherton, 1992, p. 759). In 1954 Ainsworth

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followed her husband to Uganda and with a small research grant completed one of the first studies of infant development of the twentieth century (Mooney, 2010, p. 27). Building on this, in 1967 Ainsworth developed a list of behaviours which indicated attachment between mothers and their babies—this included crying when the mother leaves, showing concern for her whereabouts, ‘flying to the mother when frightened,’ and ‘using the mother as a safe haven when in a strange situation’ (Mooney, 2010, p. 28). Ainsworth saw these behaviours as natural products of the attachment between infant and mother that have developed primarily as a survival mechanism. What’s more, she identified that babies who were securely attached to their parents explored the world with more confidence than those who were insecurely attached. These babies cried more and explored with less confidence (Bretherton, 1992, p. 764). The forms of attachment that occur between mothers and infants were categorised and studied by Ainsworth in controlled circumstances. She went on to develop the “Strange Situation” test where the infant reaction to being reunited with her mother after a slightly stressful short separation could be measured by consistent behaviours exhibited by infants, no matter what their cultural background. Furthermore, the patterns that are established in infancy are seen to carry over to later childhood and adulthood, as attachment behaviours are an internalised working model that are in some part transferred to our adult relationships. An ‘attachment’ is affectional bond, and hence an attachment figure is never wholly interchangeable or replaceable by another, even though there may be others to whom one is also attached. In attachments, as in other affectional bonds, there is a need to maintain proximity, distress upon inexplicable separation, pleasure or joy upon reunion and grief at loss. (Ainsworth, 1989, p. 711)

In the light of these clinically applied, and empirically useful, theories of Bowlby, Ainsworth, and now many others—including Brazelton (1983), Klaus and Kennell (1976) and those cited above—the “Little Hans” case study as it was recorded by Freud and Max Graff clearly lacks contextual recognition of the family trauma amidst which Hans

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lived, and the impact this will have had on Hans’ attachment to his mother. Let us first return to the comments of psychoanalyst David Abrams, and Jerome Wakefield (14 December 2008), following access to original interviews from the Freud Archive in New York which were released relatively recently. They point out many aspects of the case study that are crucial to the outcomes, but which are overlooked in the study itself. Firstly, as I have noted, and they remind their reader, the case study of Hans was recorded by Hans’ father, Max Graf, who was not a qualified psychoanalyst but a musicologist who reported his ‘findings’ to Freud quite second hand. Reading the case study itself, I am struck and disturbed by how often Max makes sexual interpretations of his son’s comments, particularly about horses, and as such, it is hardly surprising that this way of gaining positive attention from his father becomes something of a habit for the boy. Edel makes a similar point, when she observes that Hans is a most cooperative and responsive student of his father’s ideas. He enjoys dictating letters to Freud: ‘I say, I am glad. I’m always so glad when I can write to the Professor. He discerns that his father is pleased at certain responses to his questions: Father: … A good boy doesn’t wish that sort of thing, though. Hans: But he may think it. Father: But that isn’t good. Hans: If he thinks it, it is good all the same, because you can write it to the Professor.’ (Edel, 1968, p. 201)

Hans, of course, is led by his parents and his desire to impress his father shapes his behaviour. Remembering that it is a phobia of horses that initiates the father performing an ‘analysis’, Max and Freud fail to mention until much later that Hans actually witnessed a very frightening scene of a horse, pulling a crowded vehicle, falling over and dying in the street. It seems that this trauma may also be a candidate for a precipitating factor for Hans’ anxiety, perhaps more so than Hans’ supposed fear of being castrated by his father. Freud, however, draws Hans’ anxiety back to the repression of the fear of castration and also to the penis/ symbolic phallus, as Corbett astutely explains:

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The psychic states called ‘masculinity’ originate, according to Freud, through ‘biological function’, and for the boy are constituted through the penis: ‘In contrast to the alter period of maturity, this period is marked not by a genital primacy but a primacy of the phallus. ’ (Corbett, 2009, p. 24)

The phallus is the penis internalised, the symbolic reality of the father, and the father’s authority in a child’s life. It is this point that Deleuze and Guattari are the most critical of, as it is indeed an impoverished model for thinking about male subjectivity. On this I agree with them but would add that their re-reading of the case study of Little Hans does little to repair the lack of attention that Freud paid to Hans. They too think about Hans in relation to ideas rather than Hans’ experience. In A Thousand Plateaus and also in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy and Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, Deleuze with Guattari and also writing alone, imagine finding a kind of child that differs from Hans. By definition, Hans remains the ‘universal’ template, or the molar child, against which this other child is defined. This ‘other’ child is quite a romantic figure but is effectively a methodology for explaining affect and naivety. It is to a brief examination of this figure I now turn.

The Spinozist Child In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari state that young children are ‘Spinozists’; that is, they live on an affective level that is lost to most adults: Children are Spinozists. When Little Hans talks about a ‘peepee-maker’, he is referring not to an organ or an organic function but basically to a material, in other words, to an aggregate whose elements vary according to its connections, its relations of movement and rest, the different individuated assemblages it enters. … Children’s questions are poorly understood … they are not understood as question-machines; that is why indefinite articles play so important a role in their questions (a belly, a child, a horse, a chair, “how is a person made?”). Spinozism is the becoming-child of the philosopher. (1988, p. 256)

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While the curious, open and playful Deleuzoguattarian child articulated here is a Spinozist, and ‘Spinozism is the becoming-child of the philosopher’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 256), Spinoza’s child as read by Deleuze in Expressionism in Philosophy uses similar theoretical tools to offer a substantially different approach to the childhood state. Childhood, says Spinoza, is a state of impotence and slavery, a state of foolishness in which we depend in the highest degree on external causes, and in which we necessarily have more of sadness than of joy; we are never more cut off from our power of action. The first man, Adam, corresponds to the childhood of humanity. (Deleuze, 1990, pp. 262–263)

Here childhood is read primarily in terms of dependency and the possibility that comes with childhood is omitted. In contrast to the ‘Spinozist children’ of A Thousand Plateaus, Spinoza’s child in Expressionism in Philosophy is to be pitied, rather than emulated, because it is the articulation of a state that takes away our capacity to know our own mind. Deleuze restates, and seemingly cannot emphasize enough, Spinoza’s “remarks that childhood is an abject state, but one common to all of us, in which we ‘depend very heavily on external causes’” (1990, p. 219). While in A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari suggest we should ‘turn to children’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 257) in order to understand affective logic, Deleuze (1990, p. 219) also realises the vulnerability of childhood. So while in his earlier writing on Spinoza, Deleuze warns against losing one’s own mind or being too easily affected by the outside world, the affectivity of childhood is later cast as being positive, as a way of opening up to new experiences and sensitising oneself to others. One could read the meta-position being advanced across these texts as the fact that a marriage of both childhood affectivity and strength of character is important, however the problem of “interpretosis” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 114), the academic habit of making life fit ideas, rather than developing ideas that adequately express life, remains as the working model that has been employed. Children are used as a means for thought, but not engaged with in the empirical sense.

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While empirical work with children does not automatically bypass the risk of “interpretosis” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 114), as one can of course lay theory on top of experience in ways that are perhaps exploitative, there are many unexplored possibilities for ethical and innovative theoretical developments through empirical research with young people who identify as male. In the final part of this chapter I turn my attention to theorising the identity work of two boys in South East London.

Schooling Masculinity After Deleuze: Protest, Striation and Minor Refrains The sociology of education has led the uptake of Deleuze’s work in the social sciences (Harwood, Hickey-Moody, McMahon, & O’Shea, 2016; Hickey-Moody, 2009, 2013; MacLure, 2016, 2018; Ringrose, 2018; Ringrose & Coleman, 2013; Renold, Ringrose & Danielle, 2016). This enthusiasm for Deleuze’s thought has articulated across the field in more ways than I am able to consider in this chapter. Suffice to say, while much of the work on Deleuze and education is not focused on gender specifically, there is a significant collection of sociology of education scholars concerned with feminism and education, represented in some ways by the “PhEmaterialist” collection of scholars who converge in London (see Ringrose, Warfield, & Zarabadi, 2018), exploring intersections between Deleuze’s philosophy and feminist new materialisms. This expanded field is worthy of a book-length survey and analysis in its own right. Much less attention has been paid to Deleuze and masculinity as articulated in the lives of bodies that are sex marked ‘male’ in the sociology of education, however there is some existing literature bringing these fields together which I canvass in what is to follow. I begin by examining some fairly recent contributions to scholarship that undertake conceptual development opening out how we might think of young masculinities. In engaging with this literature I want to provide a caveat: I am not meaning to suggest that empirical research is devoid of the fascination with the concept that we find in Deleuze and Guattari. For example, generally Freud’s clinical practice involved engaging with people, even though this was not the case in his

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“study” of Hans. One cannot say that Deleuze and Guattari’s writings on children relate to the lived experiences of children, or that the work to which I now turn always accurately represents the experiences of the people involved in empirical research. Sociology of education may as much be a glut of “interpretosis” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 114) at times as Deleuze and Guattari’s work clearly often is. This said, the ethical ethnographic idea of understanding culture and experience from the inside, knowing through lived experience and then thinking about the knowing, is the broad scholarly sensibility informing much of the empirical work being undertaken in the sociology of education, and I want to position this as an important methodological and theoretical orientation. Of particular significance for my work here is Farrell’s (2015) piece “‘We’re the mature people’: a study of masculine subjectivity and its relationship to key stage four Religious Studies”. Farrell draws from both poststructural theory and masculinities theory to explore the ways in which Stage 4 boys enrolled in religious studies in the UK draw on the subject as a discursive resource for the constitution of the self, and “negotiate socially successful identities through their relationship to the dominant masculinising forces of sport, physicality and authority and engage with Religious Studies” (Farrell, 2015, p. 19). A few concepts offered by Deleuze and Guattari (as well as others) are drawn on in Farrell’s discussion of how the boys are negotiating masculine subjectivity. He explains that “although the boys’ identity work was fashioned through their relationship to vortices of masculinity (Connell, 2000), most notably through their successful involvement in competitive sport, the Milltown boys were able to negotiate a range of subject positions … The boys narrated their disillusionment with what Nick called ‘clockwork subjects’, maths and science with their masculine subject meanings … The boys’ openness to questions points to ways in which RE can create new territory, epistemologically open ‘nomadic’ spaces in the curriculum which can begin to disrupt dominant ‘molar’ masculine subjectivity” (Farrell, 2015, p. 32). Part of the point Farrell is making here is often argued in the sociology of education. It is well known that critical thinking is central to reflexive gender and sexuality identity construction (e.g. Harwood & Rasmussen, 2004). The production of gendered

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identity in and through curriculum is also a focus of the field, although seeing curriculum discourses as ‘striated’ spaces that machine (or produce) identities in specific ways is an apposite site for theoretical analysis that has obvious implications for sociology of gender and education. Boys can become a different kind of boy through thinking about religion and being called to interpolate often quite contradictory narratives on life and death. Social belief systems are indeed an ultimate striating force that cuts across subjectivity and shapes social relationships in very particular ways. Deleuze and Guattari characterize this through saying “the classical image of thought, and the situating of mental space it effects, aspires to universality. It in effect operates with two ‘universals’, the whole as the final ground of being or all-encompassing horizon and the Subject as the principal that converts being into being-for-us. Imperium and republic. Between the two, all of the varieties of the real and the true find their place in a striated mental space, from the double point of view of Being and Subject, under the direction of a ‘universal method’” (1983, p. 379). In Farrell’s study the boys find most curriculum areas, those that mobilize a ‘classical image of thought’, prompt them to think and become in a way from which they turn away. These boys’ shun ‘straited mental space’. Farrell shows that the philosophical aspect of religious education, and the reflexivity it requires, largely pushes boys outside existing models for schooling masculinity. Specifically: These boys elude the reductive categories of cool guy, swot, wimp, or poofter (Martino 1999). Through their choices and their reciprocal, reflexive relationship to the potent technology of parresia [free speech] offered through the discourse of RE, they showed themselves to be active, self-constituting subjects. (Farrell, 2015, p. 33)

Critical, independent thinking is a way of smoothing the striated space of gendered identity, or of becoming other-than the cool guy, swot, or other litany of schoolboy masculinities. Deleuze and Guattari characterize this smooth space as filled with possibility, saying: “smooth space is filled by events of haecceitites, far more than by formed and perceived things. It is a space of affects, more than one of properties

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… it is an intensive rather than extensive space, one of distances, not of measures and properties” (1983, p. 479). Smooth space, as Farrell’s research shows us, offers a space of feeling, relationality, and possibility. This is held in opposition or contract to the striated nature of curriculum focused on content acquisition rather than critical thinking. Curriculum focused on rote learning and/or content acquisition is a hierarchical space, which operates in relation to existing systems of power and, indeed, organizes systems of power: “The striated is that which intertwines fixed and variable elements, produces an order and succession of distinct forms, organizes horizontal … lines with vertical … planes” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 141). Learning within straited spaces is a process of acquiring the right answer, whereas learning within smooth spaces is a process of becoming in relation to experience. Farrell offers us the most specific engagement with Deleuze and Guattari’s thought and young masculine identities, yet other work in the sociology of education maps onto the experiences of childhood and youth in ways that seem important when working to better understand forms of gender in young boys’ everyday lives. Mindy Blaise’s (2013) piece, titled “Charting New Territories: Re-assembling Childhood Sexuality in the Early Years’ Classroom”, begins from the standpoint that children’s early meaning-making in relation to gender and sexuality has been shut down by moral panic. In order to offer an approach to understanding childhood sexuality that does not striate subjective development as a linear process that occurs across time, Blaise characterises Deleuze and Guattari’s work on childhood as offering a useful ‘postdevelopmental logic’. She does not offer an explicit discussion of masculinity using a postdevelopmental framework, yet this concept of postdevelopmental childhood sexuality is a critical resource for all wishing to undertake an analysis of how children do gender and sexuality in ways that extend beyond the Oedipal (heterosexual and necessarily developmental) model offered by Freud. We don’t start as sensually amorphous beings and then become sexualized, these two stages are enfolded in the experience of being human and one can often interrupt the other. The concept of postdevelopmental childhood sexuality contextualises the affective becoming of the

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Spinozist child as a form of experience that is not bound to one time of life (Hickey-Moody, 2013). A bloc of childhood affects can fold into the teleological experience of a life in a non-chronological manner. Childhood affects are a way of smoothing space and time, of uncrumpling the rigid rules of gender that are often part of sexual and gendered aspects of children’s everyday lives. This capacity to be in the world in ways that crack molar discourses of gender, creating smooth striations of identity politics and subjective belief, is a theme that researchers engaged with empirical experiences of children are drawn back to when reconciling their experiences in the field with theoretical frameworks. Thinking through embodied performances of gender, in their piece “Girls in Primary School Science Classrooms: Theorising Beyond Dominant Discourses of Gender”, Cervoni and Ivinson (2011) consider masculinity as part of the ways girls understand and ‘appropriate’ gender. They draw on Deleuze and Guattari as part of their analysis of gender at the micro-level—specifically through exploring the ‘lines of flight’ available to the girls in their study. Girls perform masculinity as a way of freeing themselves from overly feminized striations of their identity. Masculinity is also addressed at the semiotic level, in terms of the historical coding of particular subjects or practices as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’. This focus on the gendered production of subjects activates Deleuze and Guattari’s thoughts in relation to young gendered bodies in ways that remain attentive to the lived experiences of children and young people. Other examples from the sociology of education that engage with Deleuze and gender more broadly include Alicia Jackson’s article “Deleuze and the girl” (2010). In this paper Jackson takes up Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of difference as a means of naming becoming, and mobilizes this concept along with the work of Massumi as a theoretical tool to explore the subject formation of adolescent girls, focusing on the experiences of one girl specifically. Jackson addresses masculinity as part of the conditions in which the girl’s gendered becomings are situated. Jackson employs Deleuze to think through the possibility of non-binary modes of gender performance. She explains what this might look like:

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You lift with the boys. You inhabit the molar masculine field house with your expanded body, your body that is hyperdifferentiated. You cherish this derelict space, this zone of indeterminacy. You use the same equipment as the boys; sometimes you press as much weight as they do. You spot their heavy lifting; they trust you. You crack open the existing order of the molar masculine field house to make it your own, forcing it to expand to fit you. Your becoming is in- between. You are in-between molar femininity and molar masculinity, inhabiting neither fully – sidling, straddling, sidestepping. You transform both, in the threshold. You are supermolecularity. (Jackson, 2010, p. 586)

Moving between embodying popular tropes of the feminine and the masculine, the weightlifting girl changes both masculinity and femininity through embodying them in new ways. This example shows how Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts help both the researcher, the reader and possibly the research participant to understand the experience of being and becoming gendered. Examining the expanded field of gender in the sociology of education more broadly, Angervall’s (2016) paper “The Academic Career: A Study of Subjectivity, Gender and Movement Among Women University Lecturers” reports on a study of “what it means to do academic work”, in which 19 female academics reflect on opportunities and conditions in their career. Deleuze and Guattari are drawn on in the author’s efforts to explore these experiences in relation to the idea of a ‘becoming subjectivity’. The paper examines masculinity as part of the conditions in which women academics are recognised as academic subjects. The concept of the nomadic subject is employed to get a deeper understanding of the process of a ‘becoming subjectivity’ in academia. Angervall suggests that During the course of the analysis, I have been inspired by a materialistic understanding … of the investigated subjects, but also more and more by Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987, 1994) and Braidotti’s (2010) work. From my point of view, the process of becoming is a physical (material) and mental process. (2016, p. 108)

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It is this response to lived experiences and lived worlds that seems important. Angervall continues, and defines a Deleuzoguattarian model for gendered subjectivity through explaining: Accordingly, the women academics in this study are seen as in constant processes of becoming, changing and mediating levels of power and desires, and as searching for recognition and appreciation. Being in transit is not a target in itself for these academic lecturers: on the one hand, it is a strategy for using and gaining various kinds of resources. On the other hand, it is an expression of ambivalence and the uncertainty of existence. (2016, p. 108)

There is a relationship here between gendered (and, in this instance, professional) change and Deleuze and Guattari’s thought that stands out. Based on the ways in which researchers take up Deleuze and Guattari’s work in relation to empirical experiences, their concepts offer ways of better understanding social change and gendered changes when applied with a focus on understanding lived experiences. As my broad engagement with literature from the sociology of education above makes plain, there is not simply one concept or one way in which Deleuze and Guattari’s thought is of use when engaging with human subjects. While one can identify broad orientations, there is no ‘molar’, defining model. Indeed, perhaps the most obvious thing about how their writing has been used is the unifying presumption in all these works that the empirical needs to guide how we engage with theory. Taking this attention to the empirical as my own methodology, with an eye for what Maggie MacLure has characterised as data that glows, or generates wonder (2013), I now turn to a case study of my empirical data, examining the gender and identity work of two boys in a primary school in South East London. As I noted in the introduction, the case study below is drawn from a larger data set generated through ethnographic work with children and their parents across the UK and Australia.3 Identities have been anonymised. 3This work was funded the Australian Research Council Grant, FT160100293. More information can be found at www.interfaithchildhoods.com.

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David is a black British boy, six years old and full of energy. This zest for absolutely everything that captures his imagination is matched by his friend Declan, a white British six year old boy. These two boys are an ongoing part of fieldwork in this primary school. The school is in a lower socioeconomic part of London, but, being London, there are signs of gentrification springing up across some neighbouring streets. The school culture is explicitly inclusive of cultural difference, and the children are encouraged to value their heritage and culture through the ways curriculum is employed and through the approach the school takes to community engagement. There is an obvious attempt being made to focus on social and cultural wealth and not to reproduce deficit discourses of disadvantage that are embedded in the local high-rise housing areas and surrounding community. The ethnographically informed practice used to generate data here features arts workshops for children and focus groups for their parents, alongside embedded engagement with school and community culture. In my arts workshop, the children are making what I call ‘identity pictures’. These pictures can be self-portraits, a collection of favourite colours and textures, or images of things with which children identify. Often children draw objects or symbols such as mobile phones or flags. The following ethnographic vignette is a thick description written in the first person as part of my ethnographic practice. In the thick description I draw on the idea of protest masculinity, which is a form of masculinity developed in response to class based status envy and to recuperate wounding caused by an absent father. Often protest masculinity is a striated gender identity, that is to say, it is the way in which men who perform a protest masculinity have learnt to be men and their attachment to their gender identity is rigid: they are not able to change. Elliott’s (2018) empirical work with men examining intergenerational relationships between men shows the lack of flexibility associated with protest masculinity. She explains: “Men’s muscular bodies are not in and of themselves indicative of performances of hegemonic masculinity or anti-feminist sentiment. However, men’s work on hard, muscular bodies in late modernity can be seen as referencing older modes and

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presentations of masculinity and regulating the kinds of masculinity deemed acceptable or not in post-industrial nations” (Elliott, 2018, p. 5). Protest, as performed through developing a muscular body, as performed though anger, and resentment, is a form of recuperation of gendered identity. It is a mark of privilege to be able to change the way in which one performs gender identity. Elliott further explains: The narratives that emerged from interviews with these men revealed an ability and privilege among them to maneuver in and out of varying masculine expressions and behaviors depending on the context or requirement. They could move into, within, between and out of spaces and iterations of privilege, difference, progressiveness and traditionality. This privilege of movement reflected the autonomy of these participants as masculine subjects. As Bridges and Pascoe (2014: 249) state, the documentation of masculinities in transformation among white, heterosexual young men ‘evidences the flexibility of identity afforded privileged groups.’ (Elliott, 2018, p. 7)

As Elliott so astutely notes, flexibility of identity is a marker of whiteness, as well as a marker of class privilege. Drawing on their work with young men in the North of England, McDowell and Harris (2019) also articulate protest masculinity as an expression of class-based resentment and an attempt to recuperate gender identity, and, more than this, they offer an account of some of the limits of protest masculinity. Specifically: Through a case study of the geographical reach and location of these young men’s lives, we demonstrate the ways in which the associations between particular places and a version of protest masculinity act to restrict their opportunities, not only through rising material inequality but through a discursive association with ‘dangerous’ spaces and unregulated bodies. (McDowell & Harris, 2019, p. 420)

By mourning their disadvantage through performing their anger, young men’s protest masculinity further marginalizes them, reinscribing the wounds they so vehemently protest. McDowell and Harris explain that:

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Identities may be relational and performative but they are not free floating or indefinitely changeable. Nevertheless, if young men are repeatedly told that they are undeserving, bad or dangerous, they are not only constructed within these discourses as ‘other’ but may also begin to see themselves through the eyes of others. (McDowell & Harris, 2019, p. 422)

It is seeing two boys undertake exactly this practice of acting out as ‘other’, indeed, it is their experiences of seeing themselves as ‘other’ that shone through the process of asking a class to engage in a collaborative process of exploring shared values and beliefs. Two boys could not collaborate, and this was because they felt themselves as different from the rest of their class.

Protest Masculinity for a New Millennium David and Declan are two of four boys in a class of 10, but as our individual work on identity pictures begins they move away from the large table where everyone is sitting and work on the floor. Spatially, they separate themselves from the community of children. They draw racing cars as their self-portraits. Each of them asks me to project an image of a racing car on the wall for them to look at and copy. I am struck by the gendered nature of the images they choose for their identity pictures. The racing cars ooze masculine appeal: they are light, fast, high performance, ‘sports model’ cars. The pictures they look at in thinking about how they will create their car-identity picture are the hegemonic man’s ideal accessory. While having empathy for, and some appreciation of, the boys’ choice here, I also feel they may not ever drive one of the cars at which they are looking so longingly. They are certainly not the kinds of vehicles that populate the streets of their neighbourhood. We talk about culture and identity while the boys are drawing. David tells me he is Muslim and Declan says he isn’t sure about his religion. In our fairly safe group of three, I ask what religion means to them and also ask the boys if their parents are religious and David says yes, and being Muslim is very important to him, and Declan says he doesn’t know. I try to encourage the boys to express their cultural and

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religious identities in their pictures, but feel fairly confident the images are articulations of their gender identity more than anything else. The sports car seems an ideal induction into the world of hegemonic gender identity. When it is time for the group to finish identity pictures and begin working on a collaborative painting, the boys refuse. They keep colouring in their sports cars. They carefully cut the cars out and mount them on coloured card so they can take them home and stick them up in their bedrooms. David created a multicoloured sports car (as seen in Fig. 3.1) with a spoiler and sleek lines. His image affectively communicates his youthful masculinity, as the car imagined in his picture is bright, presumably fast, and his frenetic colouring-in bounces off the page at the viewer. Declan’s identity picture is similar (Fig. 3.2), although is perhaps more clearly recognisable as a car. Blue, with red and yellow wheels and a large spoiler, Declan’s car is not as close to the ground as David’s car but is clearly a sports model. It features a racing stripe along its side. The materials, design and marketing of these vehicles all seem explicitly chosen in order to emulate ideals of masculinity as being largely concerned with performance, speed and competition. I start looking up ‘masculine cars’ on Google, which tells me that in a survey of the top 10 cars for men and subsequent speculation on what makes a car “male”, CNN identifies the Porsche 911 as the top selling car for men, explaining that: The Porsche 911 – the most overwhelmingly male passenger car – has an “Index Male to Total” of 214.3 … That’s more than double the average. The car’s “Index Female to Total,” on the other hand, is just 14.3. It’s surprising the 911 doesn’t grow hair on its hood and eat Krispy Kreme for breakfast. Other cars at the top of the masculinity dial include the exotic Ford GT supercar, Maserati Spyder, Jaguar XK8 sports car and the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution. You get the idea: If it’s very fast, awfully fast, terribly fast or way, way too fast, guys like it. Also, they tend to be expensive. (Valdes-Dapena, 2006)

Both the boys’ cars look like they are supposed to be fast. Terribly fast. And arguably, the bright colours of the cars are a youthful version of the ‘hairy chest’ and ‘krispy crème for breakfast’ that CNN equates with masculine identity: a vernacular semiotic of youthful masculinity. Even once the

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Fig. 3.1  David’s car

Fig. 3.2  Declan’s identity picture

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‘identity’ pictures have been completed, the boys will not join in the group project. They want to show me the playground and so I let them take me outside. I am carried into their refrain, their embodied song of belonging. This embodied song of belonging is a way of marking out a territory. As Deleuze and Guattari remind us: Everyone, at every age, in the smallest things as in the greatest challenges, seeks a territory, tolerates or carries out deterritorializations, and is reterritorialized on almost anything—memory, fetish, or dream. Ritornellos express these powerful dynamisms (1983, pp. 310–350). The two boys have a series of practices that they repeat in space, which clearly mark out their territory and also claim their identity as a molar form of masculinity, as being a centre of power. We run across the asphalt to their ‘secret tunnel’ which tracks through the middle of the hedges along the school border. As I crouch down to get inside, the boys tell me “this is our secret place. No grown-ups know about it”. This secret place is their territory. Their running through their secret place is like Deleuze’s ‘hum’, carving pathways in space and time. Deleuze reflects: “When do I tralala? When do I hum? I hum in three various occasions. I hum when I go around my territory … and that I clean up my furniture with a radiophonic background … meaning when I am at home. I also hum when I am not at home and that I am trying to reach back my home …. I look for my way and I give myself some courage by singing tralala. I go toward home. And, I hum when I say ‘Farewell, I am leaving and in my heart I will bring…’ . ….. In other words, the ritournelle (refrain), for me, is absolutely linked to the problem of territory, and of processes of entrance or exit of the territory” (Deleuze, 1996). Like the hum soothes the weary traveller, or performs delight in the home, the boys skip through their well-worn pathways, their bouncing steps a refrain of joy. I am loathe to point out that I am in fact one of the forbidden ‘grown-ups’ from whom they believe they are hiding, I concur that it is indeed an excellent tunnel and run along (still crouching) behind the boys until they reach a tall part of the hedge where they can climb up and “look out over the whole school”. This geography is their place, their bodies in this place sing with happiness, temporarily free from the striations of the schoolyard.

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I join in with them in surveilling the asphalt but wonder exactly how hidden I am from those having their sports lesson. Kumm and Johnson agree that identity and spatiality are enmeshed in ways we are only beginning to understand. They explain that: “more often than not, … scholarship tends to locate identity politics within ideological struggles and disciplinary discourses of hegemony. We ask you to consider whether it is even possible to think ‘identity’ outside spatiality. The term we often use to describe our identities – ‘positionality’ – is one of spatial arrangements” (Kumm & Johnson, 2017, p. 903). For these two boys, their position in the school space and their close observation of the school space was central to how they performed their masculinity, which was affirmed through their superior knowledge of the other children’s activities (indeed, even adults’ activities) in the schoolyard. The three of us play ‘tag’ in the yard for the last half an hour until it is home time, the boys squealing as we run as fast as we can, trying to catch each other. When David’s mum comes to get him, I go out to meet her and show her his beautiful car picture. She is nursing a new baby, David’s infant sister. I introduce myself and we chat, and in an attempt to open up discussion about culture and identity, I ask “So, you are Muslim?”. David’s mum looks at me as if I had just said something very surprising. “No, what gives you that idea?” she asks, seemingly disturbed. Embarrassed, I quickly double-check my notes. David had definitely told us he was Muslim, and my notes and confirm this. “Oh, I’m sorry, is your partner Muslim?” I ask, genuinely apologetic. “No, we are Liberal Christian Lesbians” the mother replies, “where did all this being Muslim come from?”. I rather awkwardly explain that David had told me he was Muslim and I had believed him. I immediately realise that pretending to be Muslim is a protest against the striations of living with the Christian religion at home. For David, religion is lived as “that which intertwines fixed and variable elements, produces an order and succession of distinct forms, organizes horizontal…lines with vertical…planes” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 478). Religion is a striating force that binds his home together and organizes it, giving form and shape to life. It provides a striated structure against which he wants to rebel. David’s playing at being Muslim is a form of subversion and critique (Nash & Penney, 2015, p. 5). It is a form of play that “produces excess upon excess, …[and] allows us to assert that the productivity of play is radical” (Nash & Penney, 2015, p. 8).

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David, his mother and I go inside to look at the drawings and group paintings made across the course of the afternoon. The mother, clearly a very engaged and self-reflexive person, is puzzled by my story about David being Muslim and she asks David “What religion are you, David?”. And David enthusiastically replies “Muslim!”. “Do you want to be Muslim, David?” the mother asks. “I think I should take you to a mosque and church”, she suggests to her son. “Would you like to visit the mosque and the church?” she asks him. The mother goes on to tell me that her and her partner are actually very Christian and she is the youth minister for her congregation. Turning to David, she tries a new approach to getting him thinking about his religion. “Who do we worship at home, David?” she asks. “You, mummy” David yells, pointing his finger at his mother, who is cradling and rocking her newborn while looking rather exasperated. Clearly, David’s “Muslim” identity is, in fact, a form of protest masculinity: “protest masculinity represents an unconscious defensive manoeuvre on the part of males who are in conflict about or who are insecure about their identities as males” (Broude, 1990, p. 103). David is not simply insecure about his gender identity—the intersectionality of race, class, religion and gender is clearly shaping his experience of subjectivity. Being the only male and the only black person in his family, as well as being the older child at a time when his mother is clearly utterly besotted with her youngest, has left David feeling like an outsider. The mother held her sixmonth-old baby in her arms throughout our conversation, and David jumped off chairs and ran around crying out while we chatted. I realise that David is not only resentful of his parents’ focus on the church and the children in their congregation, he is jealous of the attention his new sister receives. Over the course of our conversation I learn that both David’s parents are white, which he would be beginning to notice acutely at this stage of his development. Little wonder he is trying to develop identity narratives that separate him from his family, as he feels separated already. He not only feels like the older child who gets less attention, he is also a child who is a different colour from his mummies, and who (hopefully temporarily) feels he plays second best not just to his baby sister but to his mother’s congregation. The choice ‘not to fit in’ by opting out of the group activities makes a lot more sense now. So too does David’s insistent focus on creating his very masculine

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identity portrait. It was, perhaps, a way of affirming himself as a legitimate male subject, despite his feeling otherwise. This story sticks. Across countries, across years, I think about David as I meet dozens of very different Muslim boys. Maggie MacLure explains fieldwork moments such as this anecdote above as data that glows, or data that generates ‘wonder’. She says: there is, I suggest, another potentiality associated with data, beyond and beside their capacity for mute surrender to the colonialist administrations of social science. This potentiality can be felt on occasions where something – perhaps a comment in an interview, a fragment in a field note, an anecdote, an object, or a strange facial expression – seems to reach out from the inert corpus (corpse) of the data, to grasp us. … they exert a kind of fascination, and have capacity to animate further thought. (MacLure, 2013, p. 228)

Not only did this conversation between David and his mother change how I was able to understand his choice to be an outsider, it resonated through numerous future workshops. David’s story glowed. The image of David pointing his finger at his mother, saying ‘you, mummy’, stayed with me, as the child protesting the adult’s authority, and challenging the striations of religious life. Thinking through David’s identity work, I recognise the interplay of political and physical dynamics that Deleuze and Guattari refer to as striation and smoothing and the identity poles of molar and molecular. David’s parents were rigidly striating his identity: requiring him to be Christian. They also called him to undertake a very specific kind of identity work, as white same-sex parents choosing to create a black baby had established a specific identity agenda for David in which he was called to reconcile feelings of being an outsider. In later discussions with the mother, I realised she had always been the outsider in her family, as the only child to be sent to tax payer funded school in an otherwise upper-class English family. Escaping this comprehensive striation, David looked to smooth space, create a line of flight or way out, and occupy a place unmapped by his parents where he can belong as a minority body sex marked male. Yet, paradoxically, he also wants to prove that his masculinity is enough, adopting molar symbols of cars and practices of spatial control in his attempts

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to recuperate his seemingly marginalized identity. David becomes the Muslim race car driver, the once marginalised young man now moving forward in his own space: with the identity he created, not the identity his mother asked him to have. Thinking through the interplay of smoothing and striating, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that: What interests us in operations of striation and smoothing are precisely the passages or combinations: how the forces at work within space continually striate it, and how in the course of its striation it develops other forces and emits new smooth spaces. … Movements, speed and slowness, are sometimes enough to reconstruct a smooth space. Of course, smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory. But the struggle is changed or displaced in them, and life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new paces, switches adversaries. Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 500)

David responds to the struggles of his life by smoothing space, by running away from class and from adults, running through the tunnels in the hedges that border the school, watching out at others so that he does not feel like the object of attention, but rather, observes others at last, with his friend, safe from scrutiny. David’s smooth space of phantasy is created partly by his mother’s striations of religious identity. David is clearly not saved by his smoothing of space. His sports car is an affiliation of desire rather than an actual means of escape. His Muslim identity, too, is an imagined way of belonging to a minoritarian and racialised culture, a culture which feels like it is a more apposite site of identification for him than his white parents’ Christian community. His imaginative play in the classroom and in the secret tunnels of the hedges are a minor refrain. He clearly feels he belongs to a minority,4 and it seems to me that indeed he does.

4Deleuze

and Guattari explain that:

What defines a minority, then, is not the number but the relations internal to the number. A minority can be numerous … What distinguishes them is that in the case of a majority the relation internal to the number constitutes a set that may be finite or infinite, but is always denumerable, whereas the minority is defined as a non-denumerable set, however many elements it may have. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 470, emphasis added)

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Conclusion This chapter has canvassed the different ways in which Deleuze and Guattari’s work characterises boyhood, and alternatively, can be seen to be of use in better understanding experiences of boyhood. Contemporary experiences of learning masculinity while growing up as a boy are striated by psychoanalytic ideas about sexual and psychological development. These are ideas that are a core part of the social and cultural fabric of contemporary cultures. While scholarly studies of ‘the root cause’ of psychoanalytic constructions of gender are numerous, I am not looking to make a significant contribution to this field as much as provide an understanding of the impact of Hans on both Deleuze and Guattari’s work and contemporary landscapes of masculinity studies. Such an understanding, however, can only offer one aspect or reading or the lived experience of contemporary experience of boyhood, or indeed gender. As I have shown, work in the sociology of education maps the lived experience of gender in relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s work in ways that suggest the psychoanalytic boy is not necessarily central to lived social and cultural experiences of gender in everyday life. This work suggests that space, time, language, the body, curriculum are all significant for boys’ identity. My ethnographic vignette articulates protest masculinity as a practice of smoothing space, of using imaginative play and visual art to develop a gendered identity that responds to lived experiences of marginalisation and imagines a molar subjectivity. Here, Deleuze and Guattari’s thought is a resource that helps navigate the expanded social field of lived cultural and gender identity, rather than a model for how gender unfolds. As this chapter has shown, Deleuze’s work clearly offers useful methods for understanding children’s experiences of learning gender and identity, even if it is not his work on childhood that proves most useful when thinking about children’s lives. I now turn my attention to intersections of masculinity and disability, in an attempt to explicate some of the ways in which disability is produced as gendered.

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Works Cited Ainsworth, M. D. S. (1989). Attachments beyond infancy. American Psychologist, 44(4), 709–716. Angervall, P. (2016). The academic career: A study of subjectivity, gender and movement among women university lecturers. Gender and Education, 30(1), 105–118. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2016.1184234. Blaise, M. (2013). Charting new territories: Re-assembling childhood sexuality in the early years classroom. Gender and Education, 25(7), 801–817. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2013.797070. Bowlby, J. (1990). A secure base: Parent-child attachment and healthy human development. London and New York, NY: Routledge. Brazelton, T. (1983). Developmental framework of infants and children: A future for pediatric responsibility. Journal of Pediatrics, 102(6), 967–972. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0022-3476(83)80036-5get. Bretherton, I. (1992). The origins of attachment theory: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth. Developmental Psychology, 28, 759–775. Broude, G. J. (1990). Protest masculinity: A further look at the causes and the concept. Ethos, 18(1), 103–122. Brown, J. A. C. (1961). Freud and the post Freudians. New York, NY: Penguin. Cervoni, C., & Ivinson, G. (2011). Girls in primary school science classrooms: Theorising beyond dominant discourses of gender. Gender and Education, 23(4), 461–475. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2010.506868. Connell, R. W. (2000). The men and the boys. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Corbett, K. (2009). Boyhoods: Rethinking masculinities. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Deleuze, G. (1990). Expressionism in philosophy: Spinoza (M. Joughin, Trans.). New York, NY: Zone Books. Deleuze, G. (1996). L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze. France: Sodaperaga Producations. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-Oedipus (R. Hurley, M. Seem, & H. R. Lane, Trans., Vol. 1). Minneapolis and New York: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988). A thousand plateaus (B. Massumi, Trans., Vol. 2). London and New York: Continuum. Deleuze, G., Guattari, F., Parnet, C., & Scala, A. (2007). The interpretation of utterances (A. Hodges & M. Taormina, Trans.). In D. Lapoujade (Ed.), Two regimes of madness: Texts and interviews 1975–1995 (pp. 89–112). New York: Semiotext(e).

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Edel, R. R. (1968). What Little Hans learned. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 4(2), 189–204. https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.1968.10745138. Elliott, K. (2018). Negotiations between progressive and ‘traditional’ expressions of masculinity among young Australian men. Journal of Sociology. https://doi.org/10.1177/1440783318802996. Farrell, F. (2015). ‘We’re the mature people’: A study of masculine subjectivity and its relationship to key stage four religious studies. Gender and Education, 27(1), 19–36. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2014.976183. Freud, S. (1907). An open letter to Dr. M. Fürst. Essaydocs. Retrieved from http://essaydocs.org/the-complete-works-of-sigmund-freud-works-psychical.html?page=160. Freud, S. (1963). The sexual enlightenment of children (E. B. M. Herford, D. Bryan, J. Strachey, & E. Colburn Mayne, Trans.). New York: Macmillan. Freud, S. (1965). Three essays on the theory of sexuality (J. Strachey, Trans.). London: Basic Books and Avon. Freud, S. (2002). The “wolfman” and other cases. London: Penguin. Harwood, V., Hickey-Moody, A., McMahon, S., & O’Shea, S. (2016). The politics of widening participation and university access for young people: Making educational futures. London: Routledge. Harwood, V., & Rasmussen, M. L. (2004). Problematising gender and sexual identities. Research Gate. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/ publication/306228445_Problematising_gender_and_sexual_identities. Hickey-Moody, A. (2009). Unimaginable bodies: Intellectual disability, performance and becomings. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense. Hickey-Moody, A. (2013). Deleuze’s children. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 45(3), 272–286. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2012.741523. Hickey-Moody, A. (2018). Little Hans and the pedagogies of heterosexuality. In M. P. J. Bohlmann & A. Hickey-Moody (Eds.), Deleuze and children (pp. 29–47). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Jackson, A. Y. (2010). Deleuze and the girl. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23(5), 579–587. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398. 2010.500630. Klaus, M. H., & Kennell, J. H. (1976). Maternal-infant bonding. St. Louis: Mosby. Koyuncu, E. (2017). Psychoanalysis of Little Hans: Deleuze and Guattari’s case against Freud. Dialogues in Philosophy and Social Sciences, 10(2), 69–81. Kumm, B. E., & Johnson, C. W. (2017). Subversive imagination: Smoothing space for leisure, identity, and politics. In K. Spracklen, B. Lashua, E. Sharpe, & S. Swain (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of leisure theory (pp. 891– 910). London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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MacLure, M. (2013). The wonder of data. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 13(4), 228–232. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708613487863. MacLure, M. (2016). The refrain of the A-grammatical child: Finding another language in/for qualitative research. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 16(3), 173–182. MacLure, M. (2018). Encounters and materiality in intimate scholarship: A conversation with Maggie MacLure. In K. Strom, T. Mills, & A. Ovens (Eds.), Decentering the researcher in intimate scholarship (Advances in Research on Teaching, Vol. 31) (pp. 197–204). Bingley: Emerald Publishing. McDowell, L., & Harris, A. (2019). Unruly bodies and dangerous spaces: Masculinity and the geography of ‘dreadful enclosures’. Urban Studies, 56(2), 419–433. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098018810320. Mooney, C. (2010). Theories of attachment. St. Paul, MN: Red Leaf. Nash, A., & Penney, T. (2015). The radical productivity of play. Philosophy of Computer Games Conference. Retrieved from https://www.academia. edu/17157995/The_Radical_Productivity_of_Play. Renold, E., Ringrose, J., & Danielle E. R. (2016). Children, sexuality and sexualization. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Ringrose, J. (2018). Digital feminist pedagogy and post-truth misogyny. Teaching in Higher Educations, 3(5), 647–656. Ringrose, J., & Coleman, R. (Eds.). (2013). Deleuze and research methodologies (1st ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ringrose, J., Warfield, K., & Zarabadi, S. (2018). Feminist posthumanisms, new materialisms and education. Abingdon: Taylor & Francis. Ross, J. M. (2007). Trauma and abuse in the case of Little Hans: A contemporary perspective. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 3(55), 779–797. Valdes-Dapena, P. (2006). Top cars: Men vs. women. When it comes to cars, it’s easy to figure out what men are after. It’s women who are complicated. Retrieved from http://edition.cnn.com/2005/AUTOS/funonwheels/06/06/ male_cars/index.html. Winnicott, D., Brazelton, T. B., Greenspan, S. I., & Spock, B. (2002). Winnicott on the child. Cambridge, UK: Perseus Publishing. Wolpe, J., & Rachman, S. (1964). A critique of Freud’s Case of Little Hans. In Eugene A. Southwell & Michael Merbaum (Eds.), Personality theory and research. Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing Co.

4 Masculinity, Disability and Sexual Publics

The field of disability studies has engaged with Deleuze and Guattari’s work in a fashion almost unprecedented by other empirically oriented disciplines, perhaps with the exception of education. In this chapter, I survey work on the sociology of disability, and disability studies more broadly, in which Deleuze, and Deleuze and Guattari’s, work has provided scholars with useful resources to think through social and cultural dynamics articulating across disability. The ways disability and masculinity are formulated in relation to each other is a contentious issue, because the social construction of disability often regulates the kinds of publics that are called to engage with texts featuring men with disabilities, and the kinds of context in which men with disabilities are welcomed. Taking my cue from the preceding chapter, I do not go so far as to suggest exactly what a Deleuzo-Guattarian informed version of disability studies might look like. Rather, I show some ways that Deleuze’s thought helps us to better understand the gendered politics of the lives of men with a disability and provides insight into the social production of the gendered nature of disability as it articulates in relation to sexuality. Before undertaking my own textual analysis of ­popular cultural texts about masculinity and disability, I examine the © The Author(s) 2019 A. Hickey-Moody, Deleuze and Masculinity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01749-1_4

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gendered nature of hierarchies of disability, paying particular attention to the ways disability is implicated in configurations of sexuality. I make some suggestions about how Deleuze and Guattari’s thought facilitates new perspectives on disability, masculinity and sexuality. In so doing, I focus in on a case study of the photographer Michael Stokes’ work on war veterans. I couple this with a consideration of the 2017 Hollywood film Me Before You, which offers a popular representation of the life, struggles and death of a man with a disability. Both these texts work from the presumption that being sexually attractive, active and romantically involved has primary significance in affirming social value for men and plays the most foundational role in building men’s self-esteem. My choice of the two examples that form the focus for this chapter was shaped by the kinds of publics the texts call to attention. Both Stokes’ photographs, and Me Before You speak to popular ideas of attractive and desirable masculinity. Most texts that position men with a ­disability (or with multiple disabilities) as a sexual pursuer, or the site of a woman’s heterosexual fantasy, are created for a subcultural audience. Texts such as Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (1997), or Hustler White (1996), present men with disabilities as sexually active and empowered, yet would be of interest to a very small viewing public. By ‘a subcultural audience’, or small viewing public I mean people already interested in disability rights, or sexual fetish, or perhaps (although less likely) those already living with a disability. For example, 12.6% of the North American male public live with a disability, however the representations of sexuality advanced in films such as those mentioned above will likely only appeal to those who are comfortable with sado-masochist practices and homosexuality as well as those who are interested in representations of disability. As such, the examples I have chosen to discuss here have been selected because, although for me they are problematic in many ways, they are also significant because they are designed to appeal to publics who might not have thought about masculinity outside popular hegemonic ideals and, furthermore, might not have thought about masculinity and disability at all. Positioning a man with a disability as a sexual pursuer in the imagination of these publics is a significant act. As such, despite the problems with the texts I have chosen for my case study, they are

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politically significant. Stokes’ photographs of, and engagement with, North American war veterans’ challenges narratives of pity directed towards men with disabilities. Stokes’ photographs present veterans as physically active, strong and sexually desirable men. While there have been some critical receptions of Stokes’ work, as I go on to show, the meta textual (or ‘big picture’) intervention made by his work into sexualised publics is of value. The war veterans in Stokes’ images are clearly sexual and sexualized subjects and they present as if they feel confident about their body and their sexuality. In contrast to Stokes’ lived engagement with men with disabilities, especially veterans, the North American Hollywood film Me Before You received broad criticisms from disability rights groups when it screened, and while I agree with existing criticisms, I approach the text as a very conventional mainstream romantic genre film, and I examine the positionality of the disabled man as the object of sexual desire as a shift for the Hollywood romance as a genre. I consider the kinds of genres and publics that are mobilised and spoken to though film in relation to disability and problematize class and gender as key themes in the text. For example, Me Before You contains clear messages about appropriate forms of (hetero)sexuality. My reading of Stokes’ photography and Me Before You takes after Leslie Roman’s (2009) framing of media campaigns as a form of public pedagogy. Roman asks how public pedagogy and media articulates particular investments, desires and values related to your everyday understanding of invisible and visible impairments and the ways in which discourses of normalcy are taught. She considers the ‘zones of exception’ created in the hierarchy for disability rights clams and human rights struggles for women with invisible impairments. Roman goes on to highlight the much needed advancements of the disability rights movements, but shows us how women with invisible impairments face certain paradoxes and challenges. As bodies with physical impairments can be verified as disabled and therefore are seen as being “truthful” to the disabled experience, whereas invisible impairments such as neurological impairments, low level learning disabilities, mental illness, asthma, fibromyalgia, hearing loss, chronic pain, are often left out of the epistemological starting points of disability research and everyday language around disabled life and access. Using media campaigns as a source

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of public pedagogy, Roman explains “as forms of public pedagogy, ­invisible impairment campaigns articulate and attempt to construct particular notions of ‘the public and the public good’ which may serve as calls to identify with particular gender, class, racial, ethnic, dis/ability, sexuality and national bodies/minds politics. As such, it behoves us to consider their educational, cultural and political implications since notions of inclusion hinge on their understanding of whom is included in the campaigns and what the rights-based implications are that follow from their omissions and commissions” (2009, pp. 678–679). Therefore, these campaigns organise the meanings of and citizenship in the zones of inclusion/exclusion. Roman claims that the reproduction of the hierarchy of the visible is superior to, and more credible than, the invisible and the visible also pervades the disability movement and goes beyond it. “How this hierarchical relationship is produced requires a finely-grained sociological analysis to understand its complexities. It parallels other hierarchies of skin colour and colorism or blood quantum in common-sense understandings of racialisation that produce ambivalence” (Roman, 2009, p. 679). Roman concludes with the idea that visible disabilities have taken center stage in disability rights movements and the mainstream media campaigns, but it is crucial to remind the public and the institutions that it is important to understand and perceive how differently impaired people are discriminated against or perceived. While deconstructing the affective ideologies at work in public campaigns about invisible disabilities is a significant task, it is important to place such public pedagogical texts in their cultural, economic and political contexts. This article asks how public pedagogical texts mobilise particular meanings about whose bodies/minds matter or figure? How do they articulate particular affective investments, desires, and values related to our everyday understanding of invisible and visible impairments, and the ways in which discourses of ‘normalcy’ are taught? (Roman, 2009, p. 678)

The films I examine for my case study of public pedagogies of disability are imbricated in how discourses of ‘normalcy’ are taught and are very much part of the ways in which these discourses of normalcy are

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configured. Yet, at the same time they are partial representations of (or at the very least, gestures towards) the sexual identities and worlds of disabled men in the midst of a sea of Hollywood block busters about able bodied people falling in love, and images of muscly men without impairment that fill our public spaces: magazine stands, billboards, television commercials—the list could go on. The point that I later go on to explore as this chapter develops, is that particular modes of citizenship are activated through different publicly available texts: images and films call a public to attention and reward particular forms of citizenship. In considering Michael Stokes’ work with veterans and Me Before You, I think through the ways that Deleuze’s work on pity and affect can be used to understand how the texts operate and provide access to new ways of thinking about identity politics in film. In preparation for these case studies, I begin by thinking about disability as a gendered construct in everyday life.

Hierarchies of Disability, Masculinity and Sexuality Disability studies is an interdisciplinary and expanding field. Physical, intellectual, psychiatric disabilities are profoundly different, but all also need to be understood as disabilities, and are respectively considered as such within disability studies literature. Across disciplines and methodologies such as literary studies, cultural studies, media studies, sociology and social work, the diverse spectrum of experiences that constitute the field of disability are accompanied by just as many medicalised discourses that frame people with a disability in very limited ways. These medical discourses of disability are, in Deleuze’s words, striations and overcodings that shape how human beings come to be known socially, culturally and medically, and also shape how they come to know themselves. Within this complex array of experiences, knowledges and subject formations, vernacular cultural logics that articulate within and around disability cultures reproduce gender and sexuality in stereotypically heterosexual ways. As Leslie Roman suggests in the literature canvased above, there are hierarchies of power that are constructed

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and mapped across disability in ways that are explicitly gendered, and in what follows I will show that discourses of disability have particular dimensions that articulate in relation to masculinity. Drawing on Deleuze, I suggest that often medical knowledges and media representations of masculinity limit the capacity of men, especially men with disabilities. Rather than harnessing the uniqueness of the sexuality of men with a disability, medical knowledges tend to express bodies in terms of what they can’t do, and media representations often value bodies in ways that overlook their uniqueness. Valuing specificity and capacities to act, not embodied limits, is framed by Deleuze (1992, p. 269) as an ethical project. He explains this through stating: To do all we can do is our ethical task properly so called. It is here that the Ethics takes the body as model; for every body extends its power as far as it can. In a sense every being, each moment, does all it can. ‘What it can do’ is its capacity to be affected, which is necessarily and constantly exercised by the thing’s relation with other beings. But in another sense, our capacity to be affected may be exercised in such a way that we are cut off from our power of action, and such that this incessantly diminishes. In this second sense it can happen that we live cut off from ‘what we can do’. This indeed is the fate of most men, most of the time. The weak man, the slave, is not someone of lesser strength in absolute terms. The weak man is he who, whatever his strength, remains cut off from his power of action, kept in slavery or impotence. To do all we can amounts to two things: How to exercise our capacity to be affected in such a way that our power of action increases? And how increase this power to the point where, finally, we produce active affections? (Deleuze, 1992, p. 269)

Rather than taking every unique body as a model, medical discourses take an imagined ‘normal’ body as a model (Hickey-Moody, 2009), as do most media representations. Goodley, Runswick-Cole and Liddiard redefine this un-ethical ‘normal’ basis for the human through the concept of the Dis-human. They state that, by positing a notion of the: DisHuman condition, we want to retain this complex emerging conception of disability: that transcends boundaries of impairment/disability; personal/public and self/other. Crucially, we consider disability to broaden

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what it means to be human; to respect but also go beyond notions of autonomy, competence and choice and to think again about the extended qualities associated with what it means to be human. Finally, and perhaps simply, our framing of disabled childhoods in terms of the DisHuman condition makes a case for thinking about childhood, culture and society in ways that contest the rigidity of what counts as human. (Goodley, Runswick-Cole, & Liddiard, 2016, p. 782)

Yet before such opening up of the ‘human’ as benchmark, indeed, as a set of limits, we find models for being that ‘cut off’ people with a disability from their power of action, by calling for them to be something other than what they are, or by comparing them to others with very different kinds of disability. The hierarchical (and gendered) organisation of disability in informal disability cultures and mainstream, ‘ableist’ cultures is discussed by a number of scholars (e.g. Gill, 2015; Kumari Campbell, 2009; McRuer, 2006, 2018; Roman, 2009) and, broadly speaking, I would argue that these are ways of cutting off people with a disability from their power of action and their capacity to be affected. I am certainly not alone in advancing this point of contention. For example, in an article published in Masculinities and Social Change called “Disabled Masculinities: A Review and Suggestions for Further Research”, Barrett (2014) identifies a number of limitations shaping the ways masculinity is constructed in the lives of men with a disability. After characterising these limited constructions as the ‘dilemma of disabled masculinity’, or the problem of trying to unite antithetical subjects (which are taken here as being disability and masculinity), Barrett argues that various disabilities and impairments potentially characterise very different (non-essentialist) relationships between men and masculinities/gender identities than research to date has been able to examine. For example, there are significant differences between acquired and congenital impairments; there has typically been a broader social research focus on the former, although not necessarily a strong rationale for why this is the case. However, this is changing.1 Barrett cites a few studies, 1Barrett

argues that a closer analysis of these complexities may provide a deeper understanding and a challenge to homogenising ‘disabled’ men.

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such as Joseph and Lindegger’s 2007 examination of visual impairment and ‘idealised masculinities’ as the beginnings of change in traditional landscapes of masculinity research into impairment. Significantly, Barrett suggests that the prevailing focus of the ‘dilemma of disabled masculinity’ misses the generative opportunity to consider how disability may add to masculinity, rather than always detract from masculinity. Barrett encourages mindfulness of how masculinities have evolved over time and quite rightly argues that these changes need to be taken up to inform the field of disability studies. Such a change will engender playing closer attention to how young men of today are rejecting typical characteristics of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ and are more often comfortable with physical affection and homosexuality. Barrett makes two points of particular interest and significance— firstly, that the seemingly accidental fetishisation of acquired injury within the social sciences has shaped inquiry into masculinity in disability studies in unnecessarily limited ways, and, secondly, that there needs to be a greater reconsideration of, and engagement with, what might constitute masculinity in contemporary cultural formations. Both these lines of address provide fruitful orientation for further studies and show how existing research on disability and masculinity, perhaps unwittingly, creates particular limits to the ways in which disabled men can be thought. Too often within such discourses, ‘masculinity’ is associated with unachievable ideals for men with disabilities. For example, in the 2014 essay “Masculinity and Strokes: The Challenges Presented to Younger Men by Chronic Illness”, published in Journal of Gender Studies, Kvigne et al. examine healthcare implications for men with disabilities that they have acquired through strokes. The authors draw on the concept of hegemonic masculinity and narrative analysis to describe how one of their Norwegian participants, “John”, who had a stroke at 45, lived with the effects. They argue John had to go through a process of renegotiating his masculinity, as his impairments meant that his life changed dramatically: “John’s relationship with his wife and other men changed post-stroke. He was challenged to negotiate his masculine identity” (Kvigne et al., 2013, p. 207). A central part of this renegotiation was swapping (gendered) roles with his wife.

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That is, John took up domestic/child care while his wife earned money. Various tensions persisted in the relationship, including his capability in this role being questioned. Although the authors state he accepted his new role, the significant turning points of his recovery aligned with what we might see as hegemonic masculinity (i.e. being able to drive again, being able to visit a cabin retreat on his own). Another tension highlighted was that hegemonic masculinity may interfere with how medical professionals respond to people like John. Underestimating the amount of support that a man might need is a common response to performances of hegemonic masculinity. This was illustrated by a particularly low point in which John ended up back in hospital and was deemed to have had a mental health breakdown due to stress and lack of support. Kvigne et al. rightly argue that medical professionals need to understand the influence of gender roles much better in order to offer adequate support to people with disabilities: On an emotional level, dysfunction and the discontinuity of normal life resulted in distress and anxiety. These issues and concerns affect men’s image of their masculinity as it relates to physical strength, strength as a provider and protector of the family, independence, practical abilities, sexual abilities and personal control over life. (Kvigne et al., 2013, p. 198)

It is interesting to think about this breakdown as what Deleuze calls a sad affect, as a mourning of something one does not have. He explains “out of sadness is born a desire, which is hate. This desire is linked to other desires, other passions: antipathy, derision, contempt, envy, anger and so on” (1992, p. 243). The sad affect of losing hegemonic masculinity (in the limited terms in which he had been taught to recognise it) drove John to hospital. A more expansive model of masculinity would perhaps engender less sad affect, across all kinds of disability. Another model of masculinity and disability can be found in the literature on impairment as disability that intersects with the extensive body of work on veteran men. In “Love and Limblessness: Male Heterosexuality, Disability, and the Great War”, Bourke (2016) describes the aftermath of the Great War in relation to British men’s

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masculinity, disability and social norms around gender, sexuality and marriage. Using the film The Jilt (1922) and newspaper articles, Bourke argues that social norms meant wounded soldiers were generally pitied and seen as ‘less-than-men’, even while simultaneously being read as better subjects for procreation due to their supposed bravery and strength. The practice of ‘strongly encouraging’ women to marry men who had been wounded in war and have children with them2 became popularised as a result of this belief that soldiers were more brave than men who had not been to war. Particular discourses of patriotism began to articulate around, and in relation to, disabled veteran bodies: The bodies of these disabled citizens could not be portrayed as ‘deformed’ or ‘defective’; rather, they were young, previously healthy, masculine bodies that had been ‘broken’ while performing their patriotic duty. (Bourke, 2016, p. 5)

This re-inscription of the wound symbolizes strength. The veteran as ‘broken’ man is much more than the sum of his parts: he is a symbolic manifestation of sacrifice. The signification of service embodied by the absence of a limb is thus imbued with particular masculine significance. In my discussion of Michael Stokes’ photography later in this chapter, I give some examples of the explicit sexualisation of amputee veterans and explore possibilities for reinscribing the prosthetic limb, and indeed the amputated limb, as a phallus. Disability, especially acquired physical disability, is often read as symbolising sexual impotence, which is not always the case. Bourke (2016, p. 7) reminds us that for many people: “…loss of sexual function or ability were in themselves regarded as destroying a man” and situates the production of hegemonic masculinity in relation to what she calls “[t]he six props of masculinity”, namely, “appearance,

2Various conflicts and tensions are discussed, such as the expectation of women to propose marriage, debates about marrying for pity rather than love, the significance and usefulness of men who have wounded genitals, wounded ex-soldiers rejection of pity (as emasculating), the idea of ‘spinster women’, and the ever present fear of eugenics. While Bourke paints an interesting historical picture, there is some lack of cohesion between the many aspects she considers.

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economic independence, camaraderie through the sporting body, white Britishness, and heterosexuality” (2016, p. 16). Unsurprisingly, Bourke finds the six props of masculinity were “mutually reinforcing: when one or more waned, all were to some degree undermined” (2016, p. 16). There are clear links here to Connell’s foundational work on hegemonic masculinity, but as I have treated this concept in detail earlier in this book, for my purposes in this chapter I remain focused on literature specifically examining literature concerned explicitly with disability and masculinity. Loeser, Crowley, and Pini’s (2017) collection Disability and Masculinities: Corporeality, Pedagogy and the Critique of Otherness contains some useful contemporary contributions to the field. Of particular interest is Gerard Goggin’s chapter Formatting Disability in Contemporary Variety TV: Experiments with Masculinity in The Last Leg. Goggin argues that The Last Leg remodels disability and masculinity in contrast to normative representations. He outlines the history of the show, which began as commentary for the 2012 Paralympics before evolving into a more generalist talk show, and then presents some examples that he claims shifts the terms of reference for disabled masculinities: The Last Leg is also highly regarded, especially across disability communities and publics, as a resource for showing how to ‘do disability differently’. That is, how to approach disability in a non-patronising, ‘normal’ way, presenting, discussing and laughing at its specificities and peculiarities – and, all in all, showing how we might incorporate disability into the warp and weave of a diverse contemporary society. (2017, p. 147)

Throughout Goggin’s analysis, he concedes that there are many elements about the show that are normative, such as its reliance on heterosexuality, ‘dick jokes’ and so on. Yet Goggin’s analysis also makes a persuasive case for some examples of how the program models ways to do ‘masculinity and disability differently’: “As The Last Leg has developed, it could be argued that masculinity and disability are woven into the hybrid format of the show – a kind of ‘new disability masculinity’, if you will” (2017, p. 149). Goggin also concedes the show’s limitations, reminding

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his readers that: “disability is not always synonymous with a crisis in masculinity; indeed, it can be an agent for the development of an extremely hegemonic, homosocial masculinity” (Hickey-Moody, 2015, p. 149 in Goggin, 2017, p. 153). Goggin concludes that “there is a pervasive sense in which the show struggles with the … power aspects of masculinity that make many of its transgressions rather conservative” (2017, p. 163). This is largely a reflection on the mainstream nature of the text: the show is designed as a popular television program targeting a generalist viewing public. Goggin’s analysis of the gender pedagogies of The Last Leg is astute, and the program remains significant as a public pedagogy of masculinity, as imperfect as popular media texts so often are. Outside the research sites with which Barrett, Kvigne et al., Bourke and Goggin engage, there are studies of masculinity and mental illness, and also of masculinity and intellectual disability, that are of use when thinking through how social and political hierarchies articulate with masculinity. As my engagement above with the literature suggests, amputees are often depicted in the most masculinised ways possible, or, to put this another way, as not being completely emasculated by their disability. As we see shown in the work of Michael Stokes, the veterans he photographs have largely worked very hard to reproduce a hegemonic, masculine body. The examples in this chapter are both popular treatments of physical disability, which is the least feminised form of disability experienced by men. Invisible disabilities are much more easily feminised, indeed, even ignored. Roman explains the creative work of having invisible disabilities recognized, and argues we need to change systems of capitalist recognition that often exclude people with a psychiatric disability, stating: We need to consider that productivist citizenship standards expecting everyone to work, as well as to work to the same ‘measure’ set unapproachable standards for productivity that actually injure people with specific impairments or simply cannot be met. This also means thinking through how inclusion in education in radical democratic terms can be framed when we have yet to uncouple the measure of successful participation in schooling and education from expectations of clear destinations to waged work. (Roman, 2009, p. 694)

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I do not want to ignore psychiatric and intellectual forms of disability because they are not part of my two case study texts in this chapter, so I discuss psychiatric disability and then intellectual disability briefly. In terms of hierarchies of gendered performance, psychiatric disability is positioned as lesser on the scale of ‘masculine competition’, as foreshadowed in Romans’ (2009) argument that invisible disability is feminised. Men have often matured physically and gone through puberty before they develop a psychiatric illness and their sexual subjectivity is clearly part of their self-concept. In contrast to amputeeism/acquired disability and psychiatric disability, intellectual disability is often represented in the most emasculating ways, as the onset of puberty is often denied or ignored by parents or support workers who are concerned their child or client might not have the emotional maturity to negotiate a sexual relationship. As I suggest here, and go on to demonstrate further, being sexually active in particular ways is seen, in many different fora, as absolutely central to having a secure masculine identity. ‘Particular ways’ here, is largely a euphemism for heterosexuality, as McRuer articulates so clearly: Compulsory heterosexuality is intertwined with compulsory able-bodiedness; both systems work to reproduce the able body and heterosexuality. But precisely because these systems work depend on a queer/disabled existence that can never quite be contained, able bodied heterosexuality’s hegemony is always in danger of collapse. (McRuer, 2006, p. 46)

Goodley et al. (2016) explain the work that is associated with having sexuality recognized for young people with an intellectual disability, through reminding disability studies theorists that we need to ask: “in what ways can disabled young people carve out (desired) normative sexual identities and subjectivities (see Liddiard, 2012) at the same time as [they] experience and embrace disability as a productive, pleasurable and polymorphous in the context of gender and sex/uality?” (p. 776). This question necessarily has as many answers as there are opportunities for it to be asked. With a view to better understanding sexuality, agency and the ways sexual agency is constructed in relation to disability, Goodley et al. (2016)

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writing on DisSexuality highlights their work with the sexual self, body, pleasures and identities of disabled people and young people, as routinely problematised, surveilled, regulated, rendered unintelligible and in some contexts deemed uncontrollable and in need of containment. The authors highlight the fact that disabled people and children are often denied access to important information relating to sexual and intimate life. They claim “It is not surprising, then, given that humanness, humanity and sexuality are so tightly bound in our cultures, that sexual normalcy subsists as a very powerful cultural and political category of which to gain entry” (Goodley et al., 2016, p. 780). Moreover, sexualized and sexualizing contexts require disabled young people to claim a sexual and gendered self, body and life which often occurs among and emotionally laborious, troublesome and ultimately precarious trajectory. In other words, becoming sexual requires a disabled being to take a disabled identity into the sexual realm, as when there are limitations to things such as “putting a condom on” the disabled sexual sphere seems out of reach to sexual education teachers that cannot come up with solutions, and therefore label these people as Dissexual, that is to say, their disability is seen as preventing their sexuality. Goodley, Runswick-Cole and Liddiard further explain that: “Therefore, DisSexual ways of being can radically disrupt normative notions of sexual humanness (Liddiard and Goodley, in press), even at times where, in our research, disabled young people forcefully asserted a (naturalised) sexual subjectivity (‘I’m a sexual being’) and made claims only for normative sexual citizenship (‘I want to be [sexually] normal’), locating their rights, access, agency and embodied experiences of sex/ uality as central to their humanness” (Goodley et al., 2016, p. 781). Building on Roman, McRuer and Goodley, Runswick-Cole and Liddiard, I would argue that both intellectual disability and psychiatric disability are more easily feminised, or emasculated, than forms of physical disability. The popular construction of men with psychiatric illness is as people who are only ‘moderately’, rather than severely emasculated by their feminising disability. I agree completely with Leslie Roman’s argument above, that invisible disabilities are feminised. However, unlike people with an intellectual disability, men with psychiatric, or ‘invisible’ disabilities are seen to be legitimate sexual subjects. As Goodley, Runswick-Cole and Liddiard show us, the sexuality of young

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people with intellectual disability is seen as transgressive in profound ways, indeed, to such an extent their sexuality is seen as disrupting what it might mean to be human: Feeling and enacting ‘human’ in such ways are undoubtedly rooted in lives and selves consistently devalued and dehumanised … DisSexuality draws on disability to invoke (emancipatory) posthuman modes of sex/ uality which value (and celebrate) inter/dependence; queer; radical relationality, collaboration and collectivity in ways that can be emancipatory for all sexual subjects. (Goodley et al., 2016, p. 781)

We can take this position as one of many possible ways of substantiating the fact that intellectual disability is seen as being a-sexual, to the extent that sexuality and intellectual disability radically challenges popular preconceptions about what it might mean to be human. Within this context, psychiatric disability is less radically desexualized than intellectual disability. Psychiatric disability does, however, remain feminised in particular ways. For example, an incredibly interesting contemporary case study on gender and mental illness can be found in Barberis’ (2017) historical essay “Hysteria in the Male: Images of Masculinity in Late Nineteenth-Century France3” (in Phallacies: Historical Intersections of Disability and Masculinity ). Barberis provides a historical perspective on the work of French psychiatrist Jean Martin Charcot who spearheaded a significant change in the understanding of ‘hysteria’. Using emerging knowledge about the brain and neurophysiology, Charcot argued that hysteria was a condition of the brain – not solely a condition of the female sex organs, as had been previously thought. Charcot diagnosed ‘male hysterics’, noting their symptoms were different to female hysterics (e.g. less heightened emotion and much more likely to be

3“Closer

to nature than upper-class men, hysterical men are closely linked to women, who have traditionally been linked to nature through the biological processes of childbearing. Hysterical men thus lie between hysterical women and the ideal of the normal man. The stability typical of their symptoms draws them closer to the ideal of the Victorian bourgeois man, supposedly characterized by emotional stability, while hysteria and susceptibility to hypnosis brings them closer to women” (Barberis, 2017, p. 188).

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depressive). In terms of gender and masculinity, Barberis argues that while Charcot’s male patients were working class and physically strong, he nonetheless ‘conceptually feminised’ them by associating their condition with ‘lower mental functions’, as has also been historically the case with women. The other parallel he drew was to relate the symptoms of hysteria to ‘animality’, in a similar fashion to the association of women being closer to nature (an association partly carried through childbirth, menstruation, breast feeding), male hysteria was seen as making men more animalistic. Barberis argues that hysteria’s connection with a supposed lower mental state hasn’t been given enough attention in research and that social constructions of masculinity overall are deeply entwined with the history of hysteria. However, as I note above, the development of psychiatric illness after puberty does still lead to a typically more defined sense of masculinity and legitimate sexuality associated with men with psychiatric illness. Moving from psychiatric disability to intellectual disability—and another metaphorical step ‘down’ the hierarchy of masculinisation in representations of disability—Björnsdóttir, Stefánsdóttir, and Stefánsdóttir, in their article “People with Intellectual Disabilities Negotiate Autonomy, Gender and Sexuality” (2017), take up the concepts of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ and ‘emphasised femininity’ to critically examine the ‘relational autonomy’ of Icelandic people with intellectual disabilities. Paying particular attention to the development of gender and sexual identities, Björnsdóttir and Stefánsdóttir et al. make the important, and often-cited (Gill, 2015), point that people with intellectual disability are typically ‘infantilised’ by family and institutions. Often men resist this infantilisation through working to create a hegemonic masculinity. For example, from the group of men Björnsdóttir and Stefánsdóttir et al. interviewed, some exhibited traditional hegemonic masculine ideals and behaviours, such as wishing to be seen as strong and independent, wanting ‘masculine’ jobs, and expressing sexist and homophobic attitudes. The authors make some suggestions that people with intellectual disabilities do not have much recourse to question traditional gender ideologies, as they are typically given minimal education about gender, sexuality or gender equality. They explain that:

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The men who participated in this research told stories about their everyday lives and relationships and many relied on what can be interpreted as traditional ideas of gender and performed hegemonic masculinity in their narratives. (Björnsdóttir et al., 2017, p. 300)

Further, and perhaps more problematically, the authors note how people with intellectual disabilities often remain eternal ‘children’ in the eyes of their families and carers4: “It is our conclusion that the participants in this research are missing out on opportunities to develop their gender and sexual identities, as well as opportunities to construct themselves as autonomous adults, which leaves them in this sort of ‘suspended adolescence’ or childhood” (Björnsdóttir et al., 2017, p. 308). The equation of sexual relationships with adulthood is performed here in the parent’s prevention of their children’s sexual relationships. These findings are substantiated by research from other locations. For example, in the paper “From Diminished Men to Conditionally Masculine: Sexuality and Australian Men and Adolescent Boys with Intellectual Disability” (2013), Wilson, Parmenter, Stancliffe, and Shuttleworth report on their research with Australian boys and men who have ‘moderate to severe’ intellectual disabilities, and who live in supported homes. Via interviews with support staff, Wilson et al. argue for a positive conception of the “conditionally masculine”, which they define as a “uniquely male construct”. The first of these points of definition gestures towards to the positive elements of “being male/masculine” and homosocial companionship/mentorship or “male mutuality”, which the authors characterise through saying: “The notion of mutable masculinity recognised that masculinity is both shaped and limited by the effect of intellectual disability on function and capacity. That is, disability was seen as a disadvantage to being able to express one’s masculinity ” (Wilson et al., 2013, p. 744; emphasis added).

4The

authors argue people who have intellectual disabilities should be better supported in their personal autonomies. The authors also note that, despite their intentions, they ended up grouping their participants into the gender binary, which is a limitation of the study. In addition to this, questions about autonomy and gender/sexuality identity could have been more deeply interrogated.

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Boys and men with intellectual disabilities express their masculinity in conditional ways, dependent on their support staff and environment, as well as in relation to gendered norms. They advocate for research that addresses this issue without necessarily basing it on hierarchies of masculinity and conclude that one possibility is to address masculinity outside power constructs and instead consider key factors that “create health and well-being” (Wilson et al., 2013, p. 747). They name this approach a “salutogenic model for health”, stating that being: Conditionally masculine is not a dichotomous proposition, it is more a recognition of masculinity on a continuum. … we proposed a salutogenic framework as the starting point for a masculinity not dependent upon power and/or normative comparisons – a construct that recognises masculinity in its many varied and conditional, but vibrant, life enhancing guises. (Wilson et al., 2013, p. 748)

Embedded, although often unspoken, within this problematic hierarchy is a question pertaining to sexual performance, gender and sexuality. The hierarchisation of masculinity that occurs in cultural forms can be mapped onto sexual life and is broadly analogous to the development and acceptance of sexual subjectivities and associated inter-subjective relations. This is made more explicit by turning to examine the literature on masculinity, disability and sexuality. Sex and gender continue to be read as co-constitutive, although years of gender studies scholarship show us otherwise, that separation between sex and gender is possible.

Sex/Ability There is a wealth of literature examining masculinity, disability and ­sexuality. Broadly, the arguments advanced in this body of work demonstrate the reconfiguration of sexuality in relation to disability and, often, the redistribution of erotic landscapes of the body (Gerschick & Miller, 1995). I engage with some of this literature to give an indication of the issues and experiences that articulate in relation to sexuality for men with a disability. My method here is a survey rather than

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a specifically targeted approach, as I work with a view to opening up and complexifying discussions of masculinity, disability and sexuality. I am looking for ways in which the sexuality of people with a disability, or their sex/ability increases their capacity to “be affected in an infinity of ways ” (Deleuze, 1992, p. 95). In “Embodying Limb Absence in the Negotiation of Sexual Intimacy5” Batty, McGrath, and Reavey (2014) discuss how people with limb absences experience their sexualities. The authors mobilise a multimodal approach of what they call ‘visual group workshops’ and interviews with five men and two women (all British and heterosexual). The ‘visual workshops’ involved participants developing a representation of how they “experience, think or feel about intimate, sexual encounters” (Batty et al., 2014, p. 691). Via what they frame as a “constructionist epistemology”, the authors argue that a core theme emerging from the research was concerned with the ‘wholeness’ of body. Unmarried participants had more concerns about not ‘feeling whole’ due to their limb absence. This feeling is described as something beyond the physical and as intrinsically related to sexuality. For example, ‘Nathan’ relayed how he worried about not being sexually attractive and letting his partner down. The authors relate these feelings to social and body norms, in which ‘disabled’ bodies are viewed as inferior and asexual. The second major theme the authors present is that of how participants use ‘exclusion’ as a strategy for feeling, and also being seen as, sexy. In other words, they attempted to hide their limbs or stumps with clothes. The third significant theme is that of gender norms and compensation. The authors argue that some of the participants took on hypermasculine or hyperfeminine characteristics to compensate for their disability, and we certainly see this kind of overcompensation in the

5‘The

loss of a limb, therefore, here can be seen as infiltrating multiple aspects of the participant’s sexuality, despite the limb in question being non-sexual’ (Batty et al., 2014, p. 694). ‘Jason describes adopting a hyper-masculine, fantastical form of embodiment which could be seen to enable him, in this account, to embody, and again ‘display’ masculinity, despite inhabiting a body which, because of its missing limb, could be seen as de-gendered, feminised, and child-like’ (Batty et al., 2014, p. 698; Guldin, 2000). ‘…our participants can be seen to draw on exaggerated normative scripts of sexuality and gender: the bionic man; the ultra feminine woman; the active sportsman’ (Batty et al., 2014, p. 701).

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bodies photographed by Micheal Stokes. Especially interesting in Batty et al’s work is the discussion about ‘Jason’ who related that he liked thinking of his prosthetic leg as ‘bionic’ and showing off its metal and ‘guts’. They argue that this allows Jason to tap into ‘fantastical’ hypermasculine representations of masculinity, akin to a “superhero, action hero or indestructible bionic man” (Batty et al., 2014, p. 697), linked to strength and power. Similarly, the authors describe another male participant as using sport in the same compensatory way. There are many studies that canvass the ways disabled men recuperate masculinity through sport and through hypermasculine prosthetics and aesthetics (see Hickey-Moody, 2015). One example of this line of argument can be found in “Queering Street: Homosociality, Masculinity, and Disability in Friday Night Lights,6” (2014), Cherney and Lindemann use queer theory to analyse the combination of hypermasculinity and disability in the HBO TV show Friday Night Lights. They explain their approach as follows: “To make visible relationships among disability, masculinity, and sport … this article employs queer theory to illuminate ways of seeing athletics as visually enmeshed in and between compulsory systems of heterosexuality and ablebodiedness” (Cherney & Lindemann, 2014, p. 3). The authors focus their attention on the character Jason Street, who is paralysed in the first episode during a football game. They argue that a combination of queer/masculinity and disability theory, along with the framework of erotic triangles [homosociality, from Sedgewick], is useful to see the complex ways in which normative able-bodiedness and heterosexuality (heterosexism) interact. For example, homosociality and homoeroticism in the show are often negated by the medicalisation and ‘emasculation’ of Street’s disability. Cherney and Lindemann make the point that it is important not to further support the gender binary in such analyses—for example, they use ‘emasculated’ rather than ‘feminised’ to argue that there is no necessarily either/or framework when it comes to the intersection of gender and disability.

6‘As before, the institutional setting allows viewers to see the disabled body in a medical context and protect the veneer of heteromasculinity’ (Cherney & Lindemann, 2014, p. 11).

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Cherney and Lindemann also argue for the importance of vision. For example, although there is a lot of ‘homosociality’ and even ‘homoeroticism’ in male sport, how this is seen is carefully constructed to maintain heterosexism and normative masculinity. Examples of analysed scenes include those with the male-female-male erotic triangle (see Sedgwick, 1985), in which the presence of a woman negates behaviour that could otherwise be read as homoerotic/male-male sexual and romantic tension. Other scenes with Street, in hospital, in which there is a malemale-male triangle, use the medical context to “protect the veneer of heteromasculinity” (Cherney & Lindemann, 2014, p. 11), so that physically intimate scenes between Street and his male (and gay) physiotherapist, as well as his male friend who helps out, in a medical context “renders the homoerotic interpretation as ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’” (Cherney & Lindemann, 2014, p. 11). Another character that is analysed is Herc who is also paralysed and plays wheelchair rugby. This character represents how some men with disabilities tend to ‘heal’ their masculinity via ‘hypermasculine’ displays of misogyny, physical strength and risk-taking. Overall, the authors argue FNL does some work in rejecting ableism but, ultimately, the show demonstrates how hierarchies of ability and masculinity are strongly interrelated and reinforces the dominance of ‘hypermasculinity’ in men’s disability sport as a method of repairing the supposed fracture to gender identity caused by disability. Turning my attention towards the intersection of gender and sexuality as articulated in sexual intercourse, in the article “‘I never felt like she was just doing it for the money’: Disabled men’s intimate (gendered) realities of purchasing sexual pleasure and intimacy7” (2014),

7‘From

the excitable way such stories were told it appeared that a lot of the ‘buzz’ both men said they got from their respective sex purchases was as much from exercising agency, autonomy, control and independence as it was about experiencing sexual fulfilment, pleasure, and satisfaction’ (2014, p. 847). Further, many ‘informants expressed that their motivations to purchase sex were grounded in having little access to spaces where they could meet prospective sexual partners because of the general inaccessibility (as well as cost) of adult meeting spaces such as pubs and clubs (Earle, 1999; Shakespeare, 2000); but also because of the attitudinal barriers and discrimination (particularly verbal abuse) that many experienced while visiting such places’ (2014, p. 848) …it was found that disabled men’s motivations rested precariously at the nexus of ­disability and hegemonic masculinity. (2014, p. 849)

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Liddiard analyses interviews with disabled men concerning their ‘sexual stories’. Positioning her work against what she characterises as ‘radical feminist’, essentialist and ableist arguments, as well as work that positions disabled people as sexually frustrated, wronged, or sexual victims, Liddiard argues that there are many reasons why men with disabilities purchase sex. These reasons are very similar to the reasons why men ‘without’ disabilities purchase sex: gaining skills and experience, invigorating their bodies, to feel sexy, to exercise agency, to enjoy a different type of ‘care-free’ sex, to be able to participate in sharing sexual stories with male friends, and because paying for sex was easier than attempting to find non-sex worker sexual partners. Liddiard argues that the motivations to purchase sex are expressions of the “social and political positioning” of disability as they are with “discourses of hegemonic masculinity and normative sexuality” (2014, p. 849). In other words, if men with disabilities were not so feminized in popular representations, it might be easier for them to find sexual partners that were not sex workers. While Liddiard supports a rights-based model, which is limited by failing to see what people with a disability give back to society, she does propose some critical questions. As noted above, she challenges the victimisation ‘model’ of disability which does not disrupt sexual/gender heteronormativity. Other issues raised include: how “disabled (male) sexualities are naturalised with discursive construction of commercial sex and disability” (2014, p. 850) and how access to (typical) sex work further restricts what sexual access could mean for disabled people. An alternative to the norm, Liddiard proposes, is a more dynamic, creative, collective and equitable conceptualisation of commercial sex (2014, p. 851). Such a concept of commercial sex is concerned with the ways sexual encounters increase the capacity to act of those who purchase sex. This is an active affective bodily engagement. The papers I canvass above emerge from a broader concern with disability and sexuality in the disability studies and masculinity studies literature. They show a sex/ ability, mapping out ways in which sex opens up what a body is capable of experiencing, and the ways in which abilites to feel and connect are distributed across bodies and surfaces. A key premise in this body of

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work is that masculine gender identity is contingent on sexuality and sexual performance. Turning from established narratives about masculinity and disability to look at new ways for thinking about subjectivity, bodies and disability, I now move to look at work on disability that takes up Deleuzian concepts as frames for analysis.

Deleuze and Disability As I suggested at the beginning of this chapter, there is an abundance of excellent material exploring Deleuze’s work in relation to disability. While this work is not exclusively focused on masculinity, it offers generative tools for rethinking disability, yet I feel there are some fruitful avenues for bringing Deleuze and disability together that are yet to be fully explored. One of the most conceptually generative thinkers in the space of Deleuze and disability is Margaret Shildrick, who has contributed an impressive body of work to Disability Studies, working from a feminist philosophical perspective, and here I examine just two of her many stellar contributions to the field. In “‘Why Should Our Bodies End at the Skin?’: Embodiment, Boundaries, and Somatechnics”, Shildrick begins with Donna Haraway’s question ‘Why should our bodies end at the skin?’. Then she draws on Merleau-Ponty’s posthumously published work The Visible and the Invisible (1968) and what she characterises as a ‘flesh ontology’ to push back against the prevailing concept of distinct entities or sovereign subjects. Shildrick argues: “Against a modernist convention of fully bounded bodies, separate and distinct from one another, such modes of corporeal transformation comprehensively undo the limits of the embodied self ” (2014, p. 16). Contending that for her purposes phenomenology is less useful than Deleuze’s concept of assemblages, Shildrick proposes that phenomenology combined with Deleuzian thinking has generative potential, especially in relation to critical disability studies (CDS): “In assemblages, it is the connection between disparate components that produces meaning rather than the other way round, where the fixed meaning of an element would prescribe the nature of its possible connections” (Shildrick, 2014, p. 21). By focusing on the prosthetic in particular, Shildrick notes

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that it is possible to acknowledge entanglements of ‘technics’ (materials, locations, spaces) without reducing disabled people’s agency.8 Indeed, Shildrick contends that we are all prosthetised bodies and no bodies can be claimed as unitary, singular wholes (2014, p. 16), stating: Once it is acknowledged that a human body is not a discrete entity ending at the skin, and that material technologies constantly disorder our boundaries, either through prosthetic extensions or through the internalization of mechanical parts, it is difficult to maintain that those whose bodies fail to conform to normative standards are less whole or complete than others. (2014, p. 24)

From a Deleuzian point of view, bodies are always becoming in/around assemblages of “the affective, the political, the institutional, and the biological” (2014, p. 18). Shildrick connects this work on the body as assemblage with the idea of somatechnics (Sullivan & Murray, 2009), or technologies of embodied production. This leads to her consideration of the Paralympics and a discussion of how prosthetics are framed in relation to Paralympic competition, in which disabled people are supposed to transcend their visible prosthetics. In contrast, Shildrick’s Deleuzian framework highlights the mutual becoming of ‘technics’ in which an athlete’s body doesn’t end at the skin, nor solely express a relationship to an external prosthetic. Moving on to the concept of the ‘molar’, Shildrick also suggests that disabled people may be more likely to depart from the hegemonic/normative concept of ‘sovereign selfhood’, described as a ‘line of flight’. Shildrick links this thinking with other studies, including Feely’s work which I discuss below, noting that is important to engage “with a full range of physical, sensory, and cognitive disabilities […] to address not just how postmodernist theories generate new understandings of embodiment, but to explore how to disrupt the whole epistemological project” (2014, p. 23). Shildrick ends by highlighting the ethical, feminist, project of taking on an

8For example, the concept of being ‘wheelchair-bound’, which is in CDS nowadays considered insulting versus ‘wheelchair user’.

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increasingly multifaceted conception of disability and embodiment, beyond the fiction of “self-contained individuality” (2014, pp. 24–25). In the jointly written essay “Estranged Bodies: Shifting Paradigms and the Biomedical Imaginary” (2015), Shildrick and Steinberg introduce a special issue of Body & Society that was developed through a series of feminist workshops focused on health discourses that have developed in relation to embodiment. Shildrick and Steinberg link this to renewed thinking around embodiment, including affect theory and Deleuzian assemblages. They reconceptualise identity, the ‘self ’, and estrangement, questioning how the self and other are constituted. Relating this to biomedicine, the authors note that this discipline typically characterises normative, singular bounded bodies (along with the Cartesian mind/body boundary) and disease and illness as an ‘estrangement’ that biomedicine is required to overcome. An alternative conception, proposed by Irigaray, is that the body is plural and complex. Shildrick and Steinberg maintain the contention that the assemblage is a useful concept: “the provisional coming together of disparate parts – which encourages a rethinking of questions of reconstituted, displaced and re-placed bodies” (Shildrick & Steinberg, 2015, p. 8). Consequently, in this framework, the body has no origin or endpoint and the self is “provisional and fluid” (Shildrick & Steinberg, 2015, p. 8). This is linked to issues of governance, in which self-management of health is required in return for basic health rights; the paradox being that we are constrained by forms of governance that regulate which bodies count as ‘healthy’ or not. Overall, biomedicine has opened up shifts in discourse and ‘imaginative possibilities’ of bodies and selfhood that both unsettle these subjects but also allow for ‘reactionary modalities’. What might be most important here is the focus on materiality and intersectionality, as the coming together of the matter of bodies with different political lenses again opens out how bodies can be experienced, seen, how they move and what they are capable of doing. In a similar fashion to Shildrick’s take up of the concept of assemblages, Stephens, Ruddick, and McKeever (2014) utilise a Deleuzian framework to trouble the concept of static and distinct bodies, arguing that bodies are enmeshed and fluid. In “Disability and Deleuze: An Exploration of Becoming and Embodiment in Children’s Everyday

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Environments”, Stephens and Ruddick et al. consider this theoretical premise that bodies are enmeshed and fluid as both informing and going ‘beyond’ the social model of disability, offering a more ‘comprehensive’ model. They argue for critically revisiting the complicated relevance of environments and materiality, impairments and other intersections, reminding their reader that: “all subjects find themselves interpolated into different positions as a result of the assemblages they are part of ” (Stephens et al., 2014, p. 212). The article reports on 13 case studies of children aged 10–15 in which their environments and ‘multiple subjectivities’ are considered. The studies included observations and interviews; a multi-method and ‘child-centred’ approach which is framed as a co-created research exercise. The authors propose their framework as a move into ‘geographic maturity’, in which disabled subjects are contextualised in their environments but also can change their subjectivities. However, in relation to Deleuzian theory, this subjectivity/agency is also troubled, understood instead as an assemblage of agencies. In order to move to what they call ‘emancipatory’ assemblages, the authors suggest using the Deleuzian-Spinozist question ‘what can a body do? ’ as an ethical evaluation. The authors consider ‘falling’ and how this is characterised very differently in the context of school and home. For disabled children, falling at home is largely unremarkable, while at school it is distressing and causes heightened concern by teachers. For one participant, ‘50 Cent’ [pseudonym], his moving between home and school involved geographic maturity, in which 50 Cent used knowledge from each environment (i.e. his independence at home is used to resist being put in a wheelchair at school for his safety). The authors consider ‘crawling’ and the complex negotiations around this form of mobility, largely characterised by normative expectations. They note that many of the children crawled at home but not anywhere else. Instead of understanding injuries from crawling and falling as negative, Stephens and Ruddick et al. understand that children with a disability “are negotiating (rationally and emotionally) a much wider set of motivations, and making decisions based on a broad set of experiential criteria” (Stephens et al., 2014, p. 205). These children are responding to ‘intolerant environments’

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and possible a desire to be ‘normal’ is part of their crawling assemblage. Considering all these elements relationally is a ‘situational ethics’.9 As we might expect, children have different understanding of environments and adaptations.10 For example, some children felt negative towards ramps and special desks at school, as they were marked as ‘different’ or othered by them. However, they expected and/or were nonchalant about similar accommodations and adaptions at home or in public spaces (such as shopping centres and playgrounds). The authors carefully resist describing this as a binary, in noting that “the private sphere cannot be cast as exempt from its own normalizing strategies” (Stephens et al., 2014, p. 211). The authors make a strong argument for the utility of Deleuze’s thought when developing non-binary understandings of disability, and they offer practical examples of how to examine assemblages but also how to bring about what they call “assemblages of mutual flourishing”. Such assemblages include situations in which disabled children are not othered by accommodations and the complexities of environments/contexts along with social norms are considered together: “Our more nuanced focus on these materialities deepens theories of embodiment and provides pragmatic possibilities for action, inviting adaptations that are more responsive to the complex, varied needs and desires of disabled children in each environment” (Stephens et al., 2014, p. 198). Here, Deleuzian thought helps to activate understandings of the agency of embodied connections in the worlds of children with disabilities, showing how connections between people and things can change what a body can do.

9The

argue that: ‘Greater efforts should be made to address the way different assemblages undermine or enhance the effectiveness of adaptations and the capacity of disabled children. Adaptations that are made solely on the basis of considerations of physical health and safety, or that make children stand out in environments where they want to blend in, may be better than nothing but may not unlock the full capacity of the children they aim to enable’ (Stephens et al., 2014, p. 214). 10The authors remind us that places have logics, saying: ‘we suggest that geographic maturity is negotiated differently within and between different assemblages; that we cannot presume a priori that one context is more or less inclusive than another; that we must explore the varied strategies and attitudes of children as they navigate multiple environments’ (Stephens et al., 2014, p. 213).

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Another example of engaging Deleuze’s thought to re-think disability can be found in the work of Michael Feely, who combines Foucault’s work on surveillance (the panopticon) and Deleuze and Guattari’s theories about assemblages and control societies with Butler’s queer theory to analyse the sexual surveillance of Irish people with intellectual disability by carers/support staff/family members/members of the public. Feely describes this assemblage of surveillance as follows: A Deleuze–Guattarian assemblage is a heterogeneous mixture of components, both material and discursive, that work together to produce a social phenomenon (in this case, sexual surveillance and control). The aim of assemblage analysis is to explore how the phenomenon works. (Feely, 2016a, p. 731)

Feely gives an account of the material and discursive flows involved in this surveillance assemblage, which include hierarchical employee structures and service rules, sexual regulation, psychiatric discourses, public attitudes, policies, CCTV/internet, architectural spaces, and affects. He states: “In contemporary control societies, bodies are not confined to a single institutional space. Rather, a body passes between, and is a subject of, a range of open institutions (e.g. the family home, the workplace, and the university). Social control works in different ways in these conditions” (Feely, 2016a, p. 730). Using in-depth interviews, Feely describes events that demonstrate how surveillance flows operate but also how people with intellectual disability and support staff both accept and resist these flows. For example, some staff try to prevent what they see as ‘inappropriate’ touching and sexual behaviour, watching and reporting on this, while other staff are more ‘lenient’, but then experience surveillance themselves for not following workplace policy. Feely cautions that: “In a sexual surveillance assemblage, where containing flows of data is extremely difficult, even gentle acts of resistance by staff, even being slightly more ‘lenient’ than one’s colleagues, carries with it considerable risks” (Feely, 2016a, p. 743). Feely’s aim is to provide a starting place for more in-depth consideration of the effects of such surveillance and possible changes to rules and policies, as he contends that: “… sexual narratives were found to

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be affected by a range of material forces …” (Feely, 2016a, p. 732). As I noted above, the sexual subjectivity of men with intellectual disability is not only highly policed but also used as a means of emasculating and controlling them. Feely (2016a) shows us this is indeed the case, taking up Deleuze’s work to better understand the momentum and modes of operation of control cultures (see also Feely, 2016b). In “Relating Through Differences: Disability, Affective Relationality, and the U.S. Public Healthcare Assemblage”, Nishida (2017) begins from the understanding that the bodies of a person with a disability and their carers are in ‘affective relationality’ with each other. In this relationship, there is a mutual agency and capacities on both sides are enhanced. In advancing this case, Nishida is critical of neoliberal individualism and argues instead for accepting human and non-human interdependence as a ‘natural’ state. Nishida’s framework draws together affect theory and a Deleuzian idea of the body as an assemblage that is animated with haptic connection, which “goes beyond cognitive connection and involves ontological connection at the encounter” (Nishida, 2017, p. 91). Nishida explains this philosophy of the body as assemblage through suggesting that “Parts of bodies preconsciously connect, relate, and adapt to other bodies, their movements, and the larger milieu. This process involves haptic connection …” (Nishida, 2017, p. 91). Nishida’s data analysis includes examples such as the intimacy developed between a person with a disability and long-term carers, in which they share responsibilities for a task, such as baking a cake, with little need to verbally communicate. Another example of affective relationality is how some people with disabilities will acknowledge their carers’ low income and insist on more hours and days from care agencies, and sometimes suggest their carers take this time off (while still getting paid). Along with this context-based analysis, Nishida examines the US public healthcare assemblage, noting the relationships between capitalism, neoliberalism and the structures of care exploiting and reducing people with disabilities and carers (who are often black, brown, and from low socioeconomic brackets). For example, Nishida notes that carers often work more hours than they are paid. Antonio Negri explains potestas through stating: “potestas refers to power in its fixed, institutional or ‘constituted form’, while potentia refers to power in its fluid,

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dynamic or ‘constitutive’ form” (Negri, 2008, p. xv). Spinoza’s concepts of potential (relationship to the world/plugging into nature) and potestas (institutional and legal, ‘fixed’ power) are useful models for understanding how social power is distributed and is articulated in relation to disability. The former helps theorists see the inherent power available to all bodies through connecting to the world at large, which, as I have noted, Spinoza also referred to as ‘God’. The latter involves the interferences in the potential of bodies (i.e. people with disability and their carers both have their agencies reduced by bureaucratic systems). Drawing on the Deleuzian concept of the encounter, Nishida reminds us that encounters between bodies can change capacity: “An encounter is a process of collective becoming, inheriting both capacitive and debilitative potential for the encountering bodies” (Nishida, 2017, p. 91). Through affective relationality, bureaucratic sad affect can be resisted/ deterritorialised: It is the recursive practices of care that facilitate affective relationality. The labour of both providers and recipients of long-term care let bits of their bodies reconfigure and slowly adapt to the other body and its shape, movement, rhythms, habits, and desires through repeating the same care tasks day after day. (Nishida, 2017, p. 95)11

Nishida concludes by suggesting that “There is certainly a possibility for the capacity born out of affective relationality to be subsumed into potestas, as one’s capacity is being exploited and diminished in the current public healthcare assemblage” (Nishida, 2017, p. 99). Nishida’s attention to the sad affect of bureaucratic discourses gives us a clue for further uses of Deleuze’s work. The limits of bureaucratic systems,

11Nishida relates this to Halberstam’s ‘undercommon’: ‘interrupting the system from within by forging the collective’ (Nishida, 2017, p. 100). This is a compelling argument, although more examples of how small resistances via affective relationality might lead to truly ‘interrupting the system’ from within would have been welcome. Some examples are provided, such as the following: ‘They assert, instead, that humans-regardless of disability status-are inherently dependent beings and manoeuvre the world in relation with their surroundings (Chandler, 2012; Fritsch, 2010; Gibson et al., 2012; Ruddick, 2010)’ (Nishida, 2017, p. 92).

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medical and popular representations of disability can be seen as what Deleuze, after Spinoza, might characterize as a sad affect: an act that reduces a body’s capacity to act. Limited representations of disability encourage impoverished models for understanding the cultural value of people with a disability. While I have examined many forms of disability in this chapter, there remains one burgeoning area of scholarship with which I am yet to engage and to which I now turn my attention, that is, deaf studies. In “The Rhizome of the Deaf Child” Valente and Boldt (2015) begin by problematising simplistic binaries around discussions of deafness and cochlear implants. In an imagined binary of verbal and non-verbal language, the cochlear implant is often positioned as the only way for deaf children to lead better/more meaningful lives. The authors—Valente is deaf and Boldt is hearing—position themselves as neither advocating or being against cochlear implants, but seeking instead to “envision a space where discourses about human bodies and human modes of communication as multiplicitous can flourish” (Valente & Boldt, 2015, p. 562). They propose ‘pluralingualism’ as an alternative to binary notions of languages, a ‘pluralingualism’ which incorporates the social and cultural elements of communication and does not oppose verbal and non-verbal forms. Valente and Boldt then link this with a Deleuzoguattarian ­“rhizomatic and relational understandings of difference and inclusion” (Valente & Boldt, 2015, p. 563). By presenting a short history of the cochlear implant, and noting its shortcomings, such as side effects, the denial of sign language to deaf children with implants and reduction of sign language in schools, the authors outline a ‘sensory politics’ which undermines multiple forms of communication and makes verbal communication ‘normative’. In contrast, they consider a ‘deaf way/ epistemology’. There are many ways to be deaf, and these vary according to identities, culture, and variable tensions with normative ways of communicating. The authors combine their Deleuzoguattarrian rhizomatic framework with Charles Garoian’s The Prosthetic Pedagogy of Art (2013), that characterises all people as impaired, dislocated and fragmented. They propose the concept of the ‘anomaly’ not as a concrete position but as a position that is mobile and shifts, like a flock of birds. Just as moving in a flock places

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some birds on the outer edge and others in the middle, a deaf person is often asked how and why they are deaf, how much they can hear, but a hearing person is not asked how much they hear. Through a case study of parents who sued their deaf daughter’s school for not being inclusive, the authors consider how this girl’s deafness might have been seen as an opportunity for her whole class to learn sign language and for all students to learn about communication in a more nuanced manner. This paper uses Deleuze’s thought to offer an alternative to simplistic notions of difference, to conceptualise deafness as a unique and open-ended becoming. This is just one of many examples of work on Deleuze and deafness, which also include the work of Crowley (2010) and Weber (2018), and illustrates the ways in which Deleuzian thought supports thinking through the opportunities created by disability. The work on disability and Deleuze that I outline above provides a range of examples that help us see how Deleuze’s thought has already been taken up in Disability Studies. In what is to follow I contextualize the cultural significance of the case studies from popular culture that comprise the remainder of this chapter in terms’ of Deleuze’s idea of sad affect.

Michael Stokes ‘Veterans’; Recuperation and Refusing Pity North American photographer Michael Stokes has received critical and popular acclaim for his photographic portraits, which include a series called Always Loyal that specifically examines North American war veterans. His work also includes additional occasional broader engagements with disability and masculinity. The men in Stokes’ work are largely white, incredibly fit, strong and muscular, and his work is of interest here because of the ways in which it redefines the popular historical trope of photographing war veterans. Stokes’ veterans refuse pity and are often depicted wearing prosthetic limbs that recuperate their masculinity through embodying a phallus. I am not the first scholar interested in disability and masculinity to write about Stokes’ work. In “Sexing

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the Disabled Veteran: The Homoerotic Aesthetics of Militarism”, Caso (2017) proposes three main arguments in relation to Stokes’ photography of veteran amputee men. The first concerns the idea of ‘techno-masculinity’, in which limb-absence comes to symbolise the power of the state. This is achieved partly by high-tech prosthetics used by the veterans, creating the representation of a posthuman ‘technomilitarised masculinity’ of strength and power. Specifically, Caso argues that: Positioned within the techno-militarized masculine discourse produced by the introduction of the cyborg soldier (Masters 2005), high-tech prostheses can be understood as the embodiment of techno-militarized masculinity by the maimed veteran. Techno-militarized masculinity produces a posthuman subject who maintains white male privileges, while also overcoming limitations associated with his human body. (Caso, 2017, p. 222)

Caso notes the significance of the penis when thinking about ­masculinity and, as Stokes’ veterans are photographed nude or partially nude, guns and prosthetics are often employed to recreate or echo the phallus—they can be read as being symbolic of a penis. Prosthetics and guns “visually reconstruct … the veterans’ masculinity” (2017, p. 223) and refute the popular assumption that men with acquired physical disabilities are impotent. The other argument Caso offers is that the ‘techno-militarised masculinity’ represented by veterans with physical/visual injuries pronounces a gendered ‘hierarchy of injury’. To contrast this, Caso discusses PTSD and argues that psychological injuries are feminised because veterans with PTSD have nothing visible to show that prevents them from returning to war: …[PTSD] is feminized, policed, and marginalized because of the threat it poses to the symbolic power of the state. On the other hand, the physically injured veteran body is re-masculinized through prosthetics and, as such, can embody the patriotic discourse of state power. (Caso, 2017, p. 225)

Caso argues that Stokes’ photography reveals how supposed liberal (gay/queer/homonormative) sexual values can be manipulated into

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supporting normative military power. She argues that the way Stokes has built up support, via a Kickstarter campaign and via Facebook, has developed what Puar refers to as ‘homonationalism’ (2017), or a state sanctioned form of homosexuality. Puar characterises homosnationalism as a kind of monogamous, same-sex relationship that is non-threatening to the state because it aligns with the structure of the nuclear family and supports capitalist economies. Caso argues that Stokes’ photography ultimately reinforces the power of state and military power, specifically stating that: It is compelling to remark that the homonational aesthetic regime produced in Always Loyal manipulates LGBT rights and feminist politics for the patriotic project of representing national power and western civilizational exceptionalism, but never advocates for LGBT rights, poorly addresses gendered power relations of vision, and forecloses critical debates about the militarization of homosexuality. (Caso, 2017, p. 230)

Developing a slightly different reading, in “Bare Strength: Representing Veterans of the Desert Wars in US Media”12 (2016), Pitchford-Hyde offers an analyses of how injured US veterans (and particularly those with amputations) are represented in US media. Specifically, she analyses the TV reality show Dancing with the Stars and Michael Stokes’ photography. For the former, the focus is on the inclusion in the show of veteran Noah Galloway who had his arm and leg amputated after an IED explosion. Pitchford-Hyde acknowledges both the personal, social and political complexities involved in the process of Galloway being on this show. For instance, she notes that the narrative of the ‘supercrip’ emerges in relation to Galloway, as well as the narrative of being able to ‘overcome disability’ if one works hard enough. The issues with both narratives are clearly explained, noting that ultimately they render people with disabilities as ‘less than’. Specifically, the former reveals the

12‘This article suggests that the initial reluctance to represent injured veterans in the US media stems from the need to reinforce the deep-rooted ideologies regarding US national identity and masculinity that influence government policy making’ (Pitchford-Hyde, 2016, p. 46).

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low expectations society holds for people with disabilities, while the latter assumes the primary goal of people with disabilities is to essentially make their impairments invisible. In relation to Stokes’s photography of men who are veteran amputees, Pitchford-Hyde argues there is an entrenched ideal (and fetishisation) of the masculine militarised body in US culture. She suggests some issues with these photos as ‘erotic/sexualised’ representations, such as potentially being revered not because of the focus on disability but rather because they represent hegemonic masculinity.13 Ultimately, Pitchford-Hyde argues that in Stokes’ work, the veterans are made out to be heroes; their injuries are reframed not as lack but as evidence of their ‘commitment to the state’. Its terms of affect, it seems to me that there is a certain amount of sad affect created by some of Stokes’ representations, to the extent that prosthetics memorialize aspects of the body that are now missing and re-make old bodily connections no longer automatically available due to limb loss. Yet, in what is to follow, I develop alternative readings. This image of veteran Brad Ivanchan (Fig. 4.1) is indicative of Stokes’ work in Always Loyal. As I have suggested, Brad (the subject of the photograph or model) is exceptionally fit and clearly positioned as the subject of possible sexual desire. His gun is held over his penis: gesturing to his sexual virility. In thinking about the possibilities of positive affect attached to, or emanating from these images, I would like to consider the images in a broader context of popular sexualized visual cultural representations of men, which do not usually include men with disabilities. In this largely ableist landscape, the presence of amputee men in itself remains progressive. The explicit, and public sexualisation of disabled men is progressive. Stokes’ war veterans recuperate their masculinity through embodying hegemonic norms and in so doing they call mainstream publics to attention. Most audiences that subscribe to hegemonic ideas of masculinity will see the men in Always 13This

is extended into the further complexities of one of Stokes’ subjects being a female veteran amputee, Sergeant Mary Dague, who is also a breast cancer survivor and is photographed topless. In this case, there is a tension with the sexualised presentation with the intention of ‘normalising’ her ‘disabled and post-mastectomy’ body.

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Fig. 4.1  Brad Ivanchan, by artist Michael Stokes

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Loyal as legitimate sexual subjects. These men are also notably not paralysed from the waist down, an injury that in some instances results in impotence. These images are ambiguous, then, on the one hand calling a mainstream public to attention to witness the sexualized disabled body in a virtually unprecedented way and yet also gesturing towards “A system of compulsory able-bodiedness that repeatedly demands that people with disabilities embody for others an affirmative answer to the unspoken question ‘Yes, but in the end, wouldn’t you rather be like me?’” (McRuer, 2006, p. 24). In examining another text positioned at this intersection, I turn my attention to the 2016 film Me Before You, which examines hegemony and impotence through the lenses of class and gender, and, like Stokes’ photographs, appeals very much to a mainstream viewing public.

Me Before You The film Me Before You was released in 2016 to popular criticism, largely (spoiler alert) because the male disabled protagonist chooses to end his own life. However, while there is certainly a clear implication that life as a man who is unable to have penetrative sex is unliveable for the film’s protagonist Will Traynor, in many respects the film is about class and gender as much as it is about disability. The film begins before Will is disabled, depicting him as the epitome of hegemonic masculinity: kissing his partner in bed with a surfboard in the background and then dashing off to work at the stock market. His frontier masculinity meets an unexpected end when he his hit by a motorbike while crossing the road and is paralysed from the neck down. A classic symbol of masculinity (the motorbike) is used to seemingly take away much of Will’s masculinity. Post-paralysation we meet young Louisa Clark, a happy, outgoing, highly feminine working-class woman who lives with, and supports, her family who are struggling to make ends meet. After losing her job at a local café because of recession, Louisa is hired as Will’s ‘companion’ in an attempt to cheer him up. Louisa has no experience with disability support, but Will’s mother believes her cheery personality and attractive body will help lift his spirits. At the point when

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Will and Louisa meet, Will only spends time with Nathan, his nurse, who assists with his care and exercise, and Will is cynical and depressed. Will initially reacts coldly to Louisa’s working-class style, feminised aesthetic and upbeat demeanour. After two weeks, Will has a visit from his former best friend Rupert and ex-girlfriend Alicia who reveal that they are engaged. He smashes all the photographs on his dresser in anger and indignation, which Louisa tries to repair the next day, leading to a verbal altercation during which Louisa chastises him. The next day Will asks Louisa to watch a foreign film with him, and she accepts, sitting down to her first subtitled movie. The two begin to bond and eventually become close friends. As Louisa and Will continue to talk daily, the feminised nature of Louisa’s care work and emotional labour becomes increasingly clear, and the class differences between them are explicated. Louisa’s disengaged working-class boyfriend, Patrick, is training to take part in a ‘Viking triathlon’ in Norway, a hobby that he often chooses over spending time with her. Will urges Louisa to broaden her horizons and repeatedly instructs her that it’s her responsibility to live life as fully as possible. While taking care of Will during one of his occasional illnesses, Louisa notices Will’s scarred wrists from a previous suicide attempt and realises that her job of ‘cheering Will up’ has rather dark undertones. She gradually comes to fall in love with Will, partly because of his class privilege but also because of his care, attention and sense of humour. While at work one day, Louisa overhears an argument between Will’s parents and she learns that Will has six months before travelling to Dignitas (in Switzerland) for assisted suicide. Will refuses to accept life with a disability that entails dependency, pain and suffering without any hope for recovery of his ‘old self ’ which was physically capable of quite different things, including penetrative sex. Louisa then takes it upon herself to change Will’s mind, and the implication here is that she is in love with Will, that she is trying to save him as someone who loves him rather than as someone who has been employed to improve his day to day. Louisa enthusiastically organises various trips and adventures in an attempt to show Will that life is worth living, despite his disability. Will gradually becomes more communicative and open to her plans. Eventually, Will joins Louisa’s family for dinner on her birthday in her humble family home, where they learn that Louisa’s father had lost his job

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in a leveraged buyout that had been organised by a younger associate of Will, working under Will’s direction. It becomes clear that Louisa being bound to provide for her family financially is partly because her father was made redundant by Will’s company. Shortly thereafter, Louisa’s father is offered the head of maintenance job at Stortfold Castle, which belongs to Will’s family, and Louisa realises that Will is trying to help her secure her freedom from her family. Their romantic feelings for one another provoke jealously in the want-to be-Viking boyfriend Patrick and cause problems in Louisa’s long-standing relationship, leading to their break-up. After attending a classical music concert, Will notes he is not ready to go inside his home yet, stating “I just want to be a man who was been to a concert with a girl in a red dress … just a few minutes more”. The ordeal of being put to bed is clearly hanging over his head, juxtaposed with his presumed desire to take Louisa to bed himself. Later, during a romantic trip to Mauritius, Will informs Louisa that he still intends to follow through with his euthanasia. He wants her to live a full life instead of “half a life” (one assumes this is a life without penetrative sex) with him. He says their time together has been special but he cannot bear to live in a wheelchair. He asks her to accompany him to Switzerland to be with him through his last moments. Heartbroken, she informs Will’s parents upon arrival in London that she is quitting immediately and travels back to her home by bus. She does not speak to Will for the days that follow. Louisa’s father finally convinces her to go to Will in Switzerland. He has already left and she joins Will in his final moments. A few weeks after Will’s death, on a holiday in Paris presumably paid for by him, she re-reads a letter Will left for her. In it he encourages her to seek out a specific perfume shop in Paris and ends the letter with “just live”, which she can afford to do because he has left her enough money to follow her dreams. One also assumes that “living” involves life not involving disability and including penetrative sex. The film is interesting because it is a Hollywood romance that is a ‘rich man meets poor girl’ Cinderella/My Fair Lady story that has a subplot about disability and masculinity. While the suggestion that life with a disability is unliveable, even for the superrich, is incredibly problematic, it is also important to note the relative rarity of a the desirable, attractive, romantic protagonist who also has a profound disability. Will is clearly presented as a sexually desirable man,

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and this is unique in representations of paraplegics in Hollywood cinema. Will’s death can be seen as a form of escaping from his impotence, as he is unable to recuperate his masculinity through performance in the ways Stokes’ veterans do. I want to consider Me Before You as a form of activism, despite the fact that the male protagonist is engulfed with sad affect to the point where he is unable to live. Ellis and Goggin (2018) offer a comprehensive overview of disability and media activism, along with a critical analysis of the transformations that have evolved from how we define and re define activism and communication within the media with regards to disability and the categories within this (e.g. Impairment). Activism through the media has been extremely important for developing public understandings of disability as a rich and significant part of human life. Many disability activist movements involve drawing attention to neglected areas of mistreatment, injustice and oppression and by making these issues visible to the public (via the media), they challenge what is seen as a “private matter” (Ellis & Goggin, 2018, p. 356). By making disabilities and the treatment or mistreatment of disabilities visible online, and through various forms of media, activists change the popular understanding of what disability is in society, and its associated (lack of ) services. Disability is therefore, no longer just a “family matter”. It calls viewing publics to attention across a range of platforms and in a variety of ways. Disability Media activism involves two areas, one focusses on using media as a key tool for social change, the other looking at the media as a key site in social justice, rights, democracy and other struggles. There are many times when the media has caused people to protest because of its devaluing of the lives of people with disabilities in media content, Ellis and Goggin use the examples of Me Before You and Million Dollar Baby, both of which sparked public protest and inspired visible public outcry about disability rights. This form of activism is to be celebrated. Mainstream viewing publics had awareness raised and disability rights activists were provided with a global platform that captured media attention through the production and distribution of the film. When we also look at media itself as a key site of struggle, disability media activists show how advances in media technologies can create exclusion as well as access. When television first came out in the 1920’s

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it took years to get widespread acceptance of captions or audio descriptions for the visually or hearing impaired. Ellis and Goggin note that disability media activism has gained momentum increasingly rapidly since the invention of mobile media and social media. They attribute the importance of social media in disability activism as being related to the fact that “personal narratives can be shared in such a way that enables the participation of disenfranchised citizens who otherwise would not become involved in disability activism (Trevisan, 2017)” (Ellis & Goggin, 2018, p. 358). In other words, Ellis and Goggin ascertain that persons with disabilities have the ability to use media platforms like twitter and facebook to speak about disability, and have the agency to represent themselves and their abilities in their own words with their own voice. This is an extremely important advancement in digital disability activism, as it has the ability to reach other people in their everyday lives, and therefore encourages disabled people to be the ones to shape and define what constitutes disability in modern society. It is important to note however, that social media and media platforms in general can afford social inclusion in many cases, but it can also further disable if the platforms are not made accessible (Ellis & Goggin, 2015). However, Ellis and Goggin try not to focus on the ‘limitations’ of social media, as the disability activism that has come around since social media has made great leaps towards improving accessibility and reframing the way we define activism in general. They take up Parsloe and Holtons’ case study of the online Aspie Central community, where collective autistic identities are built and become political through online connection. They find these movements bridge and develop ‘affective publics’ and go beyond traditional kinds of activism and publics (Ellis & Goggin, 2018, p. 359). Ellis and Goggin discuss how Shakespeare’s (1993) ‘shared identity’ is a crucial first step on the path to demanding political and social change. Through reclaiming words like “queer” and “crip” and using hashtags on digital action networks, cultural and political struggles move to the forefront of the public eye within activist groups. Therefore, even those persons with disabilities that have limited access to public spaces where other people meet and congregate over activist issues and shared identities/interests, can still actively participate in group and collection ­identity online (2018, p. 360).

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Concluding, the authors remind us that disability media activism encourages us to rethink media and communication itself. While these media environments and platforms are evolving and ever so important, they are still inaccessible to some people with disabilities. Therefore, this disability activism “provides the opportunity to broaden understandings of access to, use and control of and governance in, media” (Ellis & Goggin, 2018, p. 361). It necessitates our renegotiation of activism and accessibility to media spaces, to include the imaginative work of those people who do not have access to traditional forms of written and print media. In fewer words, Ellis and Goggin suggest we take seriously disability as a legitimate pressing and central site of activist struggles, in need of attention and change. Ellis and Goggin astutely affirm that: Disability activism often involves ‘micro-political’ contexts of everyday life and other settings (Roets & Braidotti 2012). As disability has become an increasingly visible and legible force among other social, political and cultural movements, it has also challenged key assumptions of what activism is, looks like and does, and what public spheres and publics are (Garland-Thomson 2004; Clifford 2012), something that has caused consternation, division and debate within and across activism, disability activism included (Hughes 2009). (Ellis & Goggin, 2018, p. 356)

While Me Before You as a media text has a lot of problems with the ways in which it represents disability, gender and class, it drew a mainstream public to the attention of disability activists’ rage and ignited discussions about disability rights across the globe. This platform is not as broadly progressive as the other forms of social media activism that Ellis and Goggin characterise, it is, however useful to the extent that it calls a new public to attention.

Conclusion This chapter has begun to map some ways in which Deleuze’s thought opens up thinking with, and about disability. Both the practical examples or ‘case studies’ discussed here engage broad audiences of popular culture with imperatives to recuperate disabled masculinity through

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sexuality and/or sexual desirability. They offer mainstream and accessible examples of contemporary texts that have: “challenged key assumptions of what activism is, looks like and does, and what public spheres and publics are (Garland-Thomson, 2004; Clifford, 2012), something that has caused consternation, division and debate within and across activism, disability activism included (Hughes, 2009)” (Ellis & Goggin, 2018, p. 356). In theorizing the political significance of these two texts and thinking through some ways in which they mediate affect, I follow McRuer in believing that “Theory is a form of activism, too. Sometimes there’s this sense with theory, like, what do we do with it, right? I think sometimes it’s more productively thought of in the other direction: How have all these amazing artistic and political and activist efforts generated these really complex ways of thinking about norms and institutions and structures? It’s not like Crip Theory, or any other disability text, should be a handbook for a movement. Rather, in some ways, it’s a document of all of this energy that has been going for decades at this point, and it’s not showing any signs of stopping soon” (Peers, Brittain, & McRuer, 2012, p. 154). As I have shown, Deleuze’s thought has already proved incredibly useful for the field of disability studies, yet one aspect of his thinking that offers further scope for discussion is the concept of sad affect and the ways in which pity can reduce a body’s capacity to act. Intersecting with the sad affect attached to many popular texts about disability, Michael Stokes’ work and Me Before You are both crossed by sad affect and the active affects that inspire the body’s capacity to act: they position the man with disability as holding social power and being desirable in numerous ways. This said, these constructions are also fairly conservative renditions of masculinity. They position agency within the disabled body in ways that command attention, yet they could also go to greater lengths to show how disability actually increases the sex appeal of the men represented. Arguably, the multiple phalluses of the veterans wearing prosthetic limbs are part of their attraction. And Will Traynor’s vulnerability, which only became apparent as a result of his disability, is key in his desire for Louisa and in his self-effacing humour. The sad affect of disability in reducing these men’s capacity to act has been

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overcome by the positive affect of increasing their sexual desirability. In undertaking further research on masculinity and disability, the broader economies of affect interpolated and viewing publics called to attention by texts, along with the ways in which representations increase or decrease the imagined and literal capacities to act of the disabled male body, are surely key sites for future inquiry. I now turn my attention to the gendered nature of environmental discourses and consider some ways in which Deleuze’s thought offers a useful resource for considering economies of carbon production and consumption in late capitalist economies.

Works Cited Barberis, D. S. (2017). Hysteria in the male: Images of masculinity in later nineteenth century France. In J. K. M. Brian & J. W. Trent (Eds.), Phallacies: Historical intersections of disability and masculinity. Oxford, UK: Oxford Scholarship Online. Barrett, T. (2014). Disabled masculinites: A review and suggestions for further research. Masculinites and Social Change, 3(1), 36–61. https://doi. org/10.4471/mcs.2014.41. Batty, R., McGrath, L., & Reavey, P. (2014). Embodying limb absence in the negotiation of sexual intimacy. Sexualities, 17(5–6), 686–706. https://doi. org/10.1177/1363460714532935. Björnsdóttir, K., Stefánsdóttir, A., & Stefánsdóttir, G. V. (2017). People with intellectual disabilities negotiate autonomy, gender and sexuality. Sexuality and Disability, 35, 295–311. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11195-017-9492-x. Bourke, J. (2016). Love and limblessness: Male heterosexuality, disability, and the great war. Journal for War and Culture Studies, 9(1), 3–19. https://doi. org/10.1080/17526272.2015.1106756. Caso, F. (2017). Sexing the disabled veteran: The homoerotic aesthetics of militarism. Critical Military Studies, 3(3), 217–234. https://doi.org/10.1080/2 3337486.2016.1184420. Cherney, J. L., & Lindemann, K. (2014). Queering Street: Homosocioality, masculinity, and disability in Friday Night Lights. Western Journal of Communication, 78(1), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/10570314.2013.79 2388.

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Crowley, V. (2010). A rhizomatics of hearing: Becoming deaf in the workplace and other affective spaces of hearing. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 31(4), 543–558. Deleuze, G. (1992). Expressionism in philosophy: Spinoza. New York, USA: Zone Books. Earle, S. (1999). Facilitated sex and the concept of sexual need: Disabled students and their personal assistants. Disability and Society, 14(3), 309–323. Ellis, K., & Goggin, G. (2015). Disability media participation: Opportunities, obstacles and politics. Media International Australia, 154(1), 78–88. Ellis, K., & Goggin, G. (2018). Disability and media activism. In G. Meikle (Ed.), The Routledge companion to media and activism (pp. 355–364). Oxford and New York: Routledge. Feely, M. (2016a). Sexual surveillance and control in a community-based intellectual disability service. Sexualities, 19(5–6), 725–750. https://doi. org/10.1177/1363460715620575. Feely, M. (2016b). Disability studies after the ontological turn: A return to the material world and material bodies without a return to essentialism. Disability and Society, 31(7), 863–883. Garoian, C. R. (2013). Prosthetic pedagogy of art: Embodied research and practice. Albany: State University of New York Press. Gerschick, T., & Miller, A. (1995). Coming to terms: Masculinity and physical disability. In D. Sabo & D. F. Gordon (Eds.), Men’s health and illness: Gender, power, and the body. Thousand Oaks, USA: SAGE Publications. Gill, M. (2015). Already doing it: Intellectual disability and sexual agency. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Goggin, G. (2017). Formatting disability in contemporary variety TV: Experiments with masculinity in The Last Leg. In C. Loeser, V. Crowley, & B. Pini (Eds.), Disability and masculinities. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Goodley, D., Runswick-Cole, K., & Liddiard, K. (2016). The dishuman child. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37(5), 770–784. Guldin, A. (2000). Self-claiming sexuality: Mobility impaired people and American culture. Sexuality and Disability, 18(4), 233–238. Hickey-Moody, A. (2009). Unimaginable bodies: Intellectual disability, performance and becomings. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense. Hickey-Moody, A. (2015). Carbon fibre masculinity. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 20(1), 139–153. Kirby, D. (Director). (1997). Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist [Documentary Film]. USA: Lions Gate Films.

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Kumari Campbell, F. (2009). Contours of ableism: The production of disability and abledness. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Kvigne, K., Kirkevold, M., Martinsen, R., & Bronken, B. A. (2013). Masculinity and strokes: The challenges presented to younger men by chronic illness. Journal of Gender Studies, 23(2), 197–210. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/09589236.2013.790797. La Bruce, B., & Castro, R. (1996). Hustler White. France: Star Productions. Liddiard, K. (2012). (S)exploring disability: Intimacies, sexualities and disabilities (Doctoral dissertation). University of Warwick. Liddidard, K. (2014). ‘I never felt like she was just doing it for the money’: Disabled men’s intimate (gendered) realities of purchasing sexual p ­ leasure for intimacy. Sexualities, 17(7), 837–855. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1363460714531272. Loeser, C., Crowley, V., & Pini, B. (2017). Disability and masculinities: Corporeality, pedagogy and the critique of otherness. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. McRuer, R. (2006). Crip theory: Cultural signs of queerness and disability. New York: New York University Press. McRuer, R. (2018). Crip times: Disability, globalization, and resistance. New York, USA: New York University Press. Negri, A. (2008). Subversive Spinoza. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Nishida, A. (2017). Relating through differences: Disability, affective relationality, and the U.S. public healthcare assemblage. Subjectivity, 10(1), 89–103. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-016-0018-2. Peers, D., Brittain, M., & McRuer, R. (2012). Crip excess, art, and politics: A conversation with Robert McRuer. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 34(3–4), 148–155. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714413.20 12.687284. Phillips, S. (Director). (2012) [Documentary Television Programme]. In B. TV (Producer), The Undateables. UK: Channel 4 Television Corporation. Pitchford-Hyde, J. (2016). Bare strength: Representing veterans of the desert wars in US media. Media, Culture and Society, 39(1), 45–61. https://doi. org/10.1177/0163443716672299. Roman, L. (2009). Go gigure! Public pedagogies, invisible impairments and the performative paradoxes of visibility as veracity. The International Journal of Inclusive Education, 13(7), 677-698. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 13603110903041920.

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Rosenfelt, K., Baden-Powell, S., & Owen, A. (Producers)., & Sharrock, T. (Director). (2016). Me Before You [Motion Picture]. UK and USA: New Line Cinema. Sedgwick, E. K. (1985). Between men: English literature and male homosocial desire. New York, USA: Columbia University Press. Shakespeare, T. (2000). Disabled  sexuality: Toward  rights  and  recognition. Sexuality and Disability, 18(3), 159–166. Shildrick, M. (2014). “Why should our bodies end at the skin?”: Embodiment, boundaries, and somatechnics. Hypatia, 30(1), 13–29. https://doi.org/10. 1111/hypa.12114. Shildrick, M., & Steinberg, D. L. (2015). Estranged bodies: Shifting paradigms and the biomedical imaginary. Body and Society, 21(3), 3–19. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1357034x15586242. Stephens, L., Ruddick, S., & Mckeever, P. (2014). Disability and Deleuze: An exploration of becoming and embodiment in children’s everyday environments. Body and Society, 21(2), 194–220. https://doi.org/10.1177/13570 34x14541155. Sullivan, N., & Murray, S. (2009). Somatechnics: Queering the technologisation of bodies. Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing. Trevisan, F. (2017). Disability rights advocacy online. New York, USA: Routledge. Valente, J. M., & Boldt, G. M. (2015). The rhizome of the deaf child. Qualitative Inquiry, 21(6), 562–574. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800415581885. Weber, J. C. (2018). Becoming deaf in the posthuman era: Posthumanism, artsbased research and deaf education (Doctoral dissertation). University of Regina. Wilson, N., Parmenter, T. R., Stancliffe, R. J., & Shuttleworth, R. P. (2013). From diminished men to conditionally masculine: Sexuality and Australian men and adolescent boys with intellectual disability. Culture, Health and Sexuality: An International Journal for Research, Intervention and Care, 15(6), 738–751. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691058.2013.780262.

5 Carbon Futures: Masculine Economies, Performative Materialities

Capitalism is killing us. It is killing us through producing huge amounts of environmental waste in the process of making capitalist commodities, trafficking workers along polluted highways and drilling oil to traffic workers. In this chapter, I will show that often this process of commodity production is gendered as masculine. As a core part of capitalism, contemporary economies of carbon production, consumption and trading mobilise masculinist tropes of competition, performance and frontier politics. As the carbon futures trading market shows us, carbon is now not only a core commodity on which contemporary capitalism is built, but carbon has also become a fiction that is performativity traded in a masculinist practice on which global stock markets depend. Indeed, while carbon is a resource on which both global industry and the stock markets rely, economic units of assessment never take into account the full market value of commodities that rely on generating carbon. Throughout the process of its production, carbon (which is ostensibly “in everything”), becomes gendered: carbon is made as masculine. The natural resources drawn on to make carbon can be seen as the feminised, exploited, taken for granted resource on which ‘liberal’ late capitalism depends. In this chapter, I argue that the gendered nature of © The Author(s) 2019 A. Hickey-Moody, Deleuze and Masculinity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01749-1_5

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carbon production shows us that in order to achieve a carbon neutral future we need to rethink the systems of cultural value and associated pedagogies of masculinity embedded in carbon production and consumption. Carbon production and consumption are one of the core forms of masculine performative materiality and cultural economy on which capitalism depends. This is the most polemic chapter of the book and I engage with some theorists who employ Deleuze to rethink gender and the ­environment, such as Stacy Alaimo and her brilliant work on carbon heavy masculinity. That said, the remit of this chapter is slightly different from those which come before. In this chapter, I advance an argument about masculinity and energy cultures that opens new pathways of inquiry in Masculinity Studies. Specifically, I argue that masculinity, as it is taught and learnt through carbon economies, needs to change. These are lines of inquiry I hope other scholars will pursue, employing Deleuze’s thought to consider the pedagogy of masculinity in ways I have suggested might be of use in the preceding chapters of the book. Contemporary carbon economies have a sad global affect: across a long period of time they reduce the ways in which the planet can act. They also reduce the ways in which masculinity can be recognized, to form quite a select range of similarly assisted performances: driving big cars, fast cars, aeroplanes, rocket ships, and other lightweight carbon vehicles. More than just analysing specific and located gender performances, I want to show that carbon production is a mode of masculine governance, intrinsically linked to capitalism. Carbon production and reliance is a distributed, decentralized form of what Wendy Brown calls state power. In her discussion of masculinist modes of state power, Wendy Brown argues that the liberal state effects a range of forms of governance (all of which are masculinist), namely, the juridical-legislative, or ‘liberal’ dimension, the capitalist dimension, the prerogative dimension (which deems women and children as men’s property), and the bureaucratic dimension. Brown states that: the elements of the state identifiable as masculinist correspond not to some property contained within men but to the conventions of power and privilege constitutive of gender within an order of male dominance… This

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dominance expresses itself as the power to describe and run the world and the power of access to women. (1995, p. 168; emphasis added).

Modes of governance teach gender. In the same way that the capitalist liberal state governs gender, partly through the division of family, civil society (economy) and state, by constructing the family as a ‘natural’ realm and civil society as the masculinist space where rights/freedoms are exercised, carbon production and emission is the unspoken necessity of contemporary capitalist life and, as such, is core to the production of gendered economies. The resources from which carbon is drawn are the ‘feminised other’ of economic life. Carbon is the new man in the state that Wendy Brown characterises so powerfully as constituting liberalism under late capitalism. Contemporary carbon economies need to change, and this requires a new economy of masculine performance.

The Politics of Surfaces There has been a critical engagement with the politics of surfaces across the Humanities and Social Sciences. Amato (2013), Simonetti et al. (2018) and Coleman (2016) each offer innovative conceptualizations of the politics of surfaces as a way of bringing together epistemology and ontology. Mimi Sheller’s (2014a) work on aluminium and cultural economies of speed and lightness sets a key precedent for the theoretical work on economies of production and surfaces that I undertake in this chapter. In her work on Global Energy Cultures of Speed and Lightness, Sheller examines the production and use of aluminium as part of an “energy culture” that values speed and lightness. She explains that: “I want to consider a particular set of materialized relations to speed and lightness, and how much affective work (another kind of energy) is needed to shift our stance, or reconfigure the world that speed and lightness have shaped” (2014a, p. 129). Sheller begins by using Matthew Huber’s definition of a ‘socioecological’ relationship in his analysis of oil: explaining that a “socioecological relation … requires taking seriously both the materiality of petroleum and the

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social projects that channel its biophysical capacities in particular ways” (Huber, 2013, p. 4, in Sheller, 2014a, p. 27; emphasis in original). Socioecological relations is a valuable concept and resource for the project of thinking about gendered economies of the production of carbon, and the theoretical resources laid out by Sheller substantiate the broader project of sociocultural analysis of materials and resources such as oil and carbon. Sheller argues: If transportation systems and liquid hydrocarbon infrastructures (such as drilling platforms, pipelines, gas stations, tankers, etc.) figure urban spatial formations (and their associated ways of life) as socioecologies of energy, then the circulation of electricity is the other key form of energy that shapes contemporary socioecologies. (2014a, p. 128)

Carbon is produced as energy, and as matter. In extracting carbon from the feminised, naturalised environment and making it into a commodity that can be traded in the act of masculine competition that is the carbon futures trading market, the contemporary socioecology that is created is explicitly masculinised, performative and embedded in capitalist structures in ways that ensure its longevity. The method that Sheller develops in order to follow energy pathways is one that she calls “following things”, explicitly, this is tracking material cultures from their source out into the world, “showing where material artefacts come from and how they are interconnected” (2014a, p. 130). This offers an interesting method for establishing how the formations of carbon production and consumption that I am interested in come to be shaped. Carbon itself is everywhere, in every living thing. Yet across a range of economies of production and consumption, carbon is created as a commodity to be traded, and it is a vehicle for increasing competitive masculine relationships across all kinds of fora. From its inception, and certainly from a very early point in its production, and across its globalised and globalizing trade and consumption, carbon is used to craft a masculinist energy culture. It is employed to these ends through its physical and symbolic extraction from the increasingly ‘feminised’ repository of natural resources which, while they hold the ingredients for the

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manufacture of the economically important unit of carbon, are imagined within late capitalism as ‘natural’ and therefore ‘free’ for the taking. The feminised and increasingly exploited earth is available at apparently no cost other than extraction and fabrication prices and the unspoken cost to the global environment. Well before the point at which it enters the market, carbon itself, and indeed the very idea of carbon, has a masculine e/affect which is magnified by the structure of the stock market, cultures of mobility and associated forms of frontier masculinity performed through carbon framed racing cars and road bikes. Fast and light vehicles eat up space, they move the body across frontiers in ways that are only made possible by technology. There are particular modes of gendered performance that accompany frontier masculinity. In her insightful discussion of frontier masculinity in the oil industry, Gloria Miller explains the particular gender performances that become embedded in ways of taking new spatial frontiers. Miller describes J. P. Bryan, the former CEO of Gulf Canada in a way that illustrates this performativity though characterising him as “‘a miscast cowboy’, ‘a brash, tough-talking Texan’ (McMurdy, 1998), a ‘Texas gunslinger’ who ‘follows the only rule that matters: survival of the fittest and fastest’ who ‘plays the corporate takeover game with guts and gusto’ and who ‘played by his own rules, which meant being fast on the draw, and making sure his opponent was dead before he hit the ground” (Miller, 2004, p. 62). In addition to styles of gendered performance, frontier masculinity requires a particular attitude to space and, of course, frontiers. For example, a confident claiming of space, stating “this is the way it is and we should drill here” (Miller, 2004, p. 62). Carbon brings with it a particular set of frontiers and technologies for mapping spaces. Carbon futures as imagined, valued and traded on the carbon futures trading market and ultra-light frame Formula One cars that have a chassis moulded from carbon fibre1 sheets are examples of one frontier made available for colonisation and a technology of spatial domination that is fashioned from carbon. Carbon futures are made as an afterthought of the environmental damage caused by a huge global increase in carbon emissions. 1Carbon

fibre sheets are made from woven threads, the threads are a chemical mixture containing ammonia, propylene, and oxygen.

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The notion of “energy culture” is another useful idea employed by Sheller (i.e. a culture which “shapes social practices and ways of life” (2014a, p. 133), and that is materialised via certain substances such as aluminium, or carbon). Sheller characterises the ways energy cultures come to take shape in late capitalism through explaining that: Control over energy involves transferring it into particular objects and moving it through various distribution networks. This infrastructure then supports particular materializations of energy that become routinized in the ways people use and access matter in all its forms, such that material cultures embed energy in forms that become taken for granted or invisible. (2014a, p. 134)

Contemporary masculine economies rely on carbon: carbon fuels capitalism, travel, and competition. Any historical period can be analysed for its specific assemblages of human mobility, transport of goods (logistics), and energy circulation to support these routings […]. We can refer to such assemblages of matter, energy, practices and meanings as an energy culture that is embedded in ongoing processes of mobilizing, energizing, making and doing. (Sheller, 2014a, p. 134; emphasis in original)

Carbon is both an energy culture on which contemporary capitalism depends and a material culture on and through which the energy culture is built. If we were to think about tracking the material culture of carbon we would have to begin with the realisation that carbon, or at least the possibility for carbon, is everywhere, in every living thing. Embedded in my inquiry, then, are the questions: at what point in its production, consumption and/or trade does carbon become a masculinist energy culture? And how so? If it is only at the point at which it enters the market, is it carbon itself or is it the structures of the market that give it masculine e/affect? These questions have more than one answer, and they frame my inquiry across this chapter. Following Sheller’s lead, I pay attention to contemporary “energy cultures”. I expand specifically on the point that

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energy cultures are materialised via certain substances, such as aluminium, or, as Alaimo (2016) has also shown, carbon. Sheller explains that: Control over energy involves transferring it into particular objects and moving it through various distribution networks. This infrastructure then supports particular materializations of energy that become routinized in the ways people use and access matter in all its forms, such that material cultures embed energy in forms that become taken for granted or invisible. (2014a, p. 134)

Carbon explicitly shifts and masculinises contemporary energy cultures. Alaimo characterises the contemporary fetishisation of the masculine nature of carbon through stating: A peculiar sort of hypermasculinity of impervious but penetrating subjects has emerged in the United States… SUVs and pickup trucks have not only grown ludicrously huge but are armed with aggressive impenetrability, covered, as they often are, with armour-like accoutrements including big, rugged grille guards and hubcabs arrayed with frightening cones that look like medieval weapons. Some of these vehicles sport large metal testicles that hang from the trailer hitch (the hitch itself becomes the penis in this ensemble). … Just in case this is all too subtle, the ‘rolling coal’ movement drives into blatantly connect masculinity, the exuberant production of pollution and the rejection of environmentalism … People in this movement, usually men, equip their trucks to use more, not less gasoline, in order to blow out black clouds of soot. (Alaimo, 2016, pp. 95–96)

Cars are now both made of carbon and produce carbon. They become vehicles for the performance of masculinity in numerous ways. SUV’s and the ‘rolling coal’ movement that Alaimo discusses are one example of how carbon is both used and produced in the performance of masculinity, but car racing and the fantasy of fast and strong masculinity facilitated through carbon fibre racing car shells are another example of the all-too-easy, yet ever so enduringly popular, equation between masculinity and motor cars. Carbon materially shapes our contemporary

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world, our capacity for mobility and our economy. In this respect, various forms of carbon are actants, or objects and materials that play roles in global narratives of speed and progress. This approach of reading material, objects, omissions and compounds as actants is embedded in the work of a range of scholars. In adopting this approach, Sheller draws on Jane Bennett. After Spinoza, Thoreau, Lucretius and others, Bennett reads ‘things’ as lively, or as agents. The approach to materialism facilitated here examines the agency of things as exercised through materiality in its expressive capacity to act. Bennett asks if things can actually ‘hail’ us or interpolate our experiences through their thing power. Sheller shows us that: “Aluminum can be thought of not just as an inert metal that is acted upon, but as a complex agent enrolled into transnational circuits, structuring and structured by the connections between them” (2014b, p. 67). She explains: Aluminium moves around the world, changing shape as it moves: from underground bauxite ore found especially in the Caribbean into alumina refineries and smelters driven by hydroelectric power harnessed from rivers; from ingots, rolled sheets, and extruded parts into electrochemical alloys, packaging and products; from shipments loaded and unloaded at ports and stored in warehouses into engineered infrastructures, built vehicles, and architectural assemblages; from the London Metals Exchange and the global newspapers. (2014b, p. 67)

In each of its material configurations, aluminium is surrounded by performative economies and the same can be said for carbon. Materials are agents of globalisation and provide the means to generate material signifiers of global modernity. The affective capacity of metals and resources, in this instance carbon, can be used to show that material economies of carbon production signify social values, indeed, I would argue, they articulate masculinity cultures of the anthropocene.2 2The

anthropocene is the age defined by significant human impact on the earth’s environment, as demonstrated by erosion of topsoils, pollution of waterways and global warming.

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The affective capacity of metals and resources engenders specific politics of the surface, and carbon produces a particular fetishization of carbon fibre surfaces and associated qualities of speed, durability, lightness and strength with an accompanying ideological commitment to capitalism and futurism. Carbon, both as a commodity, a resource and a lightweight metal, has an affective capacity that is competitive and desirable. Capitalism, the system that Deleuze and Guattari (1983) so aptly characterise as the beast that eats its own outsides, depends absolutely on many forms of carbon. Carbon emissions produced by fuel and industry, carbon vehicles moving bodies across continents in carbon composite airplanes and carbon futures being traded daily. Capitalism is like the id of psychoanalysis, it is embedded in everything: It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines — real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 1)

Capitalism will maintain its addictive relationship to carbon through twisting and turning itself into all kinds of justificatory positions that advocate the idea that carbon production and consumption of many forms is necessary. It absolutely is not. Humans can survive perfectly well without petrol, Formula One cars and prosthetic limbs designed for sport, but contemporary configurations of masculinity, and associated high performance economies cannot. One form of ‘justificatory squirming’ surrounding carbon economies is carbon trading on the futures market. In their work on “The Ethics of Carbon Neutrality”, Dhanda and Hartman (2011) explore the carbon offset market. Though the carbon offset market is relatively new, numerous regulated offset providers have emerged quickly. Stakeholders who participate in the carbon offset market often lack technical literacy of carbon production and consumption, and there is, as yet, no common quality assurance or certification structure for providers. Quite to the

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contrary, the media warns that a relative “cowboy” atmosphere prevails in the current environment, and that there are “widespread instances of people and organizations buying worthless credits that do not yield any reductions in carbon emissions” (Fidler & Harvey, 2007). At this point in the evolution of the market, only a handful of offset provider-rating schemes exist; and even these systems leave consumers with few answers when they seek to find a means by which to ensure that the said systems are having their intended impact. Like the modes of capitalist operation that Deleuze and Guattari so aptly describe, capitalism has created principles of operation grounded in abstract quantities that move further and further in the direction of the deterritorialization of the socius. Capitalism creates change. They explain: Capitalism is in fact born of the encounter of two sorts of flows: the decoded flows of production in the form of money-capital, and the decoded flows of labor in the form of the “free worker.” Hence, unlike previous social machines, the capitalist machine is incapable of providing a code that will apply to the whole of the social field. By substituting money for the very notion of a code, it has created an axiomatic of abstract quantities that keeps moving further and further in the direction of the deterritorialization of the socius. Capitalism tends toward a threshold of decoding that will destroy the socius in order to make it a body without organs and unleash the flows of desire on this body as a deterritorialized field. Is it correct to say that in this sense schizophrenia is the product of the capitalist machine, as manic-depression and paranoia are the product of the despotic machine, and hysteria the product of the territorial machine? (Deleuze & Guattari, 1984, p. 33)

On the path to producing schizoid detachment from the socius, and indeed the world, capitalism sells the possibility of environmental redemption; carbon offset markets posited as a way of ameliorating the damage caused by the huge carbon emissions made by the capitalist machine. Dhanda and Hartman (2011) provide a grounded understanding of the nature of the offset market and suggest a tendency toward carbon neutrality as a possible point of equilibrium for the consuming public. They outline the standards environment for offset

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providers to illustrate most effectively the need for a single set of criteria among providers that is readily understandable by the common consumer stakeholder. Dhanda and Hartman (2011) explore the differences among the providers—and articulate the specific criteria upon which providers may be evaluated by this particular stakeholder constituency—namely, by bringing together ‘best practices’ based on currently available analyses. As I have intimated above, and continue to suggest throughout this chapter, offset trading, like all economies surrounding carbon, is an inherently masculinist practice, but offset trading is unique in the respect that it is an emerging social and economic fiction. Characterised by specific performative tropes and affective registers, carbon markets form the new frontier for what Connell (1998) refers to as ‘transnational business masculinity’. In “Masculinities and Globalization”, Raewyn Connell argues that: “A transnational business masculinity, institutionally based in multinational corporations and global finance markets, is arguably the emerging dominant form on a world scale” (1998, p. 3). She contends that: “Within the arenas of international relations, the international state, multinational corporations, and global markets, there is … a deployment of masculinities and a reasonably clear hegemony” (1998, p. 17). This hegemony is based on financial fictions that form global imagined communities of belonging, performative and affective economies, and is used to justify the enduring exploitation of environmental resources that result in carbon emissions, financial profit for some and environmental destruction for all. This hegemonic performance is affective, symbolic and not physical; indeed, the performative, affective nature of this late modern capitalist masculinity is distinctive and maps a clear move away from the brawny muscle of the ‘Marlborough man’. Connell articulates this emphasis on the performative and affective through explaining that: Transnational business masculinity does not require bodily force, since the patriarchal dividend on which it rests is accumulated by impersonal, institutional means. But corporations increasingly use the exemplary bodies of elite sportsmen as a marketing tool … and indirectly as a means of legitimation for the whole gender order. (1998, p. 16)

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The institutional dividend on which the frontier markets of carbon trading rely is a financial fiction, that is grounded in environmental exploitation. True to Connell’s argument above, these practices of exploitation absolutely run through into elite sport, but also characterise the masculinist nature of late capitalist culture: fast moving, hard, ‘strong’. Moreover, global capitalism makes a fortune—indeed, a speculative fortune, from carbon production and the exploitation of natural resources. Carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels already carry an economic price, though the real bill comes to us all in masked public health care costs, harm to the environment, the effects of climate change and reduced options for the future. I briefly sketch an incomplete geography of carbon emissions before looking at the masculine performance of carbon trading, an act which can arguably only be conceived in light of some understanding of the contemporary cultural landscape of carbon production. The production of a material culture is not—as Sheller and Alaimo show us—solely a physical issue. Cultural values are conceptual and embodied as much as they are articulated through matter. The cultural value of carbon has become inextricably enmeshed with the worth of masculinity in ways that we can only begin to understand, and which I examine as this chapter develops. To begin synthesising this analysis, I want to make a materialist point about the feminisation of natural resources and the masculinisation of capitalist ‘value-adding’ processes of industrial production and associated carbon emission. A huge amount of money is made by producing carbon and selling carbon offsets in capitalist markets. For example, if we look at the carbon futures markets, we can see that capitalism is a system employed to make a speculative fortune from carbon production, carbon offset and the associated exploitation of natural resources. Carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels carry an economic price in some legal jurisdictions, though the actual damages done are repeatedly obfuscated by media, policy and masculine prowess achieved through industrial success. This process of environmental exploitation, and the feminization and exploitation of the ‘natural environment’ held up against ‘(hu)man

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made resources’ has a long history within capitalist economies, a history which coagulates in particular ways around certain materialities such as oil, aluminium and carbon. I briefly review the respective politics of these actants as pedagogies of masculinity, beginning with oil.

On the Politics of Oil: Masculinity and Post-carbon Transitions In their themed edition on “Energizing Societies”, Tyfield and Urry (2014) convene a series of investigations into the politics of oil and post-oil transitions. Of note amongst this edition of Theory, Culture and Society is Geels’ work on “Regime Resistance against Low-Carbon Transitions: Introducing Politics and Power into the Multi-Level Perspective”. Drawing on insights from political economy, Geels examines the politics and power relationships that articulate across the multi-level perspectives of low-carbon transitions. Instrumental, discursive, material and institutional forms of power and resistance are distinguished and illustrated with examples from the UK electricity system. Geels concludes that the resilience and persistence of coal, gas and nuclear production regimes currently negates the benefits from increasing renewables deployment. Fossil fuel regimes are much more difficult to stabilise than existing policy-makers assume. The same themed edition features an insightful essay by David Tyfield titled “‘King Coal is Dead! Long Live the King!’: The Paradoxes of Coal’s Resurgence in the Emergence of Global Low-Carbon Societies”. Tyfield shows us that, while discourse on low-carbon transition envisages progressive social change towards environmentally sustainable and more equitable societies, such assumptions pay inadequate attention to the key questions of (productive, relational) power embedded in existing carbon-intensive energy systems. He examines how energy infrastructures and socio-technical systems interact with, construct, enable and constrain political regimes. Conceiving low-carbon energy transitions through an analytic focus on power, Tyfield holds in relief the paradox of the ‘phenomenal’ resurgence of coal in an era of low-carbon innovation. The strong connections between coal-based socio-technical

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systems and the political regime of classical liberalism can be used to show energy and political regimes connecting ‘clean coal’ with a ‘liberalism 2.0’ centred on a rising China. This connection affords a critique of the low-carbon society emergent in these developments—a society almost completely lacking the progressive visions of much ‘low-carbon transition’ literature. Other work by Urry, in which he examines the energy economies of capitalism, is instructive. In Consuming the Planet to Excess (2010) and then later in Societies Beyond Oil: Oil Dregs and Social Futures (2013), Urry examines major changes relating to the contemporary conditions of human life. In examining what he calls ‘Carbon Capital’, Urry explains how “Many oil companies are more powerful than governments. The power of these companies, what I call ‘carbon capital’ is not just economic but also political, cultural and military. Carbon capital consists of a complex of oil and gas exploration, producing and refining companies; vehicle, plane and ship manufacturers; media, advertising and cultural corporations; and many think tanks and consultants. Such carbon capital has been enormously effective in wielding power, especially in the U.S.A but also with Britain, the Russian Federation, parts of Africa and Latin America and most Middle Eastern countries” (Urry, 2013, p. 47). Carbon capital has used “different strategies and tactics over the past half a century or so … oil is not any old energy source. It is the only one that so far is able to move people and objects on the scale that the twentieth century brought into being, and he has locked the world into social practices that will not continue if there really is an ‘energy abyss’” (Urry, 2013, pp. 95–96). Urry deals especially with emergent contradictions that stem from shifts within capitalism in the rich Global North over the course of the last century or so. He explains that: These shifts involve moving from low-carbon to high-carbon economies/ societies, from societies of discipline to societies of control, and more recently from specialized and differentiated zones of consumption to mobile, de-differentiated consumptions of excess. (Urry, 2013, p. 1)

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Urry shows us that, in no uncertain terms, societies are currently characterised by their wasteful consumption. He examines the implications of such forms of ‘excess’ consumption for clues as to the nature and characteristics of possible capitalist futures, all of which are bleak and vehicles for the environmental exploitation of the twenty-first century. Carbon creates an enmeshment of economy and cultural value that is materialist, gendered, and oriented toward the technical modification of human affairs. Carbon economies suppose that humans have become significant in terms of collective activity that is historically recent, highly unequal, and global in scope. Here, the human is configured not as a biological species, such as in debates on “life itself ” or in distinctions between humans and other species. Rather, “carbon accounting formulates the human ecologically and geologically with an eye toward imagining the future forms these relations might take. … climate change has identified the human as a contemporary problem with particular urgency” (Whittington, 2016, p. 46). Contemporary formations and performances of masculinity are at the heart of this global problem, drilling for oil, driving cars powered by oil, selling the possibility of redemption from oil and exploitation. This needs to be addressed with particular urgency.

Financial and Environmental Gendered Fictions Global emissions can be allocated to human activities in various ways. One of the most straightforward analyses of carbon emissions to be found comes from the World Resources Institute (2016), which breaks down total global emissions into the following sectors: “Energy (24.9%), Industry (14.7%), Transportation (14.3%), Other fuel combustion (8.6%), Fugitive emissions (4%), Agriculture (13.8%), Land use change (12.2%), Industrial processes (4.3%), Waste (3.2%)”3 3These

sectors are then assigned to various end uses: Road transport (10.5%) Air transport (1.7%) Other transport (2.5%)

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(World Resources Institute 2016). When considered both individually and collectively, sales of these resources, or revenue surrounding resource management (e.g. waste) show us that the extent of the fortune created by capitalism from selling natural resources is not only enormous but also made impossible to accurately quantify by the nature of the shifting metrics used to evaluate energy production, consumption and sale (Friedrich, Ge, & Pickens, 2017). The World Resources Institute (2016) shows us that a huge 24.9% of the world’s carbon emissions come from electricity and heat. While, based on this information, we could arguably develop an estimate cost of the environmental damage done, there are no estimates of the global value of the coal and gas energy market. How much money does this

Fuel and power for residential buildings (10.2%) Fuel and power for commercial buildings (6.3%) Unallocated fuel combustion (3.8%) Iron and steel production (4%) Aluminium and non-ferrous metals production (1.2%) Machinery production (1%) Pulp, paper and printing (1.1%) Food and tobacco industries (1.0%) Chemicals production (4.1%) Cement production (5.0%) Other industry (7.0%) Transmission and distribution losses (2.2%) Coal mining (1.3%) Oil and gas production (6.4%) Deforestation (11.3%) Reforestation (−0.4%) Harvest and land management (1.3%) Agricultural energy use (1.4%) Agricultural soils (5.2%) Livestock and manure (5.4%) Rice cultivation (1.5%) Other cultivation (1.7%) Landfill of waste (1.7%) Wastewater and other waste (1.5%)

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damage make corporations who are its perpetrators? The Australian Bureau of Statistics coal mining data shows that in 2014–2015 sales and service income in the coal mining industry was $45.9 billion. This was a decrease by 6.4% from 2013. If we subtract the total capital expenditure for the coal mining industry (which was $6 billion4), we can see that a conservative estimate of the net profit of the energy industry for 2014–2015 is $39.9 billion. The kind of revenue is far more than twice the amount recuperated by carbon taxes which was estimated as just $7.6 billion in 2014–2015. Since 1990, US greenhouse gas emissions have increased significantly. From year to year, emissions rise (and very occasionally fall in some places) due to changes in the economy, the price of fuel, and other factors. The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency’s 2016 report Trends in Global CO2 Emissions shows us that 2015 was the hottest year since records began in 1880. In 2016, the 16 warmest years recorded were between 1998 and 2015. In the European Union, emissions increased by 1.3% in 2014, but the year closed with the adoption of the landmark Paris Agreement on Climate Change signed by 194 countries and the European Union (Olivier, Janssesns-Maenhout, Muntean, & Peters, 2016). As a result of these changes in national emission totals, global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion, cement production and other processes decreased in 2015 by 0.1%. It is generally conceded that, in 2015, global CO2 emissions in Europe improved (Olivier et al., 2016). Carbon emissions in Asia are profoundly impacted by the world’s top emitter of CO2, China, which only started to marginally curb its carbon dioxide emissions in 2015 (WRI 2017). In 2015, China and the US reduced their emissions by 0.7% (China) and 2.6% (US), respectively, compared to 2014. However, these decreases were counterbalanced by increases in India of 5.1%, so while Asia has some relatively carbon neutral countries, it also houses the largest site of global carbon emissions, China, and the most rapidly growing emissions market, India.

4This

was mainly comprised of expenditure of $3.8 billion on plant, machinery and equipment and $1.5 billion on dwellings, other buildings and structures.

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In 2014, the major carbon emission sources in Australia were electricity, gas, water and primary industries (agriculture, forestry, fishing and mining). These emission sources accounted for 35.4 and 29.4% (primary industries) of direct emissions respectively. As I have suggested, the energy industry alone made at least $39.9 billion in the 2014–2015 financial year, and yet carbon taxes in Australia across all sectors— so including the primary industries—were just $7.6 billion. That’s a $32.3 billion profit coming from the feminisation and invisibilisation of capitalism’s reliance on carbon. Carbon taxes and the carbon futures market remain inadequate responses to the global problem of carbon pollution. Setting a carbon tax, or putting a “price” on carbon emissions, supposedly helps shift the burden for the damage back to those who are responsible for it and makes those who can reduce carbon emissions accountable for so doing. But instead of dictating who should reduce emissions, where and how, a carbon price leaves polluters to decide for themselves whether to discontinue their polluting activity, reduce emissions, or continue polluting and pay for it. Given the huge profit margins outlined above, the choice to continue polluting and pay the meagre tax placed on it is obviously appealing, as substantial profit margins are retained. You can buy preset prices for carbon emissions on the futures trading market, so even if the cost of carbon emission triples in the next three years, you can pay a carbon tax rate you secured in 2017. An emissions trading scheme, or ETS—sometimes referred to as a cap-and-trade system—caps the total level of greenhouse gas emissions and allows those industries with low emissions to sell their extra allowances to larger emitters. By creating supply and demand for emissions allowances, an ETS establishes a market price for greenhouse gas emissions. The cap helps ensure that the required emission reductions will take place to keep the emitters within their pre-allocated carbon budget. The choice of the regulatory instrument (an ETS or a carbon tax) will depend on national and economic circumstances. There are also more indirect ways of more accurately pricing carbon, such as through fuel taxes, the removal of fossil fuel subsidies, and regulations that attempt to compensate for the “social cost of carbon”. However, what I am suggesting here is that current attempts to think through the social cost of

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carbon are partial at best; and they necessarily exclude the gendered, geographic and economic politics of carbon production. The performative nature of the carbon futures trading market is evidenced by Vesty, Telgenkamp and Roscoe in their work on ‘creating numbers’. Vesty et al. illustrate the performative ways in which carbon emissions are given calculative agency. Through an empirical case study of a large Australian water utility, the authors explain the calculative appeal of the carbon emissions number, how the carbon emissions number came into being and its performative effects. Quantifying carbon emissions gives them agency and mobilizes them to act in economies in certain ways. Descheneau (2012) examines the fact that making money from carbon is now possible through a number of market devices: processes that have themselves enabled the construction of carbon as a form of money. The social underpinnings of the commodification of carbon cannot be underestimated, and, following arguments about the performativity of economics Descheneau (2012) shows us that carbon performs functions similar to those of money. He persuasively argues that the construction of carbon money should be seen as a fundamentally social (rather than ‘merely’ technical) process. Inventing and performing the carbon market, then, is a social and human as well as a material act. Liu (2015) examines the social dynamics of the performativity of the carbon market in greater detail, arguing that three important dimensions need to be considered in understanding how the carbon market operates: materiality, framing, and citizen participation. First, to understand how the carbon market is established, Liu argues that it is not enough to examine the politics among the social actors alone. Carbon’s biophysical properties actively participate in market construction, shape the contours of the market, and may resist the desires of commodification from the social actors. Liu also examines the market crisis in the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme and shows us that the heart of the debate lies in the different framings of the objectives of the carbon market. The European Union Emissions Trading Scheme can be framed respectively as economic efficiency, a market, a system of regulation, an economic disadvantage, a tax, and a European integration project. Various political coalitions are actualised through each of these different kinds of framing, while the state

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still wields the ultimate power to regulate this market. Liu concludes by arguing that the market can potentially become a site for collective action, and, subsequently, that this activity can re-embed the market into the social fabric that created it. For Liu, then, the performativity of the carbon market is just as socially constructed as it is materially produced. There are implicit links here between individual’s embodied gender performance, the commanding men who dig for oil, tear up tram tracks and barter on to stock market, with the material and social performativity of the carbon market, that relies on associated gendered economies of carbon performance. Pellizzonni (2011) also offers a critical perspective on the intersection of the social and the material embodied by the carbon futures market. Drawing on Foucault’s governmentality framework and focusing on biotechnology patenting and the financialisation of climate and weather prediction and regulation, Pellizzonni argues that the conceptual underpinnings of these approaches bring with them a novel understanding of the ontological quality of the biophysical world. The biophysical world is conceived as fully plastic, controllable, open to an ever-expanding human agency. Neoliberal governance operates through, rather than despite, disorder (i.e. through contingency, uncertainty, instability). If environmental social theory can be brought in, to account for the ways in which the chaos in the biophysical world increasingly folds into and supports neoliberal systems of governance, we might begin to see that climate change is a biopolitical strategy for social control. Romain (2014) develops a resonant perspective, arguing that as environmental degradation becomes a growing concern, the development of international law on climate change articulates profound social contradictions between accumulation and reproduction under capitalism. These contradictions are translated into the creation of a form of public property over the right to emit greenhouse gases (as opposed to the ‘privatisation’ of the atmosphere). This public property is unequally distributed among states in an imperialist manner. The distribution of these rights at the domestic level amounts to the distribution of rights to ‘climate rent’. Romain (2014) argues that emission rights are not ‘commodities’, and emissions trading and carbon markets are not ‘accumulation strategies’. These are merely depoliticised forms in which ‘climate

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rent’ is extracted and circulated to preclude political debates about the goals of production. Over the past decade, carbon trading has emerged as the industrialised world’s primary policy response to global climate change, despite considerable controversy. With carbon markets worth $144 billion in 2009, carbon trading represents the largest manifestation of the trend toward market-based environmental governance. In Carbon Coalitions, Jonas Meckling presents the first comprehensive study on the rise of carbon trading and the role that business played in making this policy instrument a central pillar of global climate governance. Meckling explains how a transnational coalition of firms and a few market-oriented environmental groups actively promoted international emissions trading as a compromise policy solution in a situation of political stalemate. The coalition side-lined not only environmental groups that favoured taxation and command-and-control regulation but also business interests that rejected any emissions controls. Considering the sources of business influence, Meckling emphasises the importance of political opportunities (policy crises and norms), coalition resources (funding and legitimacy,) and political strategy (mobilising state allies and multilevel advocacy). Meckling presents three case studies that represent milestones in the rise of carbon trading: the internationalisation of emissions trading in the Kyoto Protocol (1989–2000); the creation of the EU Emissions Trading System (1998–2008); and the re-emergence of emissions trading on the US policy agenda (2001–2009). These cases, and the theoretical framework that Meckling develops for understanding the influence of transnational business coalitions, offer critical insights into the role of business in the emergence of market-based global environmental governance. Despite this wealth of critical engagement with the material, social and political natures of the carbon futures trading market, and the generally accepted consensus that carbon is an agent, very little other than Alaimo’s insightful analysis of carbon heavy masculinity, and my earlier work on carbon fibre masculinity, has developed enough to consider the gendered nature of carbon, carbon trading and the carbon markets. The basic divide between the feminised resource of nature and the masculinised waste of CO2 or commodity of carbon fibre, echoes

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Donna Haraway’s now-well-known point that: “Feminists have sometimes affirmed the categories of nature and the body as sites of resistance to the dominations of history, but the affirmations have tended to obscure the categorical and overdetermined aspect of ‘nature’ or the ‘female body’ as an oppositional ideological resource. Instead, nature has seemed simply there, a reserve to be mined for the uses of capitalism in general. Rather than marking a categorically determined pole, ‘nature’ or ‘woman’s body’ too easily means the saving core of reality distinguishable from the social impositions of patriarchy, imperialism, capitalism, racism, history and language. That repression of the construction of the category ‘nature’ can be and has been both used by and against feminist efforts to theorize women’s agency and status as social subjects” (Haraway, 1999, p. 442). So, building on Haraway’s astute observation that natural resources, akin to women’s bodies, are unconsciously seen as simply there for the taking, I ask what happens when the feminine bites back? When we question the construction of the naturalness of matter? If we take the materialist position in which women’s status as “reproductively fertile” social subjects can become conflated with “natural resources”, we can go on to see the masculinised results of industry as an act reliant on penetrating the natural body of the earth. But to do so, we, or specifically, myself as a women would first have to be permitted to think about the gendering of matter and culture, and this, I have discovered, is a dangerous activity.5 In 2015 I co-edited a themed edition of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. My contribution to this edition was an article called “Carbon Fiber Masculinity”, and in this paper I examined the gendered economy of carbon fiber as a prosthetic form of masculinity through which men are more effectively able to compete with each other (HickeyMoody, 2015). The article focused on a case study of Oscar Pistorius and the way in which his prosthetic legs both allowed him to compete alongside non-disabled male athletes and were also part of the production of 5A materialist reading could render the category “nature” a feminized resource dominated by the abstract performativity of masculinist liberal capitalism. Elizabeth Povinelli (2015) characterizes contemporary liberal governance as bound to carbon imaginaries: she argues that a system of distinction between sentient and non-sentient life is sutured to late capitalist economies.

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his intensely misogynist subjectivity. The paper draw on Deleuze’s work on the surface as a series of effects. In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze shows us that “identity” and “experience” are actually overlapping connections between surfaces: “The struggle between the mouth and brain. .. eating, on the one hand, and thinking, on the other, where the second always risks disappearing into the first, and the first, on the contrary, risks being projected onto the second” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 240). Who we think we are, who we are seen as being, and how we feel, come together on the surface of our skin. The surfaces of carbon fibre prosthetics were used by Pistorius to connect him to other non-disabled athletes, and carbon fibre is regularly used by competitive bike riders to connect competitively with other competitive riders, by car enthusiasts and professional car racers in order to belong to the world of carbon fibre mesh ultra light racing car frames—and the list of competitive economies could continue. My analysis of this politics of surfaces has two layers—firstly, it draws attention to the misogynist gendered politics often associated with using carbon fibre in competitive practices. Secondly, it explored Deleuze’s concept of the surface as a theoretical tool that can help us understand how subjectivity extends across and beyond our bodies. Published in a cultural theory journal, the paper is not surprisingly a piece of contemporary cultural theory. It seemed strange, then, that a piece of cultural theory would attract the attention of the biologist Richard Dawkins, and, even more so, be deemed an appropriate focal point for his scathing critique, and indeed for the critique of his many vitriolic male social media fans. Their interest in the paper was not only seemingly misplaced, and ill-informed if not ignorant, but was doggedly pursued across Twitter, YouTube and various internet discussion forums. An army of angry and broadly uneducated men rallied against a feminist piece of cultural theory that dealt with matters well outside their areas of expertise (see Hartley, 2018). The remaining section of this chapter, then, is a response to Richard Dawkins’ critique of my earlier work on carbon fibre masculinity and gendered nature of the cultural value of carbon fibre. I begin by providing some institutional and disciplinary context.

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Empire and Legitimate Knowledges This analysis necessarily begins at the University of Oxford, “one of the leading universities in the world” and, by its own admission, “the oldest university in the English-speaking world.” Oxford, an institution of white patriarchal success par excellence, disregards well respected accounts of older universities beginning in Bologna, Egypt, Morocco and touts itself as the oldest English speaking University, which is indeed the case. At the time of writing, Oxford holds pride of first place in the hegemony of English-speaking educational league tables, and is an institution that is pre-eminently populated by white students. It can be seen as symbolising the last vestiges of English empire, ever fading in the shadow of Brexit and Britain’s associated waning powers. Oxford supports the work of biologist Richard Dawkins, who from 1995 until 2008 was the university’s Professor for Public Understanding of Science and is currently listed as a professor emeritus. As an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, Dawkins runs his own foundation for ‘Reason and Science’. As this name suggests, the coupling of enlightenment knowledges with a legitimation of particular ideas of reason is embedded in Dawkins’ work, as is the masculinist nature of the discipline he represents and the institution to which he belongs. There are disciplinary boundaries that mark out questions about legitimate knowledge (there are proper knowledges of carbon), and investments in policing disciplinary boundaries; investments that shore-up popular imaginings of the justified, or correct, role of s­cience that Dawkins recreates and steadfastly maintains. As I move on, I show the very cursory nature of claims for disciplinary authority that Dawkins has made in critique of my work, but first I sketch the gendered nature of a very different institutional and disciplinary home. At the time when Dawkins’ public critique of my work was advanced, I was working at Goldsmiths, a college of the University of London, originally naval and marine training school. Arguably, Goldsmiths is famous for having attributes that are easily ‘feminised’— it is known for its interdisciplinarity, has a highly-ranked art school and has a strong tradition of practice-led research cultures. While ‘high art’

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is a notoriously masculinist world, if we are to put interdisciplinary art practice and biological science on a spectrum of gendered performativity and value, biological science’s claims to truth, and its populist essentialism are likely to have the masculinist edge on art theory’s recognition of multiple truths, the postmodern cultural turn and legitimation of identity politics. Much of my research and teaching has explored the feminization of education as a profession and as a discipline.6 Dawkins’ criticism began on 20 December 2015 with a completely unexpected tweet sent from @RichardDawkins that read: “I now learn that the masculinity of carbon fibre (like the femininity of fluid dynamics) is ‘philosophy’! Goodness, how I loathe pretension.” This statement received 157 retweets, 46 direct replies and 467 likes. More than this, it sparked a debate that was, on one level seemingly about the article, but more substantively was about gender politics and anti-intellectualism. Some screen shots capturing the surrounding discussions and argument are included below. This is just a selection of pages of critical, aggressive and demeaning tweets that were sent in support of Richard Dawkin’s critique of my work. I include as many tweets as possible here to gesture towards the feeling of attack, to evoke the affective responses that are generated by experiences of being trolled on Twitter (Figs. 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3). The first thing that the lively social media discussion and associated YouTube clips show is that Dawkins, and his angry fans, have no understanding of disciplinarity. The fact that a biologist’s comment on social media could be taken as a legitimate critique of a refereed cultural theory paper clearly shows that the skills Dawkins possesses—skills that are specific to biology—were assumed completely transferable into cultural theory. It was clear from personal correspondence between myself and Dawkins surrounding the shaming of my academic work on social media that Dawkins has not read any of the resources being drawn on

6I

write from Australia, where data from the New South Wales Department of Education shows that in 2015, 26.0% of the State’s teaching workforce were male and 74.0% of the state’s teaching workforce were female.

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Fig. 5.1  Twitter screenshot 1

Fig. 5.2  Twitter screenshot 2

in the original piece on carbon fibre, and, as such, is not in any way equipped to comment on the nature of the argument being advanced. Yet a register of being ‘right’ and entitled shapes Dawkins‘ uninformed critique, and indeed those of his followers. I would qualify this statement with the fact I could and would never criticize the biological work of a biologist, and I expect disciplinarity to be respected.

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Fig. 5.3  Twitter screenshot 3

People Who ‘Know What They Are Talking About’ On 30 January 2012 the YouTube content delivery company “Crash Course” published a 12:32 video called “That’s Why Carbon Is A Tramp: Crash Course Biology #1”. Over the course of the short video, carbon is characterised in an explicitly gendered and sexed fashion. The name itself genders carbon as feminine: ‘tramp’ is a noun used to describe promiscuous women and the animation in the film presents the carbon atom as a woman’s head. The woman’s body is a voluptuous pink dress with a plunging sweetheart neckline and noticeable cleavage. “Hank”, the white American middle-class narrator of the film who talks us through the story of carbon as a tramp, contextualises his mini-lecture by telling the listener that “biology is just about sex and not dying”. Hank then proceeds to characterise carbon as “a bit of a tramp”, a “jezebel”, and a “hussy”. Why? Because carbon easily and willingly bonds with other molecules. “Carbon is kind” suggests Hank, at which point a disproportionately large pair of lips, adorned with a ‘sexy’ beauty spot appear on the molecule head of the pink-dress-wearing-sexy-carbontramp-woman. In fact, according to Hank, carbon is a perfect mix of ‘small, kind and a little bit trampy’. Here, Hank is discussing carbon

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molecules; in what is called a science video. There was no backlash to this apparently legitimate gendering of science. My paper on carbon fibre masculinity is not supposed to be a science paper, it is about social relationships between men and the ways in which they are altered by certain objects, such as things made from carbon fibre like bicycles, cars and prosthetic legs. The social life of the prosthetic leg attached to Pistorius’ frame was masculine. The legs intensified Pistorius’ competitive relationships with other men. This argument is not only sociologically accurate, it is quantitatively and qualitatively a world away from pretending that carbon molecules are heterosexual, promiscuous women. Molecules are not promiscuous women, they molecules. However, the project of pretending carbon is a hyper sexualized woman somehow seems okay, or at least went unnoticed, by the men who leapt in alarm at the prospect of thinking about the ways in which surfaces favoured by men might act as extensions of gendered subjectivity. There are clearly questions of genre, method and masculine performativity that are in need of addressing. It seems, then, that knowledges about carbon, as well as systems of producing and consuming and trading carbon are parts of complex gendered economies that are synonymous with capitalist existence. As Deleuze and Guattari show us in their scathing appraisal of capitalism, the capitalist machine is “the only social machine that is constructed on the basis of decoded flows, substituting for intrinsic codes an axiomatic of abstract quantities in the form of money” (1983, p. 139). Only capitalism could thrive on, and indeed commodify, environmental disaster. This process of commodification, unified as it is with the process of masculinization, ensures that we will not be carbon neutral without significant intervention into popular practices of masculine performativity. Carbon is humanities doing, but if we do not work to change the current state of affairs, it will also be our final undoing. The righteousness with which Dawkins’ assumed his expertise in hard science translates into expertise in cultural theory alarmed me, when held against the fact that I would never assume expertise, and indeed authority, in hard science. The public shaming of my work undertaken by Dawkins’ and his fans made me realise my argument rang true to them. They protested too much. As I reflected on the broader politics of the argument, I came to see that, for these men, expertise in the hard

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sciences translates into expertise in anything, including cultural theory. This is simply another example of the broader misogynistic economy of capitalism in which the feminised environment, and also feminized knowledges, are exploited and dominated by masculinist technologies of carbon production and consumption. These complex and connected systems of gender performativity need to change if we are to create an environmentally sustainable future. Deleuze and Guattari’s characterization of capitalism as a mad system that ‘invents’ economic value, and their work on sad affect as the way in which global agency is reduced, or positive affect as the ways in which global agency is enhanced, offer theoretical routes forward that will be of use. To begin, we must locate the gendered nature of the issues at hand, and this is what I have attempted to do here.

Conclusion This chapter has examined the surfaces, energy cultures, gendered cultures of performance and knowledges of carbon fibre. These systems are cultural pedagogies that teach men and women how to perform in gendered ways and indeed, extend and intensify performances of masculinity. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that “there is only one way of making the state of nature viable: by striving to organize its encounters. Whatever body I meet, I seek what is useful. But there is a great difference between seeking what is useful through chance (that is, striving to destroy bodies incompatible with our own) and seeking to organize what is useful (striving to encounter bodies agreeing in nature with us, in relations in which they agree)” (Deleuze, 1990, pp. 260–261). This ethical system of relation developed by Deleuze, which he takes to illustrate positive and negative, or affirmative and sad affect, shows up the gendered politics of economies of carbon with sad consistency. From the masculine domination of the feminized ‘natural resources’ mined in the quest for carbon producing substances, to the performances of hyper-masculinity facilitated by carbon fibre objects, the frontiers of the carbon futures trading market and the vehement protection of legitimate knowledges of carbon, various forms of frontier masculinity

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maximize their capacity to act through maintaining a physical and conceptual enmeshment with various cultural formations of carbon. In their study of women’s status and carbon dioxide emissions, Ergas and York’s quantitative cross-national analysis leads them to argue that: “improving gender equality may serve to transform how the environment is viewed. In particular, as gender equality improves the environment may not simply be seen as a storehouse of resources to be used to generate profits, but, rather, as having intrinsic worth. Furthermore, since women are often disproportionately harmed by environmental degradation, increasing consideration for women’s well-being may lead to greater awareness about environmental problems. More specifically, since women generally have different knowledge about and concern for the environment, it is entirely possible that women make different decisions than do men when placed in positions of power. Thus, we may see this connection because nations with more progressive gender policies may tend to have more progressive environmental policies” (2012, p. 974). It is imperative that we start to challenge the masculinist nature of carbon economies of production and consumption if we are to move towards the possibility of a carbon neutral future.

Works Cited Alaimo, S. (2016). Environmental politics and pleasures in posthuman times. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Amato, J. A. (2013). Surfaces: A history. University of California Press. Brown, W. (1995). States of injury: Power and freedom in late modernity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Coleman, R. (2016). Notes towards a surfacing of feminist theoretical turns. Australian Feminist Studies, 31(89), 228–245. Connell, R. (1998). Masculinities and globalisation. Men and Masculinites, 1(1), 3–23. https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184X98001001001. Deleuze, G. (1990). The logic of sense. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-Oedipus (R. Hurley, M. Seem, & H. R. Lane, Trans., Vol. 1). Minneapolis and New York: University of Minnesota Press.

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Descheneau, P. (2012). The currencies of carbon: Carbon money and its social meaning. Environmental Politics, 21(4), 604–620. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 09644016.2012.688356. Dhanda, K., & Hartman, L. (2011). The ethics of carbon neutrality: A critical examination of voluntary carbon offset providers. Journal of Business Ethics, 100(1), 119–149. Ergas, C., & York, R. (2012). Women’s status and carbon dioxide emissions: A quantitative cross-national analysis. Social Science Research, 41(4), 965–976. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2012.03.008. Fidler, F., & Harvey, S. (2007). Industry caught in carbon smokescreen. Financial Times. Retrieved from https://www.ft.com/content/48e334cef355-11db-9845-000b5df10621. Friedrich, J., Ge, M., & Pickens, A. (2017). This interactive chart explains world’s top 10 emitters and how they’ve changed. Washington, DC: World Resources Institute. Retrieved from https://www.wri.org/blog/2017/04/ interactive-chart-explains-worlds-top-10-emitters-and-how-theyve-changed. Geels, F. W. (2014). Regime resistance against low-carbon transitions: Introducing politics and power into the multi-level perspective. Theory, Culture and Society, 31(5), 21–40. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276414531627. Haraway, D. (1999). Simians, cyborgs, and women. New York and Abingdon: Routledge. Hartley, J. (2018). Pushing back: Social media as an evolutionary phenomenon. In J. Burgess, A. Marwick, & T. Poell (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of social media (pp. 13–34). London: Sage. Hickey-Moody, A. (2015). Carbon fibre masculinity. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 20(1), 139–153. https://doi.org/10.1080/09697 25x.2015.1017394. Huber, M. (2013). Lifeblood: Oil, freedom and the forces of capital. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Liu, J. C. (2015). Performing the carbon market: Materiality, framing and citizen participation (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global database (19274699350). McMurdy, D. (1998). Gulf ’s miscast cowboy. Maclean’s, 111(8), 50. Miller, Gloria, E. (2004). Frontier masculinity in the oil industry: The experience of women engineers. Gender, Work & Organization, 11(1), 47–73. Newman, P. C. (1998). Calgary says goodbye to a Texas gunslinger. Maclean’s, 111(8), 54. Olivier, J., Janssesns-Maenhout G., Muntean, M., Peters, J. (2016). Trends in global CO2 emissions; 2016 report. The Hague and Ispra: PBL Netherlands

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Environmental Assessment Agency and European Commission, Joint Research Centre. Retrieved from http://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/news_docs/ jrc-2016-trends-in-global-co2-emissions-2016-report-103425.pdf. Pellizzonni, L. (2011). Governing through disorder: Neoliberal environmental governance and social theory. Global Environmental Change, 21, 795–803. Povinelli, E. A. (2015). The rhetorics of recognition in geontopower. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 48(4), 428–442. Ranganathan, J., et al. (2016). Shifting diets for a sustainable food future. Working Paper, Installment 11 of Creating a Sustainable Food Future. Washington, DC: World Resources Institute. Romain, F. (2014). On climate rent. Historical Materialism, 22(3–4), 251– 280. https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206X-12341368. Sheller, M. (2014a). Global energy cultures of speed and lightness: Materials, mobilities and transnational power. Theory, Culture and Society, 31(5), 127– 154. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276414537909. Sheller, M. (2014b). The vital materiality of aluminum: Light modernity and the global atlantic. Atlantic Studies, Global Currents, 11(1), 67–81. Sheller, M. (2014c). Aluminum dreams: The making of light modernity. Cambridge: MIT Press. Simonetti, C., et al. (2018). The standardization of time: A sociohistorical perspective. Sentient Conceptualisations: Feeling and Thinking in the Scientific Understanding of Time (Vol. 17, No. 2, pp. 1–161). Cambridge: University of Chicago Press. Tyfield, D., & Urry, J. (2014). Energising society. Special Issue of Theory, Culture and Society, 31(5), 3–226. Urry, J. (2010). Consuming the planet to excess. Theory, Culture and Society, 27(2–3), 191–212. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276409355999. Urry, J. (2013). Societies beyond oil: Oil dregs and social futures. London, UK: Zed Books. Westphal, M. I., Martin, S., Zhou, L., & Satterthwaite, D. (2017). Powering Cities in the Global South: How Energy Access for All Benefits the Economy and the Environment (Working Paper). Washington, DC: World Resources Institute. Whittington, J. (2016). Carbon as a metric of the human. Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 39(1), 46–63. https://doi.org/10.1111/plar.12130.

6 Conclusion

Deleuze’s work offers exiting new methodologies. Indeed, writing on Infinite Eros, Sholtz and Carr go so far as to claim “Deleuze and Guattari offer us a new conception of life - life as the singular relations that we are. Life is constituted, sustained and amplified through connections and encounters, thus it is always constituted through difference” (2018, p. 459). Such fresh conceptions of the empirical here, configured as thinking about life itself as difference itself, are perhaps most valuable when applied to ‘real world’ problems as transformers; as ways of looking anew at established problems. Scholars of cultural pedagogies show us how the world at large teaches gender. Advertising, schooling systems, work, toilets, casting in films, clothes: the list is exhaustive, and each site of culture that is structured around (and reproduces) ideas of gender, is itself shaped by the gendered assemblages from which it is constituted. Gender pedagogies are iterative, they are affective and are assembled together across an infinite number of contexts. From carbon futures trading markets, the materials from which bicycles are made, to Hollywood films, geographies of the schoolyard and books about the human psychological condition, masculinity is shaped and named in ways over which we often have little control. Yet © The Author(s) 2019 A. Hickey-Moody, Deleuze and Masculinity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01749-1_6

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seeing this process of shaping and naming, being able to articulate gender machines, gendered affects and the assemblages that produce them, is a methodological affordance that Deleuze’s work gives us. This book has offered a consolidation of some ways Deleuze’s thought is shaping and changing masculinity studies, and most importantly shows us how Deleuze’s ideas of assemblage, affect, the child, smooth and striated space, the surface, and capitalism are methods of thought that give us a way of seeing how gender is taught not only by people but also by objects, and through systems, materials, economies, and geographies. Chapter 2 of this book offers a further provocation to continue and extend such engagements. I have noted that this is one of many possible beginnings to thinking about Deleuze and masculinity studies as a field of thought. My perspective is necessarily partial, and indeed, biased. It is important, though, because it illustrates advancements in thinking about masculinity that have been developed as Deleuze’s work is increasingly being taken up in the field. Chapter 2 shows us how Deleuze’s ideas of affect and assemblage are methods that allow us to see all performances of masculinity as expressions of social, material and discursive assemblages. Changing the performative nature of masculinity will also mean changing the social, material and language structures that frame men’s lives. Chapter 2 advances this argument in relation to the take up of Deleuze’s work in masculinity studies, particularly through the concepts of assemblage and affect, which have been applied to extend theoretical work undertaken through Butler’s concept of gender performativity. Through assemblage and affect we can see the contextual, atmospheric and material dimensions of performativity in new ways. These methods for thinking gender highlight materiality, context, and the relationship between language and material context in meaning making. They also allow us to see that affects of masculinity are produced by complex social assemblages and often these impact the bodies of men who are sex marked male in quite diverse ways. Affects of masculinity can make a man feel he is not man enough, can reduce his capacity to act, through drawing his attention to the gap between his body and experience and dominant ideals of masculinity. The a/effect of masculinity might be hours spent lifting weights in gyms, in attempts to become more like a popular form of

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man. As Jonathan Allan so astutely observes: “Masculinity … resides in a cruel optimism that highlights not only the shame of masculinity, but also the dread that is felt in having been shamed, being shamed, and the possibility, if not promise, of being shamed once more again” (Allan, 2018, p. 187). Through separating popular affects of masculinity from bodies that are sex marked male, we can see the cultural pedagogies of gender as they impact on those bodies for whom they supposedly speak. We can ask what are the effects of affects of gender? We can look to undertake and support gender activism by changing affective assemblages of masculinity on small scales. Thinking about masculinity in terms of affect and assemblage is, then, a method that brings with it possibilities for critical perspectives and critical interventions. In Chapter 3 this book establishes the fact that, as methodologies for thinking about boyhood, Deleuze’s thought and psychoanalysis are absolutely not mutually exclusive. Indeed, psychoanalysis and a psychoanalytic reading of boys’ and men’s lives can sit productively alongside empirically focused Deleuzian engagements that examine the material and social production of gender. Chapter 3 advances this argument through examining the gendered production of identity undertaken by boys in South East London. The boy’s re-inscription of their identity through phallic symbols of racing cars absolutely aligns to a Freudian reading of Oedipal castration anxiety. At the same time, the boys are profoundly embedded in place and explore their own geography of the playground in ways that align with a Deleuzian understanding of affect, intensity and micro-political acts of smoothing striated space. Here, Deleuze’s thought offers methods for understanding the ways in which gender identity can be embedded in place and can be relationally produced. These are understandings not provided in Freud’s work and can actually be seen as sitting productively alongside Freud’s ideas on boyhood. Extending this empirical observation into a recommendation for scholarship, I encourage researchers to understand the theoretical proposition that we have multiple subjectivities as an invitation to theorize various aspects of subjectivity uniquely, or through diverse theoretical and methodological tools. As humans we are understandable psychoanalytically and yet we also operate affectively, we are intensive

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and extensive, we are socially knowable and also embedded in place and time. As such, we need to have a range of methods for understanding the different aspects of subjectivity. Deleuze’s material and political thought does not preclude or exclude also working psychoanalytically when we are undertaking empirical research. Chapter 4 illustrates the fact that lived experiences and media representations of disability are often co-constitutive. Screens are a surface that we fold into how we see ourselves, and in relation to which we continue to become who we are. Images and films of men inform how boys and men understand themselves, and representations of disability of course complexify the becomings of men with disabilities. Deleuze’s work has been especially useful in better understanding the political impact of media representations of disability and of the nature of embodiment for men living with a disability. The field of disability studies has conceptually embraced Deleuze’s capacity to consider the micro-politics of identity and embodiment and can bring these theoretical foci together with a critical and reflexive understanding of the gendered nature of disability. While the gendered nature of disability is consistently re-produced through media representations, it can also be shifted through different forms of media representation. Examples of men with disabilities as active and desirable sexual subjects are one of many possible ways in which media texts might problematize the re-inscription of disability as feminised. The case studies of Michael Stokes’ work and the film text Me Before You bring the question of viewing publics into my discussion. As texts designed to appeal to mainstream viewing audiences, the photographs and the film speak to publics who may not have engaged with disability issues or thought about disability and sexuality. Creating space for these conversations to happen is critical political and affective labour that moves some way towards recognizing the sexual rights of man with disabilities and opening up to reconfigurations of sex, sexuality and the sexual body that are disability lead. Further work in this area might draw on Deleuze’s thinking with Guattari on what the body can do, and how bodily libidinal arrangements make a ‘Body without Organs’: a map of desire, to how changing what counts as sex and how sex is experienced and undertaken can re-map desire and emotional investments.

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Chapter 5 of the book shifts tone, from canvassing areas in which Deleuze’s work has already been taken up in masculinity studies to arguing that when taken together with feminist theory, Deleuze’s work provides a path for problematizing and changing carbon economies and the broader gender politics that sustain the neutralization of these economies. The gendered nature of carbon economies urgently needs to be rethought. Ergas and York have shown us “that CO2 emissions per capita are lower in nations where women have higher political status, controlling for GDP per capita, urbanization, industrialization, militarization, world-system position, foreign direct investment, the age dependency ratio, and level of democracy (2012, p. 965). They go on to note that “This finding suggests that efforts to improve gender equality around the world may work synergistically with efforts to curtail global climate change and environmental degradation more generally” (2012, p. 965). Building on Ergas and York (2012), Julio Godoy (2011), FernströmNåtby and Rönnerfalk (2018) and many others, we can take as proven the fact that the way masculinity is popularly configured and associated gender imbalances in social systems are primary drivers in climate change. The process of effecting change needs to begin with changing masculinity and the role that masculinity plays in systems of environmental degradation and pollution. Chapter 5 advances this argument, partly in relation to Deleuze’s concept of sad affect and Deleuze and Guattari’s work on capitalist machine. The sad affect of many forms of contemporary masculinity is a reduction of the earth’s capacity to act and creates an attrition of natural resources. After discussing some ways in which this occurs through oil mining and carbon generation, Chapter 5 then opens out to consider how toxic masculinities articulate in myriad ways, across surfaces and knowledges of carbon and the economies of cultural and financial relation that surround it. From popular, ill-informed critiques of scholarly disciplines and theoretical projects, to capitalist economies that construct and trade publicly owed resources for private gain, frontiers for (and registers of ) toxic masculinity shift constantly as the machine of capitalism consumes its own outsides in attempts to re-brand, re-sell and commodify that which might not otherwise support capitalist gain. The man in the suit, the stock market boss, the racing car driver, the disabled athlete wearing prosthetic limbs,

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becomes politically aligned to the mining corporation who buys, mines and sells earth for ecological ruin and financial gain. These capitalist workers can also be aligned to the bigot (Richard Dawkins) who critiques the feminist project, who argues only specific kinds of scholarly projects are legitimate. Bringing Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of capitalism together with contemporary feminism offers theoretical resources through which we can show up masculinist economies of re-production and create space for change. Masculinity studies shows us that Deleuze’s work is useful for rethinking gender performances, the effects of these performances and possibilities for becoming gendered in social and material worlds. We need to continue this project by further exploring what Deleuze’s work allows for masculinity as a practice and economy. We must explore how we can do masculinity differently, think masculinity in new ways and invent new, sustainable, gendered futures. In closing, then, I would say that Deleuze’s work offers a methodology for thinking about how gender comes to matter, but more than this, I am arguing that Deleuze’s thought needs to be read with other disciplines of scholarship. If we are to shift understandings and performances of gender and value systems associated with such performances, scholars need to pay close attention to the empirical while taking a lateral approach to how we consider masculinity in everyday life. Scholarly habits, disciplinary pairings, and ontological or epistemological differences need to be let go of in order to develop new methodological assemblages for working with and understanding masculinity. We can be more than we currently are and make the world a place that has a more sustainable and equitable future through working with Deleuze to see and do masculinity differently.

Works Cited Allan, J. A. (2018). Masculinity as cruel optimism. NORMA International Journal for Masculinity Studies, 13(3–4), 175–190. https://doi.org/10.1080 /18902138.2017.1312949. Ergas, C., & York, R. (2012). Women’s status and carbon dioxide emissions: A quantitative cross-national analysis. Social Science Research, 41(4), 965−976. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2012.03.008.

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Fernström-Nåtby, N. & Rönnerfalk, H. (2018). Gender equality and CO2emissions: A panel data study (Bachelor thesis). Retrieved from https://lup. lub.lu.se/student-papers/search/publication/8934039. Godoy, J. (2011, February 17). Men’s and women’s different impact on climate. WCEF News and Reports (Originally published in Tierramerica). Retrieved from http://www.wecf.eu/english/articles/2011/02/gender-climateimpact.php. Sholtz, J., & Carr, C. L. (2018). Introduction: Infinite Eros. Deleuze and Guattari Studies, 12(4), 455–465. https://doi.org/10.3366/dlgs.2018.0323.

Index

A

Actualisation 167 Aesthetics 9, 20, 22, 120, 133, 134, 138 Affect 5, 6, 12, 13, 16, 26, 29, 30, 32, 44–59, 71, 72, 78, 82, 84, 105, 109, 125, 128–132, 135, 140, 143, 144, 150, 153, 177, 182, 183, 185 Affective 16, 38, 43–45, 52, 54, 56–59, 72, 78, 79, 83, 104, 122, 124, 129, 130, 141, 151, 156, 157, 159, 173, 181, 183, 184 Affirmation 170 Aluminium 151, 154–156, 161, 164 Anti-Oedipus 24, 36, 65 Anxiety 1, 66, 69, 70, 73, 74, 77, 109, 183 Appropriation 71 Art 25, 47, 87, 97, 172, 173

Art practice 173 Art practice as research 173 Assemblage(s) 11, 13, 15, 26, 29, 30, 32, 36–48, 54, 55, 57–59, 78, 123–129, 154, 156, 181–183, 186 Assertion 4, 10, 44 A Thousand Plateaus 37, 39, 70, 71, 78, 79 Atom 175 Attachment theory 51, 74 B

Becoming 7, 22, 23, 39, 41, 44, 50, 54–56, 59, 72, 73, 82–86, 114, 124, 125, 130, 132, 184, 186 Being 3, 4, 6, 9, 12, 14, 19, 21, 25, 29, 31, 33–37, 45–47, 50, 52, 53, 55–59, 64, 67–69, 73,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 A. Hickey-Moody, Deleuze and Masculinity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01749-1

189

190     Index

75–77, 79, 81–83, 85–87, 95, 102, 103, 105–107, 109, 110, 112–116, 118, 119, 124–126, 128, 130–135, 139, 141, 143, 153, 157, 162, 167, 171, 173, 174, 182, 183 Binary 31, 32, 57, 84, 127, 131 Body(ies) 12, 13, 15, 19, 23, 30–32, 37–41, 44–59, 69, 71–73, 80, 84, 85, 87, 88, 95, 97, 103, 106, 109–114, 118–120, 122–131, 133, 135, 137, 143, 144, 153, 157–159, 170, 171, 175, 177, 182–184 Boy 1, 2, 7, 9, 11, 14–16, 25, 26, 33, 34, 43, 44, 63–66, 69, 70, 72–74, 77, 78, 80–82, 85–87, 89, 97, 117, 118, 183, 184 Boyhood 63, 97, 183 Butler, Judith 13, 24, 26, 29–39, 56–58, 128, 182 C

Capitalism 5, 17, 129, 149–151, 153, 154, 157, 158, 160, 162, 164, 166, 168, 170, 176, 177, 182, 185, 186 Carbon 2, 17, 44, 144, 149, 150, 152–163, 165–170, 172, 175–178, 185 Carbon economy(ies) 150, 151, 157, 162, 163, 178, 185 Carbon emissions 153, 157–160, 163–167

Carbon fibre 153, 155, 157, 169, 171, 173, 174, 177 Carbon fibre masculinity 169, 171, 176 Carbon futures 44, 153, 157 Carbon futures market 160, 166, 168 Carbon futures trading market 2, 17, 149, 152, 153, 167, 169, 177, 181 Carbon production 149–152, 156, 157, 160, 167, 177 Carbon tax 165, 166 Cars 2, 10, 17, 52, 58, 90, 95, 96, 150, 153, 155, 157, 163, 171, 176, 183, 185 Case study 13, 16, 24, 25, 65, 66, 69, 70, 72, 74, 76–78, 86, 88, 102, 104, 105, 113, 115, 126, 132, 141, 142, 167, 169, 170, 184 Castration 24, 72–74, 77, 183 Child 64, 69–75, 78, 79, 95, 109, 113, 119, 126, 182 Childhood 64, 66, 67, 72–76, 79, 83, 97, 107 Children 8–10, 25, 26, 34, 64, 65, 68, 69, 72, 75, 78, 79, 81, 83, 84, 86, 87, 97, 110, 114, 117, 125–127, 131, 150 Coal 155, 161, 162, 164, 165 Commodity 149, 152, 157, 169 Consumption 2, 144, 149, 150, 152, 157, 162–164, 177, 178 Corporeal 43, 48, 56, 59, 123 Corporeality 49

Index     191

Cultural economies 21, 150, 151 Cultural theory 171, 173, 176, 177 D

Dawkins, Richard 171–174, 176, 186 Deleuze, Gilles 1, 3–5, 7, 11–18, 20–24, 26, 29–31, 36–51, 53, 54, 58, 59, 63–68, 70–73, 78–86, 95–97, 101, 102, 105, 106, 109, 119, 123, 125, 127–130, 132, 142–144, 150, 157, 158, 171, 176, 177, 181–186 Deleuzian 13, 45, 50, 54, 123–127, 129, 130, 132, 183 Deleuzo-Guattarian 42, 44, 101 Digital 2, 25, 43, 44, 141 Disability 12, 16, 42, 46, 97, 101–115, 118–123, 125–132, 134, 135, 137–144, 184 Disability studies 101, 105, 108, 113, 122, 123, 132, 184 Disabled 16, 103, 105, 107, 108, 110, 111, 113, 114, 119–122, 124, 126, 127, 133, 135, 137, 141, 143, 144, 185 Disabled masculinity 107, 108, 142 E

Education 24, 64, 67, 80, 82, 101, 112, 114, 116, 173 Embodiment 16, 50, 56, 63, 119, 123–125, 127, 133, 184

Emissions 151, 163, 165, 166, 168, 169, 178, 185 Emphasised femininity 116 Empirical 8, 9, 12–14, 24, 25, 31, 55, 57, 63–67, 70–72, 79–81, 84, 86, 87, 167, 181, 183, 184, 186 Energy 1, 26, 87, 143, 151, 152, 154, 155, 161, 162, 164–166 Energy cultures 150, 151, 154, 155, 177 Environmental 2, 11, 17, 46, 144 Environmental sustainability 161, 177 Ethnography 8, 9, 25 Expression 5, 14, 30, 31, 38, 42, 56, 57, 68, 70, 86, 88, 95, 122, 182 F

Feminisation 160, 166 Feminism 35, 80, 186 Feminist 19, 54, 123–125, 134, 170, 171, 186 Feminist new materialism 80 Feminist theory 30, 185 Fieldwork 8–10, 14, 25, 55, 63, 87, 95 Fossil fuels 160 Freud, Sigmund 12, 24, 64–78, 80, 83, 183 G

Gender binary 117, 120

192     Index

Gendered 2, 10, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 21, 23, 24, 29, 35, 40, 51–57, 70, 81, 82, 84–86, 88, 97, 101, 105–108, 113, 114, 118, 121, 133, 134, 144, 149, 151–153, 163, 167–173, 175–177, 181–186 Gender identity 16, 30, 31, 58, 73, 87, 88, 97, 121, 123, 183 Gender performance 1, 2, 20, 23, 24, 30–32, 37, 58, 59, 84, 150, 153, 168, 186 Gender performativity 29, 30, 32, 36, 58, 177, 182 Gender roles 8, 32, 109 Gender studies 13, 24, 29, 118 Guattari, Felix 4, 5, 7, 12–16, 20–24, 36–50, 59, 63–68, 70–73, 78–86, 95–97, 101, 102, 128, 157, 158, 176, 177, 181, 184–186 H

Hegemonic masculinity 18–21, 23, 24, 34, 87, 108–111, 116, 117, 121, 122, 135, 137 Hegemony 17, 18, 20, 21, 33, 59, 113, 137, 159, 172 Heterosexism 120, 121 Heterosexual 30, 32, 64, 68, 70, 73, 83, 88, 102, 105, 119, 176 Heterosexuality 19, 67, 68, 109, 111, 113, 120 Hickey-Moody, Anna 12, 16, 17, 30, 45, 50, 72–74, 80, 84, 106, 112, 120

Homosociality 120, 121 Hyperfeminine 119 Hypermasculine 119–121 I

Identity 10, 31, 35, 42, 53, 80–82, 84, 86–88, 91, 95–97, 105, 114, 117, 125, 134, 141, 171, 173, 183, 184 Impairment 103–105, 107, 108, 112, 126, 135, 140 Industry 2, 35, 149, 153, 157, 163–166, 170 Intellectual disability 112–117, 128, 129 Ivanchan, Brad 135, 136 L

Little Hans 13, 24, 64–66, 68–73, 75, 76, 78 Lived performances 14 The Logic of Sense 17, 171 Low-Carbon Society(ies) 161, 162 M

Machine 4–7, 14, 15, 23, 36, 37, 39, 41, 82, 157, 158, 176, 182, 185 Machinic 37, 38 Machinic assemblage 37–39, 44 Masculine economies 149, 154 Masculine identity 63, 108, 113 Masculinisation 116, 160 Masculinist energy culture 152

Index     193

Masculinity 1–3, 8, 10–14, 16–20, 22–24, 29–36, 40–42, 44–46, 49–59, 63, 64, 74, 78, 80, 81, 83–85, 88, 90, 95, 97, 101, 102, 106–112, 116–121, 123, 132–135, 137, 139, 140, 143, 144, 150, 153, 155–157, 159–161, 163, 169, 170, 173, 177, 181–183, 185, 186 Masculinity studies 1–3, 11–13, 16–19, 24, 26, 29, 33, 35, 40, 42, 44–46, 51–54, 56, 57, 74, 97, 122, 150, 182, 185, 186 Massumi, Brian 12, 84 Material assemblages 38, 59 Materialism 156 Materiality 17, 37, 44–48, 55, 58, 125, 126, 151, 156, 167, 182 Matter 2, 5, 17, 31, 36, 38–40, 53, 56, 65, 72, 76, 104, 125, 152–155, 160, 170, 171, 186 Me Before You 16, 102, 103, 105, 137, 140, 142, 143, 184 Media 3, 6, 8, 10, 58, 103–106, 112, 134, 140–142, 158, 160, 162, 171, 173, 184 Method 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 17, 23–25, 29, 43, 46, 51, 65, 66, 97, 118, 121, 152, 176, 182–184 Methodology 13, 25, 78, 86, 186 Minor refrains 14, 80, 96 Molar 21–24, 39, 63, 78, 81, 84–86, 95, 97, 124 N

New materialism 80

O

Oedipus 72, 74 Oedipus Complex 72, 74 P

Pedagogy 1, 11, 12, 16, 103, 104, 112, 150, 161, 177, 181, 183 Performance 2, 4, 10–14, 20, 21, 23, 30–32, 36, 40, 41, 48, 50, 51, 55, 56, 58, 59, 84, 87, 109, 113, 140, 149–151, 153, 155, 157, 159, 160, 168, 177, 186 Performative 30, 31, 37, 40–42, 45, 51, 56, 57, 59, 89, 152, 156, 159, 167, 182 Performative materialities (materiality) 149, 150 Performativity 13, 17, 26, 29, 30, 32, 36–38, 56, 57, 59, 149, 153, 167, 168, 170, 173, 176, 182 Phallic 43, 44, 74, 183 Phallus 44, 77, 78, 110, 132, 133, 143 Post-carbon 161 Postdevelopmental childhood sexuality 83 Posthuman 44, 54, 115, 133 Power 1–7, 10–12, 15, 18, 20–24, 33, 34, 39, 46, 47, 56, 57, 71–73, 79, 83, 86, 105–107, 112, 118, 120, 129, 130, 133, 134, 143, 150, 151, 156, 161, 162, 164, 168, 178 Prosthetic limbs 110, 132, 143, 157, 185

194     Index

Protest masculinity 10, 14, 15, 87, 88, 97 Psychiatric disability 112–116 Psychoanalysis 16, 24, 64, 65, 67, 71, 72, 157, 183 Psychoanalytic 13, 14, 19, 24, 64, 65, 67, 70, 72, 97, 183 Psychoanalytic boy 13, 65, 97 Q

Queer 53, 113, 115, 120, 128, 133, 141 Queering 120

Spinoza, B. 12, 21, 45–51, 64, 79, 130, 131, 156 Spinozist child 74, 78, 84 Spinozists 48, 50, 78, 79 Stokes, Michael 16, 102, 103, 105, 110, 112, 120, 132–137, 140, 143, 184 Striation 14, 15, 47, 63, 84, 95, 96, 105 Subjectivity 44, 47, 49, 64, 65, 67, 73, 74, 78, 81, 82, 85, 86, 97, 113, 114, 123, 126, 129, 171, 176, 183, 184 T

R

Religion 8, 10, 82 S

Schooling masculinity 63, 80, 82 Sex 19, 30–32, 40, 41, 51, 57–59, 69, 70, 73, 74, 80, 95, 114, 115, 118, 119, 121, 122, 137–139, 143, 175, 182–184 Sexual ability 109 Sexual impotence 110 Sexuality 30, 32, 33, 40, 43, 44, 57, 59, 69, 72–74, 81, 83, 101–106, 110, 113–119, 121–123, 143, 184 Sexual performance 118, 123 Sexual publics 101 Sociology of education 14, 16, 63, 64, 80, 81, 83–86, 97

Terrorism 11 Theoretical 13, 18, 19, 26, 30, 33, 45, 46, 49, 51, 57, 64–66, 70, 71, 79–82, 84, 126, 151, 152, 169, 171, 177, 182–186 Toxic masculinity 2, 4, 8, 11, 17, 185 V

Veteran 16, 102, 103, 105, 110, 112, 132–135, 143 W

What is Philosophy 37, 47 World Resources Institute (WRI) 163–165