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 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 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).
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)
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 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 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 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. Blue-collar 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 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-source-machine: 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, 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).
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 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.
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.
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)
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)
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 order-word, its immediacy, gives it a power of variation in relation to the bodies to which the transformation is attributed. (p. 82)
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.
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.
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 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.
Deleuzo-Guattarian assemblage theory has been vital. Assemblage theory decentres the subject, to show how it might be made up of and 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)
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 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).
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
[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.
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 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 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.
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 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, 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.
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 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).
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)
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 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, 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.